Adventures in Criticism Part 19

"In my faith, in my hope, in my love."

In these words we have the main ethical problem solved; and Peer's _perception_ of the truth (_vide_ Mr. Wicksteed's remarks quoted above) is the one necessary climax of the poem. We do not care a farthing--at least, I do not care a farthing--whether Peer escape the b.u.t.ton-Moulder or not. It may be too late for him, or there may be yet time to live another life; but whatever the case may be, it doesn't alter what Ibsen set out to prove. The problem which Ibsen s.h.i.+rks (if indeed he does s.h.i.+rk it) is a subsidiary problem--a rider, so to speak. Can Solveig by her love redeem Peer Gynt? Can the woman save the man's soul? Will she, after all, cheat the b.u.t.ton-Moulder of his victim?

The poet, by giving Solveig the last word, seems to think it possible.

According to Mr. Archer, the Ibsen of to-day would know it to be impossible. He knows (none better) that "No man can save his brother's soul or pay his brother's debt." "No, nor women neither," adds Mr.

Archer.

Is Peer's Redemption a romantic Fallacy?

But is this so? _Peer Gynt_ was published in 1867. I turn to _A Doll's House_, written twelve years later, and I find there a woman preparing to redeem a man just as Solveig prepares to redeem Peer. I find in Mr.

Archer's translation of that play the following page of dialogue:--

_Mrs. Linden_: There's no happiness in working for oneself, Nils; give me somebody and something to work for.

_Krogstad_: No, no; that can never be. It's simply a woman's romantic notion of self-sacrifice.

_Mrs. Linden_: Have you ever found me romantic?

_Krogstad_: Would you really--? Tell me, do you know my past?

_Mrs. Linden_: Yes.

_Krogstad_: And do you know what people say of me?

_Mrs. Linden_: Didn't you say just now that with me you could have been another man?

_Krogstad_: I am sure of it.

_Mrs. Linden_: Is it too late?

_Krogstad_: Christina, do you know what you are doing? Yes, you do; I see it in your face. Have you the courage--?

_Mrs. Linden_: I need someone to tend, and your children need a mother. You need me, and I--I need you. Nils, I believe in your better self. With you I fear nothing.

Ibsen's hopes of Enfranchised Women.

Again, we are not told if Mrs. Linden's experiment is successful; but Ibsen certainly gives no hint that she is likely to fail. This was in 1879. In 1885 Ibsen paid a visit to Norway and made a speech to some workingmen at Drontheim, in which this pa.s.sage occurred:--

"Democracy by itself cannot solve the social question. We must introduce an aristocratic element into our life. I am not referring, of course, to an aristocracy of birth, or of purse, or even of intellect. I mean an aristocracy of character, of will, of mind. That alone can make us free. From two cla.s.ses will this aristocracy I desire come to us--_from our women and our workmen_. The social revolution, now preparing in Europe, is chiefly concerned with the future of the workers and the women.

On this I set all my hopes and expectations...."

I think it would be easy to multiply instances showing that, though Ibsen may hold that no man can save his brother's soul, he does not extend this disability to women, but hopes and believes, on the contrary, that women will redeem mankind. On men he builds little hope. To speak roughly, men are all in Peer Gynt's case, or Torvald Helmer's. They are swathed in timid conventions, blindfolded with selfishness, so that they cannot perceive, and unable with their own hands to tear off these bandages. They are incapable of the highest renunciation. "No man," says Torvald Helmer, "sacrifices his honor, even for one he loves." Those who heard Miss Achurch deliver Nora's reply will not easily forget it. "Millions of women have done so." The effect in the theatre was tremendous. This sentence clinched the whole play.

Millions of women are, like Solveig, capable of renouncing all for love, of surrendering self altogether; and, as I read Ibsen, it is precisely on this power of renunciation that he builds his hope of man's redemption. So that, unless I err greatly, the scene in _Peer Gynt_ which Mr. Archer calls a s.h.i.+rking of the ethical problem, is just the solution which Ibsen has been persistent in presenting to the world.

Let it be understood, of course, that it is only your Solveigs and Mrs. Lindens who can thus save a brother's soul: women who have made their own way in the world, thinking for themselves, working for themselves, freed from the conventions which man would impose on them.

I know Mr. Archer will not retort on me with Nora, who leaves her husband and children, and claims that her first duty is to herself.

Nora is just the woman who cannot redeem a man. Her Doll's House training is the very opposite of Solveig's and Mrs. Linden's. She is a silly girl brought up amid conventions, and awakened, by one blow, to the responsibilities of life. That she should at once know the right course to take would be incredible in real life, and impossible in a play the action of which has been evolved as inevitably as real life.

Many critics have supposed Ibsen to commend Nora's conduct in the last act of the play. He neither sanctions nor condemns. But he does contrast her in the play with Mrs. Linden, and I do not think that contrast can be too carefully studied.

MR. SWINBURNE'S LATER MANNER

May 5, 1894. Aloofness of Mr. Swinburne's Muse.

There was a time--let us say, in the early seventies--when many young men tried to write like Mr. Swinburne. Remarkably small success waited on their efforts. Still their numbers and their youth and (for a while also) their persistency seemed to promise a new school of poesy, with Mr. Swinburne for its head and great exemplar: exemplar rather than head, for Mr. Swinburne's att.i.tude amid all this devotion was rather that of the G.o.d than of the priest. He sang, and left the wors.h.i.+ppers to work up their own enthusiasm. And to this att.i.tude he has been constant. Unstinting, and occasionally unmeasured, in praise and dispraise of other men, he has allowed his own reputation the n.o.ble liberty to look after itself. Nothing, for instance, could have been finer than the careless, almost disdainful, dignity of his bearing in the months that followed Tennyson's death. The cats were out upon the tiles, then, and his was the luminous, expressive silence of a sphere.

One felt, "whether he received it or no, here is the man who can wear the crown."

And Her Tendency towards Abstractions.

It was not, however, the aloofness of Mr. Swinburne's bearing that checked the formation of a Swinburnian school of poetry. The cause lay deeper, and has come more and more into the light in the course of Mr.

Swinburne's poetic development--let me say, his thoroughly normal development. We can see now that from the first such a school, such a successful following, was an impossibility. The fact is that Mr.

Swinburne has not only genius, but an extremely rare and individual genius. The germ of this individuality may be found, easily enough, in "Atalanta" and the Ballads; but it luxuriates in his later poems and throughout them--flower and leaf and stem. It was hardly more natural in 1870 to confess the magic of the great chorus, "Before the beginning of years," or of "Dolores," than to embark upon the vain adventure of imitating them. I cannot imagine a youth in all Great Britain so green or unknowing as to attempt an imitation of "A Nympholept," perhaps the finest poem in the volume before me.

I say "in Great Britain;" because peculiar as Mr. Swinburne's genius would be in any country, it is doubly peculiar as the endowment of an English poet. If there be one quality beloved above others by the inhabitants of this island, it is concreteness; and I suppose there never was a poet in the world who used less concreteness of speech than Mr. Swinburne. Mr. Palgrave once noted that the landscape of Keats falls short of the landscape of Sh.e.l.ley in its comparative lack of the larger features of sky and earth; Keats's was "foreground work"

for the most part. But what shall be said of Sh.e.l.ley's universe after the immense vague regions inhabited by Mr. Swinburne's muse? She sings of the sea; but we never behold a sail, never a harbor: she sings of pa.s.sion--among the stars. We seem never to touch earth; page after page is full of thought--for, vast as the strain may be, it is never empty--but we cannot apply it. And all this is extremely distressing to the Briton, who loves practice as his birthright. He comes on a Jacobite song. "Now, at any rate," he tells himself, "we arrive at something definite: some allusion, however small, to Bonny Prince Charlie." He reads--

"Faith speaks when hope dissembles; Faith lives when hope lies dead: If death as life dissembles, And all that night a.s.sembles Of stars at dawn lie dead, Faint hope that smiles and trembles May tell not well for dread: But faith has heard it said."

"Very beautiful," says the Briton; "but why call this a 'Jacobite Song'?" Some thorough-going admirer of Mr. Swinburne will ask, no doubt, if I prefer gush about Bonny Prince Charlie. Most decidedly I do not. I am merely pointing out that the poet cares so little for the common human prejudice in favor of concreteness of speech as to give us a Jacobite song which, for all its indebtedness to the historical facts of the Jacobite Risings, might just as well have been put in the mouth of Judas Maccabaeus.

Somebody--I forget for the moment who it was--compared Poetry with Antaeus, who was strong when his feet touched Earth, his mother; weaker when held aloft in air. The justice of this criticism I have no s.p.a.ce here to discuss; but the difference is patent enough between poetry such as this of Herrick--

"When as in silks my Julia goes, Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows The liquefaction of her clothes."

Or this, of Burns--

"The boat rocks at the pier o' Leith, Fu' loud the wind blaws frae the ferry, The boat rides by the Berwick-law, And I maun leave my bonny Mary."

Or this, of Shakespeare--

"When daisies pied, and violets blue, And lady smocks all silver-white, And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue Do paint the meadows with delight."

Or this, of Milton--

"the broad circ.u.mference Hung on his shoulders like the moon, whose orb, Through optic gla.s.s the Tuscan artist views At evening from the top of Fesole, Or in Valdarno...."

And such lines as these by Mr. Swinburne--

"The dark dumb G.o.dhead innate in the fair world's life Imbues the rapture of dawn and of noon with dread, Infects the peace of the star-shod night with strife, Informs with terror the sorrow that guards the dead.

No service of bended knee or of humbled head May soothe or subdue the G.o.d who has change to wife: And life with death is as morning with evening wed."