The Theatres of Wagner and Ibsen

Author(s): Eric Russell Bentley

Source: The Kenyon Review , Autumn, 1944, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Autumn, 1944), pp. 542-569
Published by: Kenyon College

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4332546

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Kenyon College is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The
Kenyon Review

This content downloaded from

81.84.170.136 on Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:54:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 THE THEATRES OF
WAGNER AND IBSEN
By ERIC RUSSELL BENTLEY

But there can be no doubt that Wagner, and Ibsen too,

will one day come into their own again, even though for
quite different reasons and out of quite different spiritual
presuppositions. The few genuine geniuses of the theatre
which mankind has known are not to be destroyed.
Egon Friedell, some twenty years ago.

D-RAMA as a high art has appeared only sporadically. Music,

for example, has had in the modern world a much more dis-
tinguished and continuous history. So have some literary forms
such as the novel and even lyric verse. But the theatre is a step-
child. Look through any good critical journal and you will find
stringent, zealous, and expert criticism of all the arts with the
single exception of drama, for there is at present no significant
theatre, and even the better dramatists of yesterday-Strindberg,
Chekhov, and Synge - are to a large extent forgotten, while
their contemporaries in the novel and poetry - James, Proust, the
Symbolists - maintain and even enhance their reputation. The
dramatic criticism that does exist is divided into two equally in-
sufficient departments: the technical, which embraces everything
from academic history of the drama to studies of the various para-
phernalia of the theatre, and the journalistic, which even at its best
(in George Jean Nathan, James Agate, or St. John Ervine) never
amounts to more than scattered witticisms and fragmentary aper-
fus.
Perhaps an art receives the criticism it deserves. Has there

This content downloaded from

81.84.170.136 on Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:54:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
ERIC RUSSELL BENTLEY 543

been a great dramatist since Racine and M

may allow that since 1700 it has been a que
could be theatre as a high art at all. First-rat
themselves to the theatre, but often - on
Schiller, and Hebbel-something first-rate is w
which is not first-rate theatre. Goethe succeed
lyric and the dramatic poem. Schiller, for
intellect (greatly overlooked in English-sp
seldom entirely great as a dramatist; his geni
than tragic, more forensic than dramatic.
more revealing. He was a poet whose lifel
serve the theatre and whose theoretic unders
of dramatic art in the modern world was the
generation. But his plays, for all their rea
ingredients, are all somehow off center, in
unsatisfying.
Whether or no these examples convince, it will be agreed that
many great artists have written for the modern theatre without
producing great dramas. Indeed there is hardly an important
modern writer-not Eliot, nor Joyce, nor Lawrence, nor Stefan
George, not even Mallarme-who has not fancied himself as a
dramatist with largely unhappy consequences. The list could be
extended back through the 19th Century to the earliest Roman-
ticists nearly all of whom wrote bad plays in verse. Nor was the
18th Century very much luckier.
Now I do not believe that we can answer questions like, Why
was there no great drama in Victorian England? with complete
finality. We can no more explain why genius does not occur at a
certain time than we can explain why it does occur at another
time. There is an element of chance, of the imponderable, or at
least of the as yet unknown, in the matter, and Spenglerian or
other patterns which attribute such things to inevitable degenera-
tion are a futile half-wisdom after the event. On the other hand
one can partly explain why when genius did occur and did try

This content downloaded from

81.84.170.136 on Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:54:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
544 KENYON REVIEW

itself so persistently in the dram

tial explanation is, negatively st
life had disappeared, and with
dramatic form. Schiller, Victo
forms of tragedy after the sub
Moliere and Congreve was also a
which disappeared, and even th
that of Beaumarchais, Goldoni,
the earlier variety.
Even more directly than the
the drama is a chronicle and brie
not merely the surface but the w
ture; hence the necessity of his
drama since the 18th Century is
sent upon the stage the mater
new age, an age inaugurated by
nological revolutions of unprec
scope. Today we have comfortab
olutions with the three words De
trialism.
'There have been three major at
world in drama, and by a conv
identify each of these with on
Shaw are the avatars of music-
19th Century culture. Bernard
are not the subject of the prese
anced perspective is it necessary
following his immediate prede
comedy from the ironic contrast
ironic contrast of idealism and
economic aims. From this startin
his ideas operate dramatically.
the ideas had been precariously s
an intrigue is stuck precarious

This content downloaded from

81.84.170.136 on Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:54:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
ERIC RUSSELL BENTLEY 545

mean that Shaw "is not a dramatist," though he was bound to

give that impression to critics of the old school. A less biassed
critic can see that any of the best of Shaw's plays is a finely
orchestrated drama of ideas and that Shaw has realised in comedy
what Hebbel proposed as the task of modern drama generally,
when he wrote in his journal (November, 1843):

The new drama, if such a thing comes into being, will differ from
the Shakespearian drama, which must now be definitely abandoned,
in that the dramatic dialectic will be injected not only into the char-
acters, but also directly into the idea itself so that not alone the re-
lation of man to the idea is debated but also the validity of the
idea itself.

Hebbel's words are quite as pertinent to the history of tragedy,

which, in its Wagnerite and Ibsenite form, is my present theme.

2.
First, Wagner. Though the exceptions are better known than
the rule, the main operatic tradition was one of serious music
drama, that is of plays which were a serious interpretation of
life, not frivolous displays in which, as Wagner said of Meyer-
beer, effects appear without their causes. The tradition of serious
music-drama stretches from Monteverdi to Mozart in the secular
opera, and from Schuetz to Handel in sacred opera or oratorio.
In the second half of the 18th Century Gluck wrote: "I endeav-
ored to reduce music to its proper function, that of seconding
poetry by enforcing the expression of the sentiment, and the inter-
est of the situations, without interrupting the action, or weaken-
ing it by superfluous ornament." Rather earlier the composer
Mattheson wrote: "In my opinion a good opera theatre is nothing
but an academy of many fine arts, where architecture, painting,
the dance, poetry . . . and above all music should unite to bring
about a work of art." If we put Gluck and Mattheson together
we have something very close to a Wagnerian theory of a Com-
posite Work of Art (Gesamtkunstwerk).

This content downloaded from

81.84.170.136 on Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:54:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 546 KENYON REVIEW

Schiller was perhaps the first im

that the future of drama might
a certain confidence in opera," he
ing that from it will rise as from the choruses of the ancient
feasts of Bacchus the tragedy in a nobler form." Goethe replied
impressively: "The hopes you placed in the opera you would
find fulfilled to a high degree in the recent Don Juan"-Mozart's
Don Giovanni. The operas of Mozart are commonly considered
musical more than dramatic; Mozart himself wrote that in opera
"the poetry must be altogether the obedient daughter of the
music"; and Wagner asserts that Mozart did not take drama very
seriously. Nevertheless Goethe was right, and the fusion of music
and drama in Mozart's operas is closer to the Wagnerian ideal
than is the subordination of music to words in Gluck's theory.
Mozart's three operatic masterpieces are the greatest dramas of
the 18th Century and the greatest music-dramas of all time.
But neither they nor Gluck's Orfeo and Alceste are what we
are after: the expression of the modern world in drama. They are
the expression of the ancien regime, at the latest the expression
of the ancien regime under fire. Though the music of Don Gio-
vanni in its stern grandeur, its tempestuous exuberance, its subtle
psychology, and its modulated mood-painting, belies current
notions of "classicism," "rococo," and "enlightenment," yet the
world depicted is, internally as well as externally, the world of
Joseph II and not that of Bismarck.
Between Mozart and Wagner there is no music-dramatist of
the first rank. What is the road that leads from The Magic Flute,
which Wagner held to be the cornerstone of German national
opera, and Lohengrin? The question of Wagner's origin is a vexed
one. Some have regarded his art as springing fully-equipped from
the head of the maestro. Others have assailed him as an ungrateful
plagiarist. Partisan feeling being by this time less foetid, we
might venture to suggest that Wagner was about as derivative as
most good artists and no more so. He developed three chief con-

This content downloaded from

81.84.170.136 on Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:54:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
ERIC RUSSELL BENTLEY 547

ceptions which were already in existence. These could be called:

1. The national idea.
2. The symphonic idea.
3. The theatrical idea.
1. The national idea. Lacking the national unity of France
and England, the Germans lacked also a national culture. The
result since the 18th Century has been a degree of overcompen-
sation which has shocked-and rocked-the world. In the drama
Lessing managed to put German comedy on its feet, while the
pompous Johann Christoph Gottschied championed the idea of
a German national drama. 'The age of Schiller went further than
this in disseminating the idea that the theatre could be the guid-
ing light of a whole culture. In the operatic field The Magic
Flute was followed after a generation by Weber's Der Frei-
schuetz, which is as important a monument of German Romanti-
cism as Hernani is of French.
One of the many aspects of Romanticism is a renewed interest
in local tradition, and thus in national folklore. Nowhere was
this interest stronger than in Germany where the ballad and the
Maerchen were unearthed and imitated by succeeding generations
of Romanticists from Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1808) on. As
interesting in this connection as Der Freischuetz is an essay writ-
ten in 1844 by Friedrich Theodor Vischer entitled "Suggestion
for an Opera." German opera, Vischer said, had had in Mozart
its Goethe but lacked its Shakespeare. Moreover Mozart was an
Italian-feeling German, while what was wanted was a real Ger-
man. For the expression of Germanism in music an ideal subject
would be the Nibelungen story which was Germanism chemically
pure. And anyway the realm of saga was too elemental for com-
munication in mere words; it must speak in the elemental language
of music. "It is as if it were made for opera," Vischer wrote of the
Nibelungen myth, "it wells up out of the most splendid musical
motives; it has long awaited its composer and now imperiously
calls to him."

This content downloaded from

81.84.170.136 on Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:54:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
548 KENYON REVIEW

Four years after Vischer's essay

turned to theorizing on the same sub
Wibelungen, World-History in Saga
ians the Wibelungen are the Ghibelin
Waiblingen where Frederic Barbar
Richard Wagner, for whom the di
W was slight, they were the Nibelu
Newman puts it: "In some mysteriou
ungen Hoard became identified in th
successors, and the German people
kingship. With Barbarossa, the Hoard
the Grail; and that last excursion o
lost his life, was made, says Wagne
impulse to grasp the Hoard, that h
into the Grail."
In such ways did the Wagnerian m
a national symbolism. In Wagner's
period-Art and Revolution, The A
Opera and Drama-the national char
phasized ad nauseam. Art is of the
the artist is a magical mouthpiece, b
older his nationalism took on the c
came a Reich-German, anti-French, a
A Nazi critic has written that Bay
little, and indeed there is a real thoug
the demagogue of Bayreuth and the
The idea of a national German art
ends with Nazism. But Bayreuth has
Eighteenth Century opera had catere
or to other similar groups in a cou
attempt to give social function to th
bourgeoisie." Despite the blandishm
Wagner knew that to be a court m
lackey of a lackey. Despite the appa

This content downloaded from

81.84.170.136 on Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:54:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
ERIC RUSSELL BENTLEY 549

artist was supposed to have undergone in the 19th Century, Wag-

ner resolved to be more of a monarch than poor Ludwig.
The Romanticists had claimed primacy for the artist in the
ideal world; Wagner proposed to realise their ideal in actuality.
The Romanticists had called themselves unacknowledged legis-
lators of the world; Wagner would be an acknowledged legislator.
It is rightly said that Wagner made only too solid and tangible
what Romantic poets had left to the fancy. The theatre at Bay-
reuth is itself a Romantic fancy made solid and tangible. It is not
only a nationalist symbol but also a symbol of aestheticism, the
Palace of Art, Axel's Castle, the ivory tower itself. If German
soldiers on leave from the Russian front are taken to Bayreuth
it is as much to help them forget as to help them remember. Here
(and everywhere you have him) Wagner is an ambiguous figure,
imperialist and escapist, real politiker and aesthete. For Wagner
is both Parsifal and Kundry, and Bayreuth is Wartburg and Ven-
usberg in one.
2. The symphonic idea. In music-drama the chief musical
considerations are, first, the melodic lines of the voices, second,
the harmony of voice with voice and of voice with orchestra, third,
the relation of voice to orchestra, and, fourth, the relation of
musical to dramatic theme. Where did Wagner get his musical
theories? Musicologists love to tell us that he took this or that
from Marschner or Spontini or some other composer whom we
never have a chance to hear. Yet the main ideas of Wagnerian
music are present in the major composers too. When Gluck aban-
doned the secco recitativo for accompanied recitative, when Mo-
zart composed the passionate recitatives alike melodic and dra-
matic of The Magic Flute, the way was prepared for Wagner's
conception of a continuous melodic line to extend from the begin-
ning of an opera to the end. 'The phrase "endless melody" is of
course a Wagnerian hyperbole, for even in mature works like The
Valkyrie and Tristan certain passages inevitably detach themselves
from the context like any Italian aria. Yet Tristan as a whole does

This content downloaded from

81.84.170.136 on Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:54:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 550 KENYON REVIEW

not fall into many interrupted sections between which the audi-
ence takes a breath and applauds. It moves in a series of great
waves all of which seem to merge in one enormous flood-tide.
There are two types of music, absolute music and dramatic
music, and Wagner's is hyperdramatic. But, although in recent
years Wagner has always had to bear the brunt of attacks on pro-
gram and dramatic music generally, he invented neither the one
nor the other. There are programmatic elements in the music of
almost every well-known composer. There are dramatic elements
in the music of every great classical composer. Mozart for instance
uses tonality for purposes of characterisation; a given key is iden-
tified with a certain mood, theme, or person. Wagner experi-
mented endlessly with changes of key until in the Tristan we have
that chromaticism which is at least a step towards the complete
atonality of Schoenberg. Now in absolute music harmony and ton-
ality are structural; the disposition and variation of harmonies is
the architecture of the music. With Romanticism-and perhaps
that includes Mozart as well as Beethoven-harmonies come to
be used for their flavor, atmosphere, or "color." This is particu-
larly clear in parts of Beethoven's Sixth and in some of Schubert's
songs. When, as in the opening of Rhine Gold, the harmony does
not change at all through a considerable passage, interest in har-
monic progression is inevitably nil. Interest in atmosphere is all.
Such is the dramatic use of harmony; the orchestra becomes a sub-
lime stage effect.
As to the relation of voice to orchestra, Wagner's chief reform
is celebrated if not notorious. He enlarged the orchestra. Enthus-
iasts report that he is the founder of modern orchestration and of
modern conducting; anti-Wagnerians complain of his vulgar con-
fusion of size and merit. The real meaning of the enlarged orches-
tra, however, is the real meaning of Wagnerian musical technique
generally: Wagner brought the romantic symphony into the opera
house. So striking is this fact that Ernest Newman concludes that
Wagner was not a dramatist turned musician as is often held (and

This content downloaded from

81.84.170.136 on Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:54:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
ERIC RUSSELL BENTLEY 551

as I, with reservations, hold) but a musician

to be a dramatist. Actually Wagner's symphonic idea is not anti-
dramatic. Every good play has a rhythmic structure and a sym-
phonic unity. Wagner's introduction of a symphonic pattern into
music-drama is the dramatizing of opera by genuinely musical
means.
The symphonic idea in opera means that much of the onus
of the drama is transferred from the action and the dialogue to
the orchestra. The orchestral score becomes one long tone poem.
Now many dramatists have known the value of repeated catch-
words, and many musicians have known the dramatic force of
repeated melodies, and from the existing idea of dramatically
repeated musical themes comes the Wagnerian leitmotif, which
relieves the dialogue of a considerable burden and helps to bind
the whole work together. In one work of Wagner, The Ring (and
we should not speak as if all Wagner's works were the same), the
leitmotif becomes a principal element in the structure of the piece,
an element that is tiresome and mechanical if you hear a large
part of the cycle at once. But we are now on the threshold of the
next topic.
4. The theatrical idea. Notoriously in Opera and Drama, more
plausibly in later essays such as The Destiny of Opera, Wagner
has expounded his ideas of theatre. Ignoring his arbitrary Teu-
tonic antitheses and the involutions, at first baffling and in the end
disgusting, of his argument, we can extract from these documents
the assurance that Wagner was aware of the unsatisfactory status
of the theatre in modern life, that he realised that even Goethe
and Schiller had not really succeeded in the theatre, and that he
shared the hope of those who saw a future in music-drama with
mythological subject-matter. Myth, Wagner thinks, is always true;
it is elemental; it springs from the Folk; it can be expressed in
language that is meant to be musically enunciated (as against
verses which happen to be set to music later). The Wagnerian
music-drama has a more closely-knit dialogue than the despised

This content downloaded from

81.84.170.136 on Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:54:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 552 KENYON REVIEW

Grand Opera. It avoids pretty so

drama with no recitatives the dialogue is continuous like the
melodic line, and because of this Wagner slows down his voices
and gives the impression of speed with his orchestra. Hence the
typically Wagnerian pattern of slow vocal melody against a com-
plex, often bewilderingly fast and tempestuous, symphonic back-
ground.
Wagner proposed to replace the Grand Opera of Meyerbeer
and Scribe with the Composite Work of Art, and for that reason
one prime fact has been overlooked by all but the anti-Wagner-
ians: Wagner's own theatre technique is that of Meyerbeer and
Scribe. Eugene Scribe, the millionaire play-making machine of the
July Monarchy who never produced a first-rate work of art, is
one of the pioneers of cultural history. Ibsen helped to direct
Scribe plays at Bergen; Wagner courted his favor and asked him
for a libretto. Scribe is the father of both the Wagnerian and the
Ibsenite theatre. Neither Wagner, who ended with Parsifal with
its distasteful mixture of sensationalism and moralism, nor Ibsen,
who in his last plays still used the Scribean pattern of the buried
scandal, outlived Scribe's influence.
Wagner's objections to conventionality and artificiality are
not so much objections to Scribe as to the late classicism of the
18th Century which Scribe had previously rebelled against. Wag-
ner wished to simplify the drama of his operatic predecessors, to
reduce it to bare essentials, to organise and centralise it, so that
the effect might be strong and direct. That had been Scribe's idea
too. Scribe's libretti had been "constructed," "well-made," crude,
full of action, earnest but shallow, full of suspense but empty of
subtlety. So were most of Wagner's.
There is of course a difference of tone. Scribe had been wholly
a commercial hack, and that was the last thing Wagner would
ever have confessed to being. His Teutonic high seriousness, his
theoretical lucubrations, and his grandiose mythological material
give him a status as librettist, partly justified, partly the product

This content downloaded from

81.84.170.136 on Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:54:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 ERIC RUSSELL BENTLEY 553

of a confusion between pomposity and real seriousness, which

Scribe could never have attained to. Ibsen poured a Scribe plot
into an ancient Norse setting in The Feast at Solhaug; Wagner
poured Scribisms into his Germanic material. Nietzsche acutely
observed that Wagner remained essentially a late French Roman-
ticist. That is true. And as poet he was a Romanticist nearer to
the level of Scribe and Dumas than to that of the great Romantic
poets.
If operatic history since the death of Mozart means a search
for the music-drama of the modern world, the fruit of the search
is the mature work of Wagner. His early works, as far as Tann-
haeuser and even Lohengrin, are still Grand Opera of a kind that
the audiences of Scribe or Weber would understand at least dra-
matically though the vehement criticism all Wagner's works met
with shows they had something in them more challenging or at
least more puzzling than the Scribe-Meyerbeer commodity. Yet
just as Ibsen did not devise the genre which he thought most rep-
resentative of his world till he had reached middle life, so Wag-
ner did not produce a full-fledged Wagnerian music-drama till
The Ring of the Nibelung. For all its longueurs and needless repe-
titions, for all the flaws and inconsistencies which mar the final
libretto,' The Ring is one of the most significant products of the
19th Century, at once a criticism and a mirror of the age, not so
great as Faust or even Peer Gynt, yet less of the closet and more
of the theatre than either of these.
Wagner's greatest works are Tristan and The Master Singers,
for only in these is the conglomeration of elements a real syn-
thesis. Tristan is a great drama, and it is great music; but it is
marred by a diffuseness which would have ruined a work of lesser
genius. In each of his works Wagner creates a special and unmis-
takable atmosphere appropriate to his conception; even when he
works at several operas at once, he keeps them as far apart in

1. The Life of Wagner, Ernest Newman, Volume Two, Chapter 17. My own interpretation of
The Ring is to be found in my A Centu7y of Hero-W'or7hip, Part Three, Chapter 1.

This content downloaded from

81.84.170.136 on Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:54:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 554 KENYON REVIEW

atmosphere as separate worlds. That is one of the great things

about Wagner. Now none of Wagner's manners or atmospheres
is as markedly peculiar as the manner of Tristan. It can be recog-
nised wherever you drop the phonograph needle. The Tristan
manner consists (among other things) of succeeding waves of
sound, developed chromatically, and sweeping or fading into
space. The result is very curious. So much does one feel the man-
ner as an endlessly repeated pattern that Tristan seems repetitious
and long however much you cut it. Even the so-called uncut ver-
sion at the Metropolitan lacks several hundred bars. The fact that
nobody notices such and even larger omissions is at least a partial
condemnation of a work of art, which can properly be only the
right size.
The astonishing thing is that Tristan is great nevertheless,
great not as an expression of the "eternal truth of myth," but as
an expression of European nihilism, one of the deepest trends in
19th Century thought and sensibility. In its symbolism (it is one
long representation of the sexual act), in its equation of love and
death, its apotheosis of darkness and its renunciation of light, it
is the counter-Faust, the decadent poem par excellence.
If Tristan is the favorite of the Wagnerians, The Master Sing-
ers is the favorite Wagnerian opera of the non-Wagnerians. Yet
The Master Singers is just as .essentially Wagnerian and just as
authentically of the period.
The 19th Century saw the ascendancy of the middle class, and
as all the champions of genuine culture realised, this meant an
ascendancy of the middle-class mind; it meant the apotheosis of
mediocrity. In 19th Century literature, therefore, we find, since
the artist is by nature an aristocrat in the sense of a seeker after
excellence, a series of portraits of mediocrity, a type which had
not previously been common in literature. Aristotle had defined
the tragic character as being above life size, and the comic char-
acter as being below life size, and literary tradition had been
chiefly concerned with these two types; but the 19th Century, es-

This content downloaded from

81.84.170.136 on Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:54:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 ERIC RUSSELL BENTLEY 555

pecially through the novel but also in drama, was interested in

the middle-sized or average man. In Hjalmar Ekdal, Ibsen por-
trayed the type in all its ambiguity, its grandiose illusions on the
one hand, its coarse Gemuetlichkeit on the other. Wagner does not
portray the type; he embodies it; he is its mouthpiece; through his
genius, lack of genius becomes vocal; which means (and this is
Wagner's "betrayal" of culture) that he confers upon mediocrity
the favors of its opposite, genius. Hence Nietzsche's hostility.
Nietzsche knew that Wagner was the spokesman of the new age
in its most negative aspect. Tristan is grandiose illusion; The Mas-
ter Singers is incarnate Gemuetlichkeit. Hitler, we hear, is equally
at home in both worlds, and that is interesting, for fascism has
had a strong appeal to both impulses involved. It has appealed to
the middle man, the man with half-suppressed dreams of grandeur
and destruction, the man who loves to dream also of the thatched
cottages of old Germany, idyllic medieval towns, shoemakers who
sing at their work, who generously give the girl to someone else,
and whose not so gemuetlich religion is Deutschtum.
Wagner is the prime instance of a compromised genius, of one
who in criticising his age came to terms with it, of one who in
his very denunciation of falsehood himself proved a liar. His gifts
were extraordinary. The potency of his magic is unsurpassed in
the history of music. That, Nietzsche convincingly maintained,
made him all the more dangerous. None saw Wagner's merits
more clearly than Nietzsche, even after the breach of friendship,
for Nietzsche knew that Wagner was the only one who, uncom-
promised, might have brought grandeur and sublimity back to the
world; "I had no one," he lamented, "but Richard Wagner." But
Nietzsche saw not only Wagner's potentiality but also his nature
and his historical significance:

I understand perfectly if today a musician says: "I hate Wagner,

but I cannot endure any other music." But I would also understand
a philosopher who explained: "Wagner epitomises modernity. It
can't be helped, one must first be a Wagnerian."

This content downloaded from

81.84.170.136 on Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:54:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 556 KENYON REVIEW

To follow Nietzsche in the matter, and it is wise to do so, is not

to become a rabid anti-Wagnerian; it is to see very sharply
the pro and the con; it is the pro and the con for a whole world of
ideas and meanings.
Nietzsche, the enemy of compromise, the champion of culture
and all excellence, rejected Wagnerism. And there is another great
enemy of compromise, another champion of culture and excel-
lence, another advocate of an either/or choice and the categorical
imperative, a man who tried a quite different path to a modern
type of drama. Though Henrik Ibsen lived in the very capital of
Bavaria at the time of Bayreuth's early triumphs he ignored Wag-
ner. He inhabited the same province as Wagner but a different
universe. Nietzsche excoriated in Wagner a part of himself; he
was not only the greatest critic of Wagner but the greatest Wag-
nerian, and we read of his asking insistently for Wagner's music
in the year 1888, the year he wrote his most pungent anti-Wagner-
ian works, the last sane year of his life. The antipodes of Wagner
is not Nietzsche but Ibsen.

3.
If the criticism of Wagner carries us back to Gluck and Mo-
zart, the criticism of Ibsen carries us back to Lessing and Diderot.
Taking a hint from the English dramatist George Lillo, who re-
sembles Scribe alike in the extent of his influence and in the
paucity of his genius, two of the most representative and gifted
men of the 18th Century turned their minds to the creation of a
new type of serious drama. Miss Sarah Sampson and Le Pere de
Famille, though better than George Barnwell, the London Mer-
chant, are not good plays, but they are a new genre, the "bour-
geois tragedy" ("buergerliches Trauerspiel") which was later to
yield the remarkable Cabale und Liebe of Schiller, the Maria
Magdalene of Hebbel, and, some would say, the plays of Ibsen's
middle period.
The "bourgeois tragedy" did not rise to the heights of the

This content downloaded from

81.84.170.136 on Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:54:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
ERIC RUSSELL BENTLEY 557

best 18th Century opera, but it does stand

relation to 19th Century drama as Gluck an
Century opera. Wagner learnt from Gluck and Mozart, but he
learnt more from the Romanticists, both from the best like Beet-
hoven and from hacks like Meyerbeer; Ibsen is in the tradition
of "bourgeois tragedy," but he learnt more from Romanticism,
both from its high poetry and from its popular manifestations.
Eugene Scribe and all he represents stand between the 18th Cen-
tury on the one hand and Wagner and Ibsen on the other. When
Ibsen was appointed theatre poet at Bergen in 1851 he proceeded
to produce 145 plays, of which more than half were light plays
from the French, twenty-one being by Scribe himself. Where did
Ibsen go from there?
His first play came out in 1850, his last in the last month of
the century. The half century of his creative life was planned out
with the skill and precision of a master-builder. Half of it was
spent in trying out different styles, from Shakesperian fantasy to
Roman tragedy, from light verse comedy to "world-historical
drama," from Scribean well-made play to philosophic-dramatic
poem, from prose satire to national myth. It is irrelevant to my
present purpose to observe that one of the "experiments" of this
period-Peer Gynt-is probably the greatest single work of Ibsen,
irrelevant except as showing one other genius who succeeded bet-
ter in the dramatic poem than in the stage play. Ibsen later re-
pudiated the style of Peer Gynt, in words whose vehemence may
indicate diffidence:

Verse has been most injurious to dramatic art . . . It is improbable

that verse will be employed to any extent worth mentioning in the
drama of the future; the aims of the dramatists of the future are
almost certain to be incompatible with it. It is therefore doomed.

The last quarter century of Ibsen's work is a steady develop-

ment of the realistic form of play. I say realistic form because
only the framework is realistic. We see on the stage the heavy
Victorian furnishings, the heavy Victorian costumes, and the heavy

This content downloaded from

81.84.170.136 on Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:54:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 558 KENYON REVIEW

Victorian beards and coiffures. That, according to popular mis-

conception, is the quintessence of Ibsenism. But the joke is on
the imperfect Ibsenite, for the irony of the Ibsenite drama is the
fact that inside the skins of these prim-looking ladies and beefy-
looking gentlemen lurk the trolls and devils which were always
Ibsen's first preoccupation. Ibsen pretends to be a realist in the
manner of mid-century France; but he is essentially a Romanticist
-and not a Romanticist out of season, not a "neo-Romanticist,"
but a product of the Norwegian national romantic movement
which was still very much alive when he began to write. Increas-
ingly aware that this and other Norwegian modes were behind the
times, Ibsen later became a cosmopolitan, and doffed his Viking
robes. But the portentous and preposterous cage of Victorian cos-
tume and Victorian upholstery and Victorian realism conceals a
Viking's heart.
Hence Ibsenite irony, which was misunderstood at first alike
by foes and partisans. The first generation of critics (with solitary
exceptions such as the great Danish liberal Georg Brandes) were
shocked; the next lot were thrilled by Ibsen's revolutionism; fin-
ally, it was discovered that Ibsen was a "mystic." Ibsen was done
for. But nothing in the whole development was accidental. In a
manner the secretive genius had brought it upon himself. His
irony was not artifice, not mere technique. It was (and that is
why I am concerned with it here) a moral attitude, an anti-Wag-
nerian attitude, Ibsen's way of not coming to terms with an age.
In discussion of modern literature we hear much of obscurity.
Ibsen is obscure. He is one of the first modern writers to mock
his audience. He pretends to be easy, and is hard. He pretends to
write a dull, characterless dialogue. He pretends to be utterly
usual in his plots, dishing up a well-made play, a naturalistic ver-
sion of heredity, a sensational study of a femme fatale, or any-
thing at all which an enthusiast for Dumas fils or Zola would
require. In his last year he became, outwardly, an almost official
figure in Norway; he attended banquets, wore decorations, was

This content downloaded from

81.84.170.136 on Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:54:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
ERIC RUSSELL BENTLEY 559

the cultural father of his country. During all this he wrote more
and more subjective and difficult works which carried within
them a concealed condemnation of modern men including the
poet himself. Yet when Little Eyolf, the most involuted and retic-
ent of his plays, was given Philistine interpretations precisely con-
trary to its meaning, Ibsen did not protest. He sat and waited for
his state funeral. Wagner, the rebel, embarked upon his last work,
Parsifal, with the reflection that if the public wanted something
religious, he would discover religion. Ibsen, the conformist,
ended his artistic career with a portrait of an elderly sculptor at a
health resort. And no one winced when the sculptor spoke of the
realism of his portrait busts:

. . . it amuses me unspeakably. On the surface I give them strik-

ing likenesses, as they call it, so that they all stand and gape in as-
tonishment [lowers his voice] but at bottom they are all respectable,
pompous horse-faces, and self-opinionated donkey-muzzles ....
And it is these double-faced works of art that our excellent pluto-
crats come and order of me. And pay for in good faith - and in
good round figures too - almost their weight in gold. ...

To be sure Ibsen, like Wagner, became famous in his own

life-time; but upon different terms. He preserved his integrity with
such marvelous vigilance that he could even see the dangers of
losing integrity by obsession with integrity-one of the themes of
The Wild Duck. The only obsession Ibsen did suffer from was
the fear that he was a virtuoso, a mere representative and exploiter
of current trends. Accordingly he who knew that all his art was
the outcome of experiences which he personally had lived through
pressed the self-analysis ever closer; but he wrote no fake auto-
biography as Wagner did; he was even embarrassed if anyone
recognised him in one of his characters. Self-analysis was for him
a sort of purgation, even an expiation, not a form of exhibitionism.
He wrote no prefaces, no manifestos, no critical works, only-if
we except his private correspondence and a few all-too-short
speeches-some twenty-six full-length plays, the fruit of twice as
many years of concentrated work. He pretended to be pretty much

This content downloaded from

81.84.170.136 on Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:54:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 560 KENYON REVIEW

of a bore, but the meaning of this pose leaks through-in his

prose style for instance. Ibsen pretends to write flat dialogue, but
the opaque, uninviting sentences carry meanings enforced by their
context. An Ibsenite sentence often performs four or five func-
tions at once. It sheds light on the character speaking, on the char-
acter spoken to, on the character spoken about; it furthers the
plot; it functions ironically in conveying to the audience a mean-
ing different from that conveyed to the characters-and it is not
merely that the characters say things which mean more to the
audience than to them, but that they also say things which, as one
senses, mean more to the characters than to the audience; finally,
an Ibsenite sentence is part of a musical pattern which is the whole
act.
Ibsen, then, learning from diverse predecessors, devised a
highly personal drama to embody himself and his world. The
pattern which he finally decided to adopt was that of modern
French realism. He wrote of the French plays, however:
These works have for the most part a perfected technique and there-
fore they please the public; they have nothing to do with poetry
and therefore perhaps they please the public still more.2

In other words Ibsen had no illusions about the French drama or

about the middle-brow public. If he seems to write at the level of
the French drama or of the middle-brow public, that is because
we choose to read him at that level (as we might read Shake-
speare at that level) or because we do not read him at all. The
irony of Hamlet arises partly from the interplay of the crude
Saxo-Grammaticus story and the final Shakespearian poem, be-
tween the framework of Elizabethan sensationalism and the core
of tragedy. Ibsen's sources are no cruder than Shakespeare's. If we
tend more to equate him with them, it can only be because his
realistic techniques have taken us in.
For we expect a dramatist to be simple. A representative critic

2. Quoted by Julius Bab in Dir Menich auf der Buehne. Berlin. 1920. p. 259. 1 have never
discovered the context of the quotation.

This content downloaded from

81.84.170.136 on Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:54:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 ERIC RUSSELL BENTLEY 561

of the last generation wrote: "If the spec

irritated, or bored, or any of these, he has a legitimate complaint
against the dramatist." If we ask, Who is the spectator? another
critic of the time answers: "No well-written play is above the
understanding of the boy in the gallery." Few outside Broadway
and Hollywood would today endorse these generous inanities, yet
in the minds of many still lurks a suspicion that, in view of the
theatre audience, all drama should be immediately transparent.
It is a well-intentioned view, but it would lead to the condemna-
tion of most plays acknowledged to be great-whether the best
of Ibsen or Le Misanthrope or Hamlet.
From The Wild Duck (1884) on, Ibsen becomes more and
more what has been called Mystical, meaning, one gathers, edify-
ing but unintelligible. The truth is that the troll world comes
thronging back into Ibsen's work, that the realism becomes less
the substance and more of a mask, that a complex shifting sym-
bolism baffling to those who expect symbolism to be either purely
decorative or purely allegorical is employed, that the plays are,
from The Master Builder on, all about Ibsen himself. A generation
ago Ibsen had begun to seem solid, Victorian, and safe, something,
perhaps, to set up against the precious, obscure, and pessimistic
moderns. The arch-ironist had an ironical destiny. The first gen-
eration of Manders, Krolls, and Bracks tried to kill Ibsen with
their hatred; the second generation almost did kill him with their
friendship. One should turn freshly to the plays of Ibsen's last
period to re-discover a tortured, introverted, clever, repellent,
queer, and subtle genius.
The Master Builder, for example, shows exactly what kind of
a playwright Ibsen is and is not. The starting-point is a ballad
which Ibsen wrote in the folk manner. "He" and "she" lose a jewel
in a fire which burns down the house. Even if they find the jewel,
says Ibsen, she will never recover her faith, nor he his happiness.
The symbols are characteristic of the man who spoke of torpedo-
ing the ark, of a corpse hidden in the cargo, of the man who kept

This content downloaded from

81.84.170.136 on Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:54:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 562 KENYON REVIEW

as a pet a poison-spitting scorpion. The ballad is indeed the

nearest thing to an Ibsen play in all earlier literature. A ballad
celebrates a recent disaster. An air of fatality broods over it. It is
compressed. It is all catastrophe. Upon such a mythic pattern Ibsen
built a realistic superstructure.
The modern drama has used mythic patterns in many difffferent
ways. Wagner, for instance, though his superstructure is also real-
istic in the sense of solid, and though his staging was of the period
and left little to the imagination, brings the myth bodily onto
the stage; while Ibsen leaves everything to the imagination. In
a too Teutonic effort to speak eternal truth, to achieve sublimity
directly, Wagner has to make up in magic and sheer force for
what he forfeits in irony. In this he resembles Eugene O'Neill.
O'Neill, it is true, is closer to Ibsenism in that his stage-spectacle
is realistic and his dialogue is in modern prose; but there the re-
semblance ends. All O'Neill's characters are lay figures, substi-
tutes for someone else, wraiths of their Greek counterparts. Like
Wagner, O'Neill makes for sublimity by the nearest route; much
more disastrously than Wagner, whose genius he does not share,
he flounders. He tries to ride to glory on the shoulders of the
Greeks, and he has ended up, if even O'Neill can believe Days
Without End, in a Freudian Rome. Ibsen is superior to such as
O'Neill in that while they can only set one ball in motion he can
keep two or three in the air at once. The distinction is vital. To
catch one ball is an exercise but not an art. To deal with several
balls is to create and solve a problem of relationship, of tension,
of irony; and that is art. Master Builder Solness has more of the
elemental force and mysterious power of myth than any O'Neill
character partly because the myth hovers around him, not explain-
ing itself, cryptic, sinister, and partly because the him it hovers
around is a man, not an O'Neill scarecrow. Myth comes in aid
of Ibsen's belief that life is a perpetual battle with spirits, and
creative writing a perpetual evaluation of one's own experience.
In O'Neill the myth is a fixed point of reference, an academic

This content downloaded from

81.84.170.136 on Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:54:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 ERIC RUSSELL BENTLEY 563

source book which hamstrings the modern story.

In The Master Builder the mythic base and the modern natural-
istic superstructure interact like significantly juxtaposed colors. It
would be impossible to say which is more important, or which is
the prime meaning of the play, for one takes meaning from the
other. On the natural level, the play is about an ageing architect
who, growing jealous of his youn'ger rivals, is egged on by a neur-
otic young woman to an athletic feat that proves his downfall. It
could be a story by Dumas fils. If we add that the young woman's
sex-life seems to have been perverted by her receiving her first
orgasm from the autoerotic experience of seeing the Master Builder
climb a tower, we have a story for Zola. But Ibsen adds the myth.
Underlying the play is the theme of hybris, the heroic rashness of
ancient tragedy which brings retribution to the hero. Hilda Wan-
gel, the neurotic young woman, represents the troll world, the
world of the amoral, chaotic, tempestuous Id; she is a counterpart
of the male troll who haunts her mother in The Lady from the
Sea. She is not utterly immoral, for she disapproves of Solness'
harsh treatment of his assistant. She is a daemonic force exacerbat-
ing the hybris of the hero.
Mythic theme and Zolaesque story combine in Ibsen not as a
vast Composite Work but as a highly specialized study of a very
limited subject, the mind of Ibsen. Solness is the ageing playwright
who feels his powers slipping away, who wonders if in being so
wholly an artist he has ceased to be a man, or if in appointing
himself preceptor of mankind he has not built higher than he
himself can stand. Cowardice or avoidance was Ibsen's besetting
sin or at least his besetting fear. The fear is projected into The
Master Builder, split into many colors like a spectrum; and the
result is a texture of symbolic drama that is rich, complex, strange,
and by no means to be written off as Mysticism.
For many people 19th Century drama means Ibsen, but except
in so far as Ibsen is the greatest dramatist of the time this opinion
is deeply misleading. Ibsen used many current modes and methods

This content downloaded from

81.84.170.136 on Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:54:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 564 KENYON REVIEW

as every artist does; but he twisted them out of shape, imposed

his own different meaning upon them as few artists have. An
Enemy of the People is a well-made play but entirely different in
temper from Dumas. Ghosts is naturalistic but entirely different in
meaning from Zola. When We Dead Awaken is symbolist but
how different from Maeterlinck! The more one studies Ibsen the
more one finds him apart from the drama of his time. Neither
his predecessors nor his disciples bear him more than a superficial
resemblance. He carried his aloofness with him like a charm, and
it may be no accident that two of the most zealous Ibsenites were
Irish writers who have also stood aloof from literary movements
in solitary self-confidence, Bernard Shaw and James Joyce.
Ibsen is not "the man who gave drama back to the people,"
who "brought back life to the popular theatre." His popularity
was the accident-like Joyce's-of a succe's de scandale. It is true
that the 1880's are usually taken to be the occasion of a great
renewal of the culture of the theatre, and that the motive force
of the renewal is taken to be Ibsen and Ibsenism. But what was
the nature of the renewal? It was not popular. The new plays
were most often performed privately, on special occasions only,
before literary clubs, on Sunday evenings. Very few enjoyed even
a short commercial run; many were given single performances.
The exceptions to this are due either to the scandalous element
in the play or to the presence of an Eleanora Duse on the cast.
So far from taking drama out to the people Ibsen drew it in to
himself. As he grew older he went to the theatre more and more
seldom; and his work, as we have seen, grew more and more sub-
jective. Ibsen would fit better in Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle
than in lectures to women's clubs by William Lyon Phelps.
The dramatic renaissance of the period was not a true rebirth.
There were good plays, but they were not the plays of a new and
youthful age; they were the work of an old and diffident culture.
Outside Ibsen and Strindberg the most gifted dramatists of the
end of the century were Shaw, who set his axe at the root of con-

This content downloaded from

81.84.170.136 on Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:54:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
ERIC RUSSELL BENTLEY 565

temporary culture, Chekhov, who wrote

and Wedekind, whose nihilism is already almost surrealist.
The most genuine work of the era 1880-1920 was introspective,
oblique, tough, in fact the kind of literature which Van Wyck
Brooks has crassly called secondary. Although it was in some re-
spects a period of beginnings, for every period is both seedtime
and harvest, it was in more respects a period of endings. And
Ibsen knew it. He said in 1887:

It has been said that I, and that in a prominent manner, have con-
tributed to create a new era in these countries. I, on the contrary,
believe that the time in which we now live might with quite as much
reason be characterised as a conclusion and that something new is
about to be born.

Talk of a New Drama was therefore as idle as talk of a Music

of the Future. Both phenomena were utterly of the 19th Century.
As surely as Mozart and Schiller are of the 18th, Wagner and
Ibsen are of the 19th Century. Since Wagner and Ibsen, it is
worth noting, there has been much Wagnerism and Ibsenism but
no real development on Wagnerite or Ibsenite lines. Since the
state of the drama in 1944 is very much what it was in most coun-
tries in 1844, 1744, and 1644, namely a state of quiescence, it is
hard to say what 20th Century drama will be like when it comes.
Up to now there have been four hopeful signs: 1, the dramas of
Strindberg, both naturalistic and expressionist (Strindberg is the
beginning, perhaps, of the new, Ibsen the end of the old); 2,
the abortive but not negligible eruption of Expressionism in Wei-
mar Germany; 3, the continuance of real critical comedy in Ire-
land (especially Sean O'Casey); 4, the devising of a new pattern
of drama, oddly named Epic Drama, by Bertolt Brecht in Ger-
many and in exile.

4.
The historiography of the drama has suffered from the hang-
over of terminology. The words tragedy and comedy, for example,

This content downloaded from

81.84.170.136 on Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:54:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 566 KENYON REVIEW

have caused considerable embarra

by Aristotle, does not fully apply to all that was written after
Aristotle. Shakespearian drama does not fit the Procrustean bed,
nor even does the neo-classic drama of 17th Century France. In
the 19th Century, though the words still help us to distinguish
two great types (I have suggested that Ibsen is in one tradition,
Shaw in the other), they are scarcely more important than another
dichotomy, that of fantasy and photography, dream and represen-
tation, a distinction sometimes found in textbooks as Romanticism
vs. Realism or, later, as Neo-Romanticism vs. Naturalism. The
word Fantasy is more descriptive of Peer Gynt than either Comedy
or Tragedy; the term Naturalistic Drama is more descriptive of
Die Weber.
The photographic trend and its opposite are found both in
Wagner and Ibsen, and each has accordingly been praised or
damned alike for his Realism and his Romanticism, his photog-
raphy and his fantasy, his Mysticism and his worldliness. Yet it
will by now be evident that the elements were mixed differently
in the two men, and that they trod opposite paths to an interpre-
ation of their age in the theatre. Let us summarise the differences.
The stuff of Wagner's dramas is Teutonic myth; that of
Ibsen's, modern incidents culled from newspapers or from direct
contact. Though in this Wagner seems to be deep, and Ibsen triv-
ial, the real difference emerges from their interpretation of the
material. Actually many themes are common to both dramatists:
the theme of a general guilt (loss of innocence) in the industrial-
ist-capitalist world; the theme of redemption; the theme of the
Eternal Feminine; the theme of the twilight of old values; the
theme of nobility versus mediocrity. But we see the difference
between the two men in their different treatment of common
themes. Tristan and Rosmersholm both end with a love-death, yet
the meaning of one is that death is as alluring and orgiastic as
love, the meaning of the other is the Roman thought that a noble
mind cannot outlive dishonor. Wagner and Ibsen differ as drama-

This content downloaded from

81.84.170.136 on Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:54:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 ERIC RUSSELL BENTLEY 567

tists above all in their utterly different presentation of human

nature. Wagner is not interested in the individual; Ibsen is above
all interested in the individual. Wagner's characters are incarna-
tions of qualities and instincts, such as Parsifal and Kundry, or
representatives of groups, such as the Teutonic Elsa and Siegfried
or the not quite Aryan Mime and Beckmesser. Humanity comes
into Wagner only through the musical presentation of crude im-
pulses, chiefly sexual. For Ibsen on the other hand, the individual
is the beginning and the end. When he does depict Everyman-
in Peer Gynt-the result benefits from his flickering, dialectical,
personal, witty, un-Wagnerian mode of awareness.
What of the vehicles which Wagner and Ibsen chose for their
art-the music drama and the realistic drama respectively? They
have important things in common. They both accept the 19tlh
Century theatre as it is: the picture-frame stage, the dull realistic
settings, the darkened auditorium, the "mystic gulf," as Wagner
termed it, formed by the proscenium and orchestra pit. They both
imply therefore the passive audience which "surrenders" to the
play, captured by illusion, suspense, and surprise, transported to
a more or less phantasmagoric world. On the other hand the Com-
posite Work of Art is diametrically opposite to Ibsenism. Wagner
undoubtedly fell a victim to the vulgar heresy of quantity before
quality. He argued that since music appeals to the heart, speech
to the intellect, and dance to the body, the best work of art would
combine all three. But artistic experience is not quantitative.
Ibsen's highly specialised, "narrow," and "limited" drama meets
much more nearly the criterion of the arts, which is perfection.
Ibsen and Wagner belong to the same world and have there-
fore many outward things in common. They were active, much-
travelled men of Europe. Neither was highly educated or widely
read. Both directed their whole lives to art, and lived to win enor-
mous prestige in the society they had assailed. Such resemblances
are superficial. The two men were in essentials poles apart. Wag-
ner was a Bohemian, an egoist, an expansive, infinitely talkative

This content downloaded from

81.84.170.136 on Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:54:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 568 KENYON REVIEW

man, a fiery and changeable lover, a voluminous, muddled, and

humorless thinker. If Ibsen was an egoist, he was also reserved
and almost superhumanly self-critical. Like his plays he was out-
wardly orthodox, well-dressed, and respectable, like his plays he
was inwardly agitated. Though he enjoyed being a national figure
as much as Wagner ("His entire people," Ibsen said, "a poet
should have around him . . ."), his urgent sense of the dangers
of prestige is a leitmotif of the last plays. Ibsen's married life was
apparently as smooth as Wagner's was stormy; Fru Susannah
seems to have been at once homelier and more intelligent than the
egregious Frau Cosima. Ibsen's letters in their austere yet simple
sincerity, their dry sagacity, and their untheatrical vehemence are
a refreshing contrast to the campaign oratory of the Fuehrer of
Bayreuth.
But one's inevitable preference of Ibsen to Wagner is not the
point, for Wagner's success was surprisingly great in what was
after all an enormously and excessively ambitious undertaking.
The point is to note the difference in their approach to the prob-
lem of drama in their century. Whereas in the 18th Century the
operas of Gluck and Mozart succeeded far better as drama than
the plays of Schiller and Goethe, in the 19th the music-drama of
Wagner succeeded less than the plays of Ibsen.
Wagner was a fantasist outside, a realist inside; Ibsen was a
realist outside, a fantasist inside. On the whole Ibsenism worked
better. Realism, controlled by fantasy, gives us the supple strength
and fine irony of The Wild Duck and The Master Builder. But
fantasy, controlled by realism, is fantasy mechanised and thus fan-
tasy spoiled. The disturbing thing about Wagner's Valhalla is that
if you scratch it you find the Crystal Palace underneath; Wagner's
"romantic" face covers a "realist" soul, his ardent spiritualism
masks a materialistic instinct, his over-anxious idealism conceals
-or half-conceals--cynical compromise. The enemy of Victorian-
ism is himself an arch-Victorian.
The drab realist conceals a flame of Romantic inspiration, the

This content downloaded from

81.84.170.136 on Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:54:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 ERIC RUSSELL BENTLEY 569

seeming materialistic sociologist conceals a delicate spirituality,

the man who seems now a mid-century optimist, now a mid-cen-
tury pessimist, surpasses both extremes in a flexible pragmatism,
close to that of William James and Bernard Shaw.

It has been said of me on different occasions that I am a pessimist.

And I am in so far as I do not believe in the everlastingness of hu-
man ideals. But I am an optimist in so far as I firmly believe in
the capacity for the procreation and development of ideals.

That was his pronouncement.

Ibsen and Wagner are the positive and negative poles of the
century. Ibsen as thinker and artist represents the spirit of man
fighting for its rights in a mechanised world. Wagner as thinker
and artist embodies the destructive forces themselves, complete
with smoke-screen of imagery and ideology, and by a fantastic
stroke of genius or devilry confers upon them the status of art.
Between them, Ibsen and Wagner are the 19th Century.

This content downloaded from

81.84.170.136 on Wed, 12 Feb 2025 09:54:19 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms