e can always tread
on the tail of his own coat, and make quite as good a fight of it
all by himself as if some one was assisting him.

And he ended with this reference to the constructive skill of Ibsen:

Another thing strikes me in connection with this subject: the
praise of Ibsen, the Scandinavian dramatist, is abroad in England;
and again, as so often before, mine eyes have seen the glory of the
coming of the Lord in the direction of Boston. But some of the
loudest worshippers of this truly great man in both countries
either wilfully ignore, or else they know nothing about, his real
greatness.

Ibsen holds in his hand the terrible power, in dealing with the
evils of society, which dramatic construction gives to a genius
like his; he has not laid this power aside and reduced his own
stage to a mere lecture platform. A man armed with a sword who
should lay it down in the heat of battle and take up a wisp of
straw to fight with, would be a fool. Ibsen, like his great
predecessors and contemporaries in France, deals his vigorous blows
at social wrongs thru dramatic effects and the true dramatic
relations of his characters. I know of no writer for the stage,
past or present, who depends for his moral power more continuously
at all points on the art of dramatic construction than Ibsen does.
He, himself, would be the first to smile at those who praise him as
if he were a writer of moral dialogs or the self-appointed lecturer
for one of those psychological panoramas which are unrolled in
acts, at a theater, or in monthly parts in a periodical.

In conclusion: to all who argue that careful construction is
unnecessary in literary art, I will say only this: it is extremely
easy not to construct.

It may be noted also that Bronson Howard returned to the topic of his
lecture in a contribution to the _Dramatic Mirror_ in 1900; he called
this

_A MERE SUGGESTION_.

So much is written in critical notices of plays, about their
"construction," that I should like to suggest a few of the
considerations which that term involves. It is possible that some
of the beginners, who are to become the future dramatists of
America, will see the necessity of thinking twice before using the
term at all. Some of the more general considerations to be kept in
view, when a