When We Dead Awaken | Page 2

talents. But to his sane admirers the interest of the play must always be melancholy, because it is purely pathological. To deny this is, in my opinion, to cast a slur over all the poet's previous work, and in great measure to justify the criticisms of his most violent detractors. For When We Dead Awaken is very like the sort of play that haunted the "anti-Ibsenite" imagination in the year 1893 or thereabouts. It is a piece of self-caricature, a series of echoes from all the earlier plays, an exaggeration of manner to the pitch of mannerism. Moreover, in his treatment of his symbolic motives, Ibsen did exactly what he had hitherto, with perfect justice, plumed himself upon never doing: he sacrificed the surface reality to the underlying meaning. Take, for instance, the history of Rubek's statue and its development into a group. In actual sculpture this development is a grotesque impossibility. In conceiving it we are deserting the domain of reality, and plunging into some fourth dimension where the properties of matter are other than those we know. This is an abandonment of the fundamental principle which Ibsen over and over again emphatically expressed--namely, that any symbolism his work might be found to contain was entirely incidental, and subordinate to the truth and consistency of his picture of life. Even when he dallied with the supernatural, as in The Master Builder and Little Eyolf, he was always careful, as I have tried to show, not to overstep decisively the boundaries of the natural. Here, on the other hand, without any suggestion of the supernatural, we are confronted with the wholly impossible, the inconceivable. How remote is this alike from his principles of art and from the consistent, unvarying practice of his better years! So great is the chasm between John Gabriel Borkman and When We Dead Awaken that one could almost suppose his mental breakdown to have preceded instead of followed the writing of the latter play. Certainly it is one of the premonitions of the coming end. It is Ibsen's Count Robert of Paris. To pretend to rank it with his masterpieces is to show a very imperfect sense of the nature of their mastery.

WHEN WE DEAD AWAKEN.
A DRAMATIC EPILOGUE.

CHARACTERS.
PROFESSOR ARNOLD RUBEK, a sculptor. MRS. MAIA RUBEK, his wife. THE INSPECTOR at the Baths. ULFHEIM, a landed proprietor. A STRANGER LADY. A SISTER OF MERCY.
Servants, Visitors to the Baths, and Children.
The First Act passes at a bathing establishment on the coast; the Second and Third Acts in the neighbourhood of a health resort, high in the mountains.

ACT FIRST.
[Outside the Bath Hotel. A portion of the main building can be seen to the right. An open, park-like place with a fountain, groups of fine old trees, and shrubbery. To the left, a little pavilion almost covered with ivy and Virginia creeper. A table and chair outside it. At the back a view over the fjord, right out to sea, with headlands and small islands in the distance. It is a calm, warm and sunny summer morning.
[PROFESSOR RUBEK and MRS. MAIA RUBEK are sitting in basket chairs beside a covered table on the lawn outside the hotel, having just breakfasted. They have champagne and seltzer water on the table, and each has a newspaper. PROFESSOR RUBEK is an elderly man of distinguished appearance, wearing a black velvet jacket, and otherwise in light summer attire. MAIA is quite young, with a vivacious expression and lively, mocking eyes, yet with a suggestion of fatigue. She wears an elegant travelling dress.
MAIA.
[Sits for some time as though waiting for the PROFESSOR to say something, then lets her paper drop with a deep sigh.] Oh dear, dear, dear---!
PROFESSOR RUBEK.
[Looks up from his paper.] Well, Maia? What is the matter with you?
MAIA.
Just listen how silent it is here.
PROFESSOR RUBEK.
[Smiles indulgently.] And you can hear that?
MAIA.
What?
PROFESSOR RUBEK.
The silence?
MAIA.
Yes, indeed I can.
PROFESSOR RUBEK.
Well, perhaps you are right, mein Kind. One can really hear the silence.
MAIA.
Heaven knows you can--when it's so absolutely overpowering as it is here---
PROFESSOR RUBEK.
Here at the Baths, you mean?
MAIA.
Wherever you go at home here, it seems to me. Of course there was noise and bustle enough in the town. But I don't know how it is-- even the noise and bustle seemed to have something dead about it.
PROFESSOR RUBEK.
[With a searching glance.] You don't seem particularly glad to be at home again, Maia?
MAIA.
[Looks at him.] Are you glad?
PROFESSOR RUBEK.
[Evasively.] I---?
MAIA.
Yes, you, who have been so much, much further away than I. Are you entirely happy, now that you are at home again?
PROFESSOR RUBEK.
No--to be quite candid--perhaps not entirely happy---
MAIA.
[With animation.] There, you see! Didn't I know it!
PROFESSOR RUBEK.
I have been too long abroad. I have drifted quite away from all this --this home life.
MAIA.
[Eagerly, drawing her chair nearer him.] There, you see, Rubek! We had