That Ibsen exercised and will exercise great influence on American dramatists there can be little doubt.  His skill was no mere accident.  He was the most finished development of the French school of the nineteenth century, as well as the most highly artificial individual dramatist of that school.  I call it the strictly logical school of dramatic construction.  I use the word ‘artificial’ in its more artistic sense, as opposed to the so-called natural school.  His subjects of course were national, and not French.  Whether his pessimism was national or personal, I have not been able to discover.  It seemed to me that he was a pessimistic man dealing with a nation inclined to pessimism, but that had nothing to do with the technical qualities of the man any more than the national peculiarities of Denmark had to do with Thorvaldsen as a follower of Greek sculpture.

As to the policy of our theatre managers, I confess that they do follow each other; but it is simply because they think the leader they happen to be following has discovered a current of temporary popular taste.  The authors have the same interest as the managers, and you will always find them watching the public taste in the same manner.

Occasionally an individual dramatist, and not always the best from a technical point of view, will develop such a strong personal bias as to write on subjects suggested by his own tastes, without any regard to the current of popular wishes.  If he is a strong enough man he will become a leader of the public in his dramatic tastes.  Sometimes in rare instances he will influence the public so decidedly that he compels the contemporary school of writers to follow him.  This has been the case in all periods.  I need not mention Shakespeare, as everything said about him is a matter of course.

Take the vile dramatic era of Charles II.  Wycherley led the brutes, but Congreve came up and combatted with his brilliant comedies the vileness of the Restoration school, and Hallam says of him that he introduced decency to the stage that afterward drove his own comedies off it.  A little after Congreve, the school, so to speak, for we have nothing but the school, was so stupid that it brought forth no great writers, and produced weak, sentimental plays.  Then came Goldsmith, who wrote “She Stoops to Conquer” actually as a protest against the feeble sentimentality I have referred to.  Richard Brinsley Sheridan was made possible by Goldsmith.  We went on after that with a school of old comedies.  When we speak of the “old comedies,” I am not talking about Beaumont and Fletcher, nor Wycherley, nor Vanbrugh, nor even Congreve, but of the comedy of Goldsmith in the third quarter of the eighteenth century down to Bulwer Lytton’s “Money” and Boucicault’s “London Assurance,” bringing us to about 1840.  Then there swung a school of what we call the palmy days of old comedy, and in the ’40’s it dwindled to nothing, and England and America waited until the early ’60’s.  Then came Tom Robertson with his so-called “tea-cup and saucer” school, which consisted of sententious dialogue, simple situations, conventional characterizations, and threads of plots, until Pinero and Jones put a stop to the Robertson fad.