could no more penetrate than a breeze of spring to a Lapp through his skins and his oils, Ibsen says: "So long as a nation considers it more important to build chapels than theatres, so long as it is more willing to support a mission to the Zulus than to endow an art-museum, so long we perceive that it lies bound hand and foot by dark monkish traditions of the Middle Ages, which stifle its breath and render null its very being." Any notion of levity suggested by the prominence given here to theatres will be removed at once if we consider that the stage was regarded by Ibsen, all through his career, not as a means of entertainment in any trivial sense, but as the platform from which most popularly and vividly and convincingly a man of genius can proclaim the ethical faith which is in him.

Here, again, how close is the likeness to Euripides! To the ordinary poetdramatist, as to Sophocles, the scene of a romantic play is miraculous and remote, drowned in a haze of imagination. But to the author of An Enemy of the People, as to the author of Orestes or Hercules Furens, the actual conditions of the world about us take a full poetic gravity, without ceasing to be absolutely modern, and if the appeal to moral truth is more direct, more poignant, more "agitating," in the theatre than in the conventicle, it is the former and not the latter which calls for public encouragement and support. And the poet must definitely say so, even though his words sound scandalous.

The agitation produced by Brand and by Peer Gynt, however, had scarcely amounted to scandal, and at the worst there was a large and influential body of readers in the North who approved of the direct appeal to the conscience of the country which was made in those famous lyrical dramas. Ten years and more passed, during which time Ibsen was gradually accepted as an enthusiastic poet of reform, who might "go too far" in his outspoken diatribes, but whose heart was in the right place. I myself, in 1872 and later, heard this opinion ex

pressed in Norway by country pastors and people of that class, who read Brand with a shudder and Peer Gynt and Love's Comedy with a somewhat exasperated smile, but who supposed that these were the wild oats of a dramatist who would settle down, and be as other successful dramatists are. But this tame kind of acceptation did not disarm Ibsen in the slightest degree. He thought that the sleeper had turned in his slumber and had muttered, but that he had gone to sleep again. The complacency of Scandinavian thought maddened him, whether to himself it might happen to come bringing blessings or curses. The lesson of Brand was taken as being a religious, and even a Protestant one; it leveled itself down to an exhortation to Norse ministers of religion to be more zealous, and less engaged with their personal comfort. And all Norwegians, who were not in orders, smiled, and said that the lesson was well deserved.

It seemed to the satirist that he had failed. He said that it was a mere accident that his hero was a priest; he might just as well have been a politician or a sculptor. (We may note, in passing, that, long afterwards, he dealt precisely with sculptors and with politicians.) He even thought of taking Galileo as a subject, and of making him die sooner than admit to a hypocritical world that the sun goes round the earth. He thought of Holberg, as he always did in an intellectual crisis, and dreamed of a new Erasmus Montanus. In some way or other he must rouse the slumbering conscience, by some fierce imaginative pang, some stab of the pen into the very vitals. He made several efforts to show that he made no truce, that he was still carrying war into the enemy's quarters, and these efforts produced their measure of "agitation." But nothing stabbed home, nothing forced the army of obscurantism to pause in its measured retreat, and face him, if only for a moment, with a shriek of rage and pain, so completely as Ghosts.

The production of this amazing play

marks a crisis in the history of the modern drama. For the first time, the most indulgent were obliged to perceive that Ibsen's aim was not to produce a more or less satirical entertainment, but to stagger the national conscience by presenting to it an absolutely momentous dilemma. It is needless to revive the memory of the sensation Ghosts produced, the halfheartedness with which even Ibsen's best European admirers were inclined to receive it, the terrific clatter of a blind and foolish press. If we want a sign of the progress liberty of discussion has made since 1882, we may simply compare what responsible criticism says of Ghosts today with what it said then. But the curious thing is that Ibsen himself, who had been surprised at the comparative calmness with which his ever-growing public had accepted Julian the Apostate and A Doll's House, was taken aback by the scandal which Ghosts created. He paused for a moment, as one pauses if a gun is fired at one's ear, but in a moment he had recovered his equanimity. He rejoiced to find that he had not exaggerated the moral decrepitude of the masses. Even Björnson failed him, but he did not care. He wrote to Brandes: "Björnson says, the majority is always right. And as a practical politician he is bound to say so. But it is inevitable that I should say, the minority is always right." His audacity had divided from the dwindling company of the wise all those "men of stagnation" who thought to avoid coming to any logical conclusion by attaching themselves, in their moral mediocrity, to the safe and central party who called themselves Liberals. He was rid of them at last; Ghosts had sent them twittering to their hiding-places, and the poet sat down to write what is perhaps the very strongest of all his studies of life, his magnificent Enemy of the People. Here, with more complete lucidity than anywhere else, and under the most transparent of allegories, is written down Ibsen's attitude to the world of selfish reservation and vain pretense that he saw

around him. Stockmann is Ibsen himself, in the guise of a fierce monk of the Thebaïd, as he strides into the lassitude of Alexandria with a goatskin round his loins.

The theme of Brand had been the necessity of renunciation in every sincere human effort after an absolute moral idea. That humanity was sure to fail, the poet saw, but he still thought that it might fail nobly. But as he advanced in experience, his pessimism grew upon him. He came to the conclusion that the moral effort is bound to fail, basely pressed out of place by the omnipresence of conventionality. In A Doll's House—and there is no passage in Ibsen's writings which shows a more cruel insight into the weakness of mankind the central ethical interest surrounds the attitude of Helmer before and after the arrival of the letter in which Krogstad abandons his persecution of Nora. Here Ibsen displays, with irresistible skill, the powerlessness of a modern man to accept moral ideas solely on their own merits. When Helmer is assured that his own reputation is not to suffer, instantly, almost automatically, his anger falls, and his indignation with the erring Nora ceases. It has not been the offense itself, but the social punishment, which has affected him. This is an exposure of the vulgarity of individuals; in The Enemy of the People we see gibbeted the grosser vulgarity of crowds. Finally, The Wild Duck, that mysterious and singular poem, seems to involve the whole race, the reforming minority with the stagnating majority, in one savage denunciation of the degeneracy of

man.

From that point, twenty years ago, there came a softer influence over the genius of Ibsen. With Rosmersholm there appeared the element of symbol, in which, while retaining to the full the strenuous examination of conscience, the severity of the test was a little reduced, and an element of the purely poetic admitted. It should never be forgotten that Ibsen is primarily a poet by profession. The

works of his early manhood are matchless in the profusion of their melody and the ingenuity of their versification. But in writing the five great prose dramas at which we have just briefly glanced, actual æsthetic beauty seemed to the author of no avail, and he abandoned it. In the five subsequent masterpieces (and even in When we Dead Awaken, which is a work of physical decadence) the element of beauty is restored. It is most evenly suffused, perhaps, in The Lady from the Sea and Master-Builder Solness; but the last act of John Gabriel Borkman, and the entire symbolism on which Rosmersholm and Little Eyolf rest, are full of it. Hedda Gabler remains, where it is not paradoxical to see beauty rather in the exquisite, the almost perfect, technical harmony of the construction, than in anything in the subject matter of the piece itself.

Throughout his career, Ibsen was accused of encouraging ugliness, both in the subjects and in the manner of his work. This charge has, I think, to be faced, and is not met by a mere negative. The truth seems to me to be this. In his earlier works, for a judgment on which some knowledge of the Dano-Norwegian language is indispensable, Ibsen cultivated formal beauty to the height of his skill. The play called The Banquet at Solhaug, which he published in 1856, has never been translated into English, and is entirely unknown to those who cannot approach the original. It is essentially a youthful and a hyper-romantic production, so full of youth that the dialogue breaks into rhymed dancing measures as if against its will. There are characters in it who cannot appear on the stage but the metre leaps into rhyme at their approach. This is not an Ibsen to which the charge of ugliness can be attached. Nor is there any feature of the sagadramas more notable than the sculptural beauty of the prose in which they are written, nor of the trilogy which began in Love's Comedy more prominent than the nimbleness of fancy and the adroit variety of appropriate metrical effect.

But there came a moment when Ibsen felt constrained to abandon the principles of æsthetic beauty. The reasons which led him to take a step which seemed so suicidal were clearly set forth in a now famous letter, addressed to myself (January 15, 1874). He explained that he wished to divest himself of every rag of the old ideal romanticism, to descend to the common speech of mortals, and leave the gods to talk verse on their Olympus. His view is now generally understood, and needs not to be repeated here. He desired to come close down to average human nature, and everybody admits that by doing so he obtained for his work enormous advantage in vitality, novelty, and sharpness of touch. We should all have been inestimably the losers if he had taken the foolish advice I gave him in 1874, and had written Julian the Apostate in blank verse. His new theory was amply justified by his success. At the same time, it is to miss the point of his sacrifice to argue that nothing was relinquished. If we speak merely of beauty, beauty of form, beauty of fancy, beauty of symbol,

there was a sacrifice which, to a poet so exquisitely organized as Ibsen was, must have been immense. The charge of ugliness, if it is brought against Ghosts and The Wild Duck, has to be admitted. These dramas have admirable qualities, but beauty is not among them.

But in the dramas of his third period, the lost element of beauty triumphantly reappeared. Ibsen did not return to verse, and undoubtedly he was wise. His lyrical faculty had probably declined with age, while his peculiar prose was an instrument which he had now learned to practice upon to perfection. There were no metrical ornaments in the later plays, but the poet contrived to flood them with an atmosphere of beauty. The Lady from the Sea seems drowned in a golden blaze of afternoon light, like a Cuyp; Little Eyolf is set against a background of woodland and water, as dark and lustrous as a Ruysdael. It was as though the dramatist felt that his harshest work of

mere diagnosis was over, that he had taken the blunt facts of physiology enough into consideration. His life's work would not be fully performed unless he made a second appeal to the imagination, and salved some of the wounds which he had made by his satire. So he permitted his real nature as a poet to reassert itself, and symbolic charm resumed its place in his work; thus, as future criticism cannot fail to perceive more and more clearly, rounding that work to its final orbic fullness.

IV

Having accustomed ourselves to regard Ibsen as a disturbing and revolutionizing force, which met with the utmost resistance at the outset, and was gradually accepted before the close of his career, we may try to define what the nature of his revolt was, and what it was, precisely, that he attacked. It may be roughly said that what peculiarly roused the animosity of Ibsen was the character which has become stereotyped in one order of ideas, good in themselves but gradually outworn by use, and which cannot admit ideas of a new kind. Ibsen meditated upon the obscurantism of the old régime until he created figures like Rosmer, in whom the characteristics of that school are crystallized. From the point of view which would enter sympathetically into the soul of Ibsen and look out on the world from his eyes, there is no one of his plays more valuable than Rosmersholm. It dissects the decrepitude of ancient formulas, it surveys the ruin of ancient faiths. The curse of heredity lies upon Rosmer, who is highly intelligent up to a certain point, but who can go no farther than intelligence. Even if he is persuaded that a new course of action would be salutary, he cannot move,―he is bound in invisible chains. It is useless to argue with Rosmer; his reason accepts the line of logic, but he simply cannot, when it comes to action, cross the bridge where Beate threw herself into the torrent.

But Ibsen had not the ardor of the fighting optimist. He was one who 'doubted clouds would break," who dreamed, since "right was worsted, wrong would triumph." With Robert Browning he had but this one thing in common, that both were fighters, both "held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better," but the dark fatalism of the Norwegian poet was in other things in entire opposition to the sunshiny hopefulness of the English one. Browning and Ibsen alike considered that the race must be reformed periodically or it would die. The former anticipated reform as cheerily as the sower expects harvest. Ibsen had no such happy certainty. He was convinced of the necessity of breaking up the old illusions, of the imperative call for revolt, but his faith wavered as to the success of the new movements. The old order, in its resistance to all change, is very strong. It may be shaken, but it is the work of a blind Samson, and no less, to bring it rattling to the ground. In Rosmersholm all the modern thought, all the vitality, all the lucidity belong to Rebecca, but the decrepit formulas are stoutly entrenched. In the end it is not the new idea which conquers; it is the antique house, with its traditions, its avenging vision of white horses, which breaks the too-clairvoyant Rebecca.

This doubt of the final success of intelligence, this obstinate question whether, after all, as we so glibly intimate, the old order changeth at all, whether, on the contrary, it has not become a Juggernautcar that crushes all originality and independence in action, this breathes more and more plainly out of the progressing work of Ibsen. Hedda Gabler condemns the old order, in its dullness, its stifling mediocrity, but she is unable to adapt her energy to any wholesome system of new ideas, and she sinks into mere moral dissolution. She hates all that has been done, yet can herself do nothing, and she represents, in symbol, that hateful condition of spirit which cannot create, though it sees the need of creation, and

can only show the horror which its sterility awakens within it by destruction. All Hedda can actually do to assert her energy is to burn the manuscript of Lövborg and to kill herself with General Gabler's pistol. The race must be reformed or die; the Hedda Gablers who adorn its latest phase do best to die.

We have seen that Ibsen's theory was that love of self is the fundamental principle of all activity. It is the instinct of self-preservation and self-amelioration which leads to every manifestation of revolt against stereotyped formulas of conduct. Between the excessive ideality of Rebecca and the decadent sterility of Hedda Gabler comes another type, perhaps more sympathetic than either, the master-builder, Solness. He, too, is led to condemn the old order, but in the act of improving it he is overwhelmed upon his pinnacle, and swoons to death, "dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing." Ibsen's exact meaning in the detail of these symbolic plays will long be discussed, but they repay the closest and most reiterated study. Perhaps the most curious of all is The Lady from the Sea, which has been examined from the technically psychological view by a learned French philosopher, M. Jules de Gaultier. For M. de Gaultier the interest which attaches to Ibsen's conception of human life, with its conflicting instincts and responsibilities, is more fully centred in The Lady from the Sea than in any other of his productions.

The theory of the French writer is that Ibsen's constant aim is to reconcile and to conciliate the two biological hypotheses which have divided opinion in the nineteenth century, and which are known respectively by the names of Cuvier and Lamarck: namely, that of the invariability of species and that of the mutability of organic forms. In the reconciliation of these hypotheses Ibsen finds the only process which is truly encouraging to life. According to this theory, all the trouble, all the weariness, all the waste, of moral existences around us comes from the

neglect of one or other of these principles, and true health, social or individual, is impossible without the harmonious application of them both. According to this view, the apotheosis of Ibsen's genius, or at least the most successful elucidation of his scheme of ideological drama, is reached in the scene in The Lady from the Sea, where Wangel succeeds in winning the heart of Ellida back from the fascination of the Stranger. Certainly, in this mysterious and strangely attractive play Ibsen insists more than anywhere else on the necessity of taking physiology into consideration in every discussion of morals. He refers, like a zoologist, to the laws which regulate the formation and the evolution of species, and the decision of Ellida, on which so much depends, is an amazing example of the limitation of the power of change produced by heredity. The extraordinary ingenuity of M. de Gaultier's analysis of this play deserves recognition; whether it can quite be accepted as embraced by Ibsen's intention may be doubtful. At the same time, let us recollect that, however subtle our refinements become, the instinct of Ibsen was probably subtler still.

In 1850, when Ibsen first crept forward with the glimmering taper of his Catilina, there was but one person in the world who fancied that the light might pass from lamp to lamp, and in half a century form an important part of the intellectual illumination of Europe. The one person who did suspect it was, of course, Ibsen himself. Against all probability and common sense, this apothecary's assistant, this ill-educated youth, who had just been plucked in his preliminary examination, who positively was, and remained, unable to pass the first tests and become a student at the university, maintained in his inmost soul the belief that he was born to be "a knight of thought." The impression is perhaps not uncommon among ill-educated lads; what makes this case unique, and defeats our educational formulas, is that it happened to be true. But the impact of Ibsen with the