The lord of the tempest hies him down
From his billow-crest to his cavern throne,
And 'tis peace as wide as eye can see

When my lover rests on the heart of me.

That these plays have faults no one can gainsay, but that the faults are overshadowed by their innumerable excellencies is equally beyond question. The defects are those of craftsmanship and are remediable, and will be in time, for Mrs. Dargan's work has the saving quality of sincerity and uplift. Her virtues are those that are needed for the regeneration of the American stage. The lightness that cannot be moved to look on great and solemn things; the pessimism that hails downright realism as the loftiest art expression; and that bestial conception which measures art by the purse-strings, must all give way to an idealism that never falters, and an art that is grounded in the greatness of the masters of the past, with which is joined a message of truth and spirituality to the present.

It may be that Shakespeare would have stopped writing had his earlier plays not been presented, but the stage was his school and through it he was educated out of the crudenesses and affectations of "The Comedy of Errors" and "Love's Labour's Lost," attaining at last the glorious technique of "Othello" and "Lear."

One dare not venture to say that the author of "Semiramis" is a Shakespeare in embryo, but it may be said with much show of truth that her book is the most interesting volume of plays brought out by an American in many years, and, almost the only American poetic dramas worthy of the name. Just what she will achieve in the future depends not so much upon herself as upon her opportunities for beholding her plays in concrete form upon the stage with her characters interpreted by efficient

actors.

The complaint that there is no American drama may be true; but if it is not, it will soon be so unless American managers are willing to support the efforts towards the development of an indigenous drama. The stage and not the printing-press is the true medium of the playwright; his work can never obtain val

idity, nor can he cast aside the crudenesses of his chrysalis state until he is permitted to do so by touch with the home of the drama, the theatre.

So long as the stage is in the hands of those whose ideas of art are so simple that they can be summed up in the words "Will it pay?" whose sole endeavor is, Midas-like, to change all things, even those of loveliness into gold, there can be no American dramatic art. Capital is always timid. It cannot afford to make experiments, even though the result should be an American Renaissance.

Vanderbilt University.

EDWIN WILEY.

IBSEN AS A DRAMATIST1

When The League of Youth," the first of his prose social dramas, was produced in 1867, Ibsen was forty-one years old, and had already written twelve dramatic pieces. Two of these -the poetic dramas, "Brand" and "Peer Gynt"—are masterpieces; all of them show the born dramatist. Long training, therefore, together with the dramatic gift, has gone to the making of the social dramas; and this training and this gift must be reckoned with. Ibsen the dramatist is as great as Ibsen the individualist; the two cannot be separated, and, indeed, the one, in a sense, determines the other. Both have been dominant in Ibsen almost from the first. He has stood apart from his fellows, watching their movements with the curiosity (not always perfectly sane) of a psychologist and the instincts of a dramatist. The queer incidents of Ibsen's boyhood-intrinsically unimportant show that the child was father to the man. The black poodle with glowing red eyes that lived in the church-tower of his birth town; the pillory "with its gloomy mysteries;" the town-jail where criminals and mad-folk were confined; - these were the objects, Ibsen says, that most impressed his childhood. This aloofness - already presaging an unsocial nature-was greatly intensified when Ibsen was eight years old by the business failure of his father and the necessity of the family to live upon a farm outside the village. From this period until he was sixteen, when he moved to Grimstad, Ibsen gave free rein to his gloomy and solitary habits. He played alone or mused over a few old books, and his brothers and sisters failed to draw him into their outdoor sports. In all this, as well as in the juvenile dramatics of Sunday afternoons, Jæger professes to find the beginnings of Ibsen the individualist and Ibsen the dramatist.

At sixteen he went to Grimstad to become drug-clerk, where his early peculiarities, instead of being subdued by contact with society, developed more and more. But one result could come from a nature like Ibsen's -a clash with the social forces around

'Principally based on the nine social dramas included in Mr. Archer's translations, published in this country by Scribners.

him. Reserved, shy, taciturn, deep, he found nothing congenial in the community. The people interfered (or he thought they did) with his free development as an individual. Not understanding him, they misunderstood him. Left alone, he wandered among the hills, often by moonlight and late, when his soul was most apt to find itself:

Here in this wild and stormy place

My soul at last finds rest,

And here to me seems Nature's face
Reflected in my breast.

-Jæger's Translation.

The mood here expressed was not transient: essentially it never left him. Ibsen's individualism, his voluntary alienation from a society and a world he more and more despised, — all comes out in this enjoyment of nature in her wildest recesses and her loneliest hours. Something mystic, brooding, melancholy developed in the young poeta spirit romantic indeed, but not hollow nor touched with "windy sentimentalism." Instead of participat

ing in the gaieties of a ball, he prefers standing by to ask himself searching questions concerning the lives of the dancers; and he finds "anticipation, hope, and disappointment" to be the "whole story of human life." Individualism, then, with an undercurrent of mysticism, gloom, and even cynicism, constitutes Ibsen's temperament as well as his philosophy, and lies at the very basis of his poetic criticism of life, profoundly affecting the form and the substance of his later dramatic work.

Ibsen brought out his first drama, "Catilina," in 1850. The work was a failure at the hands of the theatrical managers and the public, and justly so, for it has the crudities of youth (judging from Jæger's analysis) and is lacking in dramatic situation and in mastery of detail. But the play is important because it is characteristic, and characteristic in two ways: in its subject and its manner. Its subject is social Its subject is social - the protest of the individual against the deadening restraints and conventions of society. Ibsen himself may easily be identified with his hero at war with a corrupting and narrowing environment. The work is thus written upon a truly Ibsen theme. Its manner is not less typical: the subjective, psychological manner of which Ibsen is now an ac

knowledged master. He says himself: "Many things and much upon which my later work has turned - the consideration between endowment and desire, between capacity and will, at once the entire comedy and tragedy of mankind and of the individual-may here be dimly discerned."

In 1850 Ibsen went to Christiania to prepare for examinations previous to entering the university. But his poetic and dramatic instincts were too strong for the systematic life of a student. He wrote a one-act play called "The Warriors' Tomb," performed at the Christiania Theatre, September 26, 1850. Next year came a musical tragedy in three acts, called "Norma: or a Politician's Love"-a satirical piece unpublished. In consequence of these dramas his reputation grew, and in November, 1851, Ibsen was appointed Theatre-Poet of a newly-built theatre at Bergen, erected in response to a fresh interest in Norway as a nation. He received a small travelling stipend and visited theatres at Copenhagen and at Dresden where he studied the production of many kinds of plays from "Hamlet" to "Bataille de Dames." In 1851 the influence of Scribe was at its height, and Ibsen learned much from that most skillful of contemporary French playwrights. Returning to Bergen he took up the duties of his position. Says Jæger: "For about ten years he was bound to the Norwegian theatre in the capacity of stagemanager and during this time produced at least a hundred pieces. This was exactly the training Ibsen could most profit by. No other art is more difficult to master than the art of successful stage-craft, and Ibsen's close contact with the theatre and its audiences resulted, at the end of a decade, in making him a master of dramaturgy, and at the end of two decades more, the supreme master in his century. Besides presenting numerous pieces of other authors, from Shakespeare to Scribe, he wrote and presented four of his own, two of which have not been published. They represent a conflict in Ibsen between the realism. which was inherent in him and the romanticism and patriotism which were demanded by the taste of the time. As such they are important; intrinsically they are not. Yet his reputation. continued to grow, and in 1857 he was elected director of the Norwegian Theatre at Christiania.