123. “When We Wake Up Dead”

A dramatic epilogue by Henrik Ibsen

Now that he has shared his "Dramatic Epilogue" with us, we can see deeper into Henrik Ibsen's soul than was previously possible. He has never spoken so personally, so unreservedly. He wants to lay bare the fate of the creator, his own. It is a shattering tragedy in which he does this. He dreadfully depicts the moment when the creator realizes what a cruel game the eternal powers are playing with him. They have killed him in order to turn him into a creator. And when he has reached the heights and looks down on the path he has taken, he awakens and realizes that he has walked through life as a dead man. He has sought life as every creature seeks it. But it is not to be found on his path. When he stepped out of the state of innocence and went out to seek a higher realm in art, life became alien to him, so alien that he could no longer find the way to it. In his mind he wanted to seek a higher nature, a true reality. But poetry, dream reality remains all that he finds when he leaves the circles of life. The child who perceives the things around him with fresh, innocent senses, the naive person who wanders through woods and fields and lets what he sees take full effect on him: they have nature. The creative person who wants to get to the bottom of things, who strives upwards to the archetypes: he finally realizes that it was a noble delusion that he was pursuing. This confession from the soul of the poet, who throughout his life sought reality in all its forms and strove to embody it, is deeply moving. It is devastating for all those who are forever calling out to the creative artist: Stick to nature. Ibsen gives them the answer to this demand. Do not be creators. That is the harsh answer. If you want life, nature, reality, then seek the daily pleasures; anything beyond that kills life. In the image of the "Resurrection", the sculptor Professor Rubek wanted to create a work of divinely pure beauty. The woman he takes as his model is created by nature as the ideal of beauty. He enters into a marriage with her in the realm of the spirit. The marriage of the creator with beauty is to take place. He wants to show his beloved all the glories of the world. They seek life together. But they seek it in the spirit. And so neither of them can find it. He does not touch the woman, for at the moment when earthly things mingle with the enjoyment of heavenly beauty, he believes he has lost the latter himself. And so, in his opinion, the woman in whom he sees beauty embodied should also think. But she is created by nature as a natural being. And she becomes the hater of the creator who does not satisfy her earthly urges. She leaves him. Her soul can no longer find its way back to life. Madness finally overtakes her and she lives in the idea of being dead. The creator has taken her life. He has also taken it from himself. And now that he is looking for it again, he cannot be happy in it, nor can he make it happy. He finds a wife for the second time. He is no longer capable of marriage in the earthly sense. The woman with whom he has entered into such a marriage knows nothing of desires for a higher world. Life is her realm. And when the first best man of nature steps into her path, who does not strive for beauty but for bear hunting in the wild forest, she feels that her nature is related to his. At the same time, the artist finds again the one who has also lost her earthly nature through him, whom he has turned into a dead woman. Just as his wife throws herself into the arms of the man of nature, so he throws himself into the arms of the one who was once spiritually married to him, the dead of the dead. On the heights of the mountains, where the storm of the natural elements is unleashed, the fate of the four men is fulfilled. The living woman is snatched from the avalanche in the arms of the living man and carried into the safe valley where she will find happiness. The two dead spirit people are caught up in the avalanche. They have realized that they have both made themselves hostile to life, to nature. The moment they awake from their death, they seek nature up on the mountains; but the moment of their awakening is the moment of their downfall. Fate has spoken inexorably. The innocent, the naive, the foolish are at the right hand of nature. Life is theirs. The creative, the cognizant, the spiritual people, they are on the left. Death is theirs. Life and creation are eternally incompatible in human existence. And only the fair simplicity, which has never experienced anything, nothing of reality and nothing of the spirit: it can believe that peace is possible between creation and life. But it is this fair simplicity that has the last word in tragedy. The deaconess, who has to accompany the madwoman, hurries after the sick woman as she climbs to the dangerous height with the sculptor. And when she sees them both perish in the masses of snow, she calls out: Pax vobiscum.

Now that the poet has awakened, his audience also appears to be such simple-minded people. They have often described him as the finder of life, of nature. But he obviously says the same thing about the characters in his dramas that his professor Rubek says about his busts: "There is something suspicious, something hidden in and behind these busts - something secret that people cannot see. - Only I can see it. And that gives me such pleasure inside. - From the outside they show that "striking resemblance, as it is called, and people stand there open-mouthed and amazed - but in their deepest depths they are honorable, righteous horse faces and stubborn donkey snouts and droopy-eared, low-faced dog skulls and fattened pig heads, - and stupid, brutal ox heads are also among them." Like the simple-minded deaconess who knows neither reality nor creation, people were always talking about the peace of life and poetry when they spoke of Ibsen's creations. But the poet, who has awakened from the dead, knows that there is no such "Pax vobiscum". His tragic feelings are mixed with the mocking laughter at his audience, which stands at the level of judgment of his

deaconess. It takes full measure of "these dear animals", which "man has made a mess of in his own image, and which in turn have made a mess of man. And these deceitful works of art are now being ordered from me by the bourgeois, solvent people. And buy them in good faith - and at high prices. Weigh them up with gold, as they say."

Ibsen seems to divide people into three genders. Into the innocent children of nature, who enjoy life to the full; into the creatives, who die to life because they want to transcend it; and into the art lovers and dreamers of reality, who in their lack of judgment rave about the mingling of creation with nature. He regards the first sex with melancholy; in the second he sees the comrades of his own tragic destiny; he sneers at the third.

The life of the creator is a tragedy for him when he looks at himself, a comedy when he looks at those who accept his "dear pets" for creatures like works of eternal nature itself.