The Quintessence of Ibsenism: Now Completed

to the Death of Ibsen, 1913

1   Shaw’s Obituary of Ibsen

“Ibsen’s triumph is by this time so complete that we now glibly

talk a great deal of nonsense about him.” (Shaw, “Ibsen,” The

Clarion, June 1, 1906)

On May 23, 1906, Ibsen died in his bed at the age of seventy-eight after
a long illness, and a week later, Shaw’s obituary appeared in the socialist
organ The Clarion. The first sentence makes it clear that Shaw was using
the occasion to renew his attack on the English reception of Ibsen: “The
greatest dramatic genius of the nineteenth century is dead, leaving most
of our critics proud of having mistaken him for a criminal, an imbecile,
and an ephemeral” (W 239). The discerning few in England, of course,
are aware that “Anti-Ibsen” has now gone its way into “the dustheap
of big blunders by little men; and Europe and America well know that
the news of Ibsen’s death would never have been flashed to their con-
fines had he been no greater than so many of our noisiest nobodies
supposed.”
Shaw then provides a brief account of Ibsen’s initial reception in
England, explaining how this “giant blow” to “the self-complacency
of middle-class commercial domesticity got home on our smug British
countenance” (W 239). Wanting to give credit to the Ibsen pioneers,

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254 J. Templeton

Shaw lists the principal performers of the most important early pro-
ductions: Janet Achurch leads off as Nora in A Doll’s House, followed
by Genevieve Ward as Lona Hessel and Elizabeth Robins as Martha in
Pillars of Society; then come Florence Farr as Rebecca West and Frank
Benson as Rosmer in Rosmersholm, Robins as Hedda and Marion Lea as
Thea in Hedda Gabler, and Robins and Herbert Waring as Hilda and
Solness in The Master Builder. “There was also the famous production
of Ghosts,” Shaw adds, referring to the English premiere of 1891, “with
Mrs. Theodore Wright as Mrs. Alving and Mr. [Frank] Lindo as Oswald
. . . and [the English premiere of] The Wild Duck, with Miss Winifred
Fraser as Hedvig and Mr. [W. L.] Abington and Mr. La[u]rence Irving as
Hjalmar and Relling” (240). Shaw notes that both Ghosts and The Wild
Duck were performed by a small, undernourished company—“Mr. J. T.
Grein’s forlorn hope called The Independent Theatre”—and issues a
judgment that theatrical history would confirm: now that the “lapse of
time [nine years after the company’s demise] has thrown it into its true
perspective, it is seen to have been the most important theatrical enter-
prise of its time.”
Recalling the hysteria of the anti-Ibsenites —“The shrieks of the
vanquished rent the heavens; and the language they used was appall-
ing”—Shaw comments that at one point Archer felt obliged to protest
to Clement Scott for calling him “a muck-ferreting dog” (240). If the
Ibsenites had realized how strong their case actually was, Shaw remarks,
they might not have fought so hard; “All the brains and all the good
manners were with them; so the victory was a foregone conclusion.”
Correcting a misconception and exaggerating to make his point, Shaw
writes that a curious aspect of the Ibsen campaign was that the “Ibsenites
were for the most part not in the least Ibsenists. They were fascinated by
Ibsen’s poetic magic, his dramatic vividness, his veracity, and his morbi-
dezza, not touched by his ideas.”1 Shaw points to Archer, whose trans-
lations of Ibsen’s plays “made the whole movement possible,” and asks
rhetorically, “[H]as he not just said, ‘If by some chemical process, it were
possible to eliminate from Ibsen’s work every trace of doctrine or ten-
dency, its value, in my eyes, would scarcely be diminished’?”2 And Shaw’s
own Ibsenist The Quintessence of Ibsenism, he notes wryly, was unpopular
with many of Ibsen’s followers; “many of the opposition liked it much
better, as it seemed to them a conclusive piece of evidence against him”
(240-41). What qualified people for the “Ibsenite ranks” was “sufficient
 THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM: NOW COMPLETED … 255

strength of character to stand up to [Ibsen’s] terrible searchlight without

blinking”; the anti-Ibsenites were “the aimiable people who like to see
the world in a mild radiance through rose-colored romantic spectacles”
(241). They hated Ibsen because he threatened their sentimental vision
of the world; the “ice that he was breaking was the ice they themselves
were skating on; the volcano he was stoking was the mountain on whose
slopes their suburban villas were built.”
Shaw then turns his critical gaze on the current English miscon-
ception about Ibsen: because he has triumphed on the world stage, it
has now become a “commonplace” to claim that his plays “changed
the whole current of the English drama and revolutionized its tech-
nique” (241). In fact, Shaw insists, repeating a point he had made in his
Saturday Review columns, England’s most famous playwright, Arthur
Wing Pinero, owes nothing to Ibsen. The popular notion that Pinero’s
plays containing a “certain feminine type” [the “fallen woman”] are
indebted to Ibsen is utterly false; these sentimental works are “flatly
opposed in their moral implications to Ibsenism.” The plays of Henry
Arthur Jones have been subject to the same “critical stupidity,” for the
English critics think that if a playwright makes “some attempt to study
his characters from life instead of dashing in the usual stage silhouettes
of angels and devils with a bucket of whitewash and a sack of soot,” he
must be an Ibsenite (241-42). As for the other playwrights who came of
age in the 1890s, none of them, Shaw points out, have anything in com-
mon with Ibsen: J. M. Barrie’s “extraordinary amenity of touch which
prevents anything he does from distressing his audience” disqualifies him
for the “Ibsenist” label, and Oscar Wilde’s wit “was too intensely his
own to be stamped as made in Norway” (242).
Shaw also has to consider Ibsen’s influence on himself. In partner-
ship with Granville Barker and J. E. Vedrenne at the Royal Court
Theatre, he was now seeing his own work flourish; the preceding year,
1905, had seen highly successful productions of John Bull’s Other Island
(blessed by a royal command performance for Edward VII), You Never
Can Tell, Man and Superman, and Major Barbara.3 Repeating points
he had made in “The Author to the Dramatic Critics,” an essay he had
appended to the first publication of Widowers’ Houses (1893), Shaw
notes that the press attributed the play to Ibsen’s influence before he
himself knew of Ibsen’s existence, and again insists, as he would also do
in the preface to Major Barbara, that his own ideas were not particularly
256 J. Templeton

Ibsenian, or even new, but had long been held in England by progressive
thinkers and writers: “For us[,] the moral whitewash had been stripped
off the suburban hearth and home and its genteel ‘breadwinner’ (mod-
elled on Tennyson’s King Arthur) long before A Doll’s Home [sic], Little
Eyolf, and [Tolstoy’s] The Kreutzer Sonata came crashing into polite
literature” (242). In their ignorance, English journalists assume that
England is devoid of intellectual development, so that “a playwright
with ideas must necessarily have imported them from abroad. . . . They
are always reeling in scandalized horror at the novelty and blasphemy
of some view that has been a platitude among live thinkers for the last
thirty years” (243).
Determined to destroy the claims of Ibsen’s influence on British
drama, Shaw accuses the critics of ignorance of Ibsen’s techniques, which
only a playwright, he claims, can recognize as old-fashioned. Dismissing
the widely held notion that Ibsen’s early career as a stage manager was
invaluable to him as a dramatist, Shaw declares that, in fact, putting on
the plays of Scribe and his followers “hampered and misled him” (243).
Carried away by A Doll’s House, “you quite overlook the Scribish [sic]
artificiality of its construction, which strikes you in the face at later vis-
its”; Pillars of Society, too, is marred by “conventional carpentry.” One
of Ibsen’s early plays, Lady Inger of Ostraat, is so clumsy in its “impos-
sible asides” that it could be a caricature of contemporary traveling pan-
tomimes. But what is worse is that Ibsen seems to have absorbed the
“old notion that a play is not really a play unless it contains a murder, a
suicide, or something else out of the Police Gazette.” And like Dickens,
Ibsen has followed Ruskin’s recipe for writing popular fiction: “kill a
baby.”4 Little Nell, Paul Dombey, the Brand baby, and Little Eyolf are
“tremendously effective as a blow below the belt”; but they are “dis-
honorable as artistic devices because they depend on a morbid horror
of death and a morbid enjoyment of horror.” Shaw quickly takes part
of his point back regarding Little Eyolf, admitting that here, “the end
perhaps justifies the artifice;” still, “the artifice distracts attention from
the end.” As for Brand, it is “infamously morbid” because while Brand
was right to give the clothes of his dead child to a live one, Ibsen gives
“this happy solution a final and fatal turn of the rack” [Brand’s wife dies
of grief] (243-44). Again, Shaw quickly retreats—“I grant that even
here Ibsen turns the Chamber of Horrors to astonishing and illuminat-
ing account”—but hopes that “nobody will make [Ibsen’s] example
 THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM: NOW COMPLETED … 257

an excuse for going back to the maudlin pathos and delirium tremens
of early Victorian literature” (244). Shaw judges that “Lear’s death
is far better pathos (if you want to cry for the sake of crying) than
Mrs. Brand’s baby; and as Ibsen was stupendously greater than
Shakespear in observation and criticism of life, you may always safely say,
when he falls short of him, ‘the less Ibsen he.’” But Shakespeare’s victory
turns out to be meaningless because he “never kept close enough to life
to make his murders and combats and ghosts and mad scenes too incon-
gruous for people brought up to tolerate them: even I can swallow them
without actually losing my temper”; Ibsen, on the other hand, deals with
life as we know it, and because of this, his catastrophes seem “forced—
occasionally so forced that not even his magic can compel their uncon-
scious acceptance.” In The Wild Duck, for example, Ibsen has Gregers
persuade Hedvig to kill her pet “in order that she may be provided with
a pistol to kill herself”; in Hedda Gabler, “where Brack keeps repeat-
ing the formula: ‘People don’t do such things,’ even after Hedda has
blown her brains out,” it is clear that Ibsen is using Brack to attack critics
who accused him of sensationalism. But Brack was right, after all, Shaw
claims, pointing to other unlikely catastrophes in Ibsen’s plays: Solness’s
fall from the tower in The Master Builder, which is natural “only sym-
bolically,” the death in a snowstorm of John Gabriel Borkman, and the
avalanche at the end of When We Dead Awaken. Shaw hits Ibsen hard
as he claims that “such symbolism as you can read into [these endings]
is but a thin disguise for the survival of the old conventional mortuary
ending of [Scribe’s] Adrienne Lecouvreur, and The Iron Chest [a popular
melodrama], and all the other duly qualified tragedies of the Crummles
Theatre [the hapless traveling troupe in Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby].”
Shaw concludes that “we can learn nothing technically from Ibsen,
except either what no man has ever yet learnt from another, or what can
be learnt just as well from a dozen modern playwrights.” Once again,
Shaw half retreats—“No doubt John Gabriel Borkman, for example, is a
technical masterpiece”—but that sort of technique “is inextricably bound
up with the dramatic genius which devises it. . . . [D]oes anyone suppose
that this technical evolution in the theatre would not have taken place
equally if Ibsen had never been born?” (244-45).
Shaw then returns to his homage to Ibsen, condemning the English
theatre for what “we might have learned” from Ibsen but did not: “that
our fashionable dramatic material was worn out as far as cultivated
258 J. Templeton

modern people are concerned; that what really interests such peo-
ple on the stage is not what we call action—meaning two well-known
and rather short-sighted actors pretending to fight a duel without
their glasses, or a handsome leading man chasing a beauteous leading
lady round the stage with threats, obviously not feasible, of immediate
­rapine—but stories of lives, discussion of conduct, unveiling of motives,
conflict of characters in talk, laying bare of souls, discovery of pitfalls—in
short, illumination of life for us” (245). After insisting on Ibsen’s old-
fashioned technique, Shaw praises him for his new, realistic content.
Shaw ends his obituary by reminding his readers that the reigning
English dramatists were already established when Ibsen’s plays arrived in
England and are thus too old to have been influenced by them. It is to
the new generation of playwrights, like Gorki and Granville Barker, Shaw
writes, and not to the older one of Pinero, “that we must look for the
first fruits of our indebtedness to the greatest dramatist of the n ­ ineteenth
century—perhaps one of the greatest dramatists of all the centuries”
(245).
Shaw’s obituary is a curious document. While it celebrates Ibsen as a
writer of genius whom the English theatre has blindly failed to appreci-
ate, it also offers a critical view of his dramaturgy that directly contradicts
Shaw’s own earlier accounts. Shaw had praised Ibsen in his newspa-
per journalism, his “Appendix” to the first edition of the Quintessence,
and his Saturday Review columns as the standard-bearer of modern-
ism whose stagecraft was saving the theatre from artificial plotting, sen-
timentality, and sensational endings; now, Ibsen is claimed to be guilty
of such practices himself. Shaw is right, of course, that during his early
years as a stage manager, Ibsen fell under the influence of Scribe; he
worked on productions of a hundred and fifty French comedies and
intrigue dramas, including twenty by Scribe himself. And no critical
reader would argue that Lady Inger of Ostraat, which leans heavily on
Scribe and Shakespeare, is, however promising, a good play, or deny
that the sometimes clumsy Pillars of Society is a flawed one, or that A
Doll’s House contains Scribean techniques. But Lady Inger and Pillars of
Society do not represent Ibsen’s mature dramaturgy, as Shaw himself well
knew. And in A Doll’s House, Ibsen puts Scribean devices to analytical
purpose: Helmer’s reaction to the letter waiting in the mailbox enlight-
ens Nora about her husband’s character and provokes the play’s crisis.
 THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM: NOW COMPLETED … 259

As for the deaths of Ibsen’s children, they are handled very differently
from the prolonged, unashamedly tearful fates of Little Nell and Paul
Dombey. Brand’s son appears only for an instant, as a bundle in his
mother’s arms, and his offstage death, the result of his father’s refusal to
leave his frozen parish, serves to illustrate the hardness of Brand’s credo
“All or Nothing.” And while the crippled Eyolf pulls at our heartstrings,
he appears in one scene before drowning offstage, dispatched as expo-
sitional material. Ibsen’s famous kindermord seems far less sentimen-
tal than cruelly dramaturgical. Shaw also chooses to ignore the careful
preparation of Ibsen’s catastrophes. In The Wild Duck, Hedvig’s psycho-
logical instability and great distress make her susceptible to Gregers’s
suggestion that she shoot her pet; the master builder’s fall from the
tower is not “natural only symbolically,” but also realistically, the result
of his acute acrophobia; Borkman’s dash into the snow and his subse-
quent heart attack do not seem improbable for an elderly megalomaniac;
in When We Dead Awaken, the avalanche seems the inevitable end to
Ibsen’s apocalyptic parable of the remorseful sculptor and the woman he
destroyed in the name of his art.
Jonathan Wisenthal notes that Shaw’s criticism of Ibsen’s drama-
turgy reflects his need to argue against prevailing opinion and “must
be seen in the context of Shaw’s habitual desire to express a minority
point of view” (W 23). Wisenthal points out that Shaw wrote Archer
that he felt obliged to use his space “in contradiction of current fallacies
[about Ibsen] rather than in affirmation of the old man’s qualities; how-
ever, he can look after himself in that respect” (CL 2:627). It is true that
Shaw was driven to argue against majority opinion, but he did not need
to argue that Ibsen’s dramaturgy was old-fashioned in order to claim
that he had not influenced the English theatre. He could have argued
the opposite, as he had done in his columns in the Saturday Review, in
which he pointed out that Ibsen’s playmaking was light years ahead of
the artificialities of Pinero and the conventionalities of Henry Arthur
Jones. And the critical stance that Ibsen’s dramas had been constructed
with a Scribean tool box is belied by Shaw himself, for in praising Ibsen’s
“discussion of conduct . . . conflict of characters in talk, laying bare of
souls . . . in short, illumination of life” in opposition to the fake duels
and rape threats of the commercial theatre, Shaw is writing of Ibsen’s
realistic dramaturgy as well as his thought.
260 J. Templeton

Shaw’s critical remarks on Ibsen illustrate his delight in playing the

devil’s advocate, but they also reveal his inability to refuse the temptation
of exaggeration to bolster his argument. He is so determined to show
that the English reception of Ibsen, from the first scream of outrage to
the latest glib sententiousness, was wrongheaded and even ridiculous,
that he misrepresents the object of his homage. And the clear hedging of
his judgments, his need to justify his approach to Archer, and the illogi-
cality of the justification itself are clear signs that Shaw was uneasy with
what he had written.
Archer, moved by the death of Ibsen, the chief subject of his life’s
work, and displeased and annoyed by Shaw’s obituary, published an
article in the Tribune, “Death and Mr. Bernard Shaw,” in which he
argued that Shaw was not capable of understanding tragedy because
he was uncomfortable with it; Shaw “eschews those profounder revela-
tions of character which come only in crises of tragic circumstance” (W
52). Archer also remarked that it “is not the glory but the limitation of
Mr. Shaw’s theatre that it is peopled by immortals.” Shaw provocatively
replied to Archer with an announcement in the Tribune of his new play,
The Doctor’s Dilemma, in which he promised, in the third person, that
“stung by this reproach from his old friend,” Mr. Shaw would now face
the “King of Terrors” on stage in “the most amusing play he has ever
written” (W 52). And in The Doctor’s Dilemma, he deliberately turns
what would normally be a tragic subject—the death of the artist—into,
in A. M. Gibbs’s phrase, “anticlimactic, parodic farce,” with a charlatan
doctor mumbling mangled quotations from Shakespeare’s tragedies.5
Shaw himself flaunted his stagey death scene as “a miracle of my lack of
taste” (H 2:167).
Wisenthal argues that comparing the stage deaths of Shaw’s artist
Dubedat and Ibsen’s artist Oswald in Ghosts allows us “to see the extent
to which death has had its sting removed in the world of Shaw’s drama”
(52). Comparisons of other situations common to both playwrights
illustrate “the extent to which the world of most of Shaw’s drama is
free of trouble and pain altogether”; in the treatment of disease in The
Philanderer, Craven’s condition is treated comically even before it turns
out to be non-existent while in A Doll’s House and Ghosts, syphilis is fatal
to Dr. Rank, Captain Alving, and Oswald. You Never Can Tell, which
features a bad marriage, difficult children, and a free-thinking woman
 THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM: NOW COMPLETED … 261

“prompts reflexion on the very different use to which Ibsen put such
material” in Ghosts (52).
It is true that tragedy is incompatible, to use a Shavian term, with Shaw’s
“meliorist” view of the world. But if tragedy was alien to Shaw as a thinker
and writer, this was not the case with Shaw as a reader of Ibsen. His discus-
sions of Ghosts and Rosmersholm in the first edition of the Quintessence had
put Shaw among the very few early critics who understood and appreci-
ated Ibsen’s tragic purposes, and his analyses of Ibsen’s last four plays in the
­second edition of the Quintessence will more than confirm this.
As for Shaw’s criticism of Ibsen’s old-fashioned dramaturgy, he will
offer a contrasting account in the second edition of the Quintessence,
arguing that even when Ibsen’s catastrophes seem forced, they never
exist for their own sakes. He will also add a new chapter that credits
Ibsen with inventing the discussion play, and in so doing, introducing
modernism to the theatre, and another to arguing that Ibsen’s plays
contained a new level of seriousness that marks the beginning of mod-
ernism itself. Shaw’s criticisms of Ibsen in his obituary represent a great
­exception in his writing on Ibsen.

2  An Old and a New Ibsen

“Ibsen’s plays furnish one of the best modern keys to the

prophecies of the Scripture.” (The Quintessence, 1913)

At the age of fifty-seven, Shaw begins his preface to the 1913

Quintessence with the statement that in the pages that follow, “I have
made no attempt to tamper with the work of the bygone man of thirty-
five who wrote them” (Q2 vii). He would criticize the first edition if he
thought it was misleading, but reading it through, he has no doubt “that
it is as much needed in its own form as ever it was. Now that Ibsen is
no longer frantically abused, and is safe in the Pantheon, his message is
in worse danger of being forgotten or ignored than when he was in the
pillory” (viii). While times have changed, and nobody would dream now
of calling an Ibsenite a “muck ferreting dog,” still, “the most effective
way of shutting our minds against a great man’s ideas is to take them for
granted and admit that he was great and have done with him.”
262 J. Templeton

Fig. 1 Bernard Shaw. 1913-14

Shaw takes responsibility for the fact that in spite of continued

demand, the Quintessence has long been out of print in England; how-
ever, to reprint it without a discussion of Ibsen’s “four final master-
pieces,” written after the publication of the Quintessence, would have
been a “fraud on its purchasers” and he has simply lacked the time
to do it; he also promises a new appraisal of Ibsen’s position after his
“death and canonization as an admired grand master of European
­literature” (ix).
 THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM: NOW COMPLETED … 263

In the first example in the second edition of a heightened, even more

laudatory view of Ibsen’s works, Shaw claims that Ibsen’s plays constitute
a contemporary guide to the Bible. Reading the Old Testament proph-
ets, contemporary readers are both puzzled and bored by the continual
references to idolatry and prostitution, believing “that idolatry means
praying to stocks and stones instead of to brass lectern eagles and the
new reredos presented by the local distiller in search of a title; and as
to prostitution, they think of it as ‘the social evil,’ and regret that the
translators of the Bible used a much blunter word” (x). With the help
of Ibsen’s plays, today’s readers can grasp the Scripture’s contemporary
meaning: “For idols and idolatry read ideals and idealism;” for prosti-
tution, read not only what takes place at Piccadilly Circus, but “the
political lawyer, the parson selling his soul to the squire, the ambitious
politician selling his soul for office” (xi). Shaw has even thought of sub-
stituting “the words idol and idolatry for ideal and idealism” in his text,
but this would be thoroughly misunderstood: “If you call a man a ras-
cally idealist, he is not only shocked and indignant but puzzled. . . . If
you call him a rascally idolator, he concludes calmly that you do not
know that he is a member of the Church of England.” So, for better
or worse, Shaw keeps his vocabulary and leaves his text as it is, except
for “certain adaptations made necessary by the lapse of time” and “a few
elucidations which I might have made in 1891 had I given the text a
couple of extra revisions” (xii).
Shaw signals his readers that one important subject of the first
Quintessence, however—the status of women—has greatly changed
since 1891: “In the eighteen-nineties one jested about the revolt of the
daughters, and of the wives who slammed the front door like Nora. At
present the revolt has become so general that even the feeblest and old-
est after-dinner jesters dare no longer keep Votes for Women [a rallying
cry of the suffrage campaign and the title of Elizabeth Robins’s play]
on their list of stale pleasantries about mothers-in-law, rational dress,
and mixed bathing. Men are waking up to the perception that in kill-
ing women’s souls, they have killed their own” (xii). Moreover, their
responsibilities as family breadwinners have made them into conveni-
ences, and thus they, too, like the “thousands of women” whom Nora
Helmer cites, have sacrificed their honor for love (xii-xiii). “In the plays
of Gorki and Chekhov, against which all the imbecilities and outrages of
the old anti-Ibsen campaign are being revived (for the Press never learns
anything by experience), the men appear as more tragically sacrificed by
264 J. Templeton

evil social conditions and their romantic and idealistic disguises than the
women” (xiii).
Shaw then brings Strindberg, whose plays were currently causing con-
sternation, into his discussion. Shaw saw that the persecuted Strindberg
was a remarkable writer—“Ibsen’s twin giant” (xiii)—and he under-
stood and appreciated his mind and purposes.6 With Creditors, which
had recently premiered in London, Shaw writes, Strindberg “wreaked
the revenge of the male for A Doll’s House” in a play in which “it is
the man who is the victim of domesticity, and the woman who is the
tyrant and soul destroyer.” Shaw then offers an interesting compara-
tive analysis: Strindberg has been received with “an even idler stupidity
than Ibsen himself, because Ibsen appealed to the rising energy of the
revolt of women against idealism; but Strindberg attacks women ruth-
lessly, trying to rouse men from the sloth and sensuality of their idealized
addiction to them; and as the men, unlike the women, do not want to
be roused, whilst the women do not like to be attacked, there is no con-
scious Strindberg movement” (xiii-xiv). A few days ago, Shaw notes, the
Times published “a wild Strindbergian letter” in which “an eminent bac-
teriologist” [Sir Almroth Wright] declared that women must be removed
from all professional and political work alongside men; their presence is
so disturbing that the two sexes “can work together or legislate together
only on the same conditions as horses and mares: that is, by the surgi-
cal destruction of the male’s sex” (xiv.)7 While the Times accepted this
absurd opinion as “scientific,” Shaw notes, it dismissed both Creditors
and Strindberg “with curt superciliousness as uninteresting and negligi-
ble” (xiv-xv). As another example of backwardness, Shaw mentions that
when his own comedy about “the bewilderment of conventional people
when brought suddenly in contact with the Ibsenist movement” was
produced [The Philanderer, in 1907], it “was criticized in terms which
shewed that our critics are just as hopelessly in the rear of Ibsen as they
were in 1891. The only difference was that whereas in 1891 they would
have insulted Ibsen, they now accept him as a classic” (xv). In the cur-
rent attacks on the plays of Chekhov, Galsworthy, and Granville Barker,
the critics express “the same pettish disappointment at the absence of the
old conventions, the same gaping unconsciousness of the meaning and
purpose of the warfare in which each play is a battle, as in the days when
this book was new” (xvi). The Quintessence, then, is needed now more
than ever.
 THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM: NOW COMPLETED … 265

Ending his preface, Shaw makes a last jab at the continuing refusal
to acknowledge the force of the contemporary challenge to traditional
morality. His fellow socialists ignore the fact that our “domestic ideals”
have been “shaken to their foundations, as through a couple of earth-
quake shocks, by Ibsen and Strindberg (the Arch Individualists of the
nineteenth century)”; on the opposite side, the mainstream journalists
continue “to assume that Socialism is the deadliest enemy of the domes-
tic ideals and Unsocialism their only hope and refuge” and proclaim
capitalism as “the bulwark of the Christian Churches” (xvi). Taking his
metaphor from Isaiah 9:2, Shaw remarks that we “used to be told that
the people that walked in darkness have seen a great light,” but now,
when “our people see the heavens blazing with suns, they simply keep
their eyes shut, and walk on in darkness until they have led us into the
pit.” Therefore, in his second edition of the Quintessence, Shaw will again
launch his “old torpedo with the old charge in it, leaving to the new
chapters at the end what I have to say about the change in the theatre
since Ibsen set his potent leaven to work there” (xvi-xvii).
While Shaw noted that he made no fundamental change in his old
text, he read it with an editorial eye. In his chapter “The Plays,” he
added a sub-heading—“The Objective Anti-Idealist Plays”—to sepa-
rate Ibsen’s realistic prose plays from the earlier closet dramas, and he
occasionally slotted Ibsen’s four plays written after the first edition of the
Quintessence into his earlier discussions, e.g., he noted that the protago-
nist of Ibsen’s last four plays share the autographical immediacy of the
protagonists of the early closet dramas (Q2 81), an observation that is
now a given in Ibsen studies. He also strengthened some of his points
with additional detail, e.g., he explained that the Ibsen-hating critic
Clement Scott was “an emotional, impressionable, zealous, and sincere
Roman Catholic” (3-4), and in his debunking of ideal love, he added
that even Dante, that most high-minded of poets, was unfaithful both to
the woman he idolized and the woman he married (39).
Shaw also took the trouble to make a few improvements in clarity and
focus in his discussion of Hedda Gabler, which he must have recognized
was one of his book’s finest analyses and deserved to be as good as he
could make it. In the first version, Hedda “has no ideals at all” (Q 112),
while in the second, more accurately, she “has no ethical ideals at all, only
romantic ones” (Q2 126). In 1891, Hedda was “mean, envious, inso-
lent, cruel in protest against others’ happiness, a bully in reaction from
266 J. Templeton

her own cowardice” (Q 113); now, in 1913, she is also ­“fiendish in her
dislike of inartistic people and things” (Q 2 126). Shaw also explained
more fully Hedda’s antipathy toward Thea, which arises from her “jeal-
ousy of [Thea’s] power of making a man of Løvborg, of her part in his
life as a man of genius” (Q2 133). The most interesting revisions occur
in the passage on Hedda’s vision of Løvborg’s death. Originally, Hedda
wants Løvborg to destroy himself because she wants “to gain faith in
human nobility” (Q 120), whereas now, she “is thirsting to gain faith in
the beauty of her own influence over him” (Q2 134). Shaw’s first account
of Hedda’s command to Løvborg to “do it beautifully” explains what she
means—“to kill himself without spoiling his appearance” (Q 120)—while
his second analyzes her motive—“to kill himself in some manner that will
make his suicide a romantic memory and an imaginative luxury to her for
ever” (Q2 134). Re-reading Ibsen’s play, Shaw had gained a fuller under-
standing both of Hedda’s longing and her egoism.
Shaw added a long note to his discussion of Ghosts, which he had
ended by quoting the press’s violent attacks on the play that Archer had
cited in his entertaining “Ghosts and Gibberings.” Now, Shaw claims,
these extracts may seem “quite moderate” compared to the reaction
against his own Mrs. Warren’s Profession when it was staged in New
York in 1905 [by Arnold Daly] (102). In fact, neither the number nor
the vehemence of the New York reviews approached those of London;
Shaw is referring to the fact that complaints against his play led the New
York authorities to close the theatre. His drama was deeply shocking, he
explains, because it opposed the White Slave Trade, and when the news-
paper that led the attack on the play was discovered to be profiting from
the trade through advertisements for it, it was denounced and heavily
fined, and the play resumed. The attack on Ghosts, on the other hand,
was “really disinterested and sincere on its moral side,” for Ibsen was
“virulently hated” by the reviewers; Shaw adds that the current “medi-
ocrities would abuse Ibsen as heartily as their fathers did if they were not
young enough to have started with an entirely inculcated and unintel-
ligent assumption that he is a classic, like Shakespear and Goethe” (103).
Apart from his three new chapters, Shaw’s longest addition to the
Quintessence is a six hundred sixty-word passage he inserted in his discus-
sion of Emperor and Galilean. In the first edition, Shaw had expressed
his uneasiness with what he saw as the play’s debt to Darwinism. While
he had identified Ibsen as “a meliorist,” Shaw also wrote that Ibsen
“never seems to have freed his intellect wholly from an acceptance of
 THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM: NOW COMPLETED … 267

[Darwinism’s] scientific validity” and the “gloomy” notion of human

life as “the survival of the fittest” (Q 61). In 1891, Shaw left the matter
there, and his added commentary in the 1913 Quintessence shows that he
had continued to reflect on the question. He contrasts Ibsen with “our
Samuel Butler . . . [who] was more like Ibsen than any man in Europe,
having the same grim hoaxing humor, the same grip of spiritual reali-
ties behind material facts, the same toughness of character holding him
unshaken against the world” (Q2 66). Butler “revelled” in Darwin for
six weeks before he grasped “the whole scope and the whole horror of
it, [and] warned us . . . that Darwin had ‘banished mind from the uni-
verse’.”8 Ibsen, born to an earlier generation and “intellectually nursed
on northern romance and mysticism,” was, when Darwin arrived, “past
the age at which Natural Selection could have swept him away” (66-67).
Like Butler, Ibsen probably welcomed Darwinism “for the mortal blow
it deal to the current travesties of Christianity,” for God, “though the
most dangerously capricious and short-tempered of Anarchists, is also
the most sentimental of dupes. It is against this conception of God as
a sentimental dupe that Brand rages” (67). But while we find in Ibsen’s
works “an unmistakable Darwinian atmosphere,” Shaw claims, we do
not find “the actual Darwinian discoveries and technical theory” (68).
Grinding his own axe, Shaw points out that the march of the working
class has disproved the neo-Darwinists’ argument that progress “can take
place only through an increase in the severity of the material conditions
of existence;” Ibsen was, however, probably unaware of this, in spite of
the fact that “one of his most famous utterances pointed to the working
class and the women as the great emancipators” (69). Shaw is referring
to a passage in a speech that Ibsen made during his turbulent visit to
Norway in 1885, when he became embroiled in the culture wars: “This
nobility that I hope will be granted to our nation will come to us from
two sources. It will come to us from two groups that have not as yet
been irreparably harmed by party pressure. It will come to us from our
women and from our workingmen” (LS 249). Ibsen was passionately
interested in the intellectual questions of the day and a great reader of
journals and newspapers, and it is highly unlikely that he was unaware of
the “anti-Darwinist” implications of what he had to say about the impor-
tance of gender and class in the Norway of the future.
On the other hand, Shaw’s comment that Ibsen’s plays contain an
“unmistakable Darwinian atmosphere” is an interesting one. While
Ibsen accepted Darwin’s theory with equanimity as a scientific discovery,
268 J. Templeton

his allegiance to the individual self and his complex representations of

human life demonstrate that, on the whole, he was not a determinist
thinker. He disliked being compared to writers of the naturalist school;
Zola, he famously said, “descends into the sewer to bathe in it; I, to
cleanse it” (M 489). Yet Ibsen’s plays contain determinist elements,
the most famous of which is the inherited syphilis that destroys Oswald
Alving in Ghosts; and while Mrs. Alving makes a choice between her pre-
scribed duties as a daughter and wife over what she later realizes were
duties to herself, she does so as the result of powerful conditioning.9
Shaw’s use of the term “survival of the fittest” indicates that for him,
the Darwinist element in Ibsen’s plays mostly consisted in dramatizations
of struggles in which the stronger inevitably destroys the weaker. Shaw
made his comments in his chapter on Emperor and Galilean, in which
the self-doubting, wavering hero Julian lacks the mettle to bring about
“the third empire,” and his death in battle by superior forces is pro-
claimed to be inevitable, the desire of the “world will.” Similarly, in The
Pretenders, the valiant but self-doubting Skule, Ibsen’s Hamlet, is hacked
to death by the soldiers of Haakon-Fortinbras, an unshakeable man of
destiny sure of his kingly purpose. And as Shaw had pointed out in the
first edition of the Quintessence, Ibsen’s high-minded idealists are killers
of the weak. In deference to his priestly duty, Brand lets his sickly son die
and causes the death of his wife; Gregers Werle, the crusader for truth
in The Wild Duck, persuades a distraught and vulnerable adolescent to
take up the gun with which she shoots herself; in Rosmersholm, obsessed
with expiation, Rosmer monstrously and successfully demands of the
shaken, guilt-ridden Rebecca that she kill herself to prove her love for
him; in The Master Builder, the implacable Hilda commands the infatu-
ated Solness to risk his life, which he loses, to fulfill her vision of him.
In Ibsen’s last two plays, the ruthless financier John Gabriel Borkman
gives up Ella, the woman he loves, for “the power and the glory,” and in
doing so, destroys her, and in When We Dead Awaken, the equally ruth-
less artist Rubek uses Irene for his magnum opus and destroys her. While
Ibsen did not need Darwin to arrive at what Shaw calls his “gloomy”
notion of human behavior, it is not surprising that Shaw, preoccupied
with what he considered to be Darwin’s baleful influence on notions of
human progress, felt his presence in Ibsen’s world.
Other changes that Shaw made to his original text reflect an effort
to soften some of his more schematic analyses. Recognizing that his
discussion of Brand as Ibsen’s denunciation of idealism had been too
 THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM: NOW COMPLETED … 269

one-sided, Shaw inserted a new passage that recognizes the value of

Brand’s iconoclastic mission: “Conventional, comfortable, sentimental
churchgoing withers into selfish snobbery and cowardly weakness before
[Brand’s] terrible word. ‘Your God,’ he cries, ‘is an old man: mine is
young’; and all Europe, hearing him, suddenly realizes that it has so far
forgotten God as to worship an image of an elderly gentleman with a
well-trimmed beard, an imposing forehead, and the expression of a head-
master” (Q2 51). Shaw does not alter his analysis of Brand as a danger-
ous idealist who preaches perfectionist demands, but he gives Brand his
due as a critic of institutionalized, philistine Christianity.
In another likeminded modification, Shaw removed a schematic
grouping of Ibsen’s plays of the 1860s and 1870s written before A Doll’s
House (1879). He had named The League of Youth “the first of [Ibsen’s]
realistic plays in any classification which referred to form alone” and
called it “a farcical member of the group of heroic plays beginning with
The Pretenders and ending with Emperor and Galilean” (Q 175). Shaw
chose to remove this shoehorning commentary probably because he real-
ized that Pillars of Society was a better candidate for Ibsen’s first “realis-
tic” experiment, and that to call The League of Youth even “a farcical”
cousin of The Pretenders, Brand, Peer Gynt, and Emperor and Galilean
risked pedantry. Shaw also removed his declaration that Pillars of Society
was the first play in which Ibsen “writes as one who has intellectually
mastered his own didactic purpose” (Q 75).
The most notable softening in the second edition of the Quintessence
occurs in the chapter “The Moral of the Plays.” Even though the moral
was that there was no moral, i.e., that there were no set rules for living,
Shaw changed the title to the less narrow “The Lesson of the Plays.”
In a few places, he noticeably lowers his tone. In his use of The Heart
of Midlothian as an example of idealist literature, he had written that
Scott “undoubtedly believed that it was right that Effie should hang for
the sake of Jeanie’s ideals” (Q 123); in his new version, Scott “dared
not, when it came to the point, allow Effie to be hanged for the sake
of Jeanie’s ideals” (Q2 181-82). In the earlier text, Brand and Rosmer
were protagonists “who drive those whom they love to death in its most
wanton and cruel form” (Q 124); now, they do so “with all the fine airs
of the Sophoclean or Shakespearean good man persecuted by Destiny”
(Q2 183). And Shaw got rid of his stinging reference to the explorer
Henry Morton Stanley, who, like Peer Gynt, had persuaded himself
that he was “under the special care of God” (Q 51-52). Shaw probably
270 J. Templeton

removed the remark because he was now an admiring friend of Stanley’s

wife, the ­artist Dorothy Tennant.
The most important difference between “The Lesson of the Plays”
and its first version is a marked development in the notion of Ibsen’s
anti-idealism, which Shaw now regards as not only moral but religious.
In “The Moral of the Plays,” explaining his terms idealist and realist,
Shaw had written that the terms of Ibsen’s “realist morality have not
yet appeared in our living language” (Q 125); in “The Lesson of the
Plays,” he adds, “though they are to be found in the Bible” (Q2 184).
In a significant addition, Shaw includes two new religious passages in his
discussion of his central thesis that “the quintessence of Ibsenism” is its
open-mindedness, that there is no “golden rule” for behavior. The first,
containing a hundred and twenty words, starts with a statement that
recalls a main point of Shaw’s framing chapter “The Two Pioneers”: “All
religions begin with a revolt against morality, and perish when morality
conquers them and stamps out such words as grace and sin, substitut-
ing for them morality and immorality” (Q2 188-89). Citing Bunyan’s
Christian allegory Pilgrim’s Progress, in which the town of Morality, with
its leading citizens Mr. Legality and Mr. Civility, lies close to the City
of Destruction, Shaw claims that Ibsen’s “attack on morality is a symp-
tom of the revival of religion, not of its extinction. He is on the side of
the prophets” (189). Shaw neatly makes his new clause—“He is on the
side of the prophets”—the beginning of a sentence that continues with
“in having devoted himself to shewing that the spirit or will of Man is
constantly outgrowing the ideals”; in a second new passage, more than
twice as long, Shaw extolls Ibsen as the contemporary spokesman for the
New Testament values of mercy and tolerance. To the declaration that
Ibsen protested against the assumption that moral institutions can justify
every means to sustain them, Shaw adds: “the supreme end shall be the
inspired, eternal, ever growing one, not the external [,] unchanging, arti-
ficial one; not the letter but the spirit; not the contract but the object of
the contract; not the abstract law but the living will” (190). It is “enor-
mously important that we should ‘mind our own business’ and let other
people do as they like”; it is not good that people should be persecuted,
which is why atheists and people deemed to have “bad taste” should
not be treated like criminals. Humankind should be free to evolve,
which only toleration, “the sole valid argument against Inquisitions
and Censorships, the sole reason for not burning heretics and send-
ing every eccentric person to the madhouse” can provide (190-91).
 THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM: NOW COMPLETED … 271

In Shaw’s summary of his argument, a new word—religiously—has been

added: “In short, our ideals, like the gods of old, are constantly demand-
ing human sacrifices. Let none of them, says Ibsen, be placed above the
obligation to prove itself worthy of the sacrifices it demands; and let
everyone religiously refuse to sacrifice himself and others” (191). Shaw
makes one last important change. In his conclusion of “The Moral of
the Plays,” he had written: “What Ibsen insists on is that there is no
golden rule; that conduct must justify itself by its effect upon happi-
ness and not by its conformity to any rule or ideal” (Q 134). Now, in
“The Lesson of the Plays,” the word happiness has been changed to life
(Q2 196). Tolerance is no longer essential merely to human well-being
but to human existence, and the personal has become the general.
The revisions Shaw made to his discussion of the open-­mindedness
of Ibsenism strengthen his central thesis in the first edition of the
Quintessence that the moral center of Ibsen’s plays is the notion of “live
and let live.” While he takes nothing back, he tempers his discourse by
humanizing it. And in identifying Ibsen as a religious writer, Shaw adds
a new dimension to his case for Ibsen’s importance to the theatre and to
the world. This view of Ibsen will inform the new chapters Shaw added
to the Quintessence and make them among the most ambitious and mov-
ing of Shaw’s writing on Ibsen.

3   “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.” (The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 1913)

Shaw’s new stance toward Ibsen is felt immediately at the beginning of

his first new chapter. Echoing Psalm 23, he writes that Ibsen’s “magic is
extraordinarily potent in these four plays, and his purpose more power-
ful. 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” (Q2 136). Solness of 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
272 J. Templeton

of whose delirious whisperings Nature is tired than of one who still

counts among the living.” In John Gabriel Borkman, “Borkman and the
two women, his wife and her sister, are not merely dead: they are bur-
ied; and the creatures we hear and see are only their spirits in torment.”
And Ibsen’s last play “is frankly called When We Dead Awaken” in which
“morality and reformation give place to mortality and ­ resurrection”
(136-37).
This lyrical, laudatory beginning shows that Shaw both greatly admired
Ibsen’s last four plays and that he understood that they were of a different
order from the plays that had preceded them. It is often noted that The
Master Builder (1892) marks the beginning of the more symbolic Ibsen
of the last four plays, but Ibsen’s work, like that of all great writers, had
always been symbolic. Peer Gynt is a symphony of symbols, from Peer’s
imaginary reindeer ride in the first scene to his flight from the Button
Moulder at the end of act five. The Shakespearean ghosts of Ibsen’s early
plays Catiline, Lady Inger of Ostraat, The Pretenders, and Emperor and
Galilean become metaphorical spirits in Ghosts and Rosmersholm, both of
which are rife with other symbols, and the toy inhabitants of A Doll House,
the ocean and its creatures in The Lady from the Sea, the attic menagerie
of The Wild Duck, and Hedda Gabler’s pistols are only the most obvious
symbols in these plays. Beginning with The Master Builder, Ibsen’s psycho-
logical realism continues to be inflected with symbolism, but with stronger
intimations of the uncanny, the mad, and the impossible: Solness’s help-
ers and servers and Hilda’s castles in the air in The Master Builder; the
Rat Wife, the mythical destroyer of Little Eyolf; the underground gold
that sings to John Gabriel Borkman; Irene and Rubek rushing joyously
to meet the avalanche in When We Dead Awaken. Another essential differ-
ence is that the four plays, far less combative than the plays that preceded
them, end in reconciliation; in Little Eyolf, husband and wife look toward
a new, responsible life; in John Gabriel Borkman, the mad old man dies in
a state of exaltation, and the feuding sisters who loved him shake hands
over his body; in When We Dead Awaken, Rubek and Irene exhilarate in
their mutual peace and understanding; of the death of The Master Builder,
Ibsen asked rhetorically: “Was it so insane if he lost his life, if he did it for
his happiness and realized it only now for the first time?”10 In announc-
ing that Ibsen, in his “sunset glory,” had passed from the subject of life to
death, and, in his last play, from death to “resurrection,” Shaw embraces
and celebrates the extravagant, reconciliatory Ibsen of the plays of the
 THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM: NOW COMPLETED … 273

“last quartet.” Shaw then offers, in his most personal passage on Ibsen
himself, a eulogy—perhaps the best one we have—of Ibsen’s iron spirit,
along with a moving lament of the end of the great author, felled by
strokes and doomed to live out his life like the heroes of his own last plays:

[H]e, 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, grimmest hero

since Beethoven, could not die like him, shaking his fist at the

thunder and alive to the last: he must follow the path he had

traced for Solness and Borkman, and survive himself. . . . Do

not snivel, reader, over the contrast he himself drew between

the man who was once the greatest writer in the world, and the

child of seventy-six trying to begin again at pothooks and hangers.

Depend on it, whilst there was anything left of him at all there was

enough of his iron humor to grin as widely as the skeleton with the

hour-glass who was touching him on the shoulder. (137-38)

“The Master Builder, 1892”

Ibsen said that The Master Builder was his most autobiographical play,
and Shaw was among the early writers on Ibsen who saw that in the
career of master builder Halvard Solness, Ibsen had traced his own artis-
tic development: Solness “has built churches with high towers (much as
Ibsen built great historical dramas in verse). He has come to the end of
that and built ‘homes for human beings’ (much as Ibsen took to writ-
ing prose plays of modern life)” (138).11 But the most striking aspect
of Shaw’s discussion of The Master Builder is its appreciation of Ibsen’s
retrospective dramaturgy.
274 J. Templeton

Jonathan Wisenthal has argued that Shaw, because he made no use of

it himself, ignores Ibsen’s retrospective technique. He treats “the events
of the past that are painfully forced to the surface during the plays as
if they were part of the actual plot; this means that he fails to convey
the sense of a buried past which comes to haunt the present in Ibsen’s
plays—the ghosts, gengangere, or again-goers that give the plays their
particular timbre” (W 41). The “most extreme example” is Shaw’s treat-
ment of The Master Builder, “which consists of three pages telling what
happened before the play begins and one brief paragraph on the action
of the play itself.” It is true that Shaw’s account of The Master Builder
consists almost wholly of a précis-analysis of the exposition as it emerges
in the conversations of Solness and his employees, Solness and his wife,
and Solness and Hilda. But Shaw’s focus on the past does not reflect his
ignorance of Ibsen’s dramaturgy, but, on the contrary, his understand-
ing that “what happened before the play begins” is the most important
part of an Ibsen plot. In his account of The Master Builder, the events of
the past, as they are recalled and relived, intrude upon the present, over-
whelming it until they become the present. Hilda reappears as an extermi-
nating angel whose knock on the door, sounding Solness’s death knell,
begins the recapitulation of a past that will intensify until it kills him.
Shaw’s virtual omission of events in the play’s present does not fail to
convey a sense of the past haunting the present, but, if anything, empha-
sizes the past almost to the point of excluding everything else.
As in the first edition of the Quintessence, Shaw is very conscious of
his role as the explicator of Ibsen’s plays to a misunderstanding or reluc-
tant public. Even some of the Ibsenites had greeted The Master Builder
with incredulity, and Shaw takes pains to analyze for his readers the play’s
unexpected characters and language. Risking simplicity, Shaw explains
that the “castles in the air” that Hilda demands of Solness are apt struc-
tures both for the aging, tormented builder and the young woman deter-
mined to make him build them because they are “the residences not
only of those who have finished their lives, but of those who have not
yet begun them” (138). In a matter-of-fact puncturing of Hilda’s and
Solness’s dream of a paradise à deux, Shaw writes that “when you look
round you for someone to live with you in your castle in the air,” there
is no one worthy of it, so “you resort to the most dangerous of all the
varieties of idolization: the idolization of the person you are most in love
with; and you take him or her to live with you in your castle” (138-39).
Shaw sees both the fabliau-like aspect of Ibsen’s “May and January” love
 THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM: NOW COMPLETED … 275

story—“doting old gentlemen are duped and ruined by designing young

women who care no more for them than a Cornish fisherman cares for
a conger eel”—and the romantic one—“elderly gentlemen very often
idolize adolescent girls, and adolescent girls idolize elderly gentlemen”
(139-40). He also appreciates Ibsen’s twist on the pattern: although
Solness is no longer young, he is not yet old, and is “healthy and vigor-
ous,” even “daimonic, with luck, a star, and mystic ‘helpers and servers’
who find the way through the maze of life for him. In short, a very fas-
cinating man, whom nobody, himself least of all, could suspect of having
shot his bolt and being already dead” (140). But it is his vigor and force
that make him vulnerable, “a man for whom a girl’s castle in the air is a
very dangerous place, as she may easily thrust upon him adventures that
would tax the prime of an unexhausted man” (140-41). Shaw addresses
an imagined reader: “Grasp this situation and you will be able to follow
a performance of The Master Builder without being puzzled; though to
the unprepared theatregoer it is a bewildering business” (141).
Shaw carefully examines Ibsen’s portrait of a highly successful pro-
fessional man in late middle-age with an obsessional fear of being sup-
planted by “the younger generation.” Solness suppresses the work of his
talented draughtsman, Ragnar, whom, Shaw writes, he regards “with the
secret terror of ‘the priest who slew the slayer and shall himself be slain’”
(141).12 The master builder remains burdened, too, with a deep remorse
for the destruction of his wife’s family home, which burned down, as he
had secretly dreamed of, allowing him to erect villas in its stead. Shaw
paraphrases Ibsen’s text closely as he describes what else the fire did; it
shattered Mrs. Solness’s health, “killed the children she was nursing; it
devoured the portraits and the silk dresses and the old lace; it burnt the
nine lovely dolls, and it broke [Mrs. Solness’s] heart under which the
dolls had lain like little unborn children. That was the price of the master
builder’s success” (143).
Among Solness’ architectural triumphs were churches, in one of
which, in his deepening guilt, he experienced an epiphany. During the
dedication ceremony, in spite of his great fear of heights, he climbed up
the church tower, as was the custom, to hang a wreath, and there, Shaw
writes, “face to face with God, who has, he feels, wasted the wife’s gift of
building up the souls of little children to make the husband a builder of
steeples, he declares that he will never set hand to church-building again,
and will henceforth build nothing but homes for happier men than he”
(144). He then nearly falls to his death, “for among the crowd below
276 J. Templeton

there is a little devil of a girl who waves a white scarf and makes his head
swim. This tiny animal is no other than the younger stepdaughter of
Ellida, The Lady from the Sea, Hilda Wangel, of whose taste for ‘thrill-
ing’ sensations we had a glimpse in that play.” Later, after a banquet at
which spirits were liberally served, Solness “meets the imp” in her own
house, where her step-father has invited him to spend the night, “thinks
her like a little princess in her white dress; kisses her; and promises her to
come back in ten years and carry her off to the kingdom of Orangia.”
Resuming his career as a builder of purely secular dwellings, Solness
finds that people are not happy in these homes. He guiltily but fruit-
lessly builds a fine new house for his wife, who, inconsolable at the loss
of her old home, hates it. And it is now, in his despair and torment, ten
years after he climbed the church tower, Shaw notes as he ends his analy-
sis, that the “younger generation knocks at the door with a vengeance”
(145). Hilda, “now a vigorous young woman” and tired of waiting,
“bursts in on him and demands her kingdom; and very soon she sends
him up a tower again (the tower of the new house) and waves her scarf
to him as madly as ever. This time he really does break his neck; and so
the story ends.”
In Shaw and Ibsen, in the five paragraphs he accords to Shaw’s “The
Last Four Plays,” Keith May chastises Shaw for his “preceptor’s tones”
and his treatment of Ibsen’s characters as “blundering sinners from
whose errors we are intended to profit” (123). In his discussion of The
Master Builder, May writes, Shaw gives the impression that Ibsen wrote
it “so that fewer people would behave as Solness or Hilda.” In fact,
Shaw’s approach to the play is resolutely non-moralistic as he judges nei-
ther Solness nor Hilda but rather views what takes place between them
as inevitable. His emphasis, in fact, is on the “amor fati” that May claims
he was incapable of understanding.
It is true, however, that Shaw’s reading of The Master Builder is defi-
cient: he ignores the irony in the characterization of Aline Solness, who
mourns her dead dolls rather than her dead children, and above all, his
précis-analysis omits the exalted love scenes between Solness and Hilda,
missing the ambiguity in Ibsen’s parable of the aging builder and his
dangerous but entrancing muse. But if Shaw ignores the reciprocal joy of
Ibsen’s soul-mates, his focus on Ibsen’s retrospective dramaturgy rightly
insists on the repetition of the past that governs the action of The Master
Builder as inexorably as that of Ghosts.
 THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM: NOW COMPLETED … 277

“Little Eyolf, 1894”

In 1896, Shaw had offered a two-page précis of Little Eyolf in his review
of the English premiere for the Saturday Review. His main point was
the importance of the play as a “post-romantic,” i.e., modern, drama:
an ordinary play presents love as the be-all and end-all in a plot that ends
in a blissful marriage in which one of the partners is rich; Little Eyolf
does not end with a happy marriage but begins with an unhappy one, in
which the spoiled, self-absorbed husband has withdrawn from his rich,
beautiful, and tyrannically possessive wife (OTN 2:258). The drowning
of their child awakens the couple both to their neglect of him and the
pointlessness of their lives, and they determine to redeem themselves by
helping the neighboring boys who live in poverty. Here, in the second
edition of the Quintessence, in an essay twice as long as the piece on The
Master Builder that preceded it, Shaw gave himself room to develop his
earlier reading of Little Eyolf into one of his most deeply felt essays on an
Ibsen play.
While Shaw had begun his chapter “The Last Four Plays” with the
statement that Ibsen “now lays down the completed task of warning the
world against its idols and anti-idols,” in his discussion of Little Eyolf, he
returns to the anti-idealist thesis of the first Quintessence. But he miti-
gates it in important ways. Here, all ideals are not ipso facto bad, but
can be “sometimes beneficent, and their repudiation sometimes cruel”
(Q2 145). And ideals are no longer solely patterns of behavior that are
forced on us by society or institutions, but can be “excuses for doing what
we like; and thus it happens that of two people worshipping the same ide-
als, one will be a detestable tyrant and the other a kindly and helpful friend
of mankind” (146). Shaw names as the most dangerous, the most com-
mon, and the most intimate realm of idealistic tyranny “family life,” citing
Solness’s discovery in The Master Builder that “building homes for happy
human beings is not worth a rap; men are not happy in these homes,” and
introduces Little Eyolf as a play “about such a home” (147).
The ideal of domestic bliss cannot be tested by a working-class or
middle-class home, Shaw points out, because the husband’s work keeps
him away for most of the day, and when the time for meals, sleep, wash-
ing, dressing, interaction with children, entertaining, and visiting friends
is added, an ordinary married couple actually sees less of each other than
of other people. The “full strain” of the ideal of married love can be
278 J. Templeton

found only in the propertied class, whose members do not work, and “it
is under this full strain that Ibsen tests it in Little Eyolf” (148).
Shaw begins his analysis by remarking that Ibsen’s Alfred Allmers is
“a fellow almost damned in a fair wife” [Othello I, i: 21], a phrase whose
meaning, Shaw remarks, has puzzled some readers, but is in fact obvi-
ous (148-49). Shakespeare means that Cassio is burdened by a beau-
tiful, alluring wife who “troubles and uncentres him as only a woman
can trouble and uncentre a man who is susceptible to her bodily attrac-
tion” (149). But while the wife of the “almost damned” husband of
Shakespeare’s phrase needs, in addition to his own attentions, those of
many courtiers, Rita, who is “furiously and jealously in love” with her
husband, wants only his company; he must be “wholly and exclusively
hers; and she must be wholly and exclusively his.” Rita is also wealthy,
bringing to her husband “gold and green forests” (which, Shaw notes,
is a phrase from Ibsen’s early play The Feast at Solhoug.) In short, Shaw
writes, Ibsen has created “the ideal home of romance.”
This idyll ends one day when Rita and Alfred, in the throes of “an
amorous fit,” forget about their baby son, who is lying on a table; during
their love-making, he falls to the floor, becoming crippled for life (150).
“He and his crutch become thenceforth a standing reproach to them.
They hate themselves; they hate each other; they hate him: their atmos-
phere of ideal conjugal love breeds hate at every turn: hatred masquerad-
ing as a loving bond that has been drawn closer and sanctified by their
common misfortune.”
Alfred, a former schoolteacher, has allowed himself, Shaw analyzes,
to become “a male sultana,” and, like all sultanas and others who are
“closely shut up with their own vanities and appetites” (150), he feels
the need to take himself seriously. He decides to write a book on ethics
called “Human Responsibility.” Rita, naturally, hates the book because it
takes Alfred’s attention away from her. One day, Alfred breaks away from
the “hideous slavery” of his marriage to undertake a walking tour in the
mountains (150-51). Upon his return, he finds that Rita has made “the
seraglio as delightful as possible for their reunion,” but he “purposefully
arrives tired out, and takes refuge in the sleep of exhaustion, without a
caress” (151). The next day, Rita reproaches him for sexually rejecting
her, quoting a popular line from a poem: “There stood your champagne
and you tasted it not.”13 Alfred, who has come “to loathe his cham-
pagne,” reveals that while in the mountains, he had a revelation; writing
a book on human responsibility is far inferior to acting responsibly, and
 THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM: NOW COMPLETED … 279

from now on, he will devote his life to Eyolf, confined by his c­ ondition
to reading books, and make him “an open air little boy,” which, of
course, will take him “out of the seraglio.” Rita blames the child along
with her husband for this new plan, remarking that Eyolf’s “evil eyes”
have come between her and Alfred.
Shaw, who was greatly taken with Ibsen’s Pied Piper figure, the
uncanny Rat Wife, from the moment he heard Archer read aloud his
translation of Little Eyolf, saw that the half-fantastic rat-catcher represents
Rita’s unacknowledged desire: “Has Rita any little gnawing things she
wants to get rid of? Here, it seems, is a helper and server [like those of
the master builder] for Rita. The Rat Wife’s method is to bewitch the
rats so that when she rows out to sea they follow her and are drowned.
She describes this with a heart-breaking poetry that frightens Rita, who
makes Allmers send her away. But a helper and server is not so easily
exorcized. Rita’s little gnawing thing, Eyolf, has come under the spell;
and when the Rat Wife rows out to sea, he follows her and is drowned”
(152).
The effect on Rita and Alfred is shattering, for such a shock, Shaw
writes, “makes us all human for a moment” (152). But the next morn-
ing, in his “self-devotion to artificial attitudes,” Alfred reproaches himself
for forgetting about Eyolf for brief moments and tries to keep himself
“overwhelmed with grief.” His repugnance against his slavery to Rita
“has made her presence unbearable to him” (153), and he seeks solace
in the comfort of his beloved half-sister, Asta. But Asta has discovered
in some old family papers that she and Alfred are not related and is thus
forced to admit to herself the unsisterly nature of her love for him; to
avoid breaking up the Allmers’ marriage, she leaves to marry a man she
does not love. “And now,” Shaw analyzes ironically, “Rita has her man
all to herself. Eyolf dead, Asta gone, the Book on Human Responsibility
thrown into the waste paper basket: there are no more rivals now, no
more distractions: the field is clear for the ideal union of ‘two souls with
but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one.’14 The result may be
imagined” (153-54). Husband and wife are soon “at it hammer and
tongs, each tearing the mask from the other’s grief for the child, and
leaving it exposed as their remorse: hers for having jealously hated Eyolf:
his for having sacrificed him to his passion for Rita, and to the school-
masterly vanity and folly which sees in the child nothing more than the
vivisector sees in a guinea-pig: something to experiment on with a view
to arranging the world to suit his own little ideas” (154). Facing their
280 J. Templeton

egoism, “stripped naked” in front of themselves, Rita and Alfred “can-

not bear to live; and yet they are forced to confess that they dare not kill
themselves.” It is clear, however, that they must separate.
Ibsen’s solution to the Allmers’ problem, in so far as there is a solu-
tion, Shaw notes, “is, as coming from Ibsen, very remarkable” (154).
Referencing A Doll’s House, Shaw writes that it might be expected, given
Ibsen’s long championing of individualism, that the Allmers “should
break up the seraglio and go out into the world until they have learned
to stand alone, and through that to accept companionship on honor-
able conditions only” (154-55). But in fact, a very different solution is
proposed; returning to his statement in “The Lesson of the Plays” that
Ibsen’s realist morality is found in the Bible, Shaw writes that “Ibsen here
explicitly insists for the first time that ‘we are members one of another’”
(155). Shaw’s citation is from verse five of Ephesians 4, in which the apos-
tle Paul exhorts the members of the Church to be united in their faith
and works. Retaining Paul’s practical morality, Shaw takes the phrase
out of its institutional context and applies it to the whole human com-
munity. He is writing not about altruism, he insists, but, on the con-
trary, about “the selflessness that loathes the word Altruism because to
it there are no ‘others’: it sees and feels in every man’s case the image
of its own.” To illustrate his point, Shaw cites another famous line
from New Testament Scripture, Jesus’ declaration in Matthew 25:40:
“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my breth-
ren ye have done it unto me.” This, Shaw insists, is “an explicit repudia-
tion of the patronizing notion that ‘the least of these’ is another to whom
you are invited to be very nice and kind: in short, it accepts entire iden-
tification of ‘me’ with the least of these’.” In Ibsen’s mind, Shaw writes,
“the way to Communism”—by which Shaw meant, in 1913, living for
communal goals—“lies through the most resolute and uncompromising
Individualism” (156). Shaw presents the example of James Mill, whose
“inhuman conceit and pedantry” made him impose on his son from
infancy a grinding education meant to produce “the arch Individualist of
his time, with the result that John Stuart Mill became a Socialist.” True
individualism is not egotism, Shaw insists, because when one faces himself,
“he finds himself face to face, not with an individual, but with a species,
and knows that to save himself, he must save the race. He can have no life
except a share in the life of the community; and if that life is unhappy and
squalid, nothing that he can do to paint and paper and upholster and shut
off his little corner of it can really rescue him from it” (156-57).
 THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM: NOW COMPLETED … 281

This, Shaw argues, is precisely what “that bold Individualist” Rita

Allmers comes to see. Unlike other contemporary critics of Little Eyolf,
Shaw had no difficulty in taking a sexual woman seriously. The deeply
shocked Edmund Gosse found Rita “the most repulsive of Ibsen’s femi-
nine creations,” and William Dean Howells, while he appreciated Little
Eyolf, sternly denounced “the wife and mother [who] vainly hopes to
perpetuate the passion of her first married years” as “intolerably revolt-
ing. . . . Obsession is an easy name for the state of such women, but
if it is the true name, then it is time men should study the old formu-
las of exorcism anew.”15 It does not occur to Shaw that Rita’s sexuality
disqualifies her from moral action. Implicicitly referencing the “golden
rule,” Shaw describes the plight of the Allmers after Eyolf’s death and
Rita’s saving solution: “They hate their neighbors as themselves. They
are alone together with nothing to do but wear each other out and drive
each other mad” (157). Hearing the raucous shouts of the poor boys
who live below their estate, whom the Allmers, as snobs, have always
despised, Alfred tells Rita that when he is gone, she should have the
shanty-town destroyed. And then, Shaw writes, Rita undergoes an epiph-
any: “It suddenly occurs to her that these are children too, just like lit-
tle Eyolf, and that they are suffering a good deal from neglect” (158).
And after all, “they too are little Eyolfs.” Shaw returns to Matthew
25:40, putting the dead child in the place of Christ: “Inasmuch as she
can do it unto the least of these his brethren she can do it unto him. She
determines to take the dirty little wretches in hand and look after them.”
Alfred is skeptical at first, but knowing that he has nothing to fear from
“a woman who has something else to do than torment him,” he won-
ders, perhaps, if could join her. “The world and the home suddenly take
on their natural aspect,” Shaw interprets. “Alfred offers to stay and help
her. And so they are delivered from their evil dream, and, let us hope,
live happily ever after” (158-59). Shaw’s citing of the traditional fairy-
tale ending, along with the phrase “let us hope” demonstrate his aware-
ness that the Allmers have a difficult task ahead. “Let’s try,” Rita says.
Alfred raises the flag to the top of the pole over the fjord where Eyolf
drowned. “There’s a hard day’s work ahead of us, Rita” (I 518).
Some readers have found the transformation of the Allmers unconvinc-
ing. Rita’s and Alfred’s plan to help the children, it is argued, given what
we know of their characters, can only reflect self-indulgence, and thus
Ibsen meant us to read the play’s ending as ironic.16 This would mean that
Ibsen had spent two years writing a four-act play that contains 1) a highly
282 J. Templeton

developed main and sub-plot containing detailed psychological portraits

of two protagonists and an important secondary character (Asta, Alfred’s
half-sister); 2) a mythical executioner who charms, then dispatches the
protagonists’ crippled child; 3) a hellish, blow-by-blow chronicle of the
protagonists’ subsequent accusations and recriminations that lead to a
recognition of their selfish, fruitless lives; and then 4) a surprise ending
that reveals them to be frauds. In this reading, the play becomes a very
odd much ado about characters who are not worthy of attention. And
to take such a position, as Errol Durbach argues in ‘Ibsen the Romantic’,
his book on Ibsen’s late plays, is to ignore Ibsen’s text. Examining the
final scene of Little Eyolf, Durbach points out that “irony, sentimentality,
or suspect articulation” are not to be found either in its mood or its dia-
logue. “Confronted with the fear of living life without illusions, reaching
out to each other for comfort,” Rita and Alfred “speak a language of sim-
ple eloquence purged of the venom and the self-imposing ironies of earlier
scenes. ‘Could I not perhaps join you? And help you, Rita? . . . Let us try
and see if it can’t be done’.”17 To define what Rita and Alfred hope for,
Durbach quotes a line from act three of Shaw’s Heartbreak House—“Life
with a blessing”—which designates “a world of mundane and workaday
responsibilities, illuminated by flashes of spiritual value and a sense of life’s
larger purposes” (126). And indeed, Little Eyolf was a play after Shaw’s
own heart because he saw, in the words of another perceptive Ibsen critic,
Arnold Weinstein, that the end of Ibsen’s drama is “as close to a rendering
of grace as any Ibsen play ever came.”18

“John Gabriel Borkman, 1896”

As a socialist who denounced the evils of industrial capitalism, Shaw
might have been expected not to have much sympathy for John Gabriel
Borkman, Ibsen’s ruthless venture capitalist. Keith May writes that Shaw
regarded Borkman as a criminal and misread Ibsen’s play as “an unquali-
fied denunciation of the money-voluptuaries, those moral imbeciles
whose lust for money is a disguised lust for precious metals” (Ibsen and
Shaw, 123). In fact, Shaw begins his essay precisely by taking pains to
refute such a reading.
Shaw immediately enters into the spirit of Ibsen’s extravagant por-
trait of the capitalist as romantic hero.19 Borkman “does not dream
of beautiful ladies calling to him for knightly rescue from dragons and
tyrants, but of metals imprisoned in undiscovered mines, calling to him
 THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM: NOW COMPLETED … 283

to release them and send them out into all lands fertilizing encouraging,
creating” (159). The “ring of the miner’s pick and hammer” is music to
John Gabriel, “as magical to him as the moonlit starlit night of the upper
air to the romantic poet.” Borkman’s passion for gold, Shaw argues, is
of an entirely different order from that of the money-hungry capitalist
(whom Shaw, in The Perfect Wagnerite, had seen represented in Alberich,
the enslaving dwarf of The Rhine Gold): “[Y]ou cannot call a man who
starves himself sooner than part with one sovereign from his sack of sov-
ereigns, greedy. If he did the same for the love of God, you would call
him a saint: if for the love of a woman, a perfect gentle knight. Men
grow rich according to the strength of their obsession by this passion”
(160). Shaw also distinguishes between the entrepreneur Borkman’s pas-
sion for wealth and those who possess it through mere luck. Men like
Borkman who “have passionately ‘made’ money instead of merely hold-
ing their hats under an accidental shower of it will be found to have a
genuine disinterested love of it” (160-61). It is not easy to know how
common this passion is, Shaw comments, because indifference to money
is common among “our greatest non-industrial men,” who are often in
financial difficulties, and those who do love it remain mysterious. For
Shaw, Ibsen’s achievement in John Gabriel Borkman is to have taken this
small segment of the population as his subject and probed it, going “to
the poetic basis of the type: the love of gold—actually metallic gold—and
the idealization of gold through that love” (162).
In Little Eyolf, Shaw writes, “the shadow of death lifted for a moment;
but now we enter it again. Here the persons of the drama are not only
dead but buried” (159). Long ago, on his way up, Borkman made a
bargain with a powerful colleague, who, in return for Borkman’s break-
ing his engagement to Ella Rentheim, the woman they both loved,
helped him to what he calls “the power and the glory.”20 Ella is emo-
tionally destroyed, and Borkman marries her sister Gunhild. Later, when
Borkman speculates secretly with the funds of shareholders, he respects
what Shaw names his “secondary” passion (162), his love of Ella, and
leaves her shares intact. Caught and imprisoned for embezzlement,
Borkman emerges “a ruined man and a dead man,” and Ella becomes
the sole support of the Borkman family, providing them with a house
and money. Now, in what Shaw, paying Ibsen a compliment, calls “the
grimmest lying in state ever exposed to public view by mortal dramatist”
(163), Borkman lives in isolation on the house’s second floor, dreaming
that he “will return from his Elba to scatter his enemies and complete
284 J. Templeton

the stroke that ill luck and the meddlesomeness of the law frustrated.
But he is proud: prouder than Napoleon. He will not come back to
the financial world until it finds out that it cannot do without him, and
comes to ask him to resume his place at the head of the board.” Shaw
relishes the details of Borkman’s delusion: “He keeps himself in readi-
ness for that deputation. He is always dressed for it; and when he hears
steps on the threshold, he stands up by the table; puts one hand into the
breast of his coat; and assumes the attitude of a conqueror receiving sup-
pliants. And this also goes on not for days but for years, long after the
world has forgotten them, and there is nobody likely to come for him
except Peer Gynt’s button moulder” (163-64).
Like all madmen, Shaw writes, Borkman needs someone to “nour-
ish his delusion”; this service is provided by the pathetic Foldal, “a clerk
who once wrote a tragedy, and has lived ever since in his own imagina-
tion as a poet” (164). He admires Borkman, who, “when he has ruined
him and ruined himself, is quite willing to be admired by this humble
victim, and even to reward him by a pretence of believing in his poetic
genius. Thus the two form one of those Mutual Admiration Societies on
which the world so largely subsists.”
As for Gunhild, forced to eat the “bitter bread” of her hated sister’s
charity and “live in the same house with the convicted thief who dis-
graced her,” she will neither see nor speak to her husband, whose con-
stant pacing above her head, like that of “a sick wolf,” she hears “with
loathing” (163). Her one interest in life is her young son Erhart whose
future success she counts on to repay the stolen money and rescue the
family name from disgrace. “To this task she has devoted his life.”
Following the theme he announced in his preface, “Down Among
the Dead Men,” Shaw reads Borkman, like The Master Builder, as a trag-
edy of the dead, mocked by the young; it is the details of this catastro-
phe, Shaw comments, that “make the play” (166). Shaw emphasizes
the macabre element in Ibsen’s “melancholy household of the dead”
that “crumbles to dust at the knock of the younger generation” (165).
Erhart, his mother’s would-be deliverer, who “detests the house and
its atmosphere,” has “not the faintest intention of concerning himself
with the bygone career of the crazy ex-felon upstairs,” or honoring the
request of his love-starved, dying aunt Ella, whom he associates with the
odor of stale lavender, that he live with her in her remaining days. He
“spends his time happily in the house of a pretty lady in the neighbor-
hood, who has been married and divorced, and knows how to form an
 THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM: NOW COMPLETED … 285

adolescent youth.” And when “the old house and the old people become
impossible, unthinkable, unbearable, he goes off with her to Italy and
leaves the dead to bury their dead. . . . The fresh air and the light of day
break into the tomb; and its inhabitants crumble into dust” (165-66).
And the mutual admiration society of Borkman and Foldal is shattered
when both reveal that their belief in the other’s genius was feigned.
Shaw captures very well both the tragi-comedy and the irony of
Ibsen’s dénouement: “Poor Foldal,” he writes, suffers a last indignity
when he is run down by the sleigh carrying Erhart, the pretty lady, and
Foldal’s own daughter, taken along as a “second string” for Erhart’s
sexual fancies (166). With an irony that is both unintentional and sav-
ing, Foldal rejoices in her future, and feels that he, too, is “wanted in
the world, since he must still work for his derisive family.” As for Ibsen’s
deluded Napoleon, in a last burst of demented triumph, he “returns to
his dream, and ventures out of doors at last, not this time to resume
his place as governor of the bank, but to release the imprisoned metal
that rings and sings to him from the earth. In other words, to die in the
open, mad but happy, whilst the two sisters, ‘we two shadows’, end their
strife over his body” (166-67).

“When We Dead Awaken, 1900” 21

Upon its publication, When We Dead Awaken, like The Master Builder,
caused bewilderment among some of Ibsen’s admirers, including Archer.
In poor health while he was writing the play, which turned out to be
his last, Ibsen was stricken shortly afterwards with an illness from which
he never recovered, which led to the opinion that his drama, the short-
est he had ever written, was the result of lowered mental capacity. Shaw,
arguing against this conception, was once again among the few critics to
understand an Ibsen play on its own terms: “The simplicity and brevity
of the story is so obvious, and the enormous scope of the conception
so difficult to comprehend, that many of Ibsen’s most devoted admirers
failed to do it justice. They knew that he was a man of seventy, and were
prepossessed with the belief that at such an age his powers must be fall-
ing off” (167). In fact, Shaw believes, it was the other way around: it was
writing the play that “left [Ibsen’s] mind a wreck; for he not only never
wrote another play, but, like an overstrained athlete, lost even the normal
mental capacity of an ordinary man. Yet it would be hard to say that the
play was not worth the sacrifice. It shews no decay of Ibsen’s highest
286 J. Templeton

qualities: his magic is nowhere more potent. It is shorter than usual, that
is all (168).”
Shortly after the publication of When We Dead Awaken, Ibsen
explained to an interviewer that he considered the play to be “an epi-
logue to the series of plays which began with A Doll’s House” and that if
he wrote anything more, it would be “in quite another context; perhaps,
too, in another form” (M 785). Shaw recognized that in When We Dead
Awaken, Ibsen had already begun to experiment with post-realist drama,
and that because of this, the play had to be approached differently from
its predecessors. In 1894, when The Wild Duck was received with bewil-
derment in London, Shaw had understood that many of Ibsen’s read-
ers, even those who admired him, were incapable of appreciating a drama
that differed from their idea of an “Ibsen play”; in the reaction to When
We Dead Awaken, he recognized the same phenomenon, but this time,
the obstacle was not thematic but dramaturgical.
Shaw carefully explains how When We Dead Awaken departs from its
predecessors. The play contains none of the “extraordinarily elaborate
private history, family and individual” of the characters of Ibsen’s ear-
lier plays; instead, it presents “a much simpler history of a few people in
their general human relations without any family history at all” (168).
Another important difference is that Ibsen’s conventional set of rooms
inside a house has disappeared as Ibsen’s “characteristically conscientious
fitting of the play to the mechanical conditions of old-fashioned stages
has given way to demands that even the best equipped and largest mod-
ern stages cannot easily comply with” (168-69).22 Act two takes place
in a valley, and while a painted backdrop can be used “when the action
is confined to one place in the foreground, it is a different matter when
the whole valley has to be practicable, and the movements of the fig-
ures [characters] cover distances which do not exist on the stage” (169).
Shaw notes that in a “writer less mindful of technical limitations, and less
ingenious in circumventing them,” he would attach no importance to
such a departure from his usual stagecraft, but that in the case of Ibsen,
“it is clear that in calling on the theatre to expand to his requirements
instead of, as was his custom, limiting his scene of action to the possi-
bilities of a modest provincial theatre, he knew quite well what he was
doing.” Another disquieting difference between When We Dead Awaken
and its predecessors is that in place of Ibsen’s customary detailed plot-
ting—“the elaborate gradual development which would have satisfied
Dumas [fils],” Ibsen here “throws all his cards on the table as rapidly
 THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM: NOW COMPLETED … 287

as possible, and proceeds to deal intensively with a situation that never

alters” (170). These three differences, far from being inferiorities, Shaw
argues, are necessary “to the difference of subject” and “in fact increased
the difficulty of the playwright’s task by throwing him back on sheer dra-
matic power” (169).23
The “difference of subject” that required a new form for its expres-
sion, Shaw writes, should be obvious to anybody in England. It was eas-
ier to dismiss When We Dead Awaken rather than explain it when it first
appeared, but now, over a decade later, “the dead have awakened in the
very manner prefigured in the play. . . . Now that the great awakening of
women which we call the Militant Suffrage Movement is upon us, and
you may hear our women publicly and passionately praising Ibsen’s hero-
ine without having read a word of the play, the matter is simpler. There
is no falling-off here in Ibsen” (167-68). Shaw’s reference to the suffrage
movement has led to the accusation that he saw When We Dead Awaken
as “a play about the ‘woman question’” and thus read it “moralistically”
(May, Ibsen and Shaw, 124). But Shaw understood that the “woman
question” was nothing less than the demand by one half of humanity to
live as people rather than as instruments of the other half, and that it was
the enormous scope of this subject that made Ibsen impatient with the
restrictions of the realistic theatre. The play’s seemingly simple situation,
Shaw writes, is in fact “so complex in its content that it raises the whole
question of domestic civilization” (170).
Shaw analyzes Ibsen’s allegory of two couples—the famous sculptor
Rubek and his model Irene, and the hunter Ulfheim (“wolf home”) and
his earth-woman Maja: “Take a man and a woman at the highest pitch of
natural ability and charm yet attained, and enjoying all the culture that
modern art and literature can offer them; and what does it all come to?
Contrast them with an essentially uncivilized pair, with a man who lives
for hunting and eating and ravishing, and whose morals are those of the
bully with the strong hand: in short, a man from the Stone Age as we
conceive it (such men are still common enough in the classes that can
afford the huntsman’s life); and couple him with a woman who has no
interest or ambition in life except to be captured by such a man” (170).
It is obvious that Ibsen is asking us to compare the relationship between
the man and the woman in the two pairs. “Is the cultured gifted man less
hardened, less selfish towards the woman, than the paleolithic man? Is
the woman less sacrificed, less dead spiritually in the one case than in the
other?” (170-71). While “contemporary culture” cries that the question
288 J. Templeton

is insulting, the Stone Age, “anticipating Ibsen’s reply, guffaws heartily

and says, ‘Bravo, Ibsen!’” For Ibsen’s reply “is that the sacrifice of the
woman of the Stone Age to fruitful passions which she herself shares is as
nothing compared to the wasting of the modern woman’s soul to grat-
ify the imagination and stimulate the genius of the modern artist, poet,
and philosopher. He shews us that no degradation ever devised or per-
mitted is as disastrous as this degradation; that through it women die
into luxuries for men” (171). Men and women are now becoming con-
scious of this, Shaw writes, and “what remains to be seen as perhaps the
most interesting of all imminent social developments is what will happen
‘when we dead awaken.’”
Shaw comments that Rubek, as Ibsen’s portrait of the artist, is,
as such, a portrait of Ibsen himself,24 and he was amused by Ibsen’s
pointing to his own portraits in Rubek’s description of his busts: “‘the
respectable pompous horse faces, and self-opinionated donkey-muzzles,
and lop-eared low-browed dog-skulls, and fatted swine-snouts, and dull
brutal bull fronts’ that lurk in so many human faces” (173). Of course,
Shaw remarks, all artists see human/animal correspondences, and he
points to the most celebrated example, Leonardo, who “ruled his note-
book in columns headed fox, wolf, etc., and made notes of faces by tick-
ing them off in these columns.”
But the significance of Ibsen’s artist lies not in what he shares with
Ibsen, but what he shares with all artists, as, Shaw writes, Ibsen “came
forward himself to plead to his own worst indictment of modern cul-
ture” (172-73). The sculptor Rubek refuses the woman he loves in the
name of a higher cause, which is nothing less than civilization’s noblest
achievement: art. Shaw’s anti-idealist reading of Ibsen’s plays finds its
simplest and deepest confirmation in Ibsen’s last play, for in the para-
ble of the male artist obsessed by his work and the woman he sacrificed
to make it, Rubek represents both “the highest and ablest masculine
genius” (171), in Shaw’s term, and the consummate deluded idealist.
Shaw summarizes the relation between the male artist and his female
model: Rubek found a beautiful woman, Irene, and explained to her
the “vision” she would incarnate in his allegorical statue, “Resurrection
Day,” a typical representative of nineteenth-century idealist art, a
beautiful, reawakening virgin “filled with sacred joy at finding herself
unchanged in the higher, freer, happier region after the long dreamless
sleep of death” (176).25 Irene, “immediately seizing his inspiration and
sharing it, devotes herself to the work, not merely as [Rubek’s] model,
 THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM: NOW COMPLETED … 289

but as his friend, his helper, fellow worker, comrade, all things, save one
that may be humanly natural and necessary between them for an unre-
served co-operation in the great work. The one exception is that they
are not lovers; for the sculptor’s ideal is a virgin, or, as he calls it, a pure
woman.” Irene’s “reward is that when the work is finished and the statue
achieved, he says, ‘Thank you for a priceless EPISODE,’” which reveals
“that she has, after all, been nothing to him but a means to his end”
(177). She leaves him in despair, and earns her living by posing in vari-
ety shows, where her beauty wins her rich husbands, whom she kills or
drives insane. She still cherishes the memory of the statue she posed for
until she “goes mad under the strain.”
After Irene’s departure, Rubek meets Maja, “a pretty Stone Age
woman” whom he marries, but “as he is not a Stone Age man, and she is
bored to distraction by his cultured interests, he disappoints her as thor-
oughly as she disgusts and wearies him” (177). Although he builds her a
magnificent villa, they are unhappy together, “and they take trips here,
trips there, trips anywhere to escape being alone and at home together.”
But Rubek’s “retribution for his egotism” toward Irene takes “a much
subtler form” than mere personal unhappiness; it “strikes at a much
more vital place in him: namely, his artistic inspiration” (177-78). While
he thought that he “had achieved a perfect work of art” with Irene and
thus “was done with her,” he badly miscalculated (178). He begins to
become dissatisfied with the statue. “[W]hy should it consist of a fig-
ure of Irene alone? Why should he not be in it himself? Is he not a far
more important factor in the conception?” In his paraphrase of Rubek’s
account of his transformation of the statue, Shaw reveals the damning
truth under his defensive posturing: “He changes the single figure design
to a group. He adds a figure of himself. He finds that the woman’s fig-
ure, with its wonderful expression of gladness, puts his own image out
of countenance. He rearranges the group so as to give himself more
prominence. Even so the gladness outshines him; and at last, he ‘tones
it down,’ striking the gladness out with his chisel, and making his own
expression the main interest of the group. But he cannot stop there.
Having destroyed the thing that was superior to him, he now wants to
introduce things that are inferior. He carves clefts in the earth at the feet
of his figure, and from these clefts he makes emerge the folk with the
horse faces and the swine snouts that are nearer the beast than his own
fine face” (178-79). The beauty and force of the woman who was the
model for “Resurrection Day” have been hacked away, and she is put in
290 J. Templeton

the background, effaced and mutilated. Now, with her removal, Rubek is
free to place in the center of the statue the real subject of his art: himself.
Rubek’s transformation of the statue is not, as he thinks, his final reck-
oning with the woman whose memory haunts him and whose effigy he
massacred. She comes back from the dead, as it were, to confront him in
a health resort high in the mountains, where she has been brought as a
patient and where Rubek has come “with the Stone Age woman to avoid
being left at home with her. Thither also comes the man of the Stone
Age with his dogs and guns, and carries off the Stone Age woman, to her
husband’s great relief” (179). When Rubek and Irene meet, she forces
him to admit his refusal of her love and demands to know the fate of
their “child,” the statue she posed for; remorseful, yet defensive, he tries
to convince both himself and her that he was forced to transform the
statue to follow his inspiration. Deriding him for his egoism and cruelty,
Irene determines to kill him. But then, she begins to understand, little
by little, as he tells her of his misery, that “the history of [the statue’s]
destruction is also the history of his own, and that as he used her up and
left her dead, so with her death the life went out of him.” Explaining
Ibsen’s reconciliatory, yet apocalyptic ending, and paraphrasing Irene’s
words, Shaw writes: “The dead may awaken if only they can find an hon-
est and natural relation in which they shall no longer sacrifice and slay
one another. She asks him to climb to the top of a mountain with her
and see that promised land” (179-80). Rubek joyfully agrees, and the
couple ascends. “Half way up, they meet the Stone Age pair hunting.
There is a storm coming. It is death to go up and danger to climb down.
The Stone Age man faces the danger and carries his willing prey down.
The others are beyond the fear of death, and go up. And that is the end
of them and of the plays of Henrik Ibsen” (180). Placing Ibsen’s parable
of the artist and his model in the Ibsen canon as a whole, Shaw returns
to his general anti-idealist argument: “The end, too, let us hope of the
idols, domestic, moral, religious and political, in whose name we have
been twaddled into misery and confusion and hypocrisy unspeakable. For
Ibsen’s dead hand still keeps the grip he laid on their masks when he first
tore them off; and whilst that grip holds, all the King’s horses and all the
King’s men will find it hard to set those Humpty-Dumpties up again.”
Shaw began writing his new chapters for the Quintessence in 1912,
the year he wrote Pygmalion, and it has been suggested that When We
Dead Awaken influenced Shaw’s play. Jonathan Wisenthal writes that
Irene’s leaving Rubek after realizing that she was only a means to his
end is “exactly what happens in Pygmalion (although, as usual Shaw has
 THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM: NOW COMPLETED … 291

transposed the theme into a comedy); Higgins’ insulting and revealing

phrase after he has made Eliza into a work of art is ‘Thank God it’s over’
which Eliza throws back at him a little later.” And Ibsen’s play is “at one
level, about the conflict between the claims of art and the claims of life,
which is the basic theme of Pygmalion” (W 58-59). It is true that both
Rubek and Higgins use women as instruments, but Rubek is a famous
artist while Higgins is a “phonetic enthusiast” whose project of turning
a Cockney street girl into a lady surely represents the claims of snobbery
more than “art.” And while Shaw’s title announces that his play is a riff
on the story of Pygmalion, When We Dead Awaken is a reversal of it: the
original Pygmalion asks Venus, the goddess of love, to breathe life into
his statue and create a living woman, while Ibsen’s Pygmalion takes a liv-
ing woman, refuses her love, and turns her into a statue. At the end of
Shaw’s play, when Eliza leaves her master, after learning far more about
life than how to pass herself off (more or less) as a duchess, she tells him:
“Oh, when I think of myself crawling under your feet and being tram-
pled on and called names, when all the time I had only to lift up my
finger to be as good as you, I could just kick myself.”26 As Higgins’s
trainee, learning how to speak and act properly, Eliza has been a doll
who learns to talk and walk, as much Coppelia as Galatea. In her exas-
peration and recognition we hear an echo of her real counterpart in the
Ibsen canon, Nora Helmer, former doll and newly minted woman, who
tells her former lord and master, just before she leaves him: “I believe
that I’m a human being, just as much as you” (I 111).

4  A Modernist Manifesto: “What is the New Element

in the Norwegian School?”

“[I]t can hardly be possible to go back from the death of

Hedvig Ekdal to the death of Little Nell otherwise than as

a grown man goes down on all fours and pretends to be a

bear for the amusement of his children.” (The Quintessence,

1913)

The second of Shaw’s new chapters for the second edition of the
Quintessence, “What is the New Element in the Norwegian School?,”
is one of the most ambitious and wide-ranging of the whole book.
A neglected tour de force of comparative literary analysis and cultural
292 J. Templeton

criticism, it represents Shaw as his erudite, provocative best. Shaw’s iden-

tification of his subject—“the new element” in modern literature—as
a feature of the “Norwegian School” is misleading in a complimentary
way: making Ibsen, the only Norwegian among the writers Shaw men-
tions, into a school, is Shaw’s way of naming him the chief representative
of a new sensibility.
Shaw begins his essay by establishing the great divide between the
genius of modernism and that of earlier periods: A “generation which
could read all Shakespeare and Molière, Dickens and Dumas, from end
to end without the smallest intellectual or ethical perturbation, was una-
ble to get through a play by Ibsen or a novel by Tolstoy without having
its intellectual and moral complacency upset, its religious faith shattered,
and its notions of right and wrong conduct thrown into confusion and
sometimes even reversed” (Q2 197). In 1913, Shaw was anticipating
what cultural historians would later identify as modernism’s essential
feature: its thoroughgoing revolt against the prevailing order. Peter Gay
writes that with the arrival of modernism, “ideals, ideas, relationships
unchanged since time out of mind were vulnerable to attack and open
to amendment.”27 For other theorists of the movement, modernism was
one of the “cataclysmic upheavals of culture”; it was “committed to eve-
rything in human experience that militates against custom.”28
Shaw provides a context for the shock of modernism by giving a new
twist to an old notion: the evolutionary nature of ideas. Quoting his
own Father Keegan in John Bull’s Other Island—“Every jest is an ear-
nest in the womb of time”—Shaw proposes that major revolutions of
all sorts begin as enormous jokes. He offers an anecdote involving two
friends traveling in the Spanish countryside who were asked by a shep-
herd to name their religion. Their reply—“Our religion is that there is
no God”—caused widespread hilarity among the shepherds in the region
(199). But the absurdity had entered the shepherds’ world, where “in
due time” it will “develop its earnestness; and at last travelers will come
who will be taken quite seriously when they say that the imaginary
hidalgo in the sky whom the shepherds call God does indeed not exist.”
This phenomenon is evident, Shaw writes, in changing attitudes
about what is amusing in everyday life. He offers as examples the pop-
ular fiction of the pre-Dickens era, like the novels of Smollett and the
naval adventure, Tom Cringle’s Log (1833),29 in both of which poverty
is treated “as a joke,” along with yellow fever, drunkenness, dysentery,
kickings, floggings, falls, frights, and “humiliations and painful accidents
 THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM: NOW COMPLETED … 293

of all sorts” (200). Today, however, we take some of these jokes seri-
ously; a significant part of Smollett’s Humphry Clinker “is now sim-
ply disgusting to the [same] class of reader that in its own day found
it uproariously amusing. . . . The mask of laughter wears slowly off
the shames and the evils; but men finally see them as they really are”
(200-01).
Sometimes, Shaw points out, the movement toward seriousness takes
place in the course of one work, and he points to the treatment of Don
Quixote and Mr. Pickwick, who are introduced as ridiculous but who
gradually gain the affection and even respect of their authors. Another
example, of a different sort, is Falstaff, who develops into “an enormous
joke and an exquisitely mimicked human type. Only in the end the joke
withers. The question comes to Shakespear: Is this really a laughing
matter?” (201-02). While Prince Hal ought to have waited until he had
redeemed himself before attacking his boon companion, Shaw remarks,
in the end, the joke is up and Falstaff no longer amuses anybody;
“rebuked and humiliated,” he “dies miserably” (202).
Making use of the hindsight of history, Shaw then makes a series of
anachronistically fruitful speculations: Let us suppose, he writes, that
Shakespeare “had been born at a time when, as the result of a long
propaganda of health and temperance, sack had come to be called alco-
hol, alcohol had come to be called poison, corpulence had come to be
regarded as either a disease or a breach of good manners, and a con-
viction had spread throughout society that the practice of consum-
ing ‘a half-pennyworth of bread to an intolerable degree of sack’ was
the cause of so much misery, crime and racial degeneration that whole
States prohibited the sale of potable spirits altogether” (202). And sup-
pose that women had lost their indulgence for wastrels like Falstaff and
Sir Toby Belch. “Instead of Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor,
we should have something like Zola’s L’Assommoir” (203). Lastly, sup-
pose that the first performance of The Taming of the Shrew had led to
“a modern Feminist demonstration in the theatre, and forced upon
Shakespear’s consideration a whole century of agitatresses [sic], from
Mary Wollstonecraft to Mrs. Fawcett and Mrs. Pankhurst,30 is it not
likely that the jest of Katherine and Petruchio would have become the
earnest of Nora and Torvald Helmer?”
To illustrate his evolutionary point, Shaw offers a comparison between
Dickens’s portraits of women and those of a modern author. As the sub-
ject of Shaw’s book and a writer famous for his women characters, Ibsen
294 J. Templeton

would have been the obvious choice to represent the modern school.
But instead, Shaw provocatively and ingeniously chooses Strindberg,
famous as a woman-hater. He notes that whereas Dickens presents his
vociferous shrews Mrs. Raddle, Mrs. MacStinger, and Mrs. Joe Gargery
as comic figures,31 Strindberg takes the dominating woman as a very seri-
ous matter, “a tyranny which effects more degradation and causes more
misery than all the political and sectarian oppressions known to history”
(204). And yet, Shaw points out—and this is his coup—nobody would
claim that Strindberg, with his harsh campaign against them, is “harder
on women” than Dickens. Agreeing with the novelist and critic George
Gissing (in his 1898 book Charles Dickens: A Critical Study), Shaw com-
ments that Dickens’s women, “funny as they are,” are “mostly detest-
able. Even the amiable ones are silly and sometimes disastrous.” The
few good women in Dickens’s work who are pleasant are not “specifi-
cally feminine: they are the Dickensian good man in petticoats; yet they
lack that strength which they would have had if Dickens had seen clearly
that there is no such species in creation as ‘Woman, lovely woman’,32
the woman being simply the female of the human species” (204-05).
Voicing the deepest of feminist convictions (which he had expressed ear-
lier in “The Womanly Woman”), Shaw insists “that to have one concep-
tion of humanity for the woman and another for the man, or one law
for the woman and another for the man, or one artistic convention for
woman and another for man” is “as unnatural, and in the long run as
unworkable, as one law for the mare and another for the horse” (205).
And yet it is precisely this notion that Dickens’s women embody. That is
why Dickens’s portraits “of the differentiated creatures our artificial sex
institutions have made of women are, for all their truth, either vile or
ridiculous or both.” Directly anticipating later Dickens scholarship, Shaw
argues that his women are abstractions, stereotypes of good and evil who
lack the reality of human beings.33 Betsy Trotwood of David Copperfield
“is a dear because she is an old bachelor in petticoats: a manly woman”
while “Miss Havisham [of Great Expectations], an insanely womanly
woman, is a horror, a monster” produced “by deliberate perversion of
her humanity.” In comparison to Dickens’s women, Shaw declares,
Strindberg’s “are positively amiable and attractive.” Strindberg “takes
womanliness with deadly seriousness as an evil not to be submitted to for
a moment without vehement protest” and yet the “nurse in his play [The
Father] who wheedles her old nursling and then slips a strait waistcoat
on him” is “ten times more lovable and sympathetic than Sairey Gamp
 THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM: NOW COMPLETED … 295

[the nurse in Martin Chuzzlewit], an abominable creature whose very

soul is putrid, and who yet is true to life” (206). Indeed, one of the iro-
nies of the Captain’s downfall in The Father is that his old nurse Margret
is a devoted family servant who believes that in subduing him, she is sav-
ing both him and his family from disaster, while Sarah Gamp is merely a
joke: drunken, incompetent, and dangerous. And yet, Shaw notes, the
“general impression” is that Strindberg’s women “are the revenge of a
furious woman-hater for his domestic failures, whilst Dickens is a genial
idealist (he had little better luck, domestically, by the way)” (205-06).
This effect is “produced solely by Dickens either making fun of the
whole affair or believing that women are born so” (206).
Moving toward his summary of the contrast between Dickens and
Ibsen, Shaw returns to the method of his essay on Little Eyolf in “The
Last Four Plays,” referencing a famous line from a Pauline epistle of the
New Testament—here, it is “the temple of the Holy Ghost” from First
Corinthians 19—to establish his point: Dickens’s treatment of women
means that they “must be admitted to the fellowship of the Holy Ghost
on a feminine instead of a human basis” (206). Shaw reminds his read-
ers that “none of the modern writers who take life as seriously as Ibsen
have ever been able to bring themselves to depict depraved people so pit-
ilessly as Dickens and Thackeray and even the genial Dumas père.” This
does not mean that Ibsen does not deserve his reputation as “grim”—
“no man has said more terrible things both privately and publicly”—
and yet, Shaw claims, returning to Paul’s phrase, “there is not one of
Ibsen’s characters who is not, in the old phrase, the temple of the Holy
Ghost, and who does not move you at moments by the sense of that
mystery.” In comparison, the spirit of Dickens and Thackeray is “that
of a Punch and Judy showman, who is never restrained from whacking
his little figures unmercifully by the sense that they, too, are images of
God, and, ‘but for the grace of God,’ very like himself” (206-07). Shaw
tempers his judgment by noting that “Dickens does deepen very mark-
edly toward this as he grows older, though it is impossible to pretend
that Mrs. Wilfer [the shrew of Dickens’s last novel, Our Mutual Friend]
is treated with less levity than Mrs. Nickleby [the obtuse mother in
Nicholas Nickleby];” still, “to Ibsen, from beginning to end, every human
being is a sacrifice, whilst to Dickens he is a farce. And there you have
the whole difference. No character drawn by Dickens is more ridiculous
than Hjalmar Ekdal in The Wild Duck, or more eccentric than old Ekdal,
whose toy game-preserve in the garret is more fantastic than the house
296 J. Templeton

of Miss Havisham; and yet these Ekdals wring the heart whilst Micawber
[in David Copperfield] and Chivery [in Little Dorrit] (who sits between
the lines of clothes hung out to dry because ‘it reminds him of groves’ as
Hjalmar’s garret reminds old Ekdal of bear forests) only shake the sides”
(207).
In one sense, Shaw’s distinction between Ibsen, for whom human
beings are sacrifices, and Dickens, for whom they are farces, is a way
of saying that Ibsen is a tragic writer while Dickens is a comic one. But
what interests Shaw is not genre but depth of feeling. He is arguing that
Ibsen’s characters arouse more empathy than those of Dickens, and that
because of this, we take their lives and their fates more seriously. Shaw’s
example—the Ekdal father and son from The Wild Duck—is characteristi-
cally unorthodox. Instead of naming Ibsen characters who suffer greatly
and undergo life-changing, and in some cases, life-destroying experi-
ences, e.g., Nora Helmer, Mrs. Alving, Ellida Wangel, John Rosmer,
Rebecca West, Halvard Solness, or Rita and Alfred Allmers, Shaw
chooses the self-deceived, good-for-nothing Hjalmar Ekdal, a character
who, as Shaw notes, is as ridiculous as any in the Dickens canon, and his
poor wreck of a father. Such people merit our attention and “wring our
hearts” because, they, too, have the Holy Ghost within them.
Shaw realizes that many, perhaps even most, of his readers, will disa-
gree with his claim that Ibsen is a greater humanist than Dickens, the
beloved champion of orphans, the poor, and the down-trodden. It
may be, he writes, that Dickens would say that “if we will return to his
books now that Ibsen has opened our eyes we will have to admit that
he also saw more in the soul of Micawber than mere laughing gas”; and
indeed, Shaw admits, “one cannot forget the touches of kindliness and
gallantry which ennoble his mirth” (207-08). But “between the man
who occasionally remembered and the man who never forgot, between
Dick Swiveller [Nell’s suitor in The Old Curiosity Shop] and Ulrik
Brendel [Rosmer’s former tutor in Rosmersholm] there is a mighty differ-
ence” (208). Swiveller is merely a swindler, but Brendel is swindler and
prophet. Of course, in choosing Dick Swiveller, or even Micawber, and
not, for example, Pip, of Great Expectations, who learns something of the
same lesson as Rita Allmers in Little Eyolf, Shaw is making his argument
easier.
In one sense, Shaw remarks, the failure to appreciate Ibsen’s moral
depth is a result of taking him too seriously: “When an author’s works
produce violent controversy, and are new, people are apt to read them
 THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM: NOW COMPLETED … 297

with that sort of seriousness which is very appropriately called deadly;

that is, with a sort of solemn paralysis of every sense except a quite
abstract and baseless momentousness” (208). Such readers are like “the
old lady who was edified by the word Mesopotamia, or Samuel Butler’s
Chowbok [in Erewhon], who was converted to Christianity by the effect
on his imagination of the prayer for Queen Adelaide.”34 Clement Scott,
the chief of the London anti-Ibsen critics, wrote that The Wild Duck was
“so absurd that even the champions of Ibsen could not help laughing at
it. It had not occurred to him that Ibsen could laugh like other men”
(209). Still, Shaw argues, it is impossible to believe “that Dickens took
the improvidence and futility of Micawber as Ibsen took the improvi-
dence and futility of Hjalmar Ekdal.” In a Shavian twist that becomes
a second mitigating judgment of Dickens, the proof of the rightness of
Shaw’s contrast is found in Dickens’s own works: “the Dickens of the
second half of the nineteenth century (the Ibsen half) is a different man
from the Dickens of the first half. From Hard Times and Little Dorrit to
Our Mutual Friend every one of Dickens’s books lays a heavy burden on
our conscience without flattering us with any hopes of a happy ending.
But from The Pickwick Papers to Bleak House you can read and laugh and
cry and go happy to bed after forgetting yourself in a jolly book.” Shaw
mentions what happened when the Irish writer Charles Lever, popular
for books that pictured “the old manner of rollicking through life as if
all its follies and failures were splendid jokes,” gave Dickens, as editor of
the magazine All the Year Round, a “quite new sort of novel, A Day’s
Ride: A Life’s Romance, which affected both Dickens and the public very
unpleasantly” (210). The hero, a boaster and coward, was not presented
as a figure of fun but exposed and judged for what he was, producing
“the bitter but tonic flavor we now know as Ibsenism” and making read-
ers “laugh very much on the wrong side of their mouths, exactly as if he
were a hero by Ibsen, Strindberg, Turgenieff, Tolstoy, Gorki, Tchekov or
Brieux.”
Writing in 1912–1913, less than a decade after Ibsen’s death, and cog-
nizant of the public’s continuing taste for laughs, Shaw realizes that in
spite of his fame, Ibsen is still considered too serious in some quarters.
And yet, he writes, distinguishing between the sentimentality of the early
Dickens and the sentiment of the later Dickens and Ibsen, after the death
of Hedvig in The Wild Duck, “you may not be able to cry over Little Nell,
but at least you can read Little Dorrit without calling it twaddle, as some
of its first critics did. The jests do not become poorer as they mature into
298 J. Templeton

earnest” (211). Returning to the writer he had discussed as Ibsen’s proto-

type in his framing chapter, “The Two Pioneers,” Shaw notes: “It was not
through joyless poverty of soul that Shelley never laughed, but through
an enormous apprehension and realization of the gravity of things that
seemed mere fun to other men” (211). Bringing his other great pre-­
modern favorite into his modern, humanist fold, Shaw comments that
even if there are no obviously comic characters like Dickens’s Dick
Swiveller and Trabbs’ boy (of Great Expectations) in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s
Progress, and even “if Mr. Badman [of Bunyan’s The Life and Death of Mr.
Badman] is drawn as Ibsen would have drawn him and not as Sheridan
would have seen him, it does not follow that there is less strength (and joy
is a quality of strength) in Bunyan than in Sheridan and Dickens” (211-
12). Shaw reminds his readers that after all, “the salvation of the world
depends on the men who will not take evil good-humoredly, and whose
laughter destroys the fool instead of encouraging him” (212). Returning
to the New Testament, Shaw ends his argument for a literature that takes
the measure of “the gravity of things” by elevating it into a moral impera-
tive, citing the last phrase—“the life everlasting”—of the Apostles’ Creed,
the most ecumenical of Christian doctrines:

The English cry of “Amuse us—take things easily—

dress up the world prettily for us” seems mere

cowardice to the strong souls that dare look facts in

the face; and just so far as people cast off the levity

and idolatry they find themselves able to bear the

company of Bunyan and Shelley, of Ibsen and

Strindberg and the great Russian realists. . . . They

are gaining strength and wisdom; gaining, in short,

that sort of life which we call the life everlasting, a

sense of which is worth, for pure well-being alone,

all the brutish jollities of Tom Cringle and Humphrey

Clinker, and even of Falstaff, Pecksniff and Micawber

(212).
 THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM: NOW COMPLETED … 299

5  The Playwright as Thinker: “The Technical Novelty

in Ibsen’s Plays”

“In the theatre of Ibsen we are not flattered spectators

killing an idle hour with an ingenious and amusing

entertainment: we are ‘guilty creatures sitting at a play’;

and the technique of pastime is no more applicable than

at a murder trial.” (The Quintessence, 1913)

Having identified Ibsen’s seriousness as the “new element” of mod-

ernism, Shaw now addresses what he terms the “technical novelty” of
Ibsen’s drama, a phrase that might suggest that he is turning from the
spirit to the letter of his subject. But the scope of his chapter is as broad
as that of the preceding one, for Shaw’s argument, which is his contribu-
tion to dramatic theory, is that the novelty in question—the discussion—
marks the beginning of a new kind of theatre: the drama of ideas.
Shaw begins his chapter with his habitual critical verdict on hide-
bound drama critics, who, preoccupied with “the deadest and dreariest
rubbish” (213), refuse to accept the fact that discussion now appears in
the work of every serious playwright. Before, in the well-made play, there
was “an exposition in the first act, a situation in the second, an unravel-
ling in the third. Now you have exposition, situation, and discussion; and
the discussion is the test of the playwright.” Shaw’s tight separation of
the parts of a discussion play is deliberately schematic, and he will return
to do justice to his subject later in his essay; here, he wants to establish
the difference between the old and the new schools and the victory of
the latter. The fact is that the discussion “conquered Europe in Ibsen’s
Doll’s House; and now the serious playwright recognizes in the discussion
not only the main test of his highest powers, but also the real centre of
his play’s interest” (214).
Contrasting two opposing kinds of theatre—plays that are meant to
entertain us and plays that are meant to make us think—Shaw notes
that the creation of the discussion scene was “inevitable if the drama
was ever again to be raised above the childish demand for fables without
morals” (214). Of course, “when a play is only a story of how a villain
tries to separate an honest pair of betrothed lovers; to gain the hand of
the woman by calumny; and to ruin the man by forgery, murder, [or]
300 J. Templeton

false witness,” a discussion “would clearly be ridiculous” (214-15). As

he had done in his Saturday Review columns, Shaw faults the London
actor-managers for continuing to refuse serious drama on the grounds
that “people want to be amused and not preached at in the theatre; that
they will not stand long speeches; that a play must not contain more
than 18,000 words; that it must not begin before nine nor last beyond
eleven; that there must be no politics and no religion in it” (217). These
judgments are only valid, Shaw points out, “for plays in which there is
nothing to discuss”; theatre-goers will in fact accept the work of “the
playwright who is a moralist and debater as well as a dramatist” if “they
are matured enough and cultivated enough to be susceptible to the
appeal of his particular form of art” (218). In London, there are many
such people, but the problem is that they avoid the theatre because of
its reputation as puerile entertainment. But when they do go, they dis-
cover that the new theatre is very different from the one they shun: “the
attraction is not the firing of blank cartridges at one another by actors,
nor the pretence of falling down dead that ends the stage combat, nor
the simulation of erotic thrills by a pair of stage lovers,” but rather, “the
exhibition and discussion of the character and conduct of stage fig-
ures who are made to appear real by the art of the playwright and the
performers.”
Shaw then gives his explanation, familiar to students of theatrical
modernism, of the origin of the discussion play, i.e., that Ibsen created
the new form by adding a discussion scene to a well-made play: “Up to a
certain point in the last act, A Doll’s House is a play that might be turned
into a very ordinary French drama by the excision of a few lines, and
the substitution of a sentimental happy ending for the famous last scene”
(219). Referring to Breaking A Butterfly, Henry Arthur Jones’s 1884
travesty of A Doll’s House, Shaw adds that “indeed [,] the very first thing
the theatrical wiseacres did with it was to effect exactly this transforma-
tion, with the result that the play thus pithed [sic] had no success and
attracted no notice worth mentioning.35 But at just that point in the last
act, the heroine very unexpectedly (to the wiseacres) stops her emotional
acting and says: ‘We must sit down and discuss all this that has been hap-
pening between us.’ And it was by this new technical feature: this addi-
tion of a new movement, as musicians would say, to the dramatic form,
that A Doll’s House conquered Europe and founded a new school of dra-
matic art.”
 THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM: NOW COMPLETED … 301

In fact, to turn A Doll’s House into “a very ordinary French drama”

of the Scribe-Sardou school, more than a “few lines” would have to be
excised before substituting a happy ending; the intimations of Nora’s
intelligence and courage in acts one and two, as well as Torvald’s
tirade that leads to her epiphany about her marriage, would have to be
removed or drastically revised. But Shaw’s exaggeration does not nul-
lify his point that the serious conversation between wife and husband in
Ibsen’s last scene of A Doll’s House represents a startling departure from
the scenes that preceded it. And the importance of this discussion scene,
Shaw continues, is that it has now been developed well beyond the last
ten minutes of a play to become a whole new type of drama, represented
by his own plays and the plays of others; some “begin with discussion
and end with action,” and others contain a discussion which “interpen-
etrates the action from beginning to end” (220). In 1889, when Ibsen
“invaded England” with A Doll’s House, “discussion had vanished from
the stage;” now, in 1913, “the play in which there is no argument
and no case no longer counts as serious drama. It may still please the
child in us as Punch and Judy does; but nobody nowadays pretends to
regard the well-made play as anything other than a commercial product”
(220-21).36
Shaw then arrives at his main point: the discussion play has revolu-
tionized the drama. By its very nature, it has pushed out the old, familiar
subjects of the stage: “vulgar attachments, rapacities, generosities, resent-
ments, ambitions, misunderstandings, oddities and so forth as to which
no moral question is raised” (221). And in including subjects that do
raise moral questions, the new drama has resolutely refused conventional
distinctions between right and wrong: the “villain is as conscientious
as the hero, if not more so: in fact, the question which makes the play
interesting (when it is interesting) is which is the villain and which the
hero. Or, to put it another way, there are no villains and no heroes.”
Here, Shaw is returning to the central thesis of the Quintessence—that in
Ibsen’s dramatic world, what is right and what is wrong depends not on
fixed moral codes but on the particular circumstances—to broaden the
“quintessence of Ibsenism” into the quintessence of the new drama.
Of course, Shaw remarks, the myopic drama critics see the discus-
sion as a vulgar departure from “dramatic art,” but it is “really the
inevitable return to nature” after the superficialities of the commercial
theatre; and what is natural is “mainly the everyday” (221). If they are
302 J. Templeton

to have any significance for the audience, dramatic plots “must be, if
not everyday, at least everylife” (221-22). Determined to reach the least
sophisticated among his readers, Shaw explains that accidents, however
“dramatic” in the usual sense, are actually undramatic in a play because,
being merely anecdotal, they have no significance: “There is no drama
in being knocked down or run over. The catastrophe in Hamlet would
not be in the least dramatic had Polonius fallen downstairs and broken
his neck, Claudius succumbed to delirium tremens, [or] Hamlet forgot-
ten to breathe in the intensity of his philosophic speculation” (222).
Shaw then characteristically turns the tables, taking up his old habit of
contrasting Shakespeare unfavorably with Ibsen: “Othello, though enter-
taining, pitiful, and resonant with the thrills a master of language can
produce by mere artistic sonority[,] is certainly much more accidental
than A Doll’s House; but it is correspondingly less important and interest-
ing to us” (223-24). Othello “turns on a mistake; and though a mistake
can produce a murder, which is the vulgar substitute for a tragedy, it can-
not produce a real tragedy in the modern sense” because people today
“are not more interested in the Chamber of Horrors than in their own
homes, nor in murderers, victims, and villains than in themselves” (224).
Unlike his playwriting colleagues, who “piled up torture on murder and
incest on adultery until they had far out-Heroded Herod [Hamlet III,
ii: 14],” Shakespeare “cooly treated the sensational horrors of his bor-
rowed plots as inorganic theatrical accessories, using them simply as pre-
texts for dramatizing human character as it exists in the normal world”
(225). Shakespeare, Shaw declares, “survives by what he has in common
with Ibsen, and not by what he has in common with Webster and the
rest” (226).
As is often the case in his invidious comparisons of Shakespeare to
Ibsen, Shaw sacrifices Shakespeare to his own polemics. What causes the
catastrophe in Othello is not “a mistake,” but rather Othello’s openness to
Iago’s insinuations. There are various analyses of the causes of Othello’s
willingness, or even eagerness, to suspect Desdemona, but whatever they
are, Othello is a tragedy of character, not of chance. On the other hand,
nobody would disagree with Shaw, as he cleverly makes Shakespeare into
a precursor of the drama of discussion, that what keeps Othello alive is
not the violence it shares with other tragedies of its day, but its “exhibi-
tion and discussion of human nature, marriage, and jealousy” (224). And
it would be difficult to find a more succinct definition of Shakespeare’s
greatness than his genius for “dramatizing human character as it exists in
 THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM: NOW COMPLETED … 303

the normal world.” But Shaw cannot resist skewering Shakespeare even as
he compliments him: the reaction of Hamlet when he discovers that he is
incapable of killing Claudius is so compelling that for hundreds of years,
audiences have continued to listen to him, Shaw writes, while “the older
Hamlets, who never had any Ibsenist hesitations, and shammed mad-
ness, and entangled the courtiers in the arras and burnt them, and stuck
hard to the theatrical school of the fat boy in Pickwick (‘I wants to make
your flesh creep’), are as dead as John Shakespear’s mutton” (226). This
is Shaw at his most provocative, not because it is Shakespeare, of course,
who invented Hamlet’s “Ibsenist” conflict, but because Shaw chooses not
to acknowledge that while it is true that Shakespeare survives through
what he shares with Ibsen, and not with Kyd and Webster, it is also true
that Ibsen survives through what he shares with Shakespeare, and not
with Scribe and Brieux.
Making his case that Ibsen’s plays have established a new kind of
drama that refuses the “dramatics” of violent action, Shaw feels the
need to address a delicate subject: the high death rate in Ibsen’s plays.
What had been an object of criticism in Shaw’s obituary of Ibsen now
receives a new hearing: “Do Oswald Alving, Hedvig Ekdal, Rosmer and
Rebecca, Hedda Gabler, Solness, Eyolf, Borkman, Rubek and Irene die
dramatically natural deaths, or are they slaughtered in the classic and
Shakespearean manner?” (227). Shaw’s answer is that since it is easy
to agree with either view, he will not argue the point, but he makes
Chekhov and Granville Barker do it for him: “The post-Ibsen play-
wrights apparently think that Ibsen’s homicides and suicides were forced.
In Tchekov’s Cherry Orchard, for example, where the sentimental ideals
of our amiable, cultured, Schumann playing propertied class are reduced
to dust and ashes by a hand not less deadly than Ibsen’s because it is so
much more caressing, nothing more violent happens than that the family
cannot afford to keep up its old house.” And in Granville Barker’s plays,
“the campaign against our society is carried on with all Ibsen’s implac-
ability;” deaths, however, are exceedingly rare. Shaw wittily adds that he
himself has been “reproached because the characters in my plays ‘talk
but do nothing,’ meaning that they do not commit felonies” (228). But
after all, we now see that if “people’s souls are tied up by law and public
opinion it is much more tragic to leave them to wither in these bonds
than to end their misery.” Shaw then repeats a point he had made in
his obituary of Ibsen about the improbability of Hedda Gabler’s suicide:
“Judge Brack was, on the whole, right when he said that people dont do
304 J. Templeton

such things.” Three years after the obituary, Shaw had repeated the point
in his “Preface” to Three Plays by Brieux (1909). He had also added a
critical judgment that is one of his most thought-provoking statements
about an Ibsen play: “The tragedy of Hedda Gabler in real life is not that
she commits suicide but that she continues to live” (P 199).
Having taken up his old point, Shaw has clearly decided that he will,
on the whole, let Ibsen off the hook of the old-fashioned catastrophe.
Continuing to hold on to two of his scruples, he declares that “in Ibsen’s
plays[,] the catastrophe, even when it seems forced, and when the end-
ing of the play would be more tragic without it, is never an accident; and
the play never exists for its sake” (228). The “nearest to an accident” is
the drowning of Eyolf, but even here, the death has a “dramatic use.” In
the obituary, Shaw had grouped Eyolf’s death with those of Dickens’s
Little Nell and Paul Dombey as examples of the kind of sentimentality
that moved Ruskin to scorn, but here, he argues the opposite: Ibsen “did
not kill Eyolf to manufacture pathos” but to effect the moral transforma-
tion of his parents: “They are so sunk in their dream that the awakening
can be effected only by a violent shock” (229). Whether Shaw delib-
erately used the same examples that he had used seven years earlier to
argue the opposite point is impossible to know, but even if he had for-
gotten the details of his argument, he had surely not forgotten its gist,
and his new opinion seems clearly meant as a corrective to his earlier one.
He even goes on to claim that the deaths in Ibsen’s last acts are nothing
more than “a sweeping up of the remains of dramatically finished peo-
ple” (229). While in the obituary, he had complained of the symbolic
nature of Solness’s fall from the tower in The Master Builder, here he
accepts the death as an inevitable part of Ibsen’s purpose: it is “as obvi-
ously symbolic as Phaeton’s fall from the chariot of the sun.” Unable to
resist a last invidious contrast between Shakespeare and Ibsen, Shaw jests
that if Ibsen had written Hamlet, “nobody would have been killed in the
last act except perhaps Horatio, whose correct nullity might have pro-
voked Fortinbras to let some of the moral sawdust out of him with his
sword.” And then Ibsen receives exoneration: “For Shakespearean deaths
in Ibsen, you must go back to Lady Inger and the plays of his nonage,
with which this book is not concerned” (229-30).
Shaw then makes a brilliantly concise summary of the essential differ-
ence between Shakespeare and Ibsen for the modern reader: “Shakespear
had put ourselves on the stage but not our situations.” For his world is
not ours; “we do not meet witches; our kings are not as a rule stabbed
 THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM: NOW COMPLETED … 305

and succeeded by their stabbers; and when we raise money by bills we do

not promise to pay pounds of our flesh. Ibsen supplies the want left by
Shakespear. He gives us not only ourselves, but ourselves in our own sit-
uations. The things that happen to his stage figures are things that hap-
pen to us” (230). But Shaw, characteristically, must go one step further
to make the dubious claim that because of our familiarity with Ibsen’s
world, “his plays are much more important to us than Shakespear’s”;
they are more capable both of “hurting us cruelly and of filling us
with excited hopes of escape from idealistic tyrannies, and of visions of
intenser life in the future” (230-31).
Returning to his general contrast between the old drama and the new,
Shaw notes that because Ibsen’s subject is the life of ordinary people,
“the old tricks” to catch the audience’s interest can only become “the sil-
liest of superfluities” (231). To illustrate Ibsen’s new method, Shaw cites
Shakespeare, whom he has just discussed as Ibsen’s second fiddle: “The
play called The Murder of Gonzago, which Hamlet makes the players act
before his uncle, is artlessly constructed; but it produces a greater effect
on Claudius than the Oedipus of Sophocles, because it is about himself.”
Shaw then claims erroneously that the playwright “who practices the
art of Ibsen therefore discards all the old tricks of preparation, catastro-
phe, dénouement, and so forth without thinking about it”; in his eager-
ness to emphasize the immediacy and contemporaneity of Ibsen’s plays,
Shaw ignores the fact that from Pillars of Society up to When We Dead
Awaken, all Ibsen’s plays are traditionally plotted—famously so, in fact—
with a careful expository preparation leading to a crisis, followed by a
dénouement. The same structure governs Strindberg’s naturalist plays,
and underneath the seeming aimlessness of Chekhov’s plots is, in David
Magarshack’s apt term, a “steel frame.”37 Shaw himself used traditional
plot structure when it suited him and made use of other “old tricks” of
the dramatist’s art, writing of The Devil’s Disciple that every patron of
the Adelphi, a theatre famous for its melodramas, would “recognize the
reading of the will, the oppressed orphan finding a protector, the arrest,
the heroic sacrifice, the court martial, the scaffold, the reprieve at the last
moment” (P 713). Martin Meisel has scrupulously demonstrated Shaw’s
debt to nineteenth-century theatrical conventions; even his mature plays
build on melodrama, farce, and drawing-room comedy.38 And Ibsen’s
plays are equally indebted to the conventions he inherited, e.g., the
reformed villain of A Doll’s House, the aging roué of Hedda Gabler, the
obligatory sensational scène à faire at the end of Ghosts. Shaw’s point
306 J. Templeton

would have been better taken had he argued that the playwrights of
the new drama transformed the “old tricks” to make them serve serious
ends.
But if Shaw exaggerates the extent to which the new drama rejects the
techniques of the old, he brilliantly identifies the difference in their gen-
eral purpose. The new drama does not seek to catch the interest of the
spectators in order to entertain them, but rather practices the “terrible
art of sharpshooting at the audience, trapping them, fencing with them,
aiming always at the sorest spot in their consciences” (232). In describ-
ing the method of Ibsen’s art as sharpshooting, Shaw was perceptively
and unknowingly repeating the comparison Ibsen himself had chosen to
describe his art; in 1882, he wrote to a friend: “I stand like a solitary
sharpshooter at the outpost, acting entirely on my own” (LS 202). And
although the playwright of ideas “may use all the magic of art to make
you forget the pain he causes you or to enhance the joy of the hope and
courage he awakens, he is never occupied in the old work of manufactur-
ing interest with materials that have neither novelty, significance, nor rel-
evance to the experience or prospects of the spectators.” The new drama
places itself combatively in the lives of its audiences, making them think
and engaging them in their heart of hearts.
But the new drama is, in many ways, not a new drama, Shaw explains,
for it draws on techniques that have been in use “ever since speech was
invented” by playwrights, orators, and preachers (233). The worth of the
drama of ideas, like all serious drama preceding it, depends on intelli-
gence and craft. Shaw summarizes his poetics of the new drama: “The
technical novelties of the Ibsen and post-Ibsen plays are, then: first, the
introduction of the discussion and its development until it so overspreads
and interpenetrates the action that it finally assimilates it, making play
and discussion practically identical; and second, as a consequence of mak-
ing the spectators themselves the persons of the drama, and the inci-
dents of their own lives its incidents, the disuse of the old stage tricks by
which audiences had to be induced to take an interest in unreal people
and improbable circumstances, and the substitution of a forensic tech-
nique of recrimination, disillusion, and penetration through ideals to the
truth, with a free use of all the rhetorical and lyrical arts of the orator,
the preacher, the pleader, and the rhapsodist” (233-34). The drama of
ideas consists of a dramatic action that embodies the ideas in its plot and
characters, drawing for its effects on all the resources of the rhetorician
 THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM: NOW COMPLETED … 307

and the poet. It is characterized by its relevance to actual life and the
comprehensiveness of its methods.
Shaw’s argument that Ibsen’s invention of the discussion marked the
beginning of modern drama is now part of the conventional wisdom.
The origins of modern European drama, write Malcolm Bradbury and
James McFarlane, lie in “the compulsive attention the eighties and the
nineties gave to the problematic and the contemporary” and “point
unwaveringly back to Ibsen.”39 And Shaw’s analysis was both a descrip-
tion of the work of Ibsen and the post-Ibsen playwrights of his own day
and a prophecy of the future. Eric Bentley embraces and updates Shaw’s
notion in his landmark 1946 book The Playwright as Thinker.40 Shaw’s
dramatists of the thinking school were Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov,
Gorki, Brieux, Granville Barker, and, of course, himself. Bentley’s most
important thinking playwrights are Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, Brecht, and
Pirandello; Bentley also reports on the new existential drama of France
in the work of Sartre and Camus. Shaw’s notion of the diverse nature
of the theatre of ideas is reflected in the varied art of its practitioners,
in Strindberg’s naturalism, and later, symbolism, and in Brecht’s and
Pirandello’s combinations of realism and post-realism. Bentley com-
ments on the comprehensiveness of Shaw’s conception: “Shaw’s theory
is not that everything in traditional drama should be scrapped except talk
and then the residue called the New Drama. ‘Rhetoric, irony, argument,
paradox, epigram, parable, the rearrangement of haphazard facts into
orderly and intelligent situations: these are both the oldest and the new-
est arts of the drama.’ These words include a good deal more than clever
or profound talk. . . . This is indeed an old and new theory of the drama,
old as the Greek, new as Ibsen” (113-14).
Almost two decades later, John Gassner commented on the presci-
ence of Shaw’s declaration that modern drama began when Nora Helmer
refuses her husband’s emotional about-face and commands: “We must
sit down and discuss all this.” Shaw’s analysis, Gassner argues, not only
signals the beginning of the drama of ideas, but the whole movement in
modern drama from representational to presentational theatre. The pri-
ority of thinking over feeling looks forward to the work of Brecht and
his highly influential notion of alienation, or distancing, in which the
playwright’s task is to eliminate empathy and make the spectators think
about the meaning of what they are witnessing. Ultimately, Gassner
argues, Shaw’s notion anticipates actors who step out of their roles to
308 J. Templeton

speak directly to the audience, as in the plays of Pirandello, Giraudoux,

and Anouilh.41

6  Then and Now: 1891 and 1913

The 1913 Quintessence constitutes Shaw’s last important engagement
with Ibsen. Things had changed a great deal in the twenty-two years
since the appearance of the first Quintessence, written during the Ibsen
campaign, when Shaw’s purpose had been to explain Ibsen’s plays to
a recalcitrant public and to argue the necessity of Ibsen’s saving anti-­
idealism in an idealist world. The same reforming purpose had fueled
Shaw’s use of Ibsen as the gold standard for drama in his three-and-a-
half-year battle against the London stage as drama critic for the Saturday
Review (1895-98). Now, in 1913, what Shaw had prophesied in his
“Appendix” to the Quintessence and in the Saturday Review—that Ibsen
would triumph over his detractors and that other playwrights would fol-
low his lead—had come true in continental Europe and was coming true
in England. Shaw no longer had to plead Ibsen’s worth but could reflect
on the meaning of his triumph. And Shaw was now an important play-
wright himself and could reconsider Ibsen not only as a critic but as a fel-
low dramatist of the theatre of ideas, finding in “the new element in the
Norwegian school”—Ibsen’s seriousness of mind and purpose—the soul
of modernism.
Shaw also read Ibsen with a new perspective. He mentioned to his
publisher that the new preface and the three new chapters made the
1913 Quintessence “practically a whole new book” (W 23). The thirty-
five-year-old fire-eater of 1891 who took it upon himself to explain to
the English that Ibsen, the arch-enemy of cant, should be welcomed as
a boon to their lives, is now a kinder warrior, a fifty-seven-year-old sage
who announces in his new preface that Ibsen is a religious writer whose
plays are a modern guide to the Bible. In the first Quintessence, Ibsen
was the heir of Shelley, a “pioneer” in the Western revolutionary tradi-
tion whose plays from Brand through Hedda Gabler exposed the tyranny
of moral absolutism, the inhumanity of duty, and the cupidity and stu-
pidity of the majority. The individual is primary, and self-realization is
the goal that stands above all else. Peer Gynt, consummate man of the
world who lacks a self is a negative illustration of this, followed by Julian,
Nora, Mrs. Alving, Dr. Stockmann, Ellida Wangel, John Rosmer and
Rebecca West, and Hedda Gabler, who all, in different ways and with
 THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM: NOW COMPLETED … 309

different results, struggle to become selves in a world they inhabit but

do not belong to. In 1913, Shaw took nothing back, but he read Ibsen
more deeply, appreciating the pathos in what he had termed Ibsen’s
“vigilant open-mindedness” and claiming that Ibsen exceeds Dickens in
his fellow-feeling; The Wild Duck is a great play not only because it bril-
liantly exposes the dangers of idealism but because “these Ekdals wring
your heart.” And in the last four plays, written after the first edition of
the Quintessence, Shaw discovered a different Ibsen whose purpose he
regards as even “more powerful” than that of earlier plays. In his “sun-
set glory,” he has given us great “tragedies of the dead” in his larger-
than-life strivers the builder Solness, the financier Borkman, and the
artist Rubek. In Little Eyolf and When We Dead Awaken, Shaw finds that
Ibsen’s earlier emphasis on the development of the individual self has
given way to an emphasis on the welfare of all. In A Doll’s House, Nora
tells her husband that listening to herself has now freed her from “you
and Papa,” and in Ghosts, Mrs. Alving’s refusal to believe what she had
been taught chased away the ghosts between the lines of her newspapers.
Shaw’s hero, that radical individualist Dr. Stockmann, pronounced: “The
strongest man in the world is the one who stands most alone” (I 3:216).
Now, in his chapter on Little Eyolf, implicitly referencing Dr. Stockmann,
Shaw declares that “though the strongest man is he who stands alone,
the man who is standing alone for his own sake solely is literally an idiot”
(155). The only selfhood worth having is the one that Rita Allmers
begins to seek when she recognizes that the poor boys, too, “are little
Eyolfs” (158). And in When We Dead Awaken, which Shaw called the
“final distillation” of “the quintessence of Ibsenism,” in which “morality
and reformation give way to mortality and resurrection” (137), Rubek
comes to see that his destruction of Irene reduces all his famous statues
to chaff. Shaw finds in the Ibsen of the last quartet a saving, all-inclusive
humanism in a world in which we all partake of the Holy Ghost and are
thus “members one of another.”

7   Postscript: “Needed: An Ibsen Theatre”

In 1908, a committee had been formed to create a Shakespeare
Memorial National Theatre, of which Shaw was a member, and readers
of the 1913 Quintessence would have understood, although Shaw makes
no mention of it, that Shaw’s proposal for an Ibsen theatre was offered,
if not in competition, at least in conjunction with the Shakespeare
310 J. Templeton

project. Given the great difficulties the committee was facing in gaining
support for a theatre in memory of the greatest English writer, Shaw’s
call for an Ibsen theatre was highly provocative.42 Shaw himself, at the
beginning of his proposal, makes the statement that Ibsen “might as well
never have lived” as far as the mainstream English theatre is concerned;
had it not been for Archer’s valiant translations, he remarked, Ibsen
would be virtually unknown in England (235).
Shaw points out that he has already shown that Ibsen’s dramas, “as
they succeed one another, are parts of a continuous discussion” in which
“the difficulty left by one is dealt with in the next;” it is this quality, he
argues, that makes them particularly suitable for grouped performances
(236). Shaw had made his claim in the 1891 Quintessence, seven years
before Ibsen himself did; in the preface to the first collected edition of
his works, in 1898, Ibsen insisted on “the mutual connections between
the plays,” noting that only “by grasping and comprehending my entire
production as a continuous and coherent whole will the reader be able to
receive the precise impression I sought to convey in the individual parts of
it” (LS 330). Shaw now suggests that in the Ibsen theatre, Ibsen’s plays,
like Wagner’s Ring, could be performed in cycles, “so that Ibsen may hunt
you down from position to position until you are finally cornered” (236).
Returning to his notion of Ibsen as a religious writer, Shaw insists
that a theatre devoted to his plays is essential because they embody the
spirituality of the modern world: “The larger truth of the matter is that
modern European literature and music now form a Bible far surpass-
ing in importance to us the ancient Hebrew Bible. . . . There comes a
time when the formula ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’ succeeds to the for-
mula ‘Thus saith the Lord,’ and when the parable of the doll’s house
is more to our purpose than the parable of the prodigal son” (236-37).
Shaw notes that the traditional English prejudice against fiction on the
grounds that works of the imagination are irrelevant to real life keeps
people from understanding that stories and plays can reveal truth.
Members of the Salvation Army had rejected his play Major Barbara on
the same grounds that seventeenth-century readers had refused Bunyan’s
Pilgrim’s Progress: since the characters were invented, what happened to
them had no significance.43 But the force of Ibsen’s work has “proved
the right of the drama to take scriptural rank, and his own right to
canonical rank as one of the major prophets of the modern Bible” (238).
Because the seriousness of Ibsen’s plays makes it impossible to regard
them as fashionable entertainment, the Ibsen theatre must be “frankly
 THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM: NOW COMPLETED … 311

doctrinal,” i.e., its goal must be to alleviate a “barbarous and dangerous

ignorance of the case against idealism” (238). This does not mean that
the theatre should confine itself to Ibsen any more than the Church of
England confines itself to Jeremiah; the post-Ibsen playwrights, includ-
ing Strindberg, would have their place as well. Performances should
be organized like academic courses, “designed so as to take audiences
over the whole ground as Ibsen and his successors took them” (239).
And finally, there is the question of the theatre’s financing. Since com-
mercial capital is out of the question because it demands enormous
profits, an endowment is necessary. And while nobody would support
an enterprise whose goal is to produce pleasure, “doctrine can always
command endowment”; the organizers of the Ibsen theatre should copy
“the religious people who are not foolishly ashamed to ask for what they
want” and insist that “our theatre will be an important place, and that
it will make people of low tastes and tribal or commercial ideas horribly
uncomfortable by its efforts to bring conviction of sin to them” (240).
There can be no doubt that Shaw believed deeply in the value of an
Ibsen theatre, but the enormous unlikelihood of attaining support for
it, along with the suggestion that its productions should be offered as
strictly instructive, with Philistine theatre-goers targeted for reform,
indicate strongly that Shaw’s immodest proposal was mostly a matter of
principle.

8  The Last Envoy: “Preface to the Third Edition,”

1922
The third and final edition of the Quintessence, the text that Shaw
would supply for his collected works, is sometimes erroneously referred
to as a “revision” of the second edition of 1913.44 On the contrary,
as Shaw explains in his preface, he was tempted to return to his book
“to illustrate it afresh by the moral collapse of the last ten years”—the
First World War and its aftermath—but in the end, he decided to leave
it unchanged (W 98). For to “change a pre-war book into a post-war
book would in this case mean interpreting Ibsen in the light of a catas-
trophe of which he was unaware. Nobody can pretend to say what view
he would have taken of it. He might have thought the demolition of
three monstrous idealist empires cheap at the cost of fifteen million
idealists’ lives. Or he might have seen in the bourgeois republics which
312 J. Templeton

have superseded them a more deeply entrenched fortification of idealism

at its suburban worst.”
Both opinions, equally damning, are meant to establish the severity
of the judgment that Ibsen, had he lived, would have made on the war.
While Shaw chose not to revise a book he had written when he, too,
“was as pre-war as Ibsen” (98), the subject of his two-page final preface
to the Quintessence is Ibsen’s relevance to the modern apocalypse. Citing
Revelation, Shaw notes that since the last edition of his book, “war, pes-
tilence and famine have wrecked civilization and killed a number of peo-
ple of whom the first batch is calculated as not less than fifteen millions
[including civilians]” (97). If Ibsen had been understood and heeded,
the dead might now be alive, Shaw declares, for the war, he writes, in an
analysis that history would confirm, “was a war of ideals. Liberal ideals,
Feudal ideals, National ideals, Dynastic ideals, Republican ideals, Church
ideals, State ideals, and Class ideals, bourgeois and proletarian, all heaped
up into a gigantic pile of spiritual high explosive, and then shoveled daily
into every house with the morning milk by the newspapers, needed only
a bomb thrown at Serajevo by a handful of regicide idealists to blow the
centre out of Europe.” Men “with empty phrases in their mouths and
foolish fables in their heads have seen each other, not as fellow-creatures,
but as dragons and devils, and have slaughtered each other accordingly.”
Shaw’s condemnation, written four years after the armistice of 1918,
reflects his continuing anger and frustration over a war that, in Stanley
Weintraub’s term, had been for him a “crucible.”45 Shaw had warned in
articles and speeches against the immense danger of the sword-rattling in
Europe and England, and when the war broke out, he committed him-
self wholly to a personal campaign for peace, writing over fifty thousand
words in three months. He argued that England, France, and Germany
were committing a crime against civilization, forcing their citizens to
“fight and die and pray and suffer with the grim knowledge that we are
sacrificing ourselves for an insane cause” (H 2:347). In a 1914 interview
that created a sensation, a newspaper reporter quoted him as saying, “In
both armies THE SOLDIERS SHOULD SHOOT THEIR OFFICERS
AND GO HOME”; the sentence reappeared shortly afterwards in
Shaw’s notorious essay “Common Sense about the War.”46 Taking his
title from Thomas Paine’s celebrated pamphlet, Shaw argued that com-
mon sense alone dictated that the only sane response to a senseless war
of slaughter was to end it. He cast a plague on both warring houses,
each equally in thrall to its officer caste: both England and Germany
 THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM: NOW COMPLETED … 313

were “duped, but alas! not quite unwillingly duped, by their Junkers and
Militarists into wreaking on one another the wrath that should have been
spent in destroying Junkerism and Militarism in their own country. And
I see the Junkers and Militarists of England and Germany jumping at
the chance they have longed for in vain for many years of smashing one
another” (3). Shaw offered a seven-point plan that included an acknowl-
edgement of England’s and Germany’s joint responsibility for the war,
leniency for Germany—“We and France have to live with Germany after
the war” (28)—and, above all, a recognition that militarism be recog-
nized for “a rusty sword that breaks in the hand” (29).
Shaw’s indignation and horror grew as the death toll mounted. In
1916, he began his apocalyptic tragi-comedy Heartbreak House, in
which spoiled, purposeless English gentry chatter away in a sheltered
cocoon that bursts when German bombs fall from the sky. In his pref-
ace, written after the war, Shaw explained that just as Ibsen’s “intensely
Norwegian plays exactly fitted every middle and professional class suburb
in Europe,” and Chekhov’s “intensely Russian plays fitted all the country
houses in Europe,” his own play, with its “English Themes,” stood for
all “cultured, leisured Europe before the war” (P 376), oblivious to the
coming devastation.
After the armistice, Shaw worked hard for a just peace agreement.
In his Peace Conference Hints of 1919, he opposed Lloyd George’s
demands for a mandate to punish Germany and called for an interna-
tional League for Peace on the grounds that if there was no reconcili-
ation among the European nations, civilization would be doomed to a
new world war in which technological progress would cause wholesale
slaughter. When the harshly punitive Treaty of Versailles was signed,
Shaw called it “perhaps the greatest disaster of the war for all the bellig-
erents, and indeed for civilization in general” (H 3:7).
By 1922, when Shaw wrote his last preface to the Quintessence, the
consequences of the treaty were proving him right. He had, in fact, been
right all along about the war, and it was natural that he should look to
Ibsen, not for comfort, but for confirmation of the accuracy of his warn-
ings: “Now that our frenzies are forgotten, our commissariats disbanded,
and the soldiers they fed demobilized to starve when they cannot get
employment in mending what we broke, even the iron-mouthed Ibsen,
were he still alive, would perhaps spare us, disillusioned wretches as we
are, the well-deserved ‘I told you so’” (W 97-98).
314 J. Templeton

The terrible truth, however, Shaw is quick to add, is that there is no

sign that any lesson has been learned: “Our reactions from Militarist ide-
alism into Pacifist idealism will not put an end to war: they are only a
practical form of the reculer pour mieux sauter [step back to jump fur-
ther]. We still cannot bring ourselves to criticize our ideals, because that
would be a form of self-criticism” (98). Shaw pronounces: “The shallow-
ness of the ideals of men ignorant of history is their destruction.”47 The
future would, of course, confirm Shaw’s prophecy. In 1940, when the
German armies returned to blast their way through Belgium, they came
upon stonemasons still at work on the Menin Gate at Ypres, engraving
the names of the 54,896 British soldiers whose remains had disappeared
in the battles for the salient.48
At the end of his 1922 preface, for all his sadness and fear, Shaw
returns to a hope he had expressed in his previous preface. In 1913, a
year before the war’s outbreak, he had launched the second edition of
the Quintessence with the declaration that Ibsen was needed more now
than in 1891, the year of the first edition, when his plays were chal-
lenging right-thinking England. Now, in 1922, Shaw asserts that Ibsen
is needed more than ever before, for “old abuses revive eagerly in a
world that dreamed it had got rid of them for ever; old books on mor-
als become new and topical again; and old prophets stir in their graves
and are read with a new sense of the importance of their message”
(98). That, Shaw explains, “is perhaps why a new edition of this book is
demanded.” His tone is contemplative rather than polemical, and his lan-
guage is subdued, but his powerful allegiance to Ibsen’s war against lies
and cant has not wavered.

Notes
1. Shaw seems to have in mind not the usual meaning of the art-historical
term morbidezza, invented from the Italian morbido (softness or delicacy)
to describe Botticelli’s female figures, but its older Latin etymology, mor-
bidus, meaning diseased or unwholesome, e.g., Ibsen’s syphilitic figures
Dr. Rank in A Doll’s House and Captain Alving and Oswald in Ghosts. The
English cognate—morbid—probably seemed too strong.
2. Archer had made the statement in a column honoring Ibsen in the
Morning Leader on May 26, 1906, three days after Ibsen’s death.
3. Of the nine hundred ninety-eight productions of the Royal Court
Theatre, which lasted three seasons (1904-07) and confirmed Shaw as
 THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM: NOW COMPLETED … 315

a major playwright, Shaw’s plays accounted for seven hundred and one
(H 2:173).
4. Ruskin had written in Fiction, Fair and Foul, that Nell, in The Old
Curiosity Shop, was “killed for the market, as a butcher kills a lamb”
(W 217).
5. Bernard Shaw: A Life (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005),
286.
6. Shaw met Strindberg once, on a trip to Stockholm in 1908. Seriously ill,
Strindberg took the time to give Shaw a tour of his Intimate Theatre
and arranged a private performance of Miss Julie. Four years later, as
Strindberg lay dying with stomach cancer, a Swedish newspaper contacted
famous authors soliciting their opinions of Strindberg’s importance. Shaw
replied: “Strindberg is a very great dramatist; he and Ibsen have made
Sweden and Norway the dramatic center of the world. . . . Time may
wear him out; but Death will not succeed in murdering him” (H 2:197).
Shaw later paid homage to Strindberg by donating his 1925 Nobel Prize
money to the Anglo-Swedish Literary Foundation, dedicated to publish-
ing Swedish literature in English translation; its first volume contained
four plays by Strindberg.
7. Sir Almroth Wright (1861-1947), whose letter appeared in the Times on
March 28, 1912, was an immunologist famous for his development of a
vaccine against typhoid, which saved the lives of well over a million sol-
diers in the Boer War and World War I. Wright was also a fervent misogy-
nist, author of The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage. Shaw,
who was friends with Wright, debated him on the “woman question” and
other topics, and Wright was the model for Colenso Ridgeon, the fash-
ionable physician in The Doctor’s Dilemma. Wright believed that bacteria
carry diseases but do not cause them; for this, he was given the nickname
“Almost Wright”; his colleague, Alexander Fleming, using money from
the sale of Wright’s vaccines, discovered penicillin.
8. Butler uttered this now famous phrase to Shaw during a conversation in
the courtyard of the British Museum.
9. Similarly, in A Doll’s House, Nora comes to understand, as she ruefully
tells her husband, that she passed naturally from being her father’s “doll”
to his.
10. Ernst Motzfeldt, “Af Samtelen med Henrik Ibsen” [From A Conversation
with Henrik Ibsen], Aftenposten (April 23, 1911).
11. Another strong autobiographical element in the play is the relationship
between Solness and Hilda Wangel, which draws on Ibsen’s long, deeply
romantic relationship with the young concert pianist Hildur Andersen.
See my Ibsen’s Women, 249-63.
316 J. Templeton

12. The quotation is from Macaulay’s “The Battle of the Lake Regillus” in

Lays of Ancient Rome (W 175).
13. The line is from “The Republicans,” a well-known poem by the nine-
teenth-century Norwegian writer Johan Sebastian Welhaven.
14. The line is from Friedrich Halm’s 1842 play Der Son der Wildnis [The
Son of the Wilderness] (W181).
15. Gosse, Henrik Ibsen (New York: Scribner’s, 1908), 197; Howells, “Ibsen”
[an obituary], North American Review 182 (July 1906), in Egan, Ibsen:
The Critical Heritage, 450-51.
16. Scholars who have read Ibsen’s ending as ironic include James McFarlane,
“Introduction,” The Oxford Ibsen, 8:24; Robert Raphael, “From Hedda
Gabler to When We Dead Awaken: the Quest for Self-realization,”
Scandinavian Studies 36 (1964), 36-47, and Keith May (Ibsen and Shaw,
123).
17. ‘Ibsen the Romantic’: Analogues of Paradise in the Later Plays (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1982), 126.
18. “Metamorphosis in Ibsen’s Little Eyolf,” Scandinavian Studies 62 (1990),
315.
19. Shaw’s reading anticipates Durbach’s analysis of Borkman as a mythi-
cal figure of European romanticism, the failed Napoleon, in ‘Ibsen the
Romantic,’ 52-68.
20. Shaw’s brief account of Borkman’s betrayal, which has Borkman marrying
the “older sister” Gunhild because she had more money, is inaccurate.
The sisters are twins, and Gunhild was no richer than Ella.
21. When We Dead Awaken was published in December, 1899. Archer’s trans-
lation appeared in 1900.
22. Ibsen had already moved away from the realistic stage in the cinematic
last act of John Gabriel Borkman, in which Borkman and the two sisters
walk out of the “fourth wall” of the house, disappear in a forest, and then
reappear in a vast mountain landscape.
23. Another Irishman had already argued for the greatness of When We Dead
Awaken, the eighteen-year-old student James Joyce, whose article on the
play, Joyce’s first professional publication, appeared in the Fortnightly
Review on April 1, 1900. Ibsen would become an important precedent
for Joyce as an artist who found his voice in exile and a significant pres-
ence in Joyce’s work. Joyce’s essay on When We Dead Awaken offers little
analysis of Ibsen’s play—“When the art of a dramatist is perfect the critic
is superfluous”—but he ranks it “with the greatest of the author’s work—
if, indeed, it be not the greatest” and defends its brevity: “[I]n the three
acts of the drama, there has been stated all that is essential” (Egan, Ibsen:
The Critical Heritage, 390, 386).
 THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM: NOW COMPLETED … 317

24. Shaw suggests that Ibsen may have called his sculptor “Rubek” to sug-
gest his similarity to the great French sculptor Rodin (171). Shaw knew
Rodin, who had sculpted him in France, in 1906. A considerably more
dubious claim, by the biographer of the sculptor Camille Claudel, is that
Ibsen based the relationship between Rubek and Irene on that of Rodin
and Claudel; the hypothesis is that Fritz Thaulow, the Norwegian painter,
must have told Ibsen about the love affair between the two sculptors, and
that Ibsen’s play is “a dark prophecy” of their parting and of Claudel’s
eventual incarceration in an asylum (Reine-Marie Paris, Camille Claudel,
1864-1943 [Paris: Gallimard, 1984], 105-07). The notion that Ibsen’s
play dramatizes the future of people whom he did not know is perhaps
the strangest reading of an Ibsen play on record.
25. The nude statue prompts Shaw to make a long digression against dress
codes, which he argues have prevented us from having true portraits of
even very famous people—“Dr. Johnson is a face looking through a wig
perched on a snuffy suit of old clothes” (174)—and against the practice
of the “life class,” in which students draw nude models striking unnatural
poses.
26. Pygmalion (London: Penguin 1944), 104.
27. Education of the Senses. The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 172.
28. Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890-1930, ed. Malcolm
Bradbury and James McFarlane (1976; London, Penguin, 1991), 19;
“Preface,” The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature,
ed. Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, Jr. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1865), vi.
29. “Tom Cringle” was a pseudonym for the Scottish writer Michael Scott
(1789-1835); the highly popular novel, still in print, was originally pub-
lished serially in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1829.
30. Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847-1929) and Emmeline Goulden
Pankhurst (1858-1928) were among the most important leaders of the
English suffrage campaign.
31. Mrs. Raddle is the strident, manipulative wife in Pickwick Papers; Mrs.
MacStinger is Captain Cuttle’s mean landlady in Dombey and Son;
Mrs. Joe Gargery is the termagent wife of Pip’s faithful friend in Great
Expectations.
32. The phrase comes from an apostrophe to “woman” in Thomas Otway’s
drama Venice Preserved (1682). Shaw’s use of the phrase as a summariz-
ing term for the sentimental categorizing of women into “woman” antici-
pates the feminist criticism of the 1970s and 1980s.
318 J. Templeton

33. In his classic study, Dickens and Women, Michael Slater writes, “Dickens
sees women only as they have been typecast by men—as angelic ministers
of grace and inspiration” and “as tormenting charmers” and “threateners
of male liberty,” either “gloriously absurd in their distinct femaleness” or
“as singularly capable of dog-like devotion to men” (London: Stanford
University Press, 1983), 240. See also Patricia Ingham, Dickens, Women,
and Language (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992).
34. Chowbok is the native guide in Butler’s novel; George Whitefield, the
famous English evangelist, was known for being able to convert audi-
ences by his mere pronunciation of the word Mesopotamia.
35. See the discussion of Breaking A Butterfly in chapter one. Shaw also
probably knew about the famous German premiere of A Doll’s House, in
which the actress Hedwig Niemann-Raabe refused to play the ending on
the grounds that she would never leave her children. Copyright protec-
tion did not exist, and Ibsen, who was furious, preferred to perform the
butchery himself. He avoided a happy ending by having Torvald force
Nora to the door of the children’s room, where, announcing that she
cannot leave them, she sinks to the floor and the curtain falls. The pro-
duction failed. Niemann-Raabe later played the original text with success.
36. Shaw notes that within twenty years of the arrival of A Doll’s House in
England, “women were writing better plays than men; and these plays
were passionate arguments from beginning to end” (220). It seems likely
that he was referring to the “suffrage plays,” the most famous of which
were Elizabeth Robins’s Votes for Women (1909), and How the Vote Was
Won (1909), by Cicely Hamilton and Christopher St. John (the pen
name of Christabel Marshall).
37. Chekhov the Dramatist (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960), 287.
38. Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theatre (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1963).
39. Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890-1930 (1976; London,
Penguin, 1991), 499.
40. Writing in the context of the intellectually impoverished American theatre
and paraphrasing Shaw, Bentley writes that the “most revolutionary tenet
to be advanced in this book is this: the theatre can be taken seriously”
(xx). Bentley echoes Shaw in his distinction between the theatres of art
and commodity, and his rejection of Broadway producer Lee Schubert’s
famous criterion “The box office never lies” parallels Shaw’s rejection of
the West End actor-managers’ stance that their task was to satisfy their
audiences.
41. “Shaw on Ibsen and the Drama of Ideas,” Ideas in Drama. Selected
Papers from the English Institute, ed. John Gassner (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1964), 92, 96.
 THE QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM: NOW COMPLETED … 319

42. The Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre failed to get off the ground
before the First World War interrupted the project; after the armistice,
the project did not receive sufficient support before it was interrupted by
the Second World War. Authorized by Parliament in 1948, it opened at
the Old Vic in 1963 as “The National Theatre Company,” and in 1977,
it moved to the first of its own houses, the Olivier. It is now commonly
known as “The National Theatre.”
43. This reaction was not typical of the Salvation Army, which donated uni-
forms for the first production of Major Barbara and was generally very
appreciative of the play. In his preface, Shaw makes a point that the Army
understood the play far better than many of the professional critics. He
cites one Army officer who said that “he would take money from the
devil himself and be only too glad to get it out of his hands and into
God’s” (P 124).
44. Michael Holroyd writes erroneously that in his seventies, Shaw revised the
Quintesssence “for the last time” for his collected works (“Introduction,”
Bernard Shaw: Major Critical Essays [London: Penguin, 1986], 9).
45. Journey to Heartbreak: The Crucible Years of Bernard Shaw 1914-1918
(New York: Weybright and Talley, 1971).
46. The New Statesman 4:84 (November 14, 1914), 3. Weintraub writes
that Shaw’s essay appeared in an “eighty-page” supplement to The New
Statesman (55), a statistic that reappears in the critical literature, but the
piece takes up twenty-six pages of a twenty-nine-page supplement (the
other three pages are advertisements). The issue I consulted and cite is
in the holdings of the Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York
Public Library.
47. Shaw’s aphorism, although more specific, recalls Santayana’s famous line
from The Sense of the Past (1905): “Those who cannot remember the past
are condemned to repeat it.”
48. Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History (New York:
Henry Holt, 1994), xvii.