In Defense of Pastor Manders

In Defense of Pastor Manders CHARLES LELAND PASTOR MANDERS HAS NEVER ENJOYED a good press.! His reputation is that of a child of superstition and darkness, an enemy of light and truth, defender of established but decaying or dead values, ugly, oily, domineering. In the words of one recent critic, he is "a petty tyrant who embodies the power of the Church, State, and public opinion . . . an ironically domesticated Napoleon, a drawing-room and committeeroom dictator.'" Even his use of language is insincere and hypocritical : "a kind of liturgical chant ... like the rhetoric of Brand in a flabby and debased form.'" On the stage he is often portrayed as sniggering, unctuous, and epicene. Aspersions have been cast on his virility in a well-known essay by a professor of psychiatry who pronounces clinically : "We may reasonably have doubts about his potence.'" Ibsen himself, we know, had little respect for men of the cloth, at least those from Norway. We have the famous and amusing letter to Brandes written shortly after the publication of Ghosts: In Norway I do believe it has been the case that the absurd distortions . .. were not freely arrived at; and the explanation is not far to seek. Up there, criticism is in fact to some extent the concern of a number of more or less disguised theologians, and these gen tlernen are generally quite incapable of writing sensibly about works of literature. The enfeeblement of one's critical powers which, in the case of the average person at least, is an inevitable consequence of occupying oneself with theological studies for any length of time, is particularly in evidence when the talk is of judging human nature. people's actions and people's motives. 405 406 CHARLES LELAND Business acumen on the other hand does not suITer nearly so much from this study. That is why these spiritually-minded men are very often splendid local leaders; but they are indubitably our worst critics.s Pastor Manders, priest-pillar of the community, has his briefcase stuffed full of legal documents, all of which, it may be presumed, are perfectly in order. But he is no better in judging Engstrand than he is in judging Mrs. A1ving's books. Critics who want to be kind to Manders maintain that he is "a gullible spokesman for the status quo" and that his hypocrisy is unconscious, as opposed to Engstrand's. His words and actions are simply the result of "innocent naivete.'" Harold Clurman calls him "a great big baby.'" Other critics are far less kind to Manders. They see him as eminently aware of what he is doing. He is a latter-day Tartuffe, deliberately proclaiming conventional beliefs and practicing an exemplary bourgeois life-style simply in order to maintain his position as pillar of society. The most recent spokesman for this position is J/ilCgen Haugan: Manders' only desire is to appear to be motivated by ideals, to appear to be a good example for his parish. For Brand there existed no contradiction between his public and his private interests.... Manders remains split in two, between a Sunday and a weekday nature. The private and the public spheres of action are not united in Manders . .. the dialogue reveals that Manders is a person who lives for ideals he himself does not believe in. . . . Manders is above all a self-deceiver who has offered his private life for an empty priestly vocation and now stands as a dead career-man.' There are difficulties in Manders's position- difficulties of which many a small-town clergyman, very much in the public eye, is only too aware. But there is absolutely no evidence in the text that Manders does not believe in the ideals by which he lives. There is no evidence, confused and embarrassed though he becomes through Mrs. A1ving's revelations, that he considers his "priestly vocation empty" or that his image of himself is that of "a dead career-man." In this essay I should like to argue against the simplistic views of Manders presented by both his kind and unkind critics, the views that reduce him to a caricature or at best simply a type-character, making him...