THE IDEA OF TEAGEDY 703 



tive and inconsistent thing, may and will certainly die, but the 

 butterfly will often soar with all the brighter colors because the 

 chrysalis shape has been thrown off. Observe, however, the sort of 

 moral which the mocking spirit of Ibsen seems to draw from his 

 play. Conventional marriages marriages de convenance can 

 safely be recommended. No injury can be done by them, no mortal 

 wound inflicted on love. And yet this is the man who afterwards 

 will storm and rail against conventional marriages, because they de- 

 stroy human individuality. Cynically to recommend an union which 

 is afterwards found destructive to the human soul, betrays what I 

 venture to call incoherence of ideas. Nor is this the only form in 

 which this incoherence is exhibited. 



There is a tendency in many of the later plays to employ high- 

 sounding phrases apparently of deep symbolical value, but which on 

 examination seem to contain but little or nothing. "We hear of " the 

 great law of Change," a pretentious phrase to signify that human 

 character is more or less fickle ; or " the great law of Retribution," 

 with which, indeed, every dramatist should deal without investing it 

 with capital letters. Nor shall I hesitate to say that over and over 

 again the word " Liberty " is used as if it could only mean irrespon- 

 sibility. Sometimes the freedom for which Ibsen is constantly pining 

 is hardly to be distinguished from license. 



I touch with hesitation on another point which I believe forms a 

 somewhat envenomed subject of debate between the older and the 

 newer schools of criticism. I refer to a certain poverty of mise 

 en scene, a designed squalor in the range and meaning of the plot, 

 a provincialism, as it were, in the intrigue and management of Ib- 

 sen's dramas. You will remember that Matthew Arnold believed that 

 the only true literature was the literature of the centre, something 

 that belonged to the main line of literary development on the ground 

 of its style, its manner of treatment, its arrangement of data. Ibsen's 

 literature could never be described as that of the centre. Perhaps 

 the time has come when literature ought no longer to belong to 

 the centre, but to the circumference, and there are many signs among 

 our contemporary writers that they have definitely accepted this 

 view of the circumference as the chief object of their interest. Mean- 

 while, from the point of view of tragedy, which Aristotle said to 

 deal with great things, and which has been depicted in poetry as 

 tragedy " with purple pall," as though some regal splendor should 

 belong to those whose ruin is depicted before our eyes, the tragic 

 drama that you find in Ibsen is singularly mean, commonplace, paro- 

 chial as if Apollo, who once entered the house of Admetus, was 

 now told to take up his habitation in a back parlor in South Hamp- 

 stead. There may be tragedies in South Hampstead, although expe- 

 rience does not consistently testify to the fact; but, at all events 



