730 THE DRAMA 



Well has the " poet of doubt " fulfilled his mission. If he were 

 the mere cynic, with no eye to beauty, and no belief in nobility of 

 character, who can only see, and only cares to see, what is foul, mean, 

 or repulsive, he would, indeed, have little enough significance for us. 

 But we are speaking of the creator of Lona Hessel and Martha Ber- 

 nick and her sister, of Dr. Stokman and his wife and daughter and 

 sea-faring friend, of Hedvig Ekdal and Juliane Tesman. For myself 

 I could add many more, but their names might be challenged; and 

 these are enough to vindicate the poet of doubt from the charge of 

 indiscriminate cynicism. 



Again : the poet of doubt is not the poet of negation. We have had 

 many apostles of negation, who thought they had found the formula 

 of emancipation in the gospel of reason, and the negation of all 

 that reason cannot render an account of. How many of them could 

 stand before Ibsen's judgment-seat, and come away with the same 

 light-hearted conviction that everything which they could not demon- 

 strate was mere superstition ? Surely the terrible poet of doubt will 

 not spare them any more than other believers. There is many a one 

 besides Fru Alving, who holds that any feeling for which he cannot 

 give a reason is a mere " Ghost." Do they know the meaning of their 

 creed? Let them go with her through the horrors of that night in 

 which she is called upon to judge whether every instinct of her nature, 

 and at last whether the very central purpose and passion of her whole 

 being is a mere " ghost," and they will, at least, come forth from that 

 ordeal chastened and sobered, with the glib confidence in their inde- 

 pendence of the past shaken as perhaps none but Ibsen could shake 

 it, with the knowledge that they have hardly begun to ask the ques- 

 tions they thought they had already answered. 



Or where can we find anything more searching than the light thrown 

 in " Rosmersholm " upon the self-deceptions of a man and woman, who 

 think that, in their relations one with another, they can ignore the 

 garnered wisdom and experience of ages, and dismiss as superficial 

 conventions that have no reference to them, the resultant beliefs and 

 mandates of society? Or where can we find a bolder or more virile 

 representation at once of the necessity and of the danger of the rupture 

 with an established moral or religious order already antiquated, but 

 not yet replaced, than is embodied in this same " Rosmersholm " ? 



Or yet again: if you think you have got the formula of life in a 

 war cry against conventional reticence and lies, and a belief in probing 

 instead of skinning over wounds, go with Gregers Werle on his cru- 

 sade, and learn how easy it is to think you are setting a man's feet 

 upon the rock of truth when, in fact, you are calling upon him to act 

 on principles he only respects at second hand, and to profess sentiments 

 he neither feels nor understands. 



But where am I to stop? There is scarcely one of Ibsen's social 



