women, living lives apart from the poet's creative intelligence. And in yet another way is Ibsen treated like Shakespeare, in that there is superabundant discussion not only of his characters, male and female, but also of his moral aim, of his sociological intention, of his philosophy of life, while very little attention is paid to his dramaturgic craftsmanship, to his command of structural beauty, to his surpassing skill in the difficult art of the playmaker. Yet Shakespeare and Ibsen are professional playwrights, both of them, each making plays adjusted exactly to the conditions of the theatre of his own time; and if the author of Othello can prove himself (when the spirit moves him) to be a master-technician, so also can the author of Ghosts.

There is ample recognition of Ibsen as the ardent reformer seeking to blow away the mists of sentimentality, and of Ibsen the symbolist suggesting dimly a host of things unseen and strangely beautiful; but there is little consideration of Ibsen's solid workmanship, of his sure knowledge of all the secrets of the stage, of his marvellous dexterity of exposition, construction and climax. No doubt it is as a poet, in the largest meaning of the word, that Ibsen is most interesting; but he is a playwright also-indeed, he is a playwright, first and foremost; and in that aspect also he is unfailingly interesting. For those who insist that a poet must be a philosopher, Ibsen is to be ranked with Browning as affording endless themes for debate; but for those who demand that a dramatic poet shall be a playwright, Ibsen is a rival of Scribe and of the younger Dumas and of all the school of accomplished craftsmen in France who have made Paris the capital of the dramatic art. Ibsen's skill as a playwright is so consummate that his art is never obtruded. In fact, it was so adroitly hidden that when he first loomed on the horizon, careless theatrical critics were tempted rather to deny its existence. He is such a master of all the tricks of the trade that he can improve upon them or do without them, as occasion serves and perhaps it is only those. really familiar with the practices of the accomplished French playwrights of the

nineteenth century who perceive clearly the superiority of Ibsen in the mere mechanism of the dramaturgical art.

II

Although it is possible to consider his stage-technique apart from his teaching, it needs to be noted at the outset that Ibsen the playwright owes a large portion of his power and effectiveness to Ibsen the poet-philosopher. As it happens, the doctrine of individual responsibility, which is the core of Ibsen's code, is a doctrine most helpful to the dramatist. The drama, indeed, differentiates itself from all other literary forms in that it must deal with a struggle, with a clash. of contending desires, with the naked assertion of the human will. This is the mainspring of that action without which a drama is a thing of nought; and perhaps the most obvious backbone for a play is the tense contest of two human beings, each knowing clearly what he wants and each straining to attain it, at whatever cost to his adversary, to all others, and even to himself. Rivals fighting to the death, a hero at war with the world, a single soul striving to wrench itself free from the fell clutch of fatesuch is the stuff out of which the serious drama must be compounded.

Now, as it happens, no philosopher has ever more often reiterated than Ibsen his abhorrence of smug and complacent compromise, his belief in the unimpeded independence of the individual, his conviction that every creature here below owes it as a duty to himself to live his own life in his own way. Just as Brand stiffens himself once more and makes the implacable declaration,

Beggar or rich-with all my soul

I will; and that one thing's the whole! so Dr. Stockman announces his discovery that "the strongest man upon earth is he who stands most alone;" and in every play we find characters animated by this unhesitating determination and this unfaltering energy. Even Ibsen's women, so subtly feminine in so many ways, are forever revealing themselves

virile in their self-assertion, in their claim to self-ownership. His plays move us strangely in the performance, they grip at the outset and firmly hold us to the relentless end, because his dramaturgic skill is exerted upon themes essentially dramatic in that they deal with this stark exhibition of the human will and with the bitter struggle that must ensue when the human will is in revolt against the course of nature or against the social bond.

When the poet-philosopher has suggested to the playwright one of these essentially dramatic themes, Ibsen handles it with a directness which intensifies its force and which is in itself evidence of his poetic power. As Professor Butcher has pointed out, "we are perhaps inclined to rate too low the genius which is displayed in the general structure of an artistic work; we set it down merely as the hard-won result of labour, and we find inspiration only in isolated splendours, in the lightning flash of passion, in the revealing power of poetic imagery." In these last gifts Ibsen may seem to many, if not deficient, at least, less abundant than some other dramatic poets; but he can attain "the supreme result which Greek thought and imagination achieve by their harmonious co-operation;" he can present "the organic union of parts." He has the sense of form which we feel to be the final guerdon of Greek endeavour.

A play of Ibsen's is always compact and symmetrical. It has a beginning, a middle and an end; it never straggles, but ever moves straight forward to its conclusion. It has unity; and often it conforms even to the pseudo-unities proclaimed by the super-ingenious critics of the Italian renascence. Sometimes a play of Ibsen's has another likeness to a tragedy of the Greeks, in that it presents in action before the assembled spectators only the culminating scenes of the story. Ghosts recalls Edipus the King, not only in the horror at the heart of it and the poignancy of the emotion it evokes, but also in its being a fifth act only, the culmination of a long and complex concatenation of events, which took place before the point at which Sophocles and Ibsen saw fit to begin their plays. In the

Greek tragedy, as in the Scandinavian social drama, the poet has chosen to deal with the result of the action, rather than with the visible struggle itself; it is not the present doings of the characters, but their past deeds, which determine their fate; and it seems almost as though the ancient Athenian and the modern Norwegian had taken as a motto George Eliot's saying that "consequences are unpitying."

Although no other play of Ibsen's attains the extraordinary compactness and swiftness of Ghosts, several of them approach closely to this standard, the Master Builder, for example, Little Eyolf, and more especially Rosmersholm -in which the author did not display on the stage itself more than a half of the strong series of situations he had devised to sustain the interest of the spectator and to elucidate his underlying thesis. But Ibsen does not hold himself restricted to any one formula; and sometimes he prefers, as in the Enemy of the People, to let the whole story unroll itself before the audience. Only slowly did Ibsen come to a mastery of his own methods and he had begun in the League of Youth and in the Pillars of Society by doing what every great dramatist had done before him, by accepting the form worked out by his immediate predecessors and adjusted to the actual theatre of his own time. Just as Shakespeare followed the pattern set by Kyd and Marlowe, by Lyly and Greene, just as Molière copied the model ready to his hand in the Italian comedy-ofmasks, so Ibsen began by assimilating the formulas which had approved themselves in France, the land where the drama was flourishing most luxuriantly in the middle of the nineteenth century, formulas devised by Scribe and only a little modified by Augier and the younger Dumas.

III

For three-score years, at least, Scribe was the salient figure in the French theatre; and his influence endured more than two-score years after his death. He can be considered from discordant standpoints; to the men of letters Scribe seems

wholly unimportant, since his merits were in some measure outside of literature; to the men of the theatre, Scribe is a personality of abiding interest, since he put his mark on the drama of his own day in almost every one of its departments. In the course of his active career as a playwright he made over farce, first of all, then the comedy-of-intrigue, and finally the comedy-of-manners: he tried his hand at the historical play; and he was the chief librettist of the leading French composers of opera, both grand and comic. He might lack style, he might be barren of poetry, he might be devoid of philosophy, his psychology might be pitifully inadequate, his outlook on life might be petty, but he was pastmaster of the theatre and from him were hidden none of the secrets of that special art.

It was in Scribe's hands that there was worked out the formula of the "wellmade play," la pièce bien faite, in which the exposition was leisurely and careful, in which the interest of expectancy was aroused early and sustained to the end, in which the vital scenes of the essential struggle, the scènes à faire, were shown on the stage at the very moment of the story when they would be most effective, and in which a logical conclusion dimly foreseen, but ardently desired, was happily brought about by devices of unexpected ingenuity. In perfecting the formula of the "well-made play" Scribe may have taken hints from Beaumarchais, especially from the final act of the Marriage of Figaro, and he found his profit also in a study of the methods of the melodrama, which had been elaborated in the theatres of the Parisian boulevards at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and which had been imitated already by Hugo and the elder Dumas. At its best, the "well-made play" was an amusing piece of mechanism, a clockwork toy which had a mere semblance of life, but which did precisely what its maker had constructed it to do.

The piece put together according to this formula was sufficient to itself, with its wheels within wheels; and its maker had no need of style or of poetry, of psychology or of philosophy. So long as the playwright was content to be a

playwright only and did not aspire to be a dramatist with his own views of life, the formula was satisfactory enough; but when the younger Dumas and Augier came on the stage they wanted to put a broader humanity into their plays, and they could make room for this only by simplifying the machinery. Yet while they were delivering each his own message, they accepted the model of the "wellmade play;" and it is to this that may be ascribed the artificiality we begin to discern even in such masterpieces of dramaturgic craftsmanship as the Gendre de M. Poirer and the Demi-Monde.

Upon Ibsen also the influence of Scribe is as obvious as it is upon Augier and Dumas fils. The earliest of his social dramas, the League of Youth and the Pillars of Society, are composed according to the formula of the "well-made play," with its leisurely exposition, its intricate complications of recoiling intrigue, its ingeniously contrived conclusion. If we compare The League of Youth with Scribe's Bertrand et Raton, or with Sardou's Rabagas; if we compare the Pillars of Society with Dumas's Etrangère or Augier's Effrontés, we cannot fail to find a striking similarity of structure. Set even A Doll's House by the side of any one of a dozen contemporary French comedies, and it is easy to understand why Sarcey declared that play to be Parisian in its constructionup to the moment of Nora's revolt and self-assertion, so contrary to the social instinct of the French. And this explains also why it was that Ibsen, as Herr Lindau has told us, made little or no impression on the German dramatists until after the appearance of Ghosts, although the earliest plays had been acted frequently in the German theatres. The scenes of these early plays are laid in Norway, it is true, and the characters are all Norwegian, and although it is easy enough for us to-day, with our knowledge of what Ibsen has become, to find in them the personal equation of the author, still, he was then frankly continuing the French tradition of stagecraft, with a willing acceptance of the formula of the "well-made play," and with no effort after novelty in his dramaturgic method. Not until he brought forth the

Ghosts is there any overt assertion of his stalwart and aggressive personality.

In the beginning Ibsen was no innovator. So far, at least, as its external form is concerned, the kind of play he proffered at first was very much what actors and audiences alike had been accustomed to a kind of play perfectly adjusted to the existing customs of the stage. What he did was to take over the theatre as a going concern, holding himself free to modify the accepted formula only after he had mastered it satisfactorily. Considering Ibsen's inexperience as a writer of prose plays dealing with contemporary life, the League of Youth is really very remarkable as a first attempt. Indeed, its defects are those of the models, and it errs chiefly in its excess of ingenuity and in the manufactured symmetry of the contrivance whereby the tables are turned on Stensgard, and whereby he loses all three of the women he has approached.

As Lowell has said, "it is of less consequence where a man buys his tools than what use he makes of them;" but it so happened that Ibsen acquired his stagecraft in the place where it is most easily attained, in the place where Shakespeare and Molière had acquired it, in the theatre itself. In 1851, when he was only twenty-three, he had been appointed "theatre-poet" to the newly opened playhouse in Bergen; and after five years there he had gone to Christiania to be director of a new theatre, where he was to remain yet another five years. In this decade of his impressionable and plastic youth Ibsen had taken part in the production of several score plays, some of them his own, others also original in his native tongue by Holberg and Oehlenschlaeger, and many more translated from Scribe, from Scribe's collaborators and from Scribe's contemporaries. In his vacation travels, to Copenhagen and to Dresden, he had opportunity to observe a wider variety of plays; but even in these larger cities the influence of Scribe. was dominant, as it was all over the civilised world in the mid-years of the century.

As Fenimore Cooper, when he determined to tell the fresh story of the backwoods and the prairies, found a pattern

ready to his hand in the Waverly novels, so Ibsen availed himself of the "wellmade play" of Scribe when he wrote the League of Youth, which was the earliest piece in prose presenting contemporary life and character in Norway. There is obvious significance in the fact that of all Ibsen's dramas those which have won widest popularity in the theatre itself are those which most frankly accept the Gallic framework-the Pillars of Society, the Doll's House and Hedda Gabler. Yet it is significant also that even in the least individual of Ibsen's earlier pieces, the action is expressive of character, and we cannot fail to see that Ibsen's personages control the plot; whereas in the dramas of Scribe the situations may be said almost to create the characters, which indeed exist only for the purposes of that particular plot.

IV

In spite of Ibsen's ten years of apprenticeship in two theatres, in daily contact with the practical business of the stage, it was not with prose dramas of contemporary life that he first came forward as a dramatist. In fact, his juvenile Catiline (1850) was written when he was but just of age, before he was attached to the theatre professionally, before he had read any dramatists, except Holberg and Oehlenschlaeger, and before he had had the chance to see much real acting on the stage itself. It was while he was engaged in producing the plays of others that he brought out also his own Lady Inger of Ostraat (1855) and the Vikings at Helgeland (1858), both of them actable and often acted. They are romanticist in temper, suggesting now Schiller and now Hugo.

Lady Inger is an historical melodrama, with a gloomy castle, spectral pictures and secret passages, with shifting conspiracies, constant mystery-mongering and contorted characters. The inexepert playwright uses soliloquy not merely to unveil the soul of the speaker (its eternally legitimate use), but also to convey information to the audience as to the facts of the intrigue (an outworn expedient Ibsen never condescended to use in