The Thoughts and Studies of G. Bernard Shaw: Personal Letters, Articles, Lectures & Essays. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
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.
AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE, 1882
After this, the reader will understand the temper in which Ibsen set about his next play, An Enemy of the People, in which, having done sufficient execution among the ordinary middle-class domestic and social ideals, he puts his finger for a moment on commercial political ideals. The play deals with a local majority of middle-class people who are pecuniarily interested in concealing the fact that the famous baths which attract visitors to their town and customers to their shops and hotels are contaminated by sewage. When an honest doctor insists on exposing this danger, the townspeople immediately disguise themselves ideally. Feeling the disadvantage of appearing in their true character as a conspiracy of interested rogues against an honest man, they pose as Society, as The People, as Democracy, as the solid Liberal Majority, and other imposing abstractions, the doctor, in attacking them, of course being thereby made an enemy of The People, a danger to Society, a traitor to Democracy, an apostate from the great Liberal party, and so on. Only those who take an active part in politics can appreciate the grim fun of the situation, which, though it has an intensely local Norwegian air, will be at once recognized as typical in England, not, perhaps, by the professional literary critics, who are for the most part fainéants as far as political life is concerned, but certainly by everyone who has got as far as a seat on the committee of the most obscure Ratepayers’ Association.
As An Enemy of the People contains one or two references to Democracy which are anything but respectful, it is necessary to examine Ibsen’s criticism of it with precision. Democracy is really only an arrangement by which the governed are allowed to choose (as far as any choice is possible, which in capitalistic society is not saying much) the members of the representative bodies which control the executive. It has never been proved that this is the best arrangement; and it has been made effective only to the very limited extent short of which the dissatisfaction which it appeases might take the form of actual violence. Now when men had to submit to kings, they consoled themselves by making it an article of faith that the king was always right, idealizing him as a Pope, in fact. In the same way we who have to submit to majorities set up Voltaire’s pope, Monsieur Tout-le-monde, and make it blasphemy against Democracy to deny that the majority is always right, although that, as Ibsen says, is a lie. It is a scientific fact that the majority, however eager it may be for the reform of old abuses, is always wrong in its opinion of new developments, or rather is always unfit for them (for it can hardly be said to be wrong in opposing developments for which it is not yet fit). The pioneer is a tiny minority of the force he heads; and so, though it is easy to be in a minority and yet be wrong, it is absolutely impossible to be in the majority and yet be right as to the newest social prospects. We should never progress at all if it were possible for each of us to stand still on democratic principles until we saw whither all the rest were moving, as our statesmen declare themselves bound to do when they are called upon to lead. Whatever clatter we may make for a time with our filing through feudal serf collars and kicking off old mercantilist fetters, we shall never march a step forward except at the heels of “the strongest man, he who is able to stand alone” and to turn his back on “the damned compact Liberal majority.” All of which is no disparagement of parliaments and adult suffrage, but simply a wholesome reduction of them to their real place in the social economy as pure machinery: machinery which has absolutely no principles except the principles of mechanics, and no motive power in itself whatsoever. The idealization of public organizations is as dangerous as that of kings or priests. We need to be reminded that though there is in the world a vast number of buildings in which a certain ritual is conducted before crowds called congregations by a functionary called a priest, who is subject to a central council controlling