135. “The Covenant of Youth”

A comedy by Henrik Ibsen
Performance at the Lessing Theater, Berlin

"If only they were real portrait busts, what I'm doing, Maya!" "They're still not real portrait busts, I tell you... There's something suspicious, something hidden in and behind these busts - something secret that people can't see. - Only I can see it. And it amuses me so much. - 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 - all these dear animals that man has messed up in his own image. And who have bungled man in return. - 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's words of self-confession, which he puts into the mouth of Professor Rubek in his "Epilogue" ("When We the Dead Awake"), were constantly on my mind as I watched the "Bund der Jugend" at the Lessing Theater (on 1 September). It was on October 18, 1869, when this comedy was radically rejected at its first performance at the Christiania Theater. And it evokes strange feelings to have the Ibsen before me who, in the style of the French comedy of manners, pupated the great worldview ideas that he later presents to us in such lapidary writing, as if in a farce. It is impossible today not to judge this earlier Ibsen from the point of view provided by his later works. All the motifs that come to full fruition in "Nora", "Enemy of the People", "The Pillars of Society" and so on are already hinted at here. He is already standing before us, the great ironist who, out of realism, has created "not full human beings, but human symbols, because he knows that the real, the full human being is an ideal that does not walk among us in the flesh. The people he lives with only remind Ibsen of this or that human trait, just as animals remind us of this or that human character. Aren't these Nora, this Hedda Gabler, this Rosmer and what are they all called mere human symbols? In "Bund der Jugend" we see this way of symbolizing human character traits taken to an even higher level. This lawyer Stensgärd, who spares no means to attain power and influence, this chamberlain Bratsberg, this banker, eternally nagging and litigious merchant David Hejre, this parvenu Monsen: they are all caricatures in the fullest sense of the word; and the whole plot is no less a caricature, which in the last act even escalates into a wild mockery of all naturalness. Outwardly, this "Bund der Jugend" differs in no way from a French comedy of manners of Dumas' genre. And yet we leave the performance aware that we have seen something that breathes greatness. It is the greatness that emanates from all those spirits who know how to look behind the scenes of world events. This look behind the scenes illuminates the people as they are portrayed in the "Covenant of Youth". They are not like that, but they would be like that if they were not cloaked in lies. Ibsen portrays the truth in the changing lies of the world stage. He presents us with the "things in themselves" of people, so to speak. This is what makes Ibsen the great ironist. A man stands before him with a well-formed face. But this countenance is a lie. He would never be allowed to wear this face if the exterior were to show what slumbers at the bottom of the soul. He would have to have an ugly pig's snout or a horse's muzzle. Ibsen gives it to him. - And if this is even more obvious to us in The League of Youth than in Ibsen's later plays: the way he draws soul-truth and at the same time body-untruth, caricature, is merely due to the fact that the ideas, the world-view, have later become higher, fuller, more developed, so that we then accept the caricature because the ideas take us over completely. In the "Union of Youth" everything ideal is still only hinted at, still present like a dark sensation, like a premonition only in the poet's soul. All the socio-psychological motifs, which in Ibsen's dramas will then lead to a language from which future cultural historians will draw a full picture of the secret and obvious driving forces pulsating in our time: all these motifs are already struck here. Beyond what they depict, people are viewed, and beyond the form that it offers the portraitist, life is portrayed here. When "The League of Youth" was so radically rejected at its first performance, it was mainly due to the fact that in the end the reactionaries seemed to be right, that they stood even more firmly in their old traditions than the liberal strivers. But what did Ibsen care about reaction and liberalism even then? He did not see them as expressions of human life, but as masks; and behind these masks he saw people who basically could do nothing about whether they were reactionary or liberal nerds.