cal about it, almost operatic, which even the exquiste skill of the manipulation, and the wealth of character and meaning compressed into the conventional framework, cannot quite disguise. It is admirable in its kind, but the kind is not the highest.

The following sentences from an American criticism of A Doll's House, written when the play was first produced in New York, are exactly typical of a hundred English criticisms published about the same time. "The piece under consideration," says the critic, "is almost totally devoid of dramatic action. There is only one really dramatic incident, and that occurs when Nora dances a tarantella. All the rest is words. It is seldom that such a cataract of vapid talk has been let loose in a theatre." With unerring instinct, this gentleman lays his finger on the most strained, unnatural, in a word theatrical, effect in the play, and calls it the only dramatic incident. But now mark a curious point. This tarantella scene, with all its theatricality, is hardly ever effective on the stage. I have seen many Noras, first and last, and four of them very remarkable actresses: Fru Hennings, who originally created the character in Copenhagen; the incomparable Eleonora Duse; Madame Réjane; and our own Miss Achurch. But I have never seen any actress attain an effect in the tarantella-scene at all proportionate to the effort. People applaud, of coursethey will always applaud a dancebut it is the dance they are thinking of, not the situation. The scene is disappointing, just as so many scenes of great external picturesqueness are disappointing on the stage the idea dwarfs the reality. It is so obviously, so aggressively, theatrical, that we expect from it a greater thrill than it can ever give us.

Well now, is it not curious-is it not significant-that immediately after this

passage of violent theatricality, not to say staginess-immediately after he has wrung the last dregs of effect out of his apparatus of Christmas-tree masquerade, tinsel, and tarantella-Ibsen should suddenly, at a given moment, throw it all aside, never to be taken up again, and end this very play in the strain of pure drama, sober and searching, devoid of all mechanical accessories and antithetic fripperies, to which he ever afterwards adhered? There is a point where Nora, after Helmer has "forgiven" her, goes off the stage into her own adjoining room, and when Helmer asks her what she is going to do, replies, "To take off my masquerade dress." At that point, as it seems to me, it was Ibsen himself who, consciously or unconsciously, threw off all masquerade. He put away from him whatever was external and mechanical in the French technique. He had mastered and done with it. In Pillars of Society, and now in the first two acts of A Doll's House, he had developed the method of Scribe, on a line parallel to that of Sardou, and had reached a point about even with that at which Sardou has remained stationary. He had-to employ a somewhat grotesque image-danced his tarantella, and was henceforth to apply to soberer and more artistic purposes the skill, the suppleness, in a word the virtuosity he had thus acquired. When Nora, in her every-day clothes, confronts the astonished Helmer and says, "It's not so late yet. Sit down, Torvald; you and I have much to say to each other," it is the true Ibsen, of his latest and greatest period, that for the first time appears on the scene.

When I first saw A Doll's House acted, in Christiania, the Nora was a neophyte of no great talent, and the effect of the play, up to the middle of the third act, came far short of my expectations. The tarantella espe

cially fell very flat; but indeed the action, as a whole, did not at all "grip" me as it had in reading-until the point was reached where Nora and Helmer sat down, one on each side of the table, with the lamp between them, to make up the accounts of their matrimonial bankruptcy. Then the drama seized and held me as in a vice, and every phrase of Nora's threnody over her dead dreams, her lost illusions, thrilled me with an emotion such as I had never before experienced in the theatre. I was then a quarter of a century younger than I am now, and was not in the least biassed by any technical theories. I was perfectly content with the Scribe-Sardou formula, and went to the theatre predisposed to condemn this final scene, inasmuch as it set that formula at defiance. It was no theoretical, pumped-up rapture that seized me--indeed, it took me utterly by surprise. Nor do I now mean to say that the scene is unassailably excellent. I think it is an extreme example of psychological compression. Nora has attained, in a crisis of twenty minutes, an intellectual clearness with regard to her position, which, as a matter of fact, she would scarcely have acquired in months of reflection. But though the scene is open to criticism in many respects, I take it to be the first clear example of that power in which lies the peculiar greatness of Ibsen's later plays-the power of impregnating thought with emotion, and making psychological analysis palpitate with dramatic interest.

Other dramatists give us patches of analysis, interludes of thought, scattered throughout an action which exists independently of them, and which, from the strictly technical point of view, they merely cumber and delay. In Ibsen, at his best, the psychology and the action are inextricably interfused; the psychology is the action; and he has the art of unfolding the

soul-history of his personages with such cunning gradations, such vivid surprises, such lightning-like flashes of clairvoyance, that his analysis has all the thrill of adventure, all the fascination of romance.

When we contrast the stern, severe simplicity of Ghosts with the shimmering artificiality of A Doll's House (up to the final scene) we cannot but feel that between the two plays a revolution occurred. My own conjecture is that the revolution actually occurred during the composition of A Doll's House. I cannot help thinking that Ibsen originally designed the play to have a "happy ending," like that of The League of Youth or Pillars of Society, and that Mrs. Linden's influence over Krogstad was invented and adapted to that end. Then, I take it, as his work advanced, the poet himself began to realize the higher possibilities of his art, renounced the trickery of the "happy ending," and, in the final scene, made the first essay of the new powers which he felt to have developed within him. Ghosts, the first play written entirely under the new method, showed him not yet quite at his ease with it. Majestic, impressive though it be, it is a little too simple, a little heavy in its handling. Then the poet relaxed the tension in an admirable comedy, An Enemy of the People. If we compare it with its predecessor in a similar key, The League of Youth, we cannot but recognize an enormous artistic advance. Then comes that terrible tragi-comedy, The Wild Duck, a work almost as far ahead of A Doll's House in creative potency as A Doll's House itself is ahead of, say, Still Waters Run Deep. But if I am asked what I take to be Ibsen's technical masterpiece, I reply with very little hesitation, Rosmersholm. That marvellous play seems to me flawless in structure. It has all the closeness of texture of the earlier, and all the poetry of the later, plays. Ibsen's very

to recognize in these men its natural lords? After the failure of the Japanese War, after the failure of purely police measures of internal repression, where remained the infallibility of these gentlemen? After the disclosures of Prince Urúsoff, and the continued persistence of these men in Court influence, where remained their sense of decency? Hence it was in a vulgar struggle of Court favorites that the destinies of the Duma were decided. No! One must have only a paper conception of what is Constitutionalism if one rebukes the Duma for its failure. After all, it failed because it was too moderate, because it never persistently raised the question of the right to influence of powers behind the throne. We think too well of ourselves to ever imagine that we could tolerate as much. How could we, whose Parliament is in touch with the nation, whose Premier is in touch with the Parliament, and whose Sovereign is in the closest touch with the Premier, tolerate the idea of a state of things where the President of the Duma is never once admitted to private audience with the Sovereign, and where the chief of his adversaries can enter the sacred presence at almost any hour of the day?

I quote some remarks of Conservative Members of the Duma. Mr. Stakhovich, in a speech which was practically an apology for the Government, spoke of it as "a Government which we do not understand, and which does not understand us." Prince Urúsoff told me that it was his chief wish "that the Emperor should go down the Nevsky Prospekt at 9 o'clock every day." The Conservatives in their final address after the Dissolution say: "From the side of the Ministry which was in power we have met, not with help, but opposition, carrying us into a strife with it which made co-operative work impossible." These men-Prince

Urúsoff, Count Heyden, Mr. Stakhóvich are the old nobility, the natural Conservatives of the country; they represent the small minority of some fifty who formed the party of "Peaceful Renovation" to work for a peaceful settlement.

As for the majority, composed of the Cadets and the Labor group, it understood from the beginning that its main support was in the nation, and that its main policy must be one of pressure. There were faults of detail, but any other policy would have been a farce.

The second and more special cause of the Dissolution was the land question. It was by this that the Cadets, who had the leadership of the Duma, hoped to capture the support of all the peasants. The Peasants' Union had been formed with the aim of securing "all the land for those that labor." Out of the Peasants' Union had developed the formidable Labor Party. The principles of land tenure in Russia are historically quite different from what they are in England, and compulsory expropriation, with compensation, is accepted even by the majority of Conservatives; for instance, it forms an article of the programme of the first party of Peaceful Renovation. The Cadets practically adopted no more than this principle. But they were always more anxious to treat with the strong Left than with the weak Right; and though there were no delusions amongst themselves, they allowed their Land Bill to appear more Radical than it really was. They gave it the greatest prominence, and permitted almost every peasant to air his views on the subject, in the hope that each speech would become propaganda in the ' speaker's constituency. Many of these speeches were written out in advance, and no doubt many of them were sent home. The Ministry began by declaring all expropriation, however ducted, to be "inadmissible," and

con

thereby separated itself from the whole mass of intelligent opinion in the country. But it later came forward with a not unreasonable project of its own, and, to meet the propaganda of the Duma, it issued a definitely polemical "official communication" to the country in which it praised up its own project and decried that of the Duma. The tension on both sides was become intolerable; for the Duma had meanwhile been showering interpellation after interpellation on to the Ministry, revealing one by one all the weak spots in the old order of things. The Duma replied to the "official communication" by a Resolution combating the Government propaganda, and asking the people to be patient and wait for the Duma Law. This Resolution, which was practically an appeal to the people, was not happily worded. For, while lacking in strength, it revealed irritation. These defects were felt by the House, and so strong was the debate on them that the chief leaders of the Cadets (who, by the way, had not been responsible for the wording of the Resolution) for a time lost control of the debate, and, on division, suffered a serious check. This was the moment chosen by the enemies of the Duma. After long wavering between a Cadet Ministry and Dissolution, the Emperor was induced to decide in favor of

Dissolution.

Though the blow was quite unexpected, the majority of the Members still present in St. Petersburg found The Spectator.

their way out to Viborg, in Finland, where the last discussions were marked by great restraint and solidarity, and where an Address was adopted refusing taxes and conscripts to the present Government, and disclaiming all responsibility for future foreign loans. For different reasons, the first two of these points are weaker than they would seem to be, but the third is certainly a strong retort to the Government. We at least must remember that all three embody claims which have been embodied in English precedent for centuries (no taxes without Parliament, the Mutiny Act, and the control of finance by the Commons).

This Address marks the limit of what may be called "Constitutional resistance." The alternative to it was a Constituent Assembly with a revolution. It is just possible, after all, that M. Stolypin may prove to have made a "fool's mate"; but the task which he has undertaken seems enormous. One does not see how he is going to rule without sheer reaction (which indeed has already taken the shape of the closing of newspaper offices and clubs and the prohibition of all meetings), and we may guess that a great convulsion may come in the near future.

Anyhow, there has been a Duma, and a promise of another is contained in the Decree of Dissolution. And the work of the late Members cannot, in my opinion, be wholly lost. May nothing too extreme come in their place.

Bernard Pares.