Paris and enjoy his society, and his love and gratitude, in the flower of his early manhood.
But when her son comes home, the facts refuse as obstinately as ever to correspond to her ideals. Oswald has inherited his father’s love of enjoyment; and when, in dull rainy weather, he returns from Paris to the solemn strictly ordered house where virtue and duty have had their temple for so many years, his mother sees him shew the unmistakable signs of boredom with which she is so miserably familiar from of old; then sit after dinner killing time over the bottle; and finally — the climax of anguish — begin to flirt with the maid who, as his mother alone knows, is his own father’s daughter. But there is this worldwide difference in her insight to the cases of the father and the son. She did not love the father: she loves the son with the intensity of a heart-starved woman who has nothing else left to love. Instead of recoiling from him with pious disgust and Pharisaical consciousness of moral superiority, she sees at once that he has a right to be happy in his own way, and that she has no right to force him to be dutiful and wretched in hers. She sees, too, her injustice to the unfortunate father, and the cowardice of the monstrous fabric of lies and false appearances she has wasted her life in manufacturing. She resolves that the son’s life shall not be sacrificed to ideals which are to him joyless and unnatural. But she finds that the work of the ideals is not to be undone quite so easily. In driving the father to steal his pleasures in secrecy and squalor, they had brought upon him the diseases bred by such conditions; and her son now tells her that those diseases have left their mark on him, and that he carries poison in his pocket against the time, foretold to him by a Parisian surgeon, when general paralysis of the insane may destroy his faculties. In desperation she undertakes to rescue him from this horrible apprehension by making his life happy. The house shall be made as bright as Paris for him: he shall have as much champagne as he wishes until he is no longer driven to that dangerous resource by the dulness of his life with her: if he loves the girl he shall marry her if she were fifty times his halfsister. But the halfsister, on learning the state of his health, leaves the house; for she, too, is her father’s daughter, and is not going to sacrifice her life in devotion to an invalid. When the mother and son are left alone in their dreary home, with the rain still falling outside, all she can do for him is to promise that if his doom overtakes him before he can poison himself, she will make a final sacrifice of her natural feelings by performing that dreadful duty, the first of all her duties that has any real basis. Then the weather clears up at last; and the sun, which the young man has so longed to see, appears. He asks her to give it to him to play with; and a glance at him shews her that the ideals have claimed their victim, and that the time has come for her to save him from a real horror by sending him from her out of the world, just as she saved him from an imaginary one years before by sending him out of Norway.
The last scene of Ghosts is so appallingly tragic that the emotions it excites prevent the meaning of the play from being seized and discussed like that of A Doll’s House. In England nobody, as far as I know, seems to have perceived that Ghosts is to A Doll’s House what the late Sir Walter Besant intended his own sequel to that play to be. Besant attempted to shew what might come of Nora’s repudiation of that idealism of which he was one of the most popular professors. But the effect made on Besant by A Doll’s House was very faint compared to that produced on the English critics by the first performance of Ghosts in this country. In the earlier part of this essay I have shewn that since Mrs. Alving’s early conceptions of duty are as valid to ordinary critics as to Pastor Manders, who must appear to them as an admirable man, endowed with Helmer’s good sense without Helmer’s selfishness, a pretty general disapproval of the moral of the play was inevitable. Fortunately, the newspaper press went to such bedlamite lengths on this occasion that Mr. William Archer, the well-known dramatic critic and translator of Ibsen, was able to put the whole body of hostile criticism out of court by simply quoting its excesses in an article entitled Ghosts and Gibberings, which appeared in The Pall Mall Gazette of the 8th of April 1891. Mr. Archer’s extracts, which he offers as a nucleus for a Dictionary of Abuse modelled upon the Wagner Schimpf-Lexicon, are worth reprinting here as samples of contemporary idealist criticism of the drama.
DESCRIPTIONS OF THE PLAY
“Ibsen’s positively abominable play entitled Ghosts… This disgusting representation… Reprobation due to such as aim at infecting the modem theatre with poison after desperately inoculating themselves and others… An open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly; a lazar-house with all its doors and windows open… Candid foulness… Kotzebue turned bestial and cynical. Offensive cynicism… Ibsen’s melancholy and malodorous world… Absolutely loathsome and fetid… Gross, almost putrid indecorum… Literary carrion… Crapulous stuff… Novel and perilous nuisance.” Daily Telegraph [leading article]. “This mass of vulgarity, egotism, coarseness, and absurdity.” Daily Telegraph [criticism]. “Unutterably offensive… Prosecution under Lord Campbell’s Act… Abominable piece… Scandalous.” Standard. “Naked loathsomeness… Most dismal and repulsive production.” Daily News. “Revoltingly suggestive and blasphemous… Characters either contradictory in themselves, uninteresting or abhorrent.” Daily Chronicle. “A repulsive and degrading work.” Queen. “Morbid, unhealthy, unwholesome and disgusting story… A piece to bring the stage into disrepute and dishonour with every right-thinking man and woman.” Lloyd’s. “Merely dull dirt long drawn out.” Hawk. “Morbid horrors of the hideous tale… Ponderous dulness of the didactic talk… If any repetition of this outrage be attempted, the authorities will doubtless wake from their lethargy.” Sporting and Dramatic News. “Just a wicked nightmare.” The Gentlewoman. “Lugubrious diagnosis of sordid impropriety… Characters are prigs, pedants, and profligates… Morbid caricatures… Maunderings of nookshotten Norwegians… It is no more of a play than an average Gaiety burlesque.” Black and White. “Most loathsome of all Ibsen’s plays… Garbage and offal.” Truth. “Ibsen’s putrid play called Ghosts… So loathsome an enterprise.” Academy. “As foul and filthy a concoction as has ever been allowed to disgrace the boards of an English theatre… Dull and disgusting… Nastiness and malodorousness laid on thickly as with a trowel.” Era. “Noisome corruption.” Stage.
DESCRIPTIONS OF IBSEN
“An egotist and a bungler.” Daily Telegraph. “A crazy fanatic… A crazy, cranky being… Not only consistently dirty but deplorably dull.” Truth. “The Norwegian pessimist in petto” [sic]. Black and White. “Ugly, nasty, discordant, and downright dull... A gloomy sort of ghoul, bent on groping for horrors by night, and blinking like a stupid old owl when the warm sunlight of the best of life dances into his wrinkled eyes.” Gentlewoman. “A teacher of the æstheticism of the Lock Hospital.” Saturday Review.
DESCRIPTIONS OF IBSEN’S ADMIRERS
“Lovers of prurience and dabblers in impropriety who are eager to gratify their illicit tastes under the pretence of art.” Evening Standard. “Ninety-seven percent of the people who go to see Ghosts are nasty-minded people who find the discussion of nasty subjects to their taste in exact proportion to their nastiness.” Sporting and Dramatic News. “The sexless… The unwomanly woman, the unsexed females, the whole army of unprepossessing cranks in petticoats… Educated and muck-ferreting dogs… Effeminate men and male women… They all of them — men and women alike — know that they are doing not only a nasty but an illegal thing… The Lord Chamberlain left them alone to wallow in Ghosts… Outside a silly clique, there is not the slightest interest in the Scandinavian humbug or all his works… A wave of human folly.” Truth.
