The Thoughts and Studies of G. Bernard Shaw: Personal Letters, Articles, Lectures & Essays. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
an underhand alliance with a visitor who belongs to her old set, an elderly gallant who quite understands how little she cares for her husband, and proposes a ménage à trois to her. She consents to his coming there and talking to her as he pleases behind her husband’s back; but she keeps her pistols in reserve in case he becomes seriously importunate. He, on the other hand, tries to get some hold over her by placing her husband under pecuniary obligations, as far as he can do it without being out of pocket.
Meanwhile Lôvborg is drifting to disgrace by the nearest way: drink. In due time he descends from lecturing at the university on the history of civilization to taking a job in an out-of-the-way place as tutor to the little children of Sheriff Elvsted. This functionary, on being left a widower with a number of children, marries their governess, finding that she will cost him less and be bound to do more for him as his wife. As for her, she is too poor to dream of refusing such a settlement in life. When Lôvborg comes, his society is heaven to her. He does not dare tell her about his dissipations; but he tells her about his unwritten books, which he never discussed with Hedda. She does not dare to remonstrate with him for drinking; but he gives it up as soon as he sees that it shocks her. Just as Mr. Fearing, in Bunyan’s story, was in a way the bravest of the pilgrims, so this timid and unfortunate Mrs. Elvsted trembles her way to a point at which Lôvborg, quite reformed, publishes one book which makes him celebrated for the moment, and completes another, faircopied in her handwriting, to which he looks for a solid position as an original thinker. But he cannot now stay tutoring Elvsted’s children; so off he goes to town with his pockets full of the money the published book has brought him. Left once more in her old lonely plight, knowing that without her Lovborg will probably relapse into dissipation, and that without him her life will not be worth living, Mrs. Elvsted must either sin against herself and him or against the institution of marriage under which Elvsted purchased his housekeeper. It never occurs to her that she has any choice. She knows that her action will count as “a dreadful thing”; but she sees that she must go; and accordingly Elvsted finds himself without a wife and his children without a governess, and so disappears unpitied from the story.
Now it happens that Hedda’s husband, Jorgen Tesman, is an old friend and competitor (for academic honors) of Lovborg, and also that Hedda was a schoolfellow of Mrs. Elvsted, or Thea, as she had better now be called. Thea’s first business is to find out where Lovborg is; for hers is no preconcerted elopement: she has hurried to town to keep Lovborg away from the bottle, a design she dare not hint at to himself. Accordingly, the first thing she does in town is to call on the Tesmans, who have just returned from their honeymoon, to beg them to invite Lovborg to their house so as to keep him in good company. They consent, with the result that the two pairs are brought together under the same roof, and the tragedy begins to work itself out.
Hedda’s attitude now demands a careful analysis. Lovborg’s experience with Thea has enlightened his judgment of Hedda; and as he is, in his gifted way, an arrant poseur and male coquet, he immediately tries to get on romantic terms with her (for have they not “a past”?) by impressing her with the penetrating criticism that she is and always was a coward. She admits that the virtuous heroics with the pistol were pure cowardice; but she is still so void of any other standard of conduct than conformity to the conventional ideals, that she thinks her cowardice consisted in not daring to be wicked. That is, she thinks that what she actually did was the right thing; and since she despises herself for doing it, and feels that he also rightly despises her for doing it, she gets a passionate feeling that what is wanted is the courage to do wrong. This unlooked-for reaction of idealism, this monstrous but very common setting-up of wrongdoing as an ideal, and of the wrongdoer as hero or heroine qua wrongdoer, leads Hedda to conceive that when Lovborg tried to seduce her he was a hero, and that in allowing Thea to reform him he has played the recreant. In acting on this misconception she is restrained by no consideration for any of the rest. Like all people whose lives are valueless, she has no more sense of the value of Lovborg’s or Tesman’s or Thea’s lives than a railway shareholder has of the value of a shunter’s. She gratifies her intense jealousy of Thea by deliberately taunting Lovborg into breaking loose from her influence by joining a carouse at which he not only loses his manuscript, but finally gets into the hands of the police through behaving outrageously in the house of a disreputable woman whom he accuses of stealing it, not knowing that it has been picked up by Tesman and handed to Hedda for safe keeping. Now Hedda’s jealousy of Thea is not jealousy of her bodily fascination: at that Hedda can beat her. It is jealousy of her power of making a man of Lovborg, of her part in his life as a man of genius. The manuscript which Tesman gives to Hedda to lock up safely is in Thea’s handwriting. It is the fruit of Lovborg’s union with Thea: he himself speaks of it as “their child.” So when he turns his despair to romantic account by coming to the two women and making a tragic scene, telling Thea that he has cast the manuscript, tom into a thousand pieces, out upon the fiord; and then, when she is gone, telling Hedda that he has brought “the child” to a house of ill-fame and lost it there, she, deceived by his posing, and thirsting to gain faith in the beauty of her own influence over him from a heroic deed of some sort, makes him a present of one of her pistols, only begging him to “do it beautifully,” by which she means that he is to kill himself in some manner that will make his suicide a romantic memory and an imaginative luxury to her for ever. He takes it unblushingly, and leaves her with the air of a man who is looking his last on earth. But the moment he is out of sight of his audience, he goes back to the house where he still supposes the manuscript to lie stolen, and there renews the wrangle of the night before, using the pistol to threaten the woman, with the result that he gets shot in the abdomen, leaving the weapon to fall into the hands of the police. Meanwhile Hedda deliberately burns “the child.” Then comes her elderly gallant to disgust her with the unromantically ugly details of the deed which Lôvborg promised her to do so beautifully, and to make her understand that he himself has now got her into his power by his ability to identify the pistol. She must either be the slave of this man, or else face the scandal of the connection of her name at the inquest with a squalid debauch ending in a murder. Thea, too, is not crushed by Lovborg’s death. Ten minutes after she has received the news with a cry of heartfelt loss, she sits down with Tesman to reconstruct “the child” from the old notes she has piously preserved. Over the congenial task of collecting and arranging another man’s ideas Tesman is perfectly happy, and forgets his beautiful Hedda for the first time. Thea the trembler is still mistress of the situation, holding the dead Lôvborg, gaining Tesman, and leaving Hedda to her elderly admirer, who smoothly remarks that he will answer for Mrs. Tesman not being bored whilst her husband is occupied with Thea in putting the pieces of the book together. However, he has again reckoned without General Gabler’s second pistol. She shoots herself then and there; and so the story ends.
THE LAST FOUR PLAYS
DOWN AMONG THE DEAD MEN
Ibsen now lays down the completed task of warning the world against its idols and anti-idols, and passes into the shadow of death, or rather into the splendor of his sunset glory; for his magic is extraordinarily potent in these four plays, and his purpose more powerful. And yet the shadow of death is here; for all four, except Little Eyolf, are tragedies of the dead, deserted and mocked by the young who are still full of life. The Master Builder is a dead man before the curtain rises: the breaking of his body to pieces in the last act by its fall from the tower is rather the impatient destruction of a ghost of whose delirious whisperings Nature is tired than of one who still counts among the living. Borkman and the two women, his wife and her sister, are not merely dead: they are buried; and the creatures we hear and see are only their spirits in torment. “Never dream of life again,” says Mrs. Borkman to her husband: “lie quiet where you are.” And the last play of all is frankly called When We Dead Awaken. Here the quintessence of Ibsenism reaches its final distillation; morality and reformation give place to mortality and resurrection; and the next event is the death of Ibsen himself: he, too, creeping ghost-like through the blackening mental darkness until he reaches his actual grave, and can no longer make Europe cry with pity by sitting at a copybook, like a child, trying to learn again how to write, only to find that divine power gone for ever from his dead hand. He, the crustiest,