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surprised by the spontaneity of this laughter. And even more surprising was the tardy discovery of the reviewers that The Wild Duck is genuinely enjoyable in the theatre. Ibsen had lost much, in the appreciation of the public, from the accidental fact that his plays had been banished from our current stage for nearly a dozen years. During the passage of this decade, he had come to be regarded to state the fact conveniently in slang-as a sort of “highbrow," instead of a sure-enough competitor for the plaudits of an avid audience with so practical a pair of practical a pair of playwrights as Mr. George Broadhurst and Mr. Bayard Veiller.

II

Ibsen died in 1906; and now, for the first time, he is beginning to be appreciated in this country from the disinterested point of view of sheer dramatic criticism. So long as he was still alive, his plays were studied not as plays, but under the different labels of "literature," "philosophy," or "sociology." The casual patrons of our theatre were told that they should see his dramas because of a sense of duty and not because of the incentive of enjoyment; and, in pursuance of this method, even so popular a piece as A Doll's House was heralded by many commentators as a sort of family funeral.

The reason for this cul de sac, which pocketed for many many years the popularity of Ibsen as a purveyor of entertainment, is easily apparent. Our native knowledge of Ibsen was imported overseas from England; and it was in England that the misconception of this author as a "high-brow" first originated. Ibsen was "discovered" for the English

public by Mr. William Archer and Mr. Edmund Gosse; but, when these two enlightened critics endeavoured to deliver their discovery, they found themselves impeded by the mediæval institution of the British censorship of plays. Because of this impediment, the very first performance of an Ibsen play in England that epoch-making production of Ghosts which was shown in 1891. by Mr. J. T. Grein before the private audience of the Independent Theatre Society was regarded by the general public as a thing tabooed and flung beyond the pale. In consequence of this condition, the comments called forth by this first performance of a play of Ibsen's in the English language were based upon contrasted theories of ethics instead of being based on theories of dramaturgic craftsmanship.

Ibsen was criticised-in the England of the early eighteen-ninetiesas a sociologist, a philosopher, a man of letters, a moralist, a propagandist,-in short, as everything except the one thing that he really was,a practical and interesting playwright. His technique-as a professional dramatist-was not discussed, despite the repeated pleas of so appealing a dramatic critic as Mr. Archer. Instead, his commentators -pro and con-contented themselves with throwing mud or throwing roses against his subject-matter,which is, of course, the last thing to be considered by a genuine dramatic critic in analysing any well-made play. Not what an author says, but how effectively he says it in the theatre, is the proper theme for celebration by dramatic criticism; for, in the great art of the drama, the "message" of an author is superior to comment, and nothing offers invi

tation to the technical interpreter but the mere efficiency displayed, or missed, in the elocution of this "message" to the public.

III

Because of the incubus of the British censorship, an impression was spread abroad, throughout the eighteen-nineties, that Ibsen should be regarded as a philosophic thinker and a man of letters, instead of being judged as a playwright ambitious to receive the plaudits of the theatregoing public. From the effect of this misconceived impression, our casual American audience is only now beginning to recover. Our local public is now learning, tardily, to see that Ibsen was a playwright, first and last and all the time.

The truth of the matter now, at last, appears to be that Ibsen was a very great artist of the theatre, and was nothing else at all. Quite obviously in the cold light of our later learning he cannot be accepted seriously as a man of letters. He had no literary training; and he never acquired the advantage of a literary culture. In the decade of his 'teens, he did not go to school: in the decade of his twenties, he was not even registered as a regular student in the provincial University of Christiania. His entire education was not literary but theatrical. At the age of twentyfour, he went to Bergen as the general stage-manager of a stock-company in that isolated town; and, in this capacity, he worked a dozen hours every day throughout five successive years. His annual salary amounted, in round numbers, to three hundred dollars; and his apprenticeship may be understood most quickly if we face the fact that,

throughout the formative period of his youth, he exerted all his energies, at a dollar a day, to the tasks of setting forth a new play every week with a stock-company localised before the public of a little city as secluded as Schenectady, New York.

In these years of his apprenticeship, Ibsen had no time to read; and all that he could learn was acquired incidentally from his necessary business of presenting to the local Bergen public many French plays of the school of Scribe. His own first play of any prominence-Lady Inger of Östrat-was written in emulation of the current formula of Scribe; and this minor but inevitable incident is indicative of the important fact that Ibsen's education was derived not from the library but from the stage. Never at any time-in the midst of a perilous attempt to earn his living against agonising odds-did Ibsen ever find the leisure to become a "man of letters." In his twenties and his thirties, he read a few plays of Schiller and a few plays of Shakespeare; and, at the same period, he seems to have become more familiar than he was willing later to admit. with both parts of Goethe's Faust; but, to the end of his days, he remained distinctly-and this fact became with him a point of pride-a playwright who knew next to nothing of the history of literature. Though most Norwegians are accustomed, as a matter of course, to study many other languages, Ibsen never acquired an easy fluency in any foreign tongue but German. Late in his life, he said to one of his Boswells that he hated all the plays of Alexander Dumas fils, and added the unexpected comment,

"But, of course, I have never read them." The last remark was, presumably, more candid than the first:

for Ibsen, in his later years, was genuinely proud of the fact that he had read little except the daily newspapers. When commentators pointed out that the patterned formula of Ghosts recalled the technique of Euripides, he would retort. irately that he had never read Euripides.

It was not until the time of the Italian tour which Ibsen undertook in the middle of his thirties that he ever actually saw any of the major works of architecture, painting, or sculpture that are existent in the world. At this belated moment, he attempted to employ a phrase that is current in the narrowly restricted world of professional baseball—a "delayed steal" of culture; and his experience ran parallel to that of our own Nathaniel Hawthorne, who alsomade a pilgrimage to Italy at a time of life too long deferred. Like Hawthorne, Ibsen appreciated the wrong paintings, admired the wrong statues, and waxed enthusiastic over the wrong works of architecture. While showing the sensitised impressibility of a responsive temperament, he betrayed also the effects of an early education that had been exceedingly defective. Even in responding to the appeals of such aesthetic regions as Rome, Sorrento, and Amalfi, Ibsen remained the stage-director of a stock-company in Schenectady, instead of rising to the rarer atmosphere of a stimulated man of letters.

If Ibsen lacked culture in the realm. of letters and he frequently, when interviewed, insisted on the point that he was not well-read-it is even more obvious that he claimed no standing whatsoever as a sociologist or a phi losopher. He regarded himself as a playwright, first and last and all the

time, that is to say, a craftsman whose task it was to interest the public by holding, as 't were, a mirror up to nature in the actual, commercial theatre. His teacher was Eugéne Scribe, that exceedingly adroit technician who codified the formula of "the well-made play" ["la pièce bien faite"]; and the contemporary of whose exploits he was most justly jealous was Alexander Dumas fils,who, like himself, attempted in his own way to improve and to perfect the formula of Scribe. Ibsen was not a philosopher; for he was ignorant of the accumulated records of philosophic literature. The author of Brand and Peer Gynt is not to be regarded primarily as a poet; for he had never studied any other universally important poem except the first and second parts of Goethe's Faust. To sum the matter up, he should not be considered in any other light than as an honest craftsman of the theatre who endeavoured in accordance with that downright statement of the practical Pinero "to give rise to the greatest possible amount of that peculiar kind of emotional effect, the production of which is the one great function of the theatre."

Because of the distressing influence of a mediæval British censorship, Ibsen was long regarded, in the English-speaking theatre, as a sort of Doctor Munyon of the drama, lifting loftily an admonitory finger to the moralists and crying, "I'm for health!", while his opponents countered with the Puritanical assertion that his purpose and effect were merely to disseminate disease. Now at last-in consequence of the repeated efforts of Madame Nazimova and the new enthusiasm of Mr. Arthur Hopkins-the undertakings of this downright manufacturer of

plays for the general and normal public are beginning to be appreciated at their worth, as compositions which require the disinterested

admiration of all who seek "to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the theatre of the world."

VIOLETS

BY NANCY BARR MAVITY

THERE'S a place for violets,

By a brown stream, among the long swaying grasses;
Deep and purple and wistful and tender and gay,
Fresh as the joy of youth.

I have filled my hands with their green stems,

I have hidden my face in their coolness.
Violets, I lean to kiss you over the years.

But there's a place for violets—

They laugh and shake their beauty to the wind;
They need no aid of memories.

Where I walk the grey streets they are blue,
And snow cannot cover their fragrance.
You planted them in my heart, my friend-
I send you violets out of the love in my heart.

CHRONICLE AND COMMENT

THE promoters of the Liberty Loan have found good material for their propaganda

History Repeats work in the writings of Thomas Paine, author of Common

Sense, the first book (1776) to advocate American independence, and The Crisis, a series of inspiriting pamphlets which followed Common Sense in rapid succession when the revolution of the colonies had been established. The first sentence of this quotation from The Crisis heads Liberty Loan posters, and the entire paragraph is used on other literature of the propaganda:

These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country, but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheaply we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.

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