THE WILL AND TESTAMENT OF IBSEN
77
stand anything concrete, a demon, in fact, of abstraction who bursts
into the play with his ugly face and ugly name like some parochial incor–
ruptible Robespierre whose activities are circumscribed by a sad fate to
the reform of a single bohemian family. But if Gregers Wcrle represents
the demand for truth in its ultimate, implacable form, then the message
of the play is, as some critics have said, cynical and nihilistic, since the
converse of Gregers is a Dr. R eIling, a lodger downstairs who believes
that lies and illusions are necessary to human survival.
A softer read ing of Ibsen's intention suggests that Gregers rep–
resents only the eternal interfering busybody, but this reduces the play
to a platitude-an object-lesson in what happens when an outsider
tries to tell married people how to run their livcs. Shaw's opinion was
that Gregers is simply a particularly dangerous case of idealism and
duty on the rampage, and according to Shaw's thesis Ibsen spent his
life doing doughty battle against the joint forces of duty and idcaJism–
the vested intcrests of the day. But Ibsen was a more dividcd nature
than Shaw allowed for, and the battle was within.
Ibsen is not an attractive personality, and his work has, intermit–
tently, a curious confessional closet-smell, as though he were using his
play-writing as a form of psychotherapy. This is especially noticeable in
The Master Builder,
where the hero is Ibsen in a symbolic disguise. The
master builder (read sound dramatic craftsman) has first built churches
( the early poetic plays), then houses for pcople to livc in (the social
dramas), and is finally erecting houses with steeples (the late, symbolic
plays). This hero, Master Solness, is very darkly motivated; there has
been a fire, years ago, through which, indirectly, he and his wife lost
their children, but which, at the same time, permitted him to start on
his successful career as a builder and real-estate developer. Now he is
obsessed with jealousy of younger men in his profession, and he is suffer–
ing from a failure of nerve, which is connected with the fire, perhaps,
or with his wife's compulsive sense of duty and her invalidism or with
his abandonment of church architecture. The play is strangely thin, more
like a scenario with several writers contributing suggestions in a story
conference than like a finished play, and throughout its jerky develop–
ment, there is a sense of something elusive, as though I bsen, again,
like Gregers Werle, meant something else all the time and not what
he said. There is the same odd feeling in
Rosmersholm,
which is
full
of disjointed references, like the ta lk of a n insane person-what are
those white horses, really, and what is the mill race, and what is that
quest for total innocence, on which the play seems to turn and yet
not to turn?
