Love s Comedy
Ibsen, Henrik, 1828-1906
English
We will print you a perfectly bound paperback of your selected title and send it to you at your nominated address
Below is a summary of Love s Comedy
E-text prepared by Douglas Levy
The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, Volume I
LOVE'S COMEDY
Translation by C. H. Herford
INTRODUCTION*
_Koerlighedens Komedie_ was published at Christiania in 1862. The
polite world--so far as such a thing existed at the time in the
Northern capital--received it with an outburst of indignation
now entirely easy to understand. It has indeed faults enough.
The character-drawing is often crude, the action, though full of
effective by-play, extremely slight, and the sensational climax
has little relation to human nature as exhibited in Norway, or
out of it, at that or any other time. But the sting lay in the
unflattering veracity of the piece as a whole; in the merciless
portrayal of the trivialities of persons, or classes, high in their
own esteem; in the unexampled effrontery of bringing a clergyman
upon the stage. All these have long since passed in Scandinavia,
into the category of the things which people take with their Ibsen
as a matter of course, and the play is welcomed with delight by
every Scandinavian audience. But in 1862 the matter was serious,
and Ibsen meant it to be so.
For they were years of ferment--those six or seven which intervened
between his return to Christiania from Bergen in 1857, and his
departure for Italy in 1864. As director of the newly founded
"Norwegian Theatre," Ibsen was a prominent member of the little
knot of brilliant young writers who led the nationalist revolt
against Danish literary tradition, then still dominant in
well-to-do, and especially in official Christiania. Well-to-do
and official Christiania met the revolt with contempt. Under such
conditions, the specific literary battle of the Norwegian with
the Dane easily developed into the eternal warfare of youthful
idealism with "respectability" and convention. Ibsen had already
started work upon the greatest of his Norse Histories--_The
Pretenders_. But history was for him little more than material
for the illustration of modern problems; and he turned with zest
from the task of breathing his own spirit into the stubborn mould
of the thirteenth century, to hold up the satiric mirror to the
suburban drawing-rooms of Christiania, and to the varied phenomena
current there,--and in suburban drawing-rooms elsewhere,--under
the name of Love.
Yet _Love's Comedy_ is much more than a satire, and its exuberant
humour has a bitter core; the laughter that rings through it is
the harsh, implacable laughter of Carlyle. His criticism of
commonplace love-making is at first sight harmless and ordinary
enough. The ceremonial formalities of the continental _Verlobung_,
the shrill raptures of aunts and cousins over the engaged pair,
the satisfied smile of enterprising mater-familias as she reckons
up the tale of daughters or of nieces safely married off under her
auspices; or, again, the embarrassments incident to a prolonged
_Brautstand_ following a hasty wooing, the deadly effect of
familiarity upon a shallow affection, and the anxious efforts to
save the appearance of romance when its zest has departed--all
these things had yielded such "comedy" as they possess to many
others before Ibsen, and an Ibsen was not needed to evoke it.
But if we ask what, then, is the right way from which these "cosmic"
personages in their several fashions diverge; what is the condition
which will secure courtship from ridicule, and marriage from
disillusion, Ibsen abruptly parts company with all his predecessors.
"'Of course,' reply the rest in chorus, 'a deep and sincere love';--
'together,' add some, 'with prudent good sense.'" The prudent
good sense Ibsen allows; but he couples with it the startling
paradox that the first condition of a happy marriage is the absence
of love, and the first condition of an enduring love is the absence
of marriage.
The student of the latter-day Ibsen is naturally somewhat taken
aback to find the grim poet of Doubt, whose task it seems to be
to apply a corrosive criticism to modern institutions in general
and to marriage in particular, gravely defending the "marriage of
convenience." And his amazement is not diminished by the sense
that the author of this plea for the loveless marriage, which
poets have at all times scorned and derided, was himself beyond
question happily, married. The truth is that there are two men
in Ibsen--an idealist, exalted to the verge of sentimentality, and
a critic, hard, inexorable, remorseless, to the verge of cynicism.
What we call his "social philosophy" is a _modus vivendi_ arrived
at between them. Both agree in repudiating "marriage for love";
but the idealist repudiates it in the name of love, the critic in
the name of marriage. Love, for the idealist Ibsen, is a passion
Back