Of wounds and sore defeat

I made my battle-stay,
Winged sandals for my feet.
I wove of my delay,
Of weariness and fear

I forged my shouting spear,
Of loss and doubt and dread
And swift on-coming doom
I made a helmet for my head
And a floating plume.
From the shutting mist of death,
From the failure of the breath
I made a battle-horn to blow
Across the vales of overthrow :-
O hearken, love, the battle-horn,
The triumph clear, the silver scorn!
O hearken where the echoes bring

Down the grey disastrous morn
Laughter and rallying!

William Vaughn Moody.

IBSEN IN THE HANDS OF HIS BOSTON CRITICS.

The sudden and great success of a gifted tragedienne has, more widely and for a longer time than ever before, turned the attention of Boston to the dramas of Henrik Ibsen. Although bestowing merited praise upon the actress, public sentiment seems on the whole to condemn the plays. The causes of this unpopularity seem to me to be two: one, with which I cannot deal here, is the alien nature of Ibsen's mind and art; the other, at present the more important, is the lack of intelligent criticism. Theatre-goers in general,-I mean not the few highly educated, but that great public which settles the fate of plays,having neither the time nor the energy to form their own opinions of such diamas, get their ideas mainly from the newspapers. The future of American drama depends on the development of good public taste, and that in turn on sound journalistic criticism. When the public, owing to the histrionic power of Miss O'Neil, flocked to Hedda Gabler and Lady Inger, dramatic critics had a rare opportunity of broadening the public view by helping people to an intelligent understanding of two works of the man whose severest critics acknowledge as the master-dramatist of the nineteenth century. They need not have praised, unless they approved; but they might at least have furnished correct information as a basis for praise or censure.

Before examining how Ibsen fared in the hands of his Boston critics, it is desirable briefly to recount the facts in regard to Lady Inger which anybody who pretends to give an opinion of the play ought to be familiar with. Without venturing an expression of opinion as to its merits, let us ask: "When was it written? What kind of dramatist was Ibsen at the time? What is it about?"

Lady Inger was written in 1857. In telling the story of Ibsen's life up to that time, most biographers have laid stress on events illustrating the social dramas by which he is best known; little has been said about the influences which led him to write in the manner of Lady Inger. But one ought not to forget that young Henrik Ibsen was a romantic poet writing in a romantic literary

period; that his first play (1850) Catiline was a closet-drama written under the influence of Oelenschlaeger, who may be all too briefly described as the Danish Schiller, and that it was poetic, sentimental, and very undramatic; that while he was a student at Christiania University he wrote on the one hand some exquisite lyrics and on the other patriotic verse; that he journeyed into out-of-the-way districts of Norway on a search for folk-tales and ballads; that he was, in short at the age of 23 (1851) steeped in romanticism and nothing of a dramatist. The next step is his appointment as "artistic director" of the theatre first at Bergen, then at Christiania, in which capacity he gains that practical experience of theatrical necessities, that tendency to judge plays from the point of view of efficiency without which even a Byron can write only closet-drama. He goes to Copenhagen and Berlin to study the plays and the stage conditions of the time, -seeing in Berlin performances of Goethe, Schiller, and Shakspere, gaining an increased admiration for those plays which he regards as classic. On the other hand, he comes under what is temporarily a more potent, because more novel, influence of the plays of Scribe, then at the height of popularity. This French romantic melodrama, with its intricate complications, joins with his patriotic sympathies: Lady Inger is the result.

The historical facts underlying Lady Inger may be easily summed up: In the sixteenth century, when Norway was little more than a province of Denmark, and at her period of greatest degradation, Lady Inger was the wealthiest woman in the land, two of her daughters being happily married to Danish noblemen. One of these, Eline, died; her husband, Nils Lykke, had an intrigue with a third daughter, Lucia; because such relation was then regarded as incestuous, Lykke was put to death. If an historical tragedy was to be built on such slight materials, it would seem that it ought to have been one with a very simple plot, one in which characterization and dialogue played the most important part. Ibsen, however, imagined Lady Inger as a noblewoman called to wrest Norway from Denmark, but hindered in the execution of her mission by the fact that her son was a hostage in the hands of the enemy. Nils Lykke, moreover, was conceived as identical with the Kai Lykke, who is famous as a Don Juan in Danish ballads, and as having ruined Lucia before meeting and loving