Chapter 5 PILLARS OF SOCIETY

(1877)

Pillars of Society is the fifteenth play of Henrik Ibsen, several of which, among them Norma and The Warriors' Tomb, have not yet been published. Written in Munich, it appeared in the summer of 1877. The ensuing autumn saw the play on the boards of nearly all the Scandinavian theatres; Germany followed suit early the next year, and the success of this satiric social comedy ran like wildfire throughout the continent. It was not until December 15, at the Gaiety Theatre, London, that it had an English hearing.

There is something of Swift in its bitter strokes of sarcasm at the expense of the ruling commercial classes. The Northern Aristophanes, who never smiles as he lays on the lash, exposes in Pillars of Society a varied row of whited sepulchres. His attitude is never that of Thackeray: he never seems to sympathize with his snobs and hypocrites as does the kindly English writer. There is no mercy in Ibsen, and his breast has never harboured the milk of human kindness. This remote, objective art does not throw out tentacles of sympathy. It is too disdainful to make the slightest concession, hence the difficulty in convincing an audience that the poet is genuinely human. We are all of us so accustomed to the little encouraging pat on our moral hump that in the presence of such a ruthless unmasking of our weaknesses we are apt to cry aloud,-"Ibsen, himself, is an enemy of the people!"

It is an ugly, naked art, an art unadorned by poetic halos, lyric interludes, comic reliefs, or the occasional relaxation by wit of the dramatic tension. Love me, love my truth, the playwright says in effect; and we are forced to make a wry face as we swallow the nauseous and unsugared pill he forces down our sentimental gullets. His sinews still taut from the extraordinary labours of Emperor and Galilean, that colossal epic-drama of Julian the Apostate, the Scandinavian poet felt the need of unbending, so he wrote Pillars of Society. It is the second of that group of three dramas dealing with social and political themes in the large, external style of which he is the unrivalled possessor. Ibsen smelt corruption in all governments of the people by the people and against the people. He foresaw that King Log was more dangerous than King Stork. For him Demos has ever been the most exacting of tyrants, the true foe to individuality.

The student of social pathology will find much that is amusing in a grim sort of a way scattered throughout the scenes of Pillars of Society. There is much action, much swift dialogue, much slashing wit, and the general atmosphere is of a more breezy character than in the plays which follow this one. Cheerful it is not. Surgery, whether of the body or the soul, is not exactly pleasure-breeding. The story is not an involved one, though Ibsen has woven a sufficiently complex pattern to afford ?sthetic interest in its disentanglement. If Consul Bernick had not been in need of money, he would not have married his meek wife, Betty, to whose elder half-sister he had previously pledged his faith. As a pillar of society in a thriving community, as the pillar of its church and commerce, Bernick could never afford to be caught napping. Once it had nearly happened. He had carried on an illicit love affair with a French actress. Her husband surprised the pair. Bernick contrived an escape. So his brother-in-law, who had slipped away to America, was blamed for the scandal, and you may easily imagine the tongue-wagging and head-nodding in this philistine town.

It seems that Ibsen levelled his shafts at a species of social hypocrisy peculiar to his native land. Here in America, where all is fair and naught is foul, his satire falls short of its mark, for our target is clean, and our sepulchres are unwhited! Probably this optimistic sense of being different-and better than our neighbours -fills us with satisfaction in the presence of an Ibsen play. Strangely enough the people in this very drama entertain identical opinions on the subject of their American brethren! Perhaps Pillars of Society is not so provincial in its character-painting as some of Ibsen's critics have imagined. Perhaps his shoe fits!

The return of the supposed fugitive Johan, Bernick's scapegoat brother-in-law, finds the Consul beloved and respected by his fellow-citizens. He has educated in his own household Dina Dorf, the daughter of that French actress with whom years before he had seen merry days-that is, if there is really any joy of life in those dull, drab Norwegian communities. With Johan returns Lona Hessel, the elderly sister-in-law. The Bernick household is dismayed at this rude invasion of the "Americans," and the tragi-comedy begins in earnest. Bernick has not improved with the years. He has become more grasping for wealth and power. He even conceives the idea of sending to sea an untrustworthy ship. Its rotten hulk almost carries off his young son, while the father imagines that the unwelcome visitors, Johan and Lona, are on board. To complicate matters, Dina, sick of the false odour of sanctity in the home of Bernick, loves Johan, and to the infinite scandal of every one she speaks out her mind. She will go to America, where people are not so good-alas! Ibsen didn't know that our national goodness is becoming as a rank, threatening vegetation upon the body politic.

Furthermore Bernick, so as to make himself pose as a self-sacrificing, deeply injured man, has insinuated that Johan was an embezzler as well as an immoral man. About the figure of the Consul there cluster several admirable hypocrites: Rector R?rlund, who keeps Bernick upon his pinnacle of self-righteousness; Hilmar T?nnessen, who goes about sniffing out other people's soul maladies and carrying with peevish pride the "banner of the ideal"; and several merchants, who are in with the Consul whenever a "deal," public or private, is possible. The minor characters, the women in particular, are individually outlined from the shipbuilder Aune, with his sturdy adherence to the interests of the Bernick house and his weak-kneed code of morals, to the veriest sketch of a clerk-all are human, brimming over with selfish humanity.

The catastrophe is led up to with a masterly gradation of incident. Confronted by Lona when in his darkest hour of despair and need, Bernick has the lying garments in which he invests himself for his family and friends torn away by the fearless words of Lona. She does not accuse him of committing the one unforgivable, biblical sin which Ella Rentheim throws at the desperate head of John Gabriel Borkman. No, Lona does not say, "You slew the love that was in me;" she tears up two incriminating letters, she declares that with Johan and Dina she will return to America; but-but Bernick must escape from the cage of lies in which, like a monstrous master-spider, he has been spinning a network of falsehoods for the world. He groans out that it is too late, that he must "sink along with the whole of the bungled social system"-he is not the first, nor the last man, who has attempted to shift upon society his individual sins. He calls himself the tool, not the pillar, of society, and you seem to see, as he talks, the plaster flaking off in great patches, and the ugly stains coming into view.

A grand demonstration by the town is made: torchlight, music, speeches, a presentation, and all the rest of the cheap, vain humbug of which we all disapprove so heartily in America-and indulge in it about once every hour. Bernick tells the truth, confesses that he is the real sinner, not Johan, and shocks his world immeasurably, especially the priggish R?rlund. That worthy rector, who would marry Dina in a pitying, pardoning way, is flouted by her. She leaves with Johan. Then, it may be confessed, there is a flat, conventional conclusion, "docked of its natural, tragic ending," as Allan Monkhouse truthfully declares. Bernick is in reality re-whitewashed at the close of this powerful, picturesque play.

One feels instinctively that more could be done with Lona and Bernick, more utilized from the strong scenes between Aune and Bernick. But in John Gabriel Borkman, Ibsen later realized the wicked grandeur inherent in the character of a tremendous financial scoundrel; like Balzac's Mercadet, his Borkman is a figure hewn from the native rock. Bernick is a man you may meet in Wall Street, and certainly on any Sunday in any given church you enter. He is proud, pious, fat as to paunch, and lean-souled; and he drives a hard bargain with God, man, and devil. In a word, the average pillar of any society, one who believes in making religion and patriotism pay; a good father, a good husband, a good fellow, is the inscription chiselled on his marble mortuary shaft-and then the worms stop to smile archly at their eternal banquet! Truth is always at the bottom of a grave. And Ibsen is a terrible digger of graves when he so wills it.

As a matter of record it would not be amiss to state that Pillars of Society, written in 1877, was produced in America at the Irving Place Theatre, December 26, 1889, with Ernest Possart as Bernick, Frau Christien as Mrs. Bernick, and Frl. Leithner as Lona. In English it was first heard at the Lyceum Theatre, March 6, 1891, with George W. Fawcett as Bernick, Alice Fischer as Lona, and Dina Dorf played by Bessie Tyree. There was a third performance at Hammerstein's Opera House three days later. Wilton Lackaye and his company revived the piece at the Lyric Theatre, New York, April 15, 1904.

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