The Quintessence of Ibsenism by Bernard Shaw Now Completed to the Death of Ibsen

THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM BY BERNARD SHAW NOW COMPLETED TO THE DEATH OF IBSEN NEW YORK: BRENTANO’S MCMXV Copyright, 1913 By G. Bernard Shaw THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. 2 CONTENTS Preface The Two Pioneers Ideals and Idealists The Womanly Woman The Autobiographical Anti-Idealist Extravaganzas Brand Peer Gynt Emperor and Galilean The Objective Anti-Idealist Plays The League of Youth Pillars of Society A Doll's House Ghosts An Enemy of the People The Wild Duck Rosmersholm The Lady from the Sea Hedda Gabler Down Among the Dead Men: the Last Four Plays The Master Builder Little Eyolf John Gabriel Borkman When We Dead Awaken The Lesson of the Plays What is the New Element in the Norwegian School? The Technical Novelty in Ibsen's Plays Needed: An Ibsen Theatre 3 PREFACE: 1913 In the pages which follow I have made no attempt to tamper with the work of the bygone man of thirty-five who wrote them. I have never admitted the right of an elderly author to alter the work of a young author, even when the young author happens to be his former self. In the case of a work which is a mere exhibition of skill in conventional art, there may be some excuse for the delusion that the longer the artist works on it the nearer he will bring it to perfection. Yet even the victims of this delusion must see that there is an age limit to the process, and that though a man of forty-five may improve the work- manship of a man of thirty-five, it does not follow that a man of fifty-five can do the same. When we come to creative art, to the living word of a man delivering a message to his own time, it is clear that any attempt to alter this later on is simply fraud and forgery. As I read the old Quintessence of Ibsenism I may find things that I see now at a different angle, or correlate with so many things then unnoted by me that they take on a different aspect. But though this may be a reason for writing another book, it is not a reason for altering an existing one. What I have written I have written, said Pilate, thinking (rightly, as it turned out) that his blunder might prove truer than its revision by the elders; and what he said after a lapse of twenty-one seconds I may very well say after a lapse of twenty-one years. However, I should not hesitate to criticize my earlier work if I thought it likely to do any mis- chief that criticism can avert. But on reading it through I have no doubt that it is as much needed in its old form as ever it was Now that Ibsen is no longer frantically abused, and is safe in the Pantheon, his message is in worse danger of being forgotten or ignored than when he was in the pillory. Nobody now dreams of calling me a “muck ferretting dog” because I think Ibsen a great teacher. I will not go so far as to say I wish they did; but I do say that the most effective way of shutting our minds against a great man's ideas is to take them for granted and admit he was great and have done with him. It really matters very 4 little whether Ibsen was a great man or not: what does matter is his message and the need of it. That people are still interested in the message is proved by the history of this book. It has long been out of print in England; but it has never been out of demand. In spite of the smuggling of unauthorized American editions, which I have winked at because the absence of an English reprint was my own fault (if it be a fault not to be able to do more than a dozen things at a time), the average price of copies of the original edition stood at twenty-four shillings some years ago, and is no doubt higher now. But it was not possible to reprint it without additions. When it was issued in 1891 Ibsen was still alive, and had not yet pro- duced The Master Builder, or Little Eyolf, or John Gabriel Borkman, or When We Dead Awaken. Without an account of these four final masterpieces, a book entitled The Quintessence of Ibsenism would have been a fraud on its pur- chasers; and it was the difficulty of finding time to write the additional chapters on these plays and review Ibsen's position from the point of view reached when his work ended with his death and his canonization as an admitted grand master of European literature, that has prevented me for twenty years from complying with the demand for a second edition. Also, perhaps, some relics of my old, or rather my young conscience, which re- volted against hasty work. Now that my own stream is nearer the sea, I am more inclined to encourage myself in haste and recklessness by re- minding myself that le mieux est l’ennemi du bien, and that I had better cobble up a new edition as best I can than not supply it at all. I have taken all possible precautions to keep the reader’s mind free from verbal confusion in fol- lowing Ibsen’s attack on ideals and idealism, a confusion that might have been avoided could his plays, without losing the naturalness of their dia- logue, have been translated into the language of the English Bible. It is not too much to say that the works of Ibsen furnish one of the best modern keys to the prophecies of Scripture. Read the prophets, major and minor, from Isaiah to Malachi, without such a key; and you will be puzzled and bored by the almost continuous pro- 5 test against and denunciation of idolatry and prostitution. Simpletons read all this passion- ate invective with sleepy unconcern, concluding thoughtlessly that idolatry means praying to stocks and stones instead of to brass lectern eagles and the new reredos presented by the local dis- tiller in search of a title; and as to prostitution, they think of it as “the social evil,” and regret that the translators of the Bible used a much blunter word. But nobody who has ever heard real live men talking about graven images and traders in sex, can for a moment suppose them to be the things the prophets denounced so ear- nestly. For idols and idolatry read ideals and idealism; for the prostitution of Piccadilly Circus read not only the prostitution of the journalist, the political lawyer, the parson selling his soul to the squire, the ambitious politician selling his soul for office, but the much more intimate and wide- spread idolatries and prostitutions of the private snob, the domestic tyrant and voluptuary, and the industrial adventurer. At once the prophetic warnings and curses take on meaning and pro- portion, and lose that air of exaggerated right- eousness and tiresome conventional rant which repels readers who do not possess Ibsen’s clue. I have sometimes thought of reversing the opera- tion, and substituting in this book the words idol and idolatry for ideal and idealism; but it would be impossible without spoiling the actuality of Ibsen’s criticism of society. If you call a man a rascally idealist, he is not only shocked and indig- nant but puzzled: in which condition you can rely on his attention. If you call him a rascally idola- ter, he concludes calmly that you do not know that he is a member of the Church of England. I have therefore left the old wording. Save for certain adaptations made necessary by the lapse of time and the hand of death, the book stands as it did, with a few elucidations which I might have made in 1891 had I given the text a couple of extra revisions. Also, of course, the section deal- ing with the last four plays. The two concluding chapters are new. There is no fundamental change: above all, no dilution. Whether this edition will change people’s minds to the extent to which the first did (to my own 6 great astonishment) I do not know. In the eighteen-nineties one jested about the revolt of the daughters, and of the wives who slammed the front door like Nora. At present the revolt has become so general that even the feeblest and old- est after-dinner jesters dare no longer keep Votes for Women on their list of stale pleasantries about mothers-in-law, rational dress, and mixed bathing. Men are waking up to the perception that in kill- ing women’s souls they have killed their own. Mr. Granville Barker’s worthy father of six unmarriageable daughters in The Madras House, ruefully exclaiming, “It seems to me I’ve been made a convenience of all my life,” has taken away the excited attention that Nora once com- manded when she said, “I have been living all these years with a strange man.” When she meets Helmer’s “No man sacrifices his honor for a woman” with her “Thousands of women have done that for men,” there is no longer the old impressed assent: men fiercely protest that it is not true; that, on the contrary, for every woman who has sacrificed her honor for a man’s sake, ten men have sacrificed their honor for a woman’s.

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