adjustment, of balance and counterpoise.

It is, in brief, a very elaborate mechanism with which we have to deal, involving, on the designer's part, a totally different order of effort from that which went to the making of an Elizabethan chronicle-play, or any modern play on the same model, such as Tennyson's Becket or Queen Mary. I am not asserting superiority on either side. I am only registering a difference, and a difference which would not have existed, at any rate in the same degree, had not Ibsen studied in the school of the French mechanicians.

It is especially in this play, indeed, that Ibsen proves himself a master of intrigue, by drawing a master of intriguers. Bishop Nicholas is a cunning dramaturge, a sort of ecclesiastical Scribe, who pulls the strings of the action to further his own sinister purposes. Partly out of pure malevolence, and partly in the interests of the Church, he is determined that no king shall sit secure on the throne of Norway, and to that end he plays, by a hundred artifices, upon the characters of the rival pretenders, King Haakon and Duke Skulë. His death scene, in which he devotes the last energies of his being to the construction of what he calls a perpetuum mobile to keep the King and the Duke irreconcilably at strife, is an extraordinary instance of the intimate blending of intrigue with character-study. It is a marvel no less of psychological than of constructive subtlety; and the soliloquy in which the Bishop first conceives the idea of his perpetuum mobile is notable as a perfect definition of the very art which the poet himself was exercising throughout the play.

It may be said that we have a counterpart to the fusion of the play of character with the play of intrigue, not in Shakespeare's Histories, but in Othello. This is true, in a sense; but beside Bishop Nicholas, Iago is a veriLIVING AGE. VOL. XXXII.

table bungler in villainy. We forget the clumsiness of his wiles in the masterly dialogue of that incomparable third act; but every unprejudiced critic has recognized that his happy-go-lucky machinations do not in the least deserve to succeed, and are, in fact, predestined to the discovery which overtakes them. Bishop Nicholas's subtleties are ten times subtler, and he dies triumphing in the completion of his perpetuum mobile. His character, as a whole, is much more complex and more profoundly studied than Iago's, but that is nothing to my present purpose. What I wish to point out is that the mere intrigue of The Pretenders is handled with a dexterity to which, even in Othello, his masterpiece in this kind, Shakespeare makes no pretension. Bishop Nicholas outmanevres Iago, because he has learnt his tactics in the school of Scribe.

It is to be noted that Ibsen found in history only the barest hints for the Bishop's character. The whole invention and elaboration is his own. He elaborated it in that form, because he found in himself the requisite virtuosity for the piecing together of a complex mechanism; and at the same time he made this virtuosity subserve, in Haakon and Skulë no less than in the Bishop himself, a power of characterprojection and analysis far beyond the range of his French models. The worser side-the artificiality-of the French technique is felt chiefly in the miraculous exactitude with which incidents, probable enough in themselves, are made to occur at the very moment when dramatic effect requires them. Just when Haakon feels the need of Vegard Væradal's support, the news of Vegard's death is brought to him. Just when Bishop Nicholas is chuckling over the non-appearance of the document which proves or disproves Haakon's legitimacy, the document arrives. Just as Haakon is wonder

ing what has brought the wrath of heaven upon him, his mother appears to remind him of his harshness to her. Just as Skulë is yearning for the love and trust of a son and successor, the son, of whose existence he had not dreamed, comes knocking at his door. This method of, so to speak, giving the cue for each turn of fortune, is an artificiality which it took Ibsen long to outgrow.

In The Pretenders the soliloquy is freely employed. If it occurred merely

in the Bishop's death-scene it might be defended as a touch of realism, for the old man's feverish exaltation would very probably find vent in spoken words. But both Skulë and Haakon soliloquize at points where no such defence can be urged. These are the last instances in Ibsen's prose plays of the purely conventional soliloquy. Oddly enough, he does not employ it in Emperor and Galilean, in which his technique is, for the rest, sufficiently melodramatic. He deals largely in spectacular surprises and contrasts, and even presents us with the well-worn operatic effect of two choruses chanting alternately a pagan pæan and a Christian dirge. But the architecture of this giant drama would demand a study all to itself. I must hasten on to an examination of the plays of modern life, which began in 1869 with The League of Youth.

If Francisque Sarcey could have seen The League of Youth before he was prejudiced against Ibsen by his later works, he would certainly have found it a piece after his own heart-a little languid perhaps in the first and third acts, but in the second, fourth, and fifth a model of the "well-made play." Every detail confirms this classification. Half the action hinges upon misunderstandings and mistakes of identity, or, in the jargon of French criticism, on "quiproquos." The misconception on which the splendid com

edy of the second act is based, and several of the minor misunderstandings, are brought about by that vagueness of expression, that sedulous care not to mention names, which is one of the stock devices of French comedy. A forged document is made to pass through almost as many adventures as the "scrap of paper" in Les Pates de Mouche. Stensgaard and Bastian Monsen, both wishing to propose to Madam Rundholmen, both do so in writing (for no particular reason), and each (for no particular reason) gives his letter to Aslaksen to deliver. Then, when Stensgaard changes his mind, and determines to deliver his letter himself, Aslaksen mixes the two up and hands him Bastian's letter instead of his own. All this is so deftly managed that, in the rush of the action, we are scarcely conscious of its artificiality; but a moment's reflection shows us that it comes, not from life, but from midcentury French comedy. Who is not familiar with the scene in which Stensgaard, making a proposal to Madam Rundholmen on behalf of Bastian Monsen, does it in such ambiguous terms that she thinks he is wooing her on his own account? There is no more favorite device in the whole repertory of farce-effects. It was not in its first youth when Dickens employed it in Pickwick. Every detail in the structure of the play tells the same tale-Ibsen is simply using in masterly fashion the tools provided for him, as for Europe at large, by the French playwrights of the school of Scribe.

It is evident, too, that he still conceives comedy as a sort of game which neither author nor audience must be expected to take too seriously. This appears particularly in the way in which the end is patched up. As soon as Stensgaard has run the gauntlet of rejection by all three ladies to whom he had made his mercenary advancesas soon as he has been dismissed with

contumely, in a scene which resembles a symmetrical dance-figure rather than any conceivable episode in real life the rest of the characters beam with smiles, and proceed to fall into one another's arms. The Chamberlain forgives his son, who has forged his name, and, reversing the whole policy of his life, goes into partnership with him. His rebellious daughter-in-law, Selma, is reconciled to her husband; Daniel Heire abandons his law-suits; even Aslaksen is invited to sit at the Chamberlain's table; and the moral of the comedy is formulated in what may almost be called a set "tag." The whole thing has been a storm in a teacup. It has blown over; every one (except Stensgaard) is the wiser and the better for it; and they are all going to live happily for ever afterwards. We are even provided with the statutory "love interest," though it takes a subordinate place. Dr. Fieldbo, the entirely reasonable and sympathetic personage (the first and last in Ibsen's modern plays), after wandering through the action in sententious superiority, is rewarded with the hand of Thora Bratsberg. All this complacent conventionality acts as a sort of oil to the cogs and cranks of the mechanism, and comes from the same emporium.

If I were asked to name the perfect model of the well-built play of the French school, I should not go either to Augier or Sardou for an example, but to Ibsen's Pillars of Society. In symmetrical solidity of construction, complexity combined with clearness of mechanism, it seems to me incomparable. Yet at the same time I should call it by far the least interesting of all the works of his maturity.

In one respect it shows him very distinctly feeling forward towards his later method. In The League of Youth the whole of the action passed, so to speak, within the frame of the picture. Nothing depended on the bygone his

tory of the characters. What little we learn of Stensgaard's, Heire's, Selma's antecedents comes in quite incidentally, and is not in the least necessary to our comprehension of the story. In Pillars of Society, on the other hand, what is presented on the stage is only the second half of a drama, the first half of which was enacted fifteen years before the rise of the curtain. The action, in fact, consists almost entirely in the gradual revelation of the truth concerning a series of bygone events. More and more, as time goes on, does this become Ibsen's formula. His characters are occupied in raising curtain after curtain from the past, in probing deeper and deeper towards some hidden truth; and as soon as this is reached and realized, they are on the brink of the catastrophe. It has been said, not without justice, that Ibsen's later plays, are all retrospect and catastrophe; and it has, with equal justice, been pointed out that, in so far, his method is identical with that of Sophocles in the Edipus Tyrannus.

In Pillars of Society, as I have said, he is only feeling his way towards the "retrospect and catastrophe" formula. A good deal of action within the frame of the picture, or, in other words, of intrigue, is created by the fact that the principal character, Karsten Bernick, energetically, and even by criminal devices, struggles against the elucidation of the past, thereby approaching in some measure to the villain of ordinary melodrama. When the formula is more fully developed (as in the typical instance of Rosmersholm) the process of elucidation, once begun, proceeds by such inevitable degrees that no one dreams of struggling against it. Veil after veil is torn from the face of truth as though by some invisible, ineluctable destiny. There is a sense of fatality in the air which accentuates the kinship between Ibsen and the tragic poets of antiquity.

All the complex threads of the action in Pillars of Society are interwoven with astonishing clearness. In the nice adjustment of motive and incident, the play may hold its own with such masterpieces of intrigue as Scribe's Adrienne Lecouvreur and Sardou's Fédora. In its structure it belongs entirely to this school; it is in matters unconnected with structure-for instance, in the masterly scene of casuistry between Bernick and Rörlund in the fourth act-that Ibsen's true originality manifests itself. In some respects, moreover, he is still under the influence, not only of Scribe, but of the French Romanticists. He is still intent on what may be called the external irony of picturesque antithesis. For instance, it is while the streets are illuminated in his honor, and while a torchlight procession of his fellowcitizens is approaching to do him homage, that Karsten Bernick learns of the flight of his son in the coffin-ship which he himself is sending to sea. This is the sort of effect which Victor Hugo loved and would have applauded. Its somewhat cheap emphasis is very foreign to Ibsen's later manner.

It need scarcely be pointed out, too, that in Pillars of Society Ibsen has not outgrown the convention of the happy ending. In The League of Youth, essentially a light comedy, the perfunctoriness of the close does not trouble us. But when, in Pillars of Society, Olaf is brought safe home, and Bernick, converted in the crisis of emotion, makes a clean breast of his misdeeds and proclaims himself a reformed character, we feel that Ibsen is not yet taking his art quite seriously. He still holds with Scribe that the business of the dramatist is not to obey psychological necessity, but to invent plausible means of evading it, in the interests of popular optimism.

It is in A Doll's House that he finally breaks with French tradition, and

breaks with it, one may say, almost at a definite line on which one can lay one's finger. The first two acts, and the first half of the third act, are thoroughly French in method. First we have the confidante, Mrs. Linden. She has a certain character of her own, for Ibsen could not, if he would, draw a mere lay figure. But she and her character do not belong to the spiritual essence of the play. Her function is mechanical. She has to listen to Nora's confidences, in order that we may overhear them; and she has to influence the upshot of the action by softening the heart of Krogstad. She is external, if I may so phrase it, to the psychological chemistry of the action. She serves, now as a rod to stir the mixture, now as a ladle to skim it; but she has no part in the chemical process itself. In Ibsen's later plays, you will scarcely find another character of the slightest prominence to whom this description applies.

The long scene between Nora and Mrs. Linden constitutes a formal exposition of that part of the action-a good half-which lies outside the frame of the picture. It ends with Nora's cry, "Oh, what a wonderful thing it is to live and to be happy!"-and instantly there comes a ring at the bell, and Krogstad's shadow falls across Nora's glee. Here we have an instance of the old traditional irony; a case of Nemesis in miniature; an exclamation of happiness giving the cue for the entrance of disaster. Again, a little further on, we have the same antithesis in a heightened form. Nora, romping with her children, is so absorbed in the game, that when Krogstad comes to strike the fatal blow at her happiness, he actually stands amongst them before she is aware of his presence. An admirable stage-effect this is, no doubt, and introduced most skilfully and naturally. But in the light of Ibsen's later method, one sees that it is of the stage,

stagey. Such so-called "dramatic" conjunctures do, no doubt, occur in life; but as the dramatist sees deeper into the inexhaustible wealth of essential drama in the human soul, he is less and less tempted to concern himself with surface accidents such as this.

Krogstad reveals to Nora the true import of her action in signing her father's name, and leaves her a prey to terror which she strives in vain to shake off. And here mark the ingenuity with which Krogstad's own delinquency is made to throw a lurid light upon Nora's. In a scene which forms a sort of counterpart to that between Bernick and Rörlund before alluded to, Nora tries to find comfort in getting Helmer to say that Krogstad's offence was not unpardonable; but he, little dreaming what is at stake, merely hammers the nail deeper into her soul. This scene (the last scene of the first act) is manipulated with the utmost skill, but produces an unmistakable effect of artificiality. Note, for instance, Helmer's remark, "Nearly all cases of early corruption may be traced to lying mothers." We cannot but echo Nora's question: "Why-mothers?" We feel that Ibsen here gives the conversation a slight twist, a little kink as it were, which is not absolutely unnatural, indeed, but is too clearly designed to dot the i of the situation. Again, Nora's withdrawal of her hand when Helmer says, "It gives me a positive sense of physical discomfort to come in contact with such people," is merely an old stage trick turned outside in. Sardou, too, had he written the scene, would infallibly have made Nora say, "How warm it is here!" That is the established remark for a character who wishes to dissemble great mental perturbation.

The second act, as we all know, culminates in the famous tarantella-scene -a crowning and final instance of that striving after picturesque antithesis

which is as old in drama as Euripides at least, but is specially affected by the French romantic playwrights and their Spanish progenitors. There is no more favorite antithesis than that of revelry and horror-witness the marble guest appearing at Don Juan's orgie, or the Miserere in Lucrèce Borgia extinguishing the mirth of the doomed roysterers. The analogy between these scenes and that of Nora's tarantella may not at first be apparent; but a little examination will show that Ibsen simply screws up the effect a peg or two by making the contrast between gaiety and horror no longer lie in the mere inert juxtaposition of the two elements, but in Nora's active assumption of feverish merriment in order to mask her resolve of suicide. Reduce the scene to its bare formula-a woman dancing on the brink of the grave-and you see how ultra-romantic, how Spanish, how Hugoesque it is. But it is not merely in the actual tarantella-scene that Ibsen strives for this effect of antithesis. That scene is only the culmination of an antithesis running through the whole play. He has deliberately selected the season of Christmas festivity to form a radiant background to the horror of Rank's doom and Nora's agony. While Nora is learning from Helmer the true import of her innocent felony, she is mechanically decking a Christmas-tree with candles and tinsel. While Rank is telling her that the clutch of death is at his heart, she is preparing her masquerade dress. In the last act, as the sense of impending disaster deepens, we hear the gay rhythms of the tarantella from the ball-room above. Nora enters with the dread of death in her eyes, and decked out in the parti-colored dress of an Italian contadina. Throughout there runs this strain of insistent antithesisthe familiar mediæval antithesis of the rose-wreathed skeleton, the Dance of Death. There is something theatri