social order of his age was unlucky, we see, from the first; it was perhaps more unlucky than that of any other great man of the same class with whose biography we have been made acquainted. He was at daggers drawn with all that was successful and respectable and "nice" from the outset of his career until near the end of it.

Hence we need not be surprised if in the tone of his message to the world there is something acrimonious, something that tastes in the mouth like aloes. He prepared a dose for a sick world, and he made it as nauseous and astringent as he could, for he was not inclined to be one of those physicians who mix jam with their julep. There was no other writer of genius in the nineteenth century who was so bitter in dealing with human frailty as Ibsen was. By the side of his cruel clearness the satire of Carlyle is bluster, the diatribes of Leopardi shrill and thin. All other reformers seem angry and benevolent by turns; Ibsen is uniformly and impartially stern. That he probed deeper into the problems of life than any other modern dramatist is acknowledged, but it was his surgical calmness which enabled him to do it. The problem-plays of Alexandre Dumas fils flutter with emotion, with prejudice and pardon. But Ibsen, without impatience, examines under his microscope all the protean forms of organic social life, and coldly draws up his diagnosis like a report. We have to think of him as thus ceaselessly occupied. Long before a sentence was written, he had invented and studied, in its remotest branches, the life-history of the characters who were to move in his play. Nothing was unknown to him of their rience, and for nearly two years, like a coral-insect, he was building up the scheme of them in silence. Odd little objects, fetishes which represented people to him, stood arranged on his writingtable, and were never to be touched. He gazed at them until, as if by some feat of black magic, he turned them into living persons, typical and yet individual.

expe

The actual writing down of the dialogue was swift and easy, when the period of incubation was complete. Each of his plays presupposed a long history behind it; each started, like an ancient Greek tragedy, in the full process of catastrophe. This method of composition was extraordinary, was perhaps unparalleled. It accounted in measure for the coherency, the inevitability, of all the detail, but it also accounted for some of the difficulties which meet us in the task of interpretation. Ibsen calls for an expositor, and will doubtless give occupation to an endless series of scholiasts. They will not easily exhaust their theme, and to the last something will escape, something will defy their most careful examination. It is not disrespectful to his memory to claim that Ibsen sometimes packed his stuff too closely. Criticism, when it marvels most at the wonder of his genius, is constrained to believe that he sometimes threw too much of his soul into his composition, that he did not stand far enough away from it always to command its general effect. The result, especially in the later symbolical plays, is too vibratory, and excites the spectator too much.

One very curious example of Ibsen's minute care is found in the copiousness of his stage directions. He has been imitated in this, and we have grown used to it; but thirty years ago it seemed extravagant and needless. As a fact, it was essential to the absolutely complete image which Ibsen desired to produce. The stage directions in his plays cannot be "skipped" by any reader who desires to follow the dramatist's thought step by step, without losing the least link. These notes of his intention will be of ever-increasing value as the recollection of his personal wishes is lost. In 1899, Ibsen remarked to me that it was almost useless for actors nowadays to try to perform the comedies of Holberg, because there were no stage directions and the tradition was lost. Of his own work, fortunately, that can never be said. Dr. Verrall, in his brilliant and penetrating

studies of the Greek tragedians, has pointed out more than once the "undesigned and unforeseen defect, with which, in studying ancient drama, we must perpetually reckon," namely, the loss of the action and of the equivalent stage directions. It is easy to imagine "what problems Shakespeare would present if he were printed like the Poetae Scenici Graeci," and not more difficult to realize how many things there would be to puzzle us in Ghosts and The Wild Duck if we possessed nothing but the bare text.

V

The body of work so carefully conceived, so long maintained, so passionately executed, was far too disturbing in its character to be welcome at first. In the early eighties the name of Ibsen was loathed in Norway, and the attacks on him which filled the press were often of an extravagant character. At the present moment, any one conversant with Norwegian society, who will ask a priest or a schoolmaster, an officer or a doctor, what has been the effect of Ibsen's influence, will be surprised at the unanimity of the reply. Opinions may differ as to the attractiveness of the poet's art or of its skill, but there is an almost universal admission of its beneficial tendency. Scarcely will a voice be found to demur to the statement that Ibsen let fresh air and light into the national life, that he roughly but thoroughly awakened the national conscience, that even works like Ghosts, which shocked, and works like Rosmersholm, which insulted, the prejudices of his countrymen, were excellent in their result. The conquest of Norway by this dramatist, who reviled and attacked and abandoned his native land, who railed at every national habit, and showed a worm at the root of every national tradition, is amazing. The fierce old man lived long enough to be accompanied to his grave "to the noise of the mourning of a nation," and he who had almost starved in exile to be con

ducted to the last resting-place by a parliament and a king.

It must always be borne in mind that, although Ibsen's appeal is to the whole world, his determination to use prose aiding him vastly in this dissemination, -yet it is to Norway that he belongs, and it is at home that he is best understood. No matter how acrid his tone, no matter how hard and savage the voice with which he prophesied, the accord between his country and himself was complete long before the prophet was silent. As he walked about, the strange, picturesque old man, in the streets of Christiania, his fellow citizens gazed at him with a little fear, but with some affection, and with unbounded reverence. They understood at last what the meaning of his message had been, and how closely it applied to themselves, and how much the richer and healthier for it their civic atmosphere had become. They would say, as the soul of Dante said in the Vita Nuova :· :

è costui

Che viene a consolar la nostra mente,
Ed è la sua virtù tanto possente,

Ch' altro pensier non lascia star con nui. No words, surely, could better express the intensity with which Ibsen had pressed his moral quality, his virtù, upon the Norwegian conscience, not halting in his pursuit till he had captured it, and had banished from it all other ideals of conduct. No one who knows will doubt that the recent events in which Norway has taken so chivalric, and at the same time so winning and gracious, an attitude in the eyes of the world owe not a little to their being the work of a generation nurtured in that new temper of mind, that spiritel nuovo d'amore, which was inculcated by the whole work of Ibsen.

It is natural, of course, that other nations should be oblivious of, or indifferent to, this peculiar national quality. In Sweden, for example, although he was early read there, and although he made special studies of the Swedish forms of life, he was never greatly appreciated.

He remarked, in 1872, that it was difficult for Danes and Norwegians to put themselves in a line with Swedes, whose degree of social development was so much less mature than theirs. His only real friend in Sweden was the great poet, Carl Snoilsky, long an exile, like himself. Ibsen's conquest of Danish culture was much more rapid; it was in Copenhagen, indeed, that he was earliest appreciated, and his name stood there for that of a great poet long before it was recognized in Christiania; from the publication of Brand onwards there was no longer any question about Ibsen's eminence among thoughtful and cultivated Danes, led throughout by the intelligent criticism of Georg Brandes. Among the Continental peoples other than Scandinavian, it was Germany that fell the soonest under Ibsen's spell. He had been accustomed to visit the north of that country from as early as 1852, and he had considerable familiarity with German customs. As a Scandinavian, the action of Prussia towards Denmark had, indeed, been odious to him, but he enjoyed German modes of life, and when the Franco-German war broke out, "I spent that great time in Dresden," he said afterwards, "to the advantage, on many points, of my apprehension of world-history and human existence." German criticism was not much occupied with him, until 1878, when The Pillars of Society was played in Berlin, and attracted the enthusiasm of the young. This enthusiasm, however, wavered before the storm of disfavor awakened by Ghosts, which managers tried for three years, without success, to present to an indignant public. The year 1887 is named as that in which German prejudice finally gave way to admiration, and Ibsen's position was secure in Germany. The feeling for his works grew until it took ludicrous forms; there appeared shoals and flights of translations, each less graceful than the other, till at last (August 31, 1892), we find Ibsen bemoaning loudly, "Alas! alas! I have far more German translators than I wish for."

In Germany, in Russia, in Holland, in Italy, Ibsen has for fifteen years past been recognized as one of the settled forces of literature. Even in France his genius is universally admitted. We must, of necessity, give a moment's attention to the different fate which has attended him in the Anglo-Saxon world. Thirtyfive years have passed since Ibsen's name was first mentioned in an English newspaper, and his reputation in England and America has undergone strange vicissitudes. His clearness of delineation, his extraordinary skill in the building up of a play and in the conduct of dialogue, his force and vitality, have, somewhat grudgingly and without genial sympathy, been accepted by Anglo-Saxon criticism as facts which cannot be gainsaid. But the British public has never loved him, and his plays are seldom acted in our theatres. In our attitude toward Ibsen, we are practically at issue with the rest of the cultivated world. We admit his existence, because we cannot help doing so, but we belittle it, and we resist it as much as we possibly can. There is no doubt that this is one of the many points in which the Anglo-Saxon world stands opposed to all the rest of Europe, and to fathom the causes of it, it would be necessary to go into international questions which are not fitted to the present discussion.

Two reasons, however, may be suggested for the curious grudge which English-speaking criticism, of the second order, continues to bear against Ibsen. One is that his moral anger, his violent appeal to the conscience, are with difficulty understood by those who have grown up in the atmosphere of Anglo-Saxon optimism. Americans and Englishmen are alike in this, that they admit with extreme difficulty the idea that their national characteristics are capable of improvement. That a poet should want to diagnose the diseases of "God's own country," when it is obvious that there can be no diseases there, seems so preposterous as to rob the satire of interest.

No one could successfully attack the conventions of either of the Anglo-Saxon nations except under the disguise of gross national flattery, such as Mr. Rudyard Kipling practices, because in no other way could he secure any attention. The Germanic and Scandinavian races are less confident of their virtues, and more amenable to reflection, and they will sit through a performance of such a drama as The Wild Duck, asking themselves how it affects their inner nature, and what message it has to their souls. The American or English audience merely says: "What funny people! Do you suppose they are intended to be funny?"

The other possible reason is allied to the first. It is that by a long-confirmed habit, based upon our manners, the AngloSaxon world really tolerates the theatre only as a place of physical entertainment. This is the indignity which Puritanism has succeeded in fixing upon the stage.

Ac

The time is passed when fanaticism was able to close the playhouse altogether, or even to make it a sort of disgrace to be seen attending it. The most respectable people may now go to the play, but there lingers this result of Puritan prejudice, that nothing seen at the play can be, or ought to be, grave or intellectual. cordingly, as none but dolls can be depended on to betray no mental or moral emotions, the Anglo-Saxon world has decided that its stage shall be inanimate; the figures which move on it shall always be puppets, romantic, social, pantomimic, pathetic, what you will, but always puppets, figures in whom is not the dangerous breath of life. Countries in which such a convention holds can never have a general apprehension of what the majestic, sinister, and powerfully vitalized dramatic art of Ibsen means to nations which have not enjoyed the advantages of Puritan paralysis.

My greatest intellectual privilege is my acquaintance with a philosopher. He is not one of those unsocial philosophers who put their best thoughts into books to be kept in cold storage for posterity. My philosopher is eminently social, and is conversational in his method. He belongs to the ancient school of the Peripatetics, and the more rapidly he is moving the more satisfactory is the flow of his ideas.

He is a great believer in the Socratic method. He feels that a question is its own excuse for being. The proper answer to a question is not a stupid affirmation that would close the conversation, but another question. The questions follow one another with extreme rapidity. He acts upon my mind like an air pump. His

questions speedily exhaust my small stock of acquired information. Into the mental vacuum thus produced rush all sorts of irrelevant ideas, which we proceed to share together. In this way there comes a sense of intellectual comradeship which one does not have with most philosophers.

For four years my philosopher has been interrogating Nature, and he has not begun to exhaust the subject. Though he has accumulated a good deal of experience, he is still in his intellectual prime. He has not yet reached the "school age," which in most persons marks the beginning of the senile decay of the poetic imagination.

In my walks and talks with my philosopher I have often been amazed at my

own limitations. Things which are so easy for him are so difficult for me. Particularly is this the case in regard to the more fundamental principles of philosophy. All philosophy, as we know, is the search for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. These words represent only the primary colors of the moral spectrum. Each one is broken up into any number of secondary colors. Thus the Good ranges all the way from the good to eat to the good to sacrifice one's self for; the Beautiful ascends from the most trifling prettiness to the height of the spiritually sublime; while the True takes in all manner of verities, great and small. In comparing notes with my philosopher I am chagrined at my own color-blindness. He recognizes so many superlative excellences to which I am stupidly oblivious.

err therein, baking-powder and coffee and a dozen eggs, and last and least, and under no circumstances to be forgotten, a cake of condensed yeast. These things weigh upon my spirits. The thought of that little yeastcake shuts out any disinterested view of the store. It is nothing to me but a prosaic collection of the necessaries of life. I am uncheered by any sense of romantic adventure.

Not so with my philosopher. He is in the rosy dawn of expectation. The doors are opened, and he enters into an enchanted country. His eyes grow large as he looks about him. He sees visions of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in all their bewildering, concrete variety. They are in barrels and boxes and paper bundles. They rise toward the sky in shelves that reach at least the height of the gloriously unattainable. He walks among the vales of Arcady, among pickles and cheeses. He lifts up his eyes wonderingly

to snowy Olympus crowned with Pillsbury's Best. He discovers a magic fountain, not spurting up as if it were but for a moment, but issuing forth with the mysterious slowness that befits the liquefactions of the earlier world. "What is that?" he asks, and I can hardly frame the prosaic word "Molasses."

"Molasses!" he cries, gurgling with content; "what a pretty word!" I had n't thought about it, but it is a pretty word, and it has come straight down from the Greek word for honey.

He discovers another work of art. Surprising pictures, glowing in color, are on the walls. These are cherubs rioting in health, smiling old men, benignant matrons, radiant maidens, all feasting on nectar and ambrosia. Here and there is a pale ascetic, with a look of agony on his emaciated face.

"What makes that man feel so bad?" asks my philosopher, anxious to extract a story from the picture. It seems like an inadequate explanation to say that he is only a martyr to his own folly in not getting the right kind of breakfast food.

For one thing, my philosopher has a great physical advantage over me when it comes to seeing things. His eyes are only two feet ten inches from the ground, while mine are some five feet ten. Three feet do not count for much when we are considering astronomical distances, but they make a great difference in the way things seem. There is a difference in the horizon line, and the realm of mystery begins much nearer. There is no disenchanting bird's-eye view of the counter with all things thereon. There are alluring glimpses of piled-up wealth.

There particularly is the land of the heart's desire in a square glass-covered case. There are many beautiful things in the store to be admired from below; but one supremely beautiful and delectable object is the crowning glory of the place.

The artist who spends his life in attempting to minister to dull adult sensibilities never created a masterpiece that