Anarchism and Other Essays
community, has reached the summit through the channel of lies,
deception, and fraud. He has robbed his bosom friend, Johann, of his
good name, and has betrayed Lona Hessel, the woman he loved, to marry
her step-sister for the sake of her money. He has enriched himself
by shady transactions, under cover of "the community's good," and
finally even goes to the extent of endangering human life by
preparing the INDIAN GIRL, a rotten and dangerous vessel, to go to
sea.
But the return of Lona brings him the realization of the emptiness
and meanness of his narrow life. He seeks to placate the waking
conscience by the hope that he has cleared the ground for the better
life of his son, of the new generation. But even this last hope soon
falls to the ground, as he realizes that truth cannot be built on a
lie. At the very moment when the whole town is prepared to celebrate
the great benefactor of the community with banquet praise, he
himself, now grown to full spiritual manhood, confesses to the
assembled townspeople:
"I have no right to this homage-- ... My fellow-citizens must know
me to the core. Then let everyone examine himself, and let us
realize the prediction that from this event we begin a new time. The
old, with its tinsel, its hypocrisy, its hollowness, its lying
propriety, and its pitiful cowardice, shall lie behind us like a
museum, open for instruction."
With A DOLL'S HOUSE Ibsen has paved the way for woman's emancipation.
Nora awakens from her doll's role to the realization of the injustice
done her by her father and her husband, Helmer Torvald.
"While I was at home with father, he used to tell me all his
opinions, and I held the same opinions. If I had others I concealed
them, because he would not have approved. He used to call me his
doll child, and play with me as I played with my dolls. Then I came
to live in your house. You settled everything according to your
taste, and I got the same taste as you, or I pretended to. When I
look back on it now, I seem to have been living like a beggar, from
hand to mouth. I lived by performing tricks for you, Torvald, but
you would have it so. You and father have done me a great wrong."
In vain Helmer uses the old philistine arguments of wifely duty and
social obligations. Nora has grown out of her doll's dress into full
stature of conscious womanhood. She is determined to think and judge
for herself. She has realized that, before all else, she is a human
being, owing the first duty to herself. She is undaunted even by the
possibility of social ostracism. She has become sceptical of the
justice of the law, the wisdom of the constituted. Her rebelling
soul rises in protest against the existing. In her own words: "I
must make up my mind which is right, society or I."
In her childlike faith in her husband she had hoped for the great
miracle. But it was not the disappointed hope that opened her vision
to the falsehoods of marriage. It was rather the smug contentment of
Helmer with a safe lie--one that would remain hidden and not endanger
his social standing.
When Nora closed behind her the door of her gilded cage and went out
into the world a new, regenerated personality, she opened the gate of
freedom and truth for her own sex and the race to come.
More than any other play, GHOSTS has acted like a bomb explosion,
shaking the social structure to its very foundations.
In DOLL'S HOUSE the justification of the union between Nora and
Helmer rested at least on the husband's conception of integrity and
rigid adherence to our social morality. Indeed, he was the
conventional ideal husband and devoted father. Not so in GHOSTS.
Mrs. Alving married Captain Alving only to find that he was a
physical and mental wreck, and that life with him would mean utter
degradation and be fatal to possible offspring. In her despair she
turned to her youth's companion, young Pastor Manders who, as the
true savior of souls for heaven, must needs be indifferent to earthly
necessities. He sent her back to shame and degradation,--to her
duties to husband and home. Indeed, happiness--to him--was but the
unholy manifestation of a rebellious spirit, and a wife's duty was
not to judge, but "to bear with humility the cross which a higher
power had for your own good laid upon you."
Mrs. Alving bore the cross for twenty-six long years. Not for the
sake of the higher power, but for her little son Oswald, whom she
longed to save from the poisonous atmosphere of her husband's home.
It was also for the sake of the beloved son that she supported the
lie of his father's goodness, in superstitious awe of "duty and
decency." She learned, alas! too late, that the sacrifice of her
entire life had been in vain, and that her son Oswald was visited by
the sins of his father, that he was irrevocably doomed. This, too,
she learned, that "we are all of us ghosts. It is not only what we
have inherited from our father and mother that walks in us. It is
all sorts of dead ideas and lifeless old beliefs. They have no
vitality, but they cling to us all the same and we can't get rid of
them.... And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of
light. When you forced me under the yoke you called Duty and
Obligation; when you praised as right and proper what my whole soul
rebelled against as something loathsome; it was then that I began to
look into the seams of your doctrine. I only wished to pick at a
single knot, but when I had got that undone, the whole thing ravelled
out. And then I understood that it was all machine-sewn."
How could a society machine-sewn, fathom the seething depths whence
issued the great masterpiece of Henrik Ibsen? It could not
understand, and therefore it poured the vials of abuse and venom upon
its greatest benefactor. That Ibsen was not daunted he has proved by
his reply in AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE.
In that great drama Ibsen performs the last funeral rites over a
decaying and dying social system. Out of its ashes rises the
regenerated individual, the bold and daring rebel. Dr. Stockman, an
idealist, full of social sympathy and solidarity, is called to his
native town as the physician of the baths. He soon discovers that
the latter are built on a swamp, and that instead of finding relief
the patients, who flock to the place, are being poisoned.
An honest man, of strong convictions, the doctor considers it his
duty to make his discovery known. But he soon learns that dividends
and profits are concerned neither with health nor principles. Even
the reformers of the town, represented in the PEOPLE'S MESSENGER,
always ready to prate of their devotion to the people, withdraw their
support from the "reckless" idealist, the moment they learn that the
doctor's discovery may bring the town into disrepute, and thus injure
their pockets.
But Doctor Stockman continues in the faith he entertains for has
townsmen. They would hear him. But here, too, he soon finds himself
alone. He cannot even secure a place to proclaim his great truth.
And when he finally succeeds, he is overwhelmed by abuse and ridicule
as the enemy of the people. The doctor, so enthusiastic of his
townspeople's assistance to eradicate the evil, is soon driven to a
solitary position. The announcement of his discovery would result in
a pecuniary loss to the town, and that consideration induces the
officials, the good citizens, and soul reformers, to stifle the voice
of truth. He finds them all a compact majority, unscrupulous enough
to be willing to build up the prosperity of the town on a quagmire of
lies and fraud. He is accused of trying to ruin the community. But
to his mind "it does not matter if a lying community is ruined. It
must be levelled to the ground. All men who live upon lies must be
exterminated like vermin. You'll bring it to such a pass that the
whole country will deserve to perish."
Doctor Stockman is not a practical politician. A free man, he
thinks, must not behave like a blackguard. "He must not so act that
he would spit in his own face." For only cowards permit
"considerations" of pretended general welfare or of party to override
truth and ideals. "Party programmes wring the necks of all young,
living truths; and considerations of expediency turn morality and
righteousness upside down, until life is simply hideous."
These plays of Ibsen--THE PILLARS OF SOCIETY, A DOLL'S HOUSE, GHOSTS,
and AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE--constitute a dynamic force which is
gradually dissipating the ghosts walking the social burying ground
called civilization. Nay, more; Ibsen's destructive effects are at
the same time supremely constructive, for he not merely undermines
existing pillars; indeed, he builds with sure strokes the foundation
of a healthier, ideal future, based on the sovereignty of the
individual within a sympathetic social environment.
England with her great pioneers of radical thought, the intellectual
pilgrims like Godwin, Robert Owen, Darwin, Spencer, William Morris,
and scores of others; with her wonderful larks of liberty--Shelley,
Byron, Keats--is another example of the influence of dramatic art.
Within comparatively a few years, the dramatic works of Shaw, Pinero,
Galsworthy, Rann Kennedy, have carried radical thought to the ears
formerly deaf even to Great Britain's wondrous poets. Thus a public
which will remain indifferent reading an essay by Robert Owen, on
Poverty, or ignore Bernard Shaw's Socialistic tracts, was made to
think by MAJOR BARBARA, wherein poverty is described as the greatest
crime of Christian civilization. "Poverty makes people weak,
slavish, puny; poverty creates disease, crime, prostitution; in fine,
poverty is responsible for all the ills and evils of the world."
Poverty also necessitates dependency, charitable organizations,
institutions that thrive off the very thing they are trying to
destroy. The Salvation Army, for instance, as shown in MAJOR
BARBARA, fights drunkenness; yet one of its greatest contributors is
Badger, a whiskey distiller, who furnishes yearly thousands of pounds
to do away with the very source of his wealth. Bernard Shaw,
therefore, concludes that the only real benefactor of society is a
man like Undershaft, Barbara's father, a cannon manufacturer, whose
theory of life is that powder is stronger than words.
"The worst of crimes," says Undershaft, "is poverty. All the other
crimes are virtues beside it; all the other dishonors are chivalry
itself by comparison. Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible
pestilences; strikes dead the very soul of all who come within sight,
sound, or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing; a murder
here, a theft there, a blow now and a curse there: what do they
matter? They are only the accidents and illnesses of life; there are
not fifty genuine professional criminals in London. But there are
millions of poor people, abject people, dirty people, ill-fed,
ill-clothed people. They poison us morally and physically; they kill
the happiness of society; they force us to do away with our own
liberties and to organize unnatural cruelties for fear they should
rise against us and drag us down into their abyss.... Poverty and
slavery have stood up for centuries to your sermons and leading
articles; they will not stand up to my machine guns. Don't preach at
them; don't reason with them. Kill them.... It is the final test
of conviction, the only lever strong enough to overturn a social
system.... Vote! Bah! When you vote, you only change the name
of the cabinet. When you shoot, you pull down governments,
inaugurate new epochs, abolish old orders, and set up new."
No wonder people cared little to read Mr. Shaw's Socialistic tracts.
In no other way but in the drama could he deliver such forcible,