Chapter 7 GHOSTS

(1881)

Following the scandal created by the first performance of A Doll's House, Ghosts seemed like a deliberate affront to his critics, a gauntlet hurled into their faces by the sturdy arm of Dr. Ibsen. Now, he said, in effect,-though he has never condescended to pulpit polemics or café ?sthetics,-here is a wife who resolves to endure who stays at home and bears that burden. Nora Helmer refused! Behold Mrs. Alving, the womanly woman, good housewife-malgré elle même-and good mother!

Ghosts, like much that is great in art, is a very painful play. So is Macbeth, so is Lear, so is ?dipus Rex. There are some painful pictures in the small gallery of the world's greatest art, and in music analogous examples are not wanting. Probably the most poignant emotional music thus far written is to be found in the last movement of Tschaikowsky's Pathetic Symphony. It is cosmic in its hopeless woe. Yet Ibsen gives the screw a tighter wrench, for he conceived the idea of transposing all the horror of the antique drama to the canvas of contemporary middle-class life.

He gives us an Orestes in a smoking jacket, the Furies within the walls of his crumbling brain. Naturally the academic critics cry aloud at the blasphemy. The ancients, Racine, Shakespeare, and the rest, softened their tragic situations by great art. As in a vast mirror the souls of the obsessed pass in solemn, processional attitudes; the contours are blurred; the legend goes up to the heavens in exquisite empurpled haze.

"Very well," grumbles in answer the terrible old man from Norway, "I'll give you a new ?sthetik. Art in old times is at two removes from life. I'll place it at one. I'll banish its opiates, its comic reliefs, all its conventions that mellow and an?stheticize."

Then he wrote Ghosts. It is terrible. The Orestean Furies are localized. They are no longer poetic and pictorial abstractions, but a disease. So you can accept the thesis or leave it. One thing you cannot do: you cannot be indifferent; and therein lies one secret of Ibsen's power. It is his aloofness that his audiences resent the most of all. If, like another master showman, Thackeray, Ibsen would occasionally put his tongue in his cheek, or wink his eye in an aside, or whisper that the story was only make-believe-there, dear ones, don't run away -why, the Ibsen play might not be avoided as if it were the pest. But there are no concessions made, and the sense of reality is tremendous and often nerve-shocking.

The blemishes in Ghosts are few, yet they are in full view. That fire is our old friend, "the long arm of coincidence." And what pastor of any congregation, anywhere, could have been such a doddering old imbecile as Manders with his hatred of insurance? Possibly he represents a type of evangelical and very parochial clergyman, but a type, we hope, long since obsolete. It is not well, either, to pry deeply into the sources of Oswald's insanity. Thus far it has not been accurately diagnosed. Let us accept it with other unavoidable conventions. The pity about Ghosts, which is in the repertory of every continental theatre, is that the Ibsenites made of it a stalking horse for all kinds of vagaries, from free love to eating turnips raw.

Ibsen holds no brief for free love, or for diseased mental states. You may applaud Mrs. Alving, you may loathe her; either way it is a matter of no import to this writer. To call Ghosts immoral is a silly and an illogical proceeding, for it is, if it is anything at all within the domain of morals, a dramatic setting of the biblical wisdom that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children. This may be pure pathology; in Ibsen's hands it is a drama of terrible intensity.

Ghosts is a very simple but painful story. The dissolute Captain Alving, the father of Oswald, dies of his debaucheries before the play begins. His wife, the mother of Oswald, has believed it her bounden duty to hide from the world the cancer which is eating up her family life. She partially succeeds, and only when he brings shame to her very door does she weaken and fly to Pastor Manders, whom she once loved, and who presumably loves her. This worthy clergyman does only what his ideals have taught him. He refuses her refuge and sends her back to her husband, admonishing her that her duty is to accept the cross which God has imposed upon her and to reclaim her husband. Frozen up in heart and soul, Mrs. Alving begins a long fight with the beasts of appetite which rule her husband's nature. She sends away her son Oswald, she even adopts a bastard daughter of her husband's, and marries off the mother-a servant in her employ-to a carpenter, Jacob Engstrand by name. The girl grows up to womanhood; Oswald, her son, becomes a painter and lives in Paris. Captain Alving dies a miserable death, his vices a secret to all but a few, while his widow seeks a salve for her conscience by erecting with his money an orphanage. Naturally Pastor Manders takes much interest in this scheme, and when he meets Oswald fresh from Paris, he is struck by the resemblance the morbid, sickly-looking youth bears to his dead father.

But all has not been well with the young man. He has been told by a famous alienist in Paris that his days of sanity are numbered, and he is at a loss to conjecture why such a curse should be visited upon him. He always heard of his father's greatness and goodness. I know of few more touching scenes than the conversation between mother and son, and the horrible confession which follows. It is like a blast from a charnel house; but then, what power, what lucidity! The poor, tortured mother unburthens her heart to her pastor, and of course receives scant consolation. How could he, according to his lights, treat her otherwise than he did? Manders is a type, and he always faces the past; Mrs. Alving looks toward the west for the glimmer of the new light. Alas, it comes not I She only hears her son crying aloud, "Give me wine, mother!" It is the spiritual battle of the old and new. And the old order is changing.

Worse follows. The boy falls in love with Regina, his half-sister, as to whose identity he is in absolute darkness, for she has been brought up as a maid in his mother's house. But with his mind weakening he clutches at this straw to help him. "Isn't she splendid, mother?" he says, admiring the girl's superb animal development, and we can easily conjecture the agony of his mother. Weak she must appear in the pastor's eyes, for she almost hesitates about revealing the birth of Regina, and wavers on the question of Oswald marrying her. She has been too indulgent to the boy, and Manders does not scruple to tell her so. He is one of your iron-minded men who have a rigid sense of what is right and wrong, and one who would have no sympathy with fluttering souls like Amiel, Lamenais, Clough, or any of the spiritual band to whom dogmas are as steel clamps. Mr. Manders is outraged at Mrs. Alving, and proposes sending Regina away, but where? To her father, Jacob Engstrand, a cunning, low, hypocritical rascal? No, he is not her real father. At the end of the first act both overhear Oswald trying to kiss Regina in the dining room, and another such scene, in which Captain Alving and Regina's mother were the actors, flashes before her, and she cries "Ghosts!" as the curtain falls.

Everything then goes wrong. The Alving orphanage burns down, and there is no insurance because Pastor Mander believes that insuring a consecrated building against fire would be questioning Providence. But his human respect plays him into the hands of Jacob Engstrand, whose cunning is more than a match for the worthy priest. The dialogue between these two widely varying types is a masterpiece.

Mrs. Alving is at last goaded into telling Oswald and Regina of their blood relationship, and the girl, who is a bad, selfish lot, goes away-deserts the family at the most critical period. She upbraids Mrs. Alving for not having told her of her true station in life, and turns her back on the poor mumbling wretch Oswald. She then walks off defiantly and to her putative father's home, a sailors' dance house. Oswald's mind is completely unhinged by this dénouement, and he confides to his mother in stuttering, stammering accents-the sure forerunner of the crumbling brain within-that he has some poison to kill himself with; that he had relied on Regina to do it when he would be an absolute idiot; but, as Regina was at hand no longer, his mother must play the executioner.

The end is as relentless as a Greek tragedy. The boy chases his mother from room to room imploring and screaming at her to rid him of his pain; as she brought him into life without his consent, so should she send him forth from it when he bade her. It is all frightful, but enthralling. When Oswald cries aloud for the sun, the end has been reached. He is a hapless lunatic, and his wretched, half-crazed mother, remembering her promise to him, searches frantically in his pocket for the morphine, and then a merciful curtain bars out from further view the finale. If Ibsen's scalpel digs down too deep and jars some hidden and diseased nerves, what shall we say? Rather can he not turn upon us and cry, "I but hold the mirror up to nature; behold yourselves in all your nakedness, in all your corruption!" Anatole France once wrote, "If the will of those who are no more is to be imposed on those who still are, it is the dead who live, and the live men who become the dead ones." And this idea is the motive of Ghosts.

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