‘Ibsen the Romantic’: Analogues of Paradise in the Later Plays by Errol Durbach (review)

REVIEWS Errol Durbach. ‘Ibsen the R om a n tic’: A n alogu es o f P aradise in the L a ter P lays. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982. Pp. vii + 213. $19.00. “The historic events of today are claiming a large share of my thoughts,” Ibsen wrote to Georg Brandes. Errol Durbach, in this often brilliant, always fascinating, thoroughly infuriating book, will have none of this. His Ibsen seems to have been obsessed over a lifetime with the aspirations and shortcomings of the Romantic Movement in Literature: to have been swallowed up very early by this subject, as it were, and, unlike Jonah, never to have got out of the belly of the Romantic whale. Durbach argues his thesis with a great deal of force and imagination, and many of the obiter d icta he lets fall rank with the most perceptive and arresting comments on his subject. That his thesis strikes me as completely misconceived, his methods often dubious and his conclusions absurdly reductive does not prevent my recommending this book to all who are interested in Ibsen. It is Durbach's contention that Ibsen is a “Romantic” poet, but one who is deeply skeptical of the pretensions, extravagances and desperate dilemmas expressed in Romantic literature; and that he casts an often sardonic eye on the predicaments of his own “Romantic” protagonists who are created to exhibit, presumably to the disapproving eyes of Ibsen’s bourgeois audiences, like captured monarchs before the Roman mobs, the unacceptable aspects of various forms of Romantic heroism. He creates what is itself a highly Romantic idea of Ibsen as a poet, suffering the agonies of the Romantic spirit he is exposing, “bedevilled by incomprehension, occasionally discovering in ‘responsibility’ or ‘joy’ a possible way out of the dilemma, now plunging into chaos again when such solutions seem inadequate or inappropriate to the psychic needs of the character—it is this ebb and flow that seems to characterize the rhythm of Ibsen’s imagination” (pp. 30-31). In other words, Ibsen is what George Santayana would term a “barbaric” poet, unable to create, as the supreme poets were able to, objective, rational, even “program­ matic” structures of the intellect within which the individual passionate moments could be seen in perspective. Instead, Ibsen remains thrashing about desperately within the whale’s belly. The idea of Ibsen “plunging into chaos” over the dilemmas of his fictional characters forgets what Bernard Shaw called “the san ity of art”—its ability to observe human life steadily and whole and “under the eye of eternity.” “The best things that come into a man’s con­ sciousness,” George Santayana observed, “are the things that take him out of it—the rational things that are independent of his personal per183 184 Comparative Drama ception and of his personal existence. These he approaches with his reason, and they, in the same measure, endow him with their immor­ tality” (T h e P oetry o f B arbarism ). Durbach’s Ibsen is devastated by the discovery of the death of God, the mortality of humanity, the loss of paradise, the inevitability of corruption and decay and so forth. But these things have been soberly endured by the human race at least since the time of the more skeptical classical Greeks: by the tough-minded Stoics, Epicureans and others, so that it is no very flattering image of Ibsen that paints him getting so worked up about them. Nor is Dur­ bach’s account of the Romantic movement, a Procrustean bed to which Ibsen’s plays are brought to be chopped to size, fair to that movement. He makes occasional use of M. H. Abrams N atu ra l Supernaturalism but overlooks that, while Abrams takes note of the Romantic heart and its agonies, he also pays tribute to that impressive Romantic head whose strongly historical sense was always aware that its own age was only one phase of human history and that a sane awareness of that total history could not inflate current Romantic preoccupations to the extent that Durbach claims Ibsen did. To accept Durbach’s argument we would have to agree: (a) that Ibsen could perceive the Romantic...