at it can
synthesize in time like poetry, that it can synthesize outside of time
and space like music, that it can unite all the arts without forcing
them to interfere the one with the other, and, therefore, without taking
from any one aught of its force or aught of its dignity; that it can
unite them all in a vast, powerful, and harmonious synthesis embracing
the whole of life and the whole of art."

(1903.)

IBSEN THE PLAYWRIGHT

I

One indisputable service has Ibsen rendered to the drama: he has
revealed again that it may be an incomparable instrument in the hands of
a poet-philosopher who wishes to make people think, to awaken them from
an ethical lethargy, to shock them into asking questions for which the
complacent morality of the moment can provide no adequate answer. In the
final decades of the nineteenth century,--when the novel was despotic in
its overwhelming triumph over all the other forms of literary
expression, and when arrogant writers of fiction like Edmond de Goncourt
did not hesitate to declare that the drama was outworn at last, that it
was unfitted to convey the ideas interesting to the modern world, and
that it had fallen to be no more than a toy to amuse the idle after
dinner,--Ibsen brought forth a succession of social dramas as tho to
prove that the playhouse of our own time could supply a platform whereon
a man might free his soul and boldly deliver his message, if only he
had first mastered the special conditions of the playwright's art. Of
course, Ibsen has solved none of the problems he has propounded; nor was
it his business as a dramatist to provide solutions of the strange
enigmas of life, but rather to force us to exert ourselves to find each
of us the best answer we could.

No one who has followed the history of the theater for the past quarter
of a century can fail to acknowledge that these social plays of Ibsen
have exerted a direct, an immediate and a powerful influence on the
development of the contemporary drama. It is easy to dislike them;
indeed, it is not hard even to detest them; but it is impossible to deny
that they have been a stimulus to the dramatists of every modern
language--and not least to playwrights of various nationalities wholly
out of sympathy with Ibsen's own philosophy. The fascination of these
social dramas may be charmless, as Mr. Henry James once asserted; but
there is no gainsaying the fascination itself. As M. Maeterlinck has
declared, I