Discussions of Henrik Ibsen ed. by James Walter McFarlane (review)

1964 BOOK REVIEWS 109 not only in the page notes, which are more frequent and more lengthy, but also in the appendix, where the biographical notes have been amplified and the bibliography extended to include newspaper articles. LAUlU!NT LESAGE The Pennsylvania State University DISCUSSIONS OF HENRIK IBSEN, ed. James Walter Mcfarlane, D. C. Heath and Company, Boston, 1962, 110 pp. Price $1.50. As a major writer whose works are written in a language that few people outside his native land, including some of his best-known apologists, are comfortably familiar with, Ibsen is something of a unique phenomenon. What other writer having a comparable international reputation has elected to speak to the world in a language the audience for which is so small? Perhaps one of the reasons Ibsen turned from the writing of poetic drama to the writing of prose drama was so that language per se would be a minimal obstacle in the transmission of his art. One might almost say that with the writing of Brand and Peer Gynt he spent the animating force of the specifically Norwegian element of his genius, and thereafter devoted himself to the creation of characters who, muted in the restricted atmosphere of middle class conventionality, would be more accessible to an international audience. It is interesting to note in connection with this speculation , how many of the essays in Mr. McFarlane's anthology find in the silences, the unspoken nuances, and the negative aspects of characterization, the most intriguing elements of Ibsen's art. It is in the extraverbal elements of Ibsen's plays-setting , costume, symbolism-that critical comment centers. Of the seventeen people represented in Mr. Mcfarlane's collection, six are themselves "creative" writers: Bernard Shaw, Henry James, James Joyce, E. M. Forster, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Arthur Miller. Their comments, arising from what is primarily a concern with their own craft, tend inevitably to shed more light on themselves than on Ibsen. Just as for Shaw the most significant aspect of Ibsen's plays is their iconoclasm, their Shavian defiance of Victorian morality, so for Henry James, in his review of Hedda Gabler, Ibsen's heroine is fascinating because he sees in her what is to be seen, though he does not say so, in his own portraits of American provincials: ". . • a touching vision of strong forces struggling with a poverty, a bare provinciality, of life." (56) A chronological survey of the essays shows that the criticism of Ibsen has evolved from concern with moral issues (the fanatical Ibsenite versus the prim Victorian moralist) to concern with aesthetic ones. A question that looms large for the aesthetic critic is that of Ibsen's realism. Francis Fergusson, in his essay on Ghosts taken from The Idea of a Theater, argues that even though Ibsen achieved intensity within a realistic setting, his "living rooms" are too confining for the human spirit. An attempt at refuting this charge can be found in the excerpt from Daniel Haakonsen's Henrik Ibsens realisme (1957) translated expressly for the anthology by the editor. Mr. Haakonsen, who is incidentally the only Norwegian critic represented in the collection, maintains in a provocative essay that ".•• genuine human dimensions are preserved in the midst of Ibsen's realism." (81) His reasoning is persuasive, at least to one who is predisposed to believe that Ibsen's genius transcends the limitations of the particular aesthetic style that time and place imposed on him. JOHN H. KELSON Eastern Montana College ...