700 THE DRAMA 



evolution of such plot as he allows himself. Both his characters 

 and the phrases which from time to time he puts into their mouth 

 have a distinct power over our imagination, so that they become un- 

 forgettable. Indeed, I might go further. They obsess the mind like 

 a nightmare that we should like to shake off, but cannot. 



If all this means anything, it means that Ibsen is a real dramatist. 

 Think, for instance, in one of the least satisfactory of his dramas, 

 " Little Eyolf," how admirably the first act is arranged, how clearly 

 it puts the issues before us, how instantly we understand the situ- 

 ation of the father and mother now that their boy is lost. Some- 

 times, as in this case, Ibsen begins with a catastrophe, and works 

 out its consequences ; sometimes, as in " John Gabriel Borkman," the 

 catastrophe has happened before the curtain goes up. In each case 

 we are put as close as possible to the critical moment, and the con- 

 centration of interest which is thereby gained is found to be of no 

 little dramatic value. The Norwegian writer prefers to work analyti- 

 cally rather than synthetically. He does not show how the tragedy 

 grows, but, breaking it into its component parts, he traces the effects 

 of the tragedy on his characters. 



Nevertheless there remains one constant quality for which it is not 

 easy to find a word. It is a quality of grimness, of ruggedness, of 

 irritability, as though life and the world had got on his nerves and 

 filled him with spleen. His dramas are never written in a serene 

 artistic temper, but too often represent the unfathomable indigna- 

 tion of the idealist who looks from Dan to Beersheba and finds the 

 whole country barren. It is not an uncommon effect of analysis that 

 it leaves few of the fair structures of life standing. The analytic 

 mind, whether in the man of science or in a disappointed and 

 thwarted poet like Ibsen, by resolving a thing into its component 

 parts, loses the sense of its general value, mars its beauty, destroys 

 its serviceableness in the order of the universe. We know, for in- 

 stance, how victorious analysis, in the sphere of practical and moral 

 science, has done its best to resolve the notion of duty into con- 

 venience or pleasure or personal utility, and the idea of conscience 

 into an inherited fear of the spirits of dead ancestors. 



Something of the same kind must happen when an isolated thinker 

 like Ibsen probes the ordinary conventions of social life and finds 

 them hollow, taps at all the shutters and discovers that what is be- 

 hind them is valueless, throws open the closet-doors and reveals the 

 skeletons, tears the veil from human affections, and displays their 

 meanness and littleness. Mankind must appear very despicable to 

 a man who makes Peer Gynt the hero of a drama, paints the conven- 

 tional husband under the form of a self-satisfied idiot like Helmer, 

 and has an especial fondness for introducing the Norwegian eman- 

 cipated young woman as the destroyer of connubial felicity. The 



