crouch unseen within three yards of the most vigilant. Little doubt that each man eyed the cross-bar on his spear, and thought how very small and very near him it looked: it gave a pleasurable titillation of excitement amid the tumult of the numbers of the village; but its significance now became very real and very grim.

The chief shouted his order to the men to stand steady because he thought that, as the tiger had not by this time passed the guns, it must be aware of their position and intend to seek safety by breaking back through the line of beaters. Every one knew what the chief thought, and waited, peering into the dark forest in front of him, in readiness for the next word of command. Then the chief shouted again. All leapt to their feet, ran forward a few yards, five or six perhaps or it may be even less, and then as suddenly stopped and knelt again. "Steady! Hold steady!" they shouted up and down the line, while all strained their eyes to catch a gleam of yellow in the heavy shadows of the black and green of the forest. Thus they advanced in short quick rushes with sudden pauses until they were within two hundred yards of us. The excitement by this time was almost overpowering in its intensity. I could not of course see the men, but knew by the sound that only this distance separated us, and that on the other side of the thickets and tree-trunks in front of me, fierce Malay eyes glared and peered for the hidden tiger. Then suddenly in a tree, half-way between the beaters and the guns, a squirrel raised its chattering note of alarm. Another squirrel immediately took up the cry, and the pair of them kept up such an incessant clamor that it was plain that they were scolding an intruder; it was obvious also that the intruder was within a few yards of them. The tree from which they uttered their defiance

was situated in a ravine-like depression in the forest, exactly the sort of place in which a tiger, or any animal, would seek a refuge from the invasion of the beaters. The chief shouted to the men to move in upon the place, and the long line swept inwards and enclosed it in a semicircle. By this time the length of the line had so contracted that the men were nearly shoulder to shoulder. Only a hundred yards or so separated them from the guns, and it was therefore practically impossible for any animal between them and us to escape. The Malays now advanced foot by foot, and in an almost breathless silence. Then I saw something move stealthily under a fallen tree, whose dead leaves prevented me from getting more than a glimpse of it, and that, too, a glimpse not so much of it as of the place from which it had stirred. It saw me as soon as I saw it, and, knowing itself to have been discovered, a great, gaunt wild sow rushed out and dashed past The nearer of the beaters heard it and dropped on their knees with their spears thrust forward to receive it. "Here he is! Here he is! Steady! Hold steady!"

me.

For a space not a man moved; probably not a man breathed. Then I shouted that the animal that had come out was only a pig, and that the tiger had not yet shown itself. "Pig," they roared up and down the line, "only a pig"; and again the line moved forward to beat out the few remaining yards that separated them from the guns. But when they reached us not a sign was there anywhere of the tiger.

Excited questions were yelled on every side. No one knew what had happened. What every one failed to understand was why no one had fired. The men thronged round the place where the old sow had passed by me, and leant upon their spears examining the tracks and mournfully shaking their heads. Their heaving chests, twitch

ing muscles, and unnaturally contracted eyelids told of the intense nervous strain which they had undergone.

Had any one seen or heard the tiger, and who had first raised the alarm? In reply to this, several men spoke to having heard the tiger, but no one had actually seen it. Every man of them indignantly repudiated the suggestion that he could have mistaken a pig's grunt for a tiger's growl. Malays know the two sounds so well that such a mistake would be most unlikely. Several pigs had been seen, but no one had taken any notice of them. When we asked the men who declared that they had heard the tiger how they accounted for its having escaped unseen, they pointed out that when the squirrels had given their alarm we had all taken it for granted that they had seen the tiger (whereas it was probably only the sow), and that when the beaters closed in upon the ravine they had left the forest on either side unguarded. This of course was perfectly true, and their explanation of our failure was probably the correct one.

Some of the more enthusiastic of the Malays proposed that the ground should at once be beaten over again, but midday was past and it did not need a second glance at the majority of the men to see that the excitement, rather than their exertions, had so exhausted them that they were not fit to undertake another drive. Moreover, even if the tiger had really been in the ground covered by the first drive, it by no means followed that it would be there by the time that the beaters were ready to line up again. We decided therefore that we must give it up. We covered our disappointment as best we could, but our long high-strung excitement had had such a miserable ending that one might have noticed an almost hysterical catch in the laugh of more than one man.

drive that I have ever seen. The fact that no tiger was seen and that possibly no tiger was near us does not in any way detract from the sport. We all believed that the tiger was there: the guns thought that a tiger which was aware of their presence was being forced to come towards them; and the beaters felt that they were impelling forward an animal whose desire was to charge back through their ranks. If the drive had ended by a tiger being shot, it would not in the slightest degree have added to the excitement that marked the duration of the drive. I have shot a tiger in a drive that had not a tenth of the interest of this day. Accompanied only by Malays I have occasionally had to follow wounded tigers on foot through nasty country: as I have said above, I have heard the selawat answered in royal style; but nowhere else have I seen such an intensity of feeling and excitement. With this the number of men employed had a great deal to do. It is seldom that one requires more than thirty or forty beaters, whereas in this case fully two hundred men were engaged. The amount of magnetic feeling, where the excitement was communicated from unseen unit to unseen unit throughout the forest, was enormous, and the air vibrated to the unuttered excitement of the men.

It is in a drive where a line of men armed only with spears advances thus determinedly upon a tiger, that you realize how powerful a brute it is that they are assailing. From the safety and height of a tree or an elephant's back, you may shoot tigers with safety; but when you come down to the ground, and either advance on foot to meet the tiger or wait on foot for it to be driven up, the feeling comes home to you of the marvellous strength and activity that are combined in that beautiful frame. It may be within a few

you do, and itself unseen. It can steal noiselessly through the forest where you can only move with crackling of leaves and breaking of twigs. You know that, when the occasion comes, that wonderful lithe body can come with lightning speed through the thick tangled growth that hampers and impedes your every movement. Finally you know that at close quarters a man is as helpless as a child against the overpowering weight and strength of an animal that kills an ox at a blow.

There is little doubt that almost every one has a peculiar sensation of the almost god-like beauty, power, activity, and strength of a tiger. A tiger will overawe and make conscious of his inferiority a man who would be unaffected by the bulk of an elephant. The feeling is, however, elusive of description, and I can perhaps best explain it in the words of a most charming French gentleman (now dead, alas!) who was once manager of a great tinmining company in Perak. I well remember his coming into the Tapah messroom where the Europeans of the district used in those days to take their meals. We had just finished lunch when he entered in a state of tremendous excitement. Walking alone and unarmed along an unfrequented bridle-path through the forest he had Macmillan's Magazine.

us a most vivid narrative of the encounter; how the tiger had been lying down concealed in some long lalang grass beside the path, how he was within ten yards of it before he saw it, how then it rose and looked at him, how it yawned at him, how it then walked slowly across the path in front of him, and then stopped and looked at him, again yawning; and how it then deliberately walked away into the forest whose depths finally hid it from view. I cannot attempt to imitate the beautiful and forcible diction that Monsieur C. had at his command, for the plain facts that I have thrown into a single sentence received from the narrator a majesty of style and a wealth of coloring and detail that cannot be reproduced on paper.

Some one asked him whether it was a big tiger. It is his answer that illustrates my meaning.

"Well, Messieurs, I cannot say if he is a big tiger. My eyes see that he is big; but I cannot say how big I see him to be; and if I say how big, it is perhaps that I tell you a lie. But I can tell you, Messieurs, how big I feel him to be, and I can tell you the truth. When he is standing there in front of me, I tell you that I feel he is not less than thir-r-ty feet high."

George Maxwell.

In a former article in this Review1 I examined the repertory of the Bergen Theatre during the six years of Henrik Ibsen's connection with it, and showed that, in the exercise of his functions, he must have closely studied some seventy-five French plays, most of them belonging to the then dominant school of Eugène Scribe. I suggested, very

1 Ibsen's Apprenticeship. January 1904.

briefly, that the influence of these studies was apparent in all his plays (except the three dramas in verse), from Lady Inger right down to A Doll's House. In that play, as it seemed to me, he finally outgrew and cast off the domination of the French school; but he would never have been the mastertechnician he ultimately became had he not first learnt, and then deliberately

unlearnt, the former

dexterities of Scribe and his disciples. I now propose to illustrate a little more fully this reading of the history of his technical development.

It is no longer necessary to insist on the fact that Ibsen was a consummate craftsman. In the days when the great Ibsen controversy raged throughout Europe, the hostile critics declared his work to be childishly simple, regarding it, apparently, as a sort of eccentric improvisation. No one now doubts that its seeming simplicity is only the mask of a complexity beyond all precedent. Ibsen's dialogue is a marvellously-adjusted mosaic, in which every tiniest tessera has its definite and carefully-studied function. But this art of adjustment is not so much an invention as a development. We can trace its growth through play on play. And it distinctly grew out of that delicacy in the adjustment of external incidents which Ibsen acquired in the .school of Scribe.

Perhaps it may not be altogether misleading if we put the matter thus: .Scribe's contribution to theatrical technique was the art of constant movement.2 Every scene and almost every speech of his plays shook the kaleidoscope and brought about a more or less marked and interesting change in the fortunes or relations of his char-acters. He led the spectator through a continuous series of small "peripeties," .and thus kept his attention, his interest in the process of events, constantly on the alert. He never allowed three minutes to elapse without some marked alteration, more or less surprising, or exciting, or moving, or entertaining, in

I do not here inquire into the question of Scribe's originality, or his relation to his immediate predecessors,from Beaumarchais onward. Probably he was not a great innovator, -even in technique, but is rather to be regarded as the representative figure in a general movement which would have taken no very different course even if he had never -existed. The human mind will never rest con

the posture of affairs. This art of external movement Ibsen acquired and practised in his earlier plays. In The League of Youth he exercises it very much as Scribe himself would have done. But, as play follows play, he gradually applies it more and more deliberately to different ends, until at last, instead of external movement, it is psychological movement on which he is intent. With him, too, the pattern, the posture of affairs, is never stationary; but the changes take place in the souls of the actors, and are often scarcely discernible in their external fortunes and relations until the final catastrophe is reached. Movement, in fine, is the secret of Ibsen's theatre, as it is of Scribe's; but the movement is spiritual instead of material.

Of the plays of his Bergen period I have spoken in the article referred to above. Let me only say here that the most remarkable of them, Lady Inger, though it contains all the germs of his future greatness, is so clearly prentice-work that it might almost be taken for a caricature both of German romanticism, with its grave-vaults and coffins, and of French intrigue, with its mistakes of identity brought about through the careful abstinence of all concerned from reasonable clearness of expression.

In The Vikings at Helgeland (1858)— the first play he wrote after leaving Bergen-Ibsen had made an extraordinary technical advance. He aimed at, and he achieved, something of the stern simplicity of the sagas from which he took his material. The trag edy grows, indeed, out of an incredible mistake of identity-a mistake tent until it has exhausted the possibilities of any given instrument; and the Scribe style of play was one of the possibilities, and at first sight one of the most fascinating, of the highly complex instrument that we call the modern theatre. It was an inevitable phase of development, the philosophy of which has yet to be thoroughly studied.

which, in the earliest, mythical form of the legend, is brought about by supernatural means. Ibsen, eschewing supernatural agency, places the thing on the plane of romance. Sigurd's personation of Gunnar in the killing of the bear and carrying-off of Hiördis is an incident to be conventionally accepted, just as we conventionally accept the disguises and substitutions of one person for another which abound in Elizabethan drama. But in The Vikings this mythical or ultra-romantic motive is placed outside the frame of the play. It has occurred years before the action opens, and thus taxes our credulity far less than if it were "subjected to our faithful eyes." It is one of those initial postulates which, according to Sarcey's famous maxim (a corollary to the Horatian principle), we are always ready to accept without cavil. Apart from this postulate, the action of The Vikings is entirely logical, and is carried forward without trickery of any sort. The supremely pathetic situation of the second act arises, no doubt, from a misunderstanding of Ornulf's purpose in setting forth in pursuit of Kaare; but the misunderstanding is natural and even inevitable; it was not in Ornulf's character to be explicit as to his intentions. The soliloquy, too, is almost suppressed, for Hiördis's mutterings in the third act are little more than the ejaculations which in fact are often wrung from us by strong emotion. There are, indeed, two extremely inartistic "asides" in the final scene Dagny's "So bitterly did she hate him!" and Gunnar's "Then after all she loved me!" But these are worse than merely technical flaws; they are symptoms of the romantic-sentimental psychology which is still dominant in the play. Taking it as a whole, one may almost say that the technique of The Vikings is in advance of its substance. The French principle of change, of movement, is realized with little or no resort to French artifice. It

seems as though Ibsen had already assimilated what is good, and rejected what is bad, in the technique of Scribe.

But this is a fallacious appearance. Ibsen eschews artifice, not because he theoretically rejects it, but because he feels it to be out of keeping with the heroic simplicity of the characters and manners he is delineating. When we pass to The Pretenders, in itself an immeasurably greater work, we find him falling back without a qualm upon all the methods of French intriguespinning.

To realize what Scribe and his school had done towards the subtilizing of the dramatic mechanism, we need only compare The Pretenders, with one of Shakespeare's, or even of Schiller's or Ehlenschläger's, historical plays. Here is a theme of which all the elements are present in Shakespeare's historiesrival pretenders to the throne, turbulent nobles of either faction, a crafty churchman undermining the temporal power in the interest of his order. How, then, would Shakespeare have treated it? He would have been content to take from Snorri Sturlasson, as he did from Holinshed, a few episodes suitable for rhetorical expansion, and to string them loosely together, perhaps with a comic underplot still more loosely attached to them. However dramatic in its individual scenes, his play would have been essentially epical in its general form. Now a certain amount of the epical element is doubtless discernible in Ibsen's play. It has not the absolute unity and concentration of, say, the Edipus Rex. or of Rosmersholm, or even of The Vikings. But its complex interweaving of motive and event is totally foreign to the technique of historical drama as it was understood before the days of Scribe and Dumas. Everywhere we have a sense of nice measurement and forethought, the winding up of springs, the fitting of wheel into wheel, the careful