plot of the ’Pillars of Society’ would probably have hugely pleased Scribe.  But he has also the larger imagination which can people situation with character and which can make situation significant as an opportunity for character to express itself.  Ingenious as he is in plot-building, with him character always dominates situation.  To Ibsen character is destiny, and the persons of his plays seem to have created, by their own natural proceeding, the predicaments in which they are immeshed.

Ibsen is particularly happy in the subordinate devices by which he reveals character,—­for example, Maia’s taking off the green shade when the Master-Builder enters the room.  And another device, that of the catchword, which he took over from Scribe and the younger Dumas, and which, even in his hands, remains a mere trick in the early ’League of Youth,’ is so delicately utilized in certain of the later plays—­witness, the “vine-leaves in his hair” of ‘Hedda Gabler’ and the “white horses” in ’Rosmersholm’—­that these recurrent phrases are transformed into a prose equivalent of Wagner’s leading-motives.  So, too, Ibsen does without the raisonneur of Dumas and Augier, that condensation of the Greek chorus into a single person, who is only the mouthpiece of the author himself and who exists chiefly to point the moral, even tho he may sometimes also adorn the tale.  Ibsen so handles his story that it points its own moral; his theme is so powerfully presented in action that it speaks for itself.

It must also be noted that Ibsen, like all born playwrights, like Scribe and Dumas and Augier, like Sophocles and Shakspere and Moliere, is well aware of the double aspect of the theater, in that the stage can rise to the loftiest heights of philosophic poetry and that it can fall also to the lowest depths of the show-business.  An audience has ears, but the spectators who compose it have eyes also; and the born playwright never fails to provide the picturesqueness and the visible movement which satisfy the senses, whatever may be the more serious appeal to the mind.  In the modern theater the stage is withdrawn behind a picture-frame; and it is the duty of the dramatist to satisfy our demand for a stage-setting pictorially adequate.  The sets of Ibsen’s plays have evidently been sharply visualized by him; they are elaborately described; and they lend themselves effectively to the art of the scene-painter.  Sometimes they are beautiful in themselves, novel and suggestive; always are they characteristic of the persons and of the underlying idea of the play.

VI

When we examine carefully the earlier of his social dramas we discover Ibsen to be a playwright of surpassing technical dexterity, whose work is sustained and stiffened and made more valuable and more vital by the cooeperation of the philosopher that Ibsen also is, a philosopher who is a poet as well and who helps the playwright to find the stuff he handles, the raw material of his art, in the naked human soul, in its doubts and its perplexities, in its blind gropings and in its ineffectual strivings.  But in considering the later plays we are forced to wonder whether the philosopher has not gained the upper hand and reduced the playwright to slavery.