Chapter 9 HEDDA GABLER

(1890)

Hedda Gabler is a great play, great despite its unpleasant theme, and also remarkable, inasmuch as its subject-matter is essentially undramatic-"the picture not of an action but of a condition," as Henry James puts it. The Norwegian poet usually begins to develop his drama where other writers end theirs. Yet so wonderful is his art that we are treated to no long explanations, no retrospective speeches; indeed, the text of an Ibsen play is little more than a series of memoranda for the players. Cuvier-like, the actor must reconstruct a living human from a mere bone of a word. These words seem detached, seem meaningless, yet in action their cohesiveness is unique; dialogue melts into dialogue, action is dovetailed to action, and fleeting gestures reveal a state of soul. Ibsen does not read as well as he acts. He is extremely difficult to interpret for the reason that the old technic of the actor is inadequate, as Bernard Shaw long ago declared.

One merit of the piece is its absence of literary flavour. It is a slice of life. In his prose dramas, Ibsen throws overboard the entire baggage of "literary" effects. He who had worked so successfully in the field of the poetic legendary and historic drama; who had fashioned that mighty trilogy Brand, Peer Gynt, and Emperor and Galilean, saw that a newer rubric must be found for the delineation of modern men and women, of modern problems. So style is absent in his later plays-style in the rhetorical sense. Revolutionist as he is, he is nevertheless a formalist of the old school in his adherence to the classic unities. In Hedda Gabler the action is compressed within a space of about thirty-six hours, in one room, and with a handful of persons. One is tempted to say that the principal action occurs before the play or "off" the stage during its progress. We may see that Hedda does little throughout. Yet, through some magical impartment of the dramatist, we seem to be in possession of the characteristic facts of her nature before she arrives on the scene. Concision does not alone explain this, it may be noticed in other plays of the Norwegian. It is the dramaturgic gift raised to its highest power, though that power be expended upon base metal. Why Ibsen preferred a Hedda to an Isolde is a question that would lead us into devious paths.

In Hedda Gabler all lyricism is sternly suppressed. As if the master had determined to punish himself for his championing of individualism in his earlier plays, he draws the portrait of one who might easily figure as a Nietzschean Super-Woman. Preaching that the state is the foe of the individual, that only revolution-spiritual revolution-can regenerate society, that the superior man and woman are lonely, that individual liberty must be fought for at all hazards,-liberty of thought, speech, action,-Ibsen then deliberately shows the free woman, one emancipated from the beliefs of her family circle and her country. She epitomizes the latter-day anti-social being and is rightfully considered by psychologists as a flaming sign of the times, a brief for the social democrats.

With remorseless logic and an implacable analysis Ibsen discovers to our gaze this bare soul. We see Hedda at school, a discontented, restless girl, envious of her companions, conscious of her own superiority, mental and physical, cruel and overbearing. Little, timid Thea Rysing, with the crown of white-gold hair, wavy, copious, excites anger in the breast of the badly balanced Hedda. She pulls the hair and would delight to see it burn. After all, is she not General Gabler's daughter, an aristocrat, though a poor one! She goes into society and has admirers. Few attract her. They are either too stupid or not rich enough. In this dangerous predicament, jelly-like and drifting, she encounters Eiljert L?vborg, a young man of genius-at least Ibsen says he is; he has certainly the temperament of erratic genius, though at no time does he betray the possession of higher gifts. Yet an interesting man, a romancing idealist, a deceiver of himself as well as of the women before whom he masquerades and poses in the r?le of the misunderstood and persecuted. He is first cousin to Hjalmar Ekdal in The Wild Duck, one of those egotists of the self-pitying, elegiac kind who weeps when he regards in the mirror his own sentimental features.

Despite her hardness, vanity, selfishness, Hedda is taken in by this clever fellow. Like Emma Bovary (though socially more elevated) she is at heart an incorrigible romantic and very snobbish. Modish elegance is her notion of the universe, and a saddle horse with a man in livery discreetly following her as she dashes through the crowded park represents to her the top notch of mundane happiness. L?vborg is a born liar. He has personal address, is undoubtedly a man of brains, and dissipated as he is manages to surround his loose living with the halo of Byronism. His debauches, he believes, are the result of a finely strung nature in conflict with a prosaic world. Hedda sympathizes with this view. She does more. She becomes morbidly interested in his doings and asks imprudent questions which the man rightfully construes as evidences of desire for the life he describes. He makes his first error. It is Hedda's opportunity and she avails herself of it. Naturally theatric, she seizes her father's pistol-there is a brace of old cavalry pistols which play an important r?le throughout-and threatens L?vborg. He leaves her and pretends that he is going to the dogs, but in reality quits the city and takes a position in a country family, there to find a more credulous victim, Thea, now the wife of Sheriff Elvsted.

Remember that these experiences are not shown on the stage. Deftly conveyed by the dramatic stenography of Ibsen, the audience absorb the facts almost unconsciously; and when the curtain falls on Act II, we seem to have known the Gablers, Tesmans, L?vborg, and Thea for years. And all the time Ibsen is not overstepping the traditional territory of the drama; his L?vborg and Hedda, his Thea and George, his Brack-are they not, in their relative position, stock figures for any classic comedy? George Tesman is own brother to Georges Dandin and twin to Charles Bovary. He belongs to that large army of husbands called by Balzac "the predestined." His beard, eyes, nose,-above all his nose,-speech, gait, clothes, are they not so many stigmata of the man whose wife will deceive him? The beauty of the situation is that Hedda does not betray George, and yet she seems more criminal than the timid Thea, who boldly deserts her old husband to follow the scapegrace L?vborg. Hedda is the woman on the brink, the adulteress in thought, the eternal type of one whose will is weakened by egoism. Her soul, its roots nurtured in rank soil, has expanded secretly into a monstrous growth. Her whole life has been one of concealment. She has lied, presumably, in her girlhood, as she lies in the married state. She is never happy except when teasing a man. Laura Marholm paints her portrait as the détraquée: "Her wanton curiosity, her constant longing, inflame the decadent and appeal directly to his sensuality; but her cowardice and disinclination to satisfaction drive her forever from attack to flight, and no sooner has she retreated than she stretches forth her antennas and gropes for him again. To see man feverish-that is what she lives upon; if she cannot have this atmosphere about her, she becomes sallow, hollow-cheeked, and hysteric."

Here is Hedda Gabler sketched in a few words. A cold heart, a cool head, curious but not sensual, combined with a cowardly fear of the conventions-a snobbish tribute to virtues in which she does not believe-these sent Hedda Gabler to her destruction, to that Button-moulder who fashions anew the souls of the useless in his cosmic dust-heap. She went through her life with the chip of chastity on her shoulder; yet dare a man approach her and she is in the throes of mock virtue. She made L?vborg feel this. Brack, with the measuring eye of a worldly man, was not deceived by her tantrums; he saw the essential baseness of the creature.

Hedda stands for a certain order of her sex-not the "strong-minded" or "advanced"-that is, happily, in the minority. In Ibsen's judgment she is doomed to failure because she did not dare far enough. She feared to sin, not because of scrupulosity, but because of the world's opinion. If she ever allowed tender feelings to usurp the hard image of herself enthroned in her soul, they were for L?vborg. He struck in her a depraved chord of feeling. Both loved pleasure. Both took the seeming for actuality. If there is one thing that discredits L?vborg's claim as a man of genius, it is his worship of trivial things. The scholar, the philosopher, the poet, seek pleasure, seek the gratification of the senses; but L?vborg's attitude is too base. He is worthy of Hedda's admiration, and Hedda's only.

With his incomparable irony Ibsen gives the victory to the weak, to the stupid. We may foresee the future of George and Thea when the shock of battle has passed. Both, dull persons, plodding, painstaking, absolutely devoid of humour, settle down to a peaceful existence over the "great" work of the dead L?vborg. It is all piteous, all hopelessly banal-and it is also daily life to its central core.

To assert that Hedda's acts were alone the result of her condition would be to place the drama within the category of the pathologic. Rather is the point made that, despite her approaching motherhood, Hedda's manifest disgust at any reference to it is a sign of her deep-seated depravity. She loathes children, especially a child of Tesman. She is too selfish to enter, even imaginatively, into the joys of maternity. Ibsen notes this when he puts into George's mouth the silly speech about young wives and the burning of the manuscript. Hedda is, on the contrary, less hysterical and more self-contained after marriage than before. Nothing could be more damnably cold-blooded than her deliberate manipulation of L?vborg's vain nature. Only at the grate as she burns the manuscript and in the outburst of wild music preceding her suicide are the demoniac forces of her nature unloosed.

The former act is, nevertheless, controlled by a slow, cautious hate, and the latter occurs off the stage; the pistol shot is the final punctuation mark to this destructive, restless existence. No, Ibsen aimed at something more profound than exhibition of maternal hysteria. The causes of Hedda's behaviour dated back to her girlhood. She was perverse, how perverse we see in her shameless confession that she had led George to an avowal simply because she wanted the comfortable Falk villa for a residence. Her revolt against life was bounded by her petty appetites, nothing more; and for this reason she is an invaluable "human document."

Removed from her cramping environments Hedda would have developed along more normal lines; and herein lies the beauty of Ibsen's problem, Ibsen who always asks questions-like Rembrandt in his Night Watch with its mystic daylight. Hedda might have become an actress or a circus rider, anything less evil than her position as the trouble-breeding wife of Tesman. By enclosing her within the Tesman walls, surrounding her with stupid and dissipated people, she was driven in upon herself, and passing from one mood of exasperation to another she finally became shipwrecked. As Allan Monkhouse writes, "Hedda Gabler is a personification of ennui, a daring effort of imagination, a great piece of construction, a study of essentials with all accidental human element omitted, a work indeed not of realism, though surrounded by realistic details, but belonging rather to such ideal art as the Melancholia of Albert Dürer." Mr. Monkhouse could have quoted La Bruyère about "opposition truths that illuminate one another," Hedda Gabler is one of those "opposition truths" that illuminate an entire section of her sex.

Technically, Ibsen has not surpassed himself in this work. Never has he woven his patterns so densely-the pattern of character and the pattern of action. As in a dream we divine the past of the humans he sets strutting before us, and we leave the theatre as if obsessed by an ugly nightmare. Those who condemn the characters are compelled perforce to admire the cunning workmanship, and no greater error can be committed than supposing the two may be disentangled. Study carefully the play, study carefully its performance, and then despair at separating the characterization from the purely formal elements. Here matter and manner are merged perfectly. We note a few symbolic catchwords, such as "vine leaves," but they serve their spiritual as well as their technical purpose. The pistols, too, are cunningly prepared agents of ruin. We also wonder why George is such a blind fool; why Thea so soon consoles herself, with L?vborg's body still warm; why L?vborg, who despises Tesman, should be anxious to show him his new work. But, to quote Mr. James again: "There are many things in the world that are past finding out, and one of them is whether the subject of a work had not better have been another subject. We shall always do well to leave that matter to the author; he may have some secret for solving the riddle, so terrible would his revenge easily become if he were to accept a responsibility for his theme." And further: "The 'use' of Hedda Gabler is that she acts on others, and that even her most disagreeable qualities have the privilege, thoroughly undeserved doubtless, but equally irresistible, of becoming a part of the history of others. And then one isn't so sure that she is wicked, and by no means sure that she is disagreeable. She is various and sinuous and graceful, complicated and natural; she suffers, she struggles, she is human, and by that fact exposed to a dozen different interpretations, to the importunity of our suspense...."

This seems to be a final judgment-if judgments of Ibsen can be final-upon a woman, who, all said, is human enough to suffer, suffer principally because she feared to sin. She is not a caricature of the "modern" woman. If she had become conscious of the claims of others, in a word the modern, unselfish, emancipated woman, her life would have been different-and the theatre deprived of a most fascinating and enigmatic figure, with her pallid skin, her haunting gray eyes, her sweet, studied languor, and her delicate air of one to whom life owes its richest gifts.

Dr. Wicksteed, in his admirable lectures on Ibsen, remarks: "I am convinced that it is in this typical significance of marriage, and not in any special interest in the so-called woman question as such, that we are to seek the reason of Ibsen's constant recurrence to this theme. Suppress individuality and you have no life; assert it, and you have war and chaos.... Hedda Gabler neither drifted nor was forced into marriage, but she deliberately and shamelessly paid the flattered and delighted Tesman in the forged coinage of love for opening to her a retreat from the career she had exhausted, and entry into the best career she could still think of as possible, and we see the result. Without the spirit of self-surrender, free choice will never secure self-realization."

Her death, sought because of cowardly reasons, is yet the one real fact in Hedda's shallow, feverish existence. Death could alone solve the discords of her life's cruel music.

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