Loves Comedy | Page 2

to the verge of
sentimentality, and a critic, hard, inexorable, remorseless, to the verge
of cynicism. What we call his "social philosophy" is a modus vivendi
arrived at between them. Both agree in repudiating "marriage for love";

but the idealist repudiates it in the name of love, the critic in the name
of marriage. Love, for the idealist Ibsen, is a passion which loses its
virtue when it reaches its goal, which inspires only while it aspires, and
flags bewildered when it attains. Marriage, for the critic Ibsen, is an
institution beset with pitfalls into which those are surest to step who
enter it blinded with love. In the latter dramas the tragedy of married
life is commonly generated by other forms of blindness--the childish
innocence of Nora, the maidenly ignorance of Helena Alving, neither
of whom married precisely "for love"; here it is blind Love alone who,
to the jealous eye of the critic, plays the part of the Serpent in the Edens
of wedded bliss. There is, it is clear, an element of unsolved
contradiction in Ibsen's thought;--Love is at once so precious and so
deadly, a possession so glorious that all other things in life are of less
worth, and yet capable of producing only disastrously illusive effects
upon those who have entered into the relations to which it prompts. But
with Ibsen--and it is a grave intellectual defect--there is an absolute
antagonism between spirit and form. An institution is always with him,
a shackle for the free life of souls, not an organ through which they
attain expression; and since the institution of marriage cannot but be,
there remains as the only logical solution that which he enjoins--to
keep the soul's life out of it. To "those about to marry," Ibsen therefore
says in effect, "Be sure you are not in love!" And to those who are in
love he says, "Part!"
It is easy to understand the irony with which a man who thought thus of
love contemplated the business of "love-making," and the ceremonial
discipline of Continental courtship. The whole unnumbered tribe of
wooing and plighted lovers were for him unconscious actors in a
world-comedy of Love's contriving--naive fools of fancy, passionately
weaving the cords that are to strangle passion. Comedy like this cannot
be altogether gay; and as each fresh romance decays into routine, and
each aspiring passion goes out under the spell of a vulgar environment,
or submits to the bitter salvation of a final parting, the ringing laughter
grows harsh and hollow, and notes of ineffable sadness escape from the
poet's Stoic self-restraint.
Ibsen had grown up in a school which cultivated the romantic, piquant,

picturesque in style; which ran riot in wit, in vivacious and brilliant
imagery, in resonant rhythms and telling double rhymes. It must be
owned that this was not the happiest school for a dramatist, nor can
Love's Comedy be regarded, in the matter of style, as other than a risky
experiment which nothing but the sheer dramatic force of an Ibsen
could have carried through. As it is, there are palpable fluctuations,
discrepancies of manner; the realism of treatment often provokes a
realism of style out of keeping with the lyric afflatus of the verse; and
we pass with little warning from the barest colloquial prose to the
strains of high-wrought poetic fancy. Nevertheless, the style, with all
its inequalities, becomes in Ibsen's hands a singularly plastic medium
of dramatic expression. The marble is too richly veined for ideal
sculpture, but it takes the print of life. The wit, exuberant as it is, does
not coruscate indiscriminately upon all lips; and it has many shades and
varieties--caustic, ironical, imaginative, playful, passionate--which take
their temper from the speaker's mood.
The present version of the play retains the metres of the original, and
follows it in general line for line. For a long passage, occupying
substantially the first twenty pages, the translator is indebted to the
editor of the present work; and two other passages-- Falk's tirades on
pp.58 and 100--result from a fusion of versions made independently by
us both. C. H. H.
*Copyright, 1907, by Charles Scribner's Sons.

LOVE'S COMEDY
PERSONS OF THE COMEDY
MRS. HALM, widow of a government official. SVANHILD AND
ANNA, her daughters. FALK, a young author, and LIND, a divinity
student, her boarders. GULDSTAD, a wholesale merchant. STIVER, a
law-clerk. MISS JAY, his fiancee. STRAWMAN, a country clergyman.
MRS. STRAWMAN, his wife. STUDENTS, GUESTS, MARRIED
AND PLIGHTED PAIRS. THE STRAWMANS' EIGHT LITTLE

GIRLS. FOUR AUNTS, A PORTER, DOMESTIC SERVANTS.
SCENE--Mrs. Halm's Villa on the Drammensvejen at Christiania.

LOVE'S COMEDY
PLAY IN THREE ACTS

ACT FIRST
The SCENE represents a pretty garden irregularly but tastefully laid out;
in the background are seen the fjord and the islands. To the left is the
house,