bsen is "perhaps the only writer for the stage who has caught
sight of and set in motion, a new, tho still disagreeable, poetry, which
he has succeeded in investing with a kind of savage, gloomy beauty"; and
M. Maeterlinck then questions whether this beauty is not too savage and
too gloomy to become general or definitive. But, none the less, it is
at least beauty, a quality long banished from the stage, when Ibsen
showed how it might be made to bloom there again.

Nor is there any dispute as to the variety and the veracity of the
characters that people these studies from life. Indeed, as Mr. Archer
once pointed out, "habitually and instinctively men pay to Ibsen the
compliment (so often paid to Shakspere) of discussing certain of his
female characters as tho they were real women, living lives apart from
the poet's creative intelligence." And in yet another way is Ibsen
treated like Shakspere, in that there is superabundant discussion not
only of his characters, male and female, but also of his moral aim, of
his sociological intention, of his philosophy of life, while very little
attention is paid to his dramaturgic craftsmanship, to his command of
structural beauty, to his surpassing skill in the difficult art of the
play-maker. Yet Shakspere and Ibsen are professional playwrights, both
of them, each making plays adjusted exactly to the conditions of the
theater of his own time; and if the author of 'Othello' can prove
himself (when the spirit moves him) to be a master-technician, so also
can the author of 'Ghosts.'

There is ample recognition of Ibsen as the ardent reformer seeking to
blow away the mists of sentimentality, and of Ibsen, the symbolist,
suggesting dimly a host of things unseen and strangely beautiful; but
there is little consideration of Ibsen's solid workmanship, of his sure
knowledge of all the secrets of the stage, of his marvelous dexterity of
exposition, construction and climax. No doubt, it is as a poet, in the
largest meaning of the word, that Ibsen is most interesting; but he is a
playwright also,--indeed, he is a playwright, first and foremost; and in
that aspect also he is unfailingly interesting. For those who insist
that a poet must be a philosopher, Ibsen is to be ranked with Browning
as affording endless themes for debate; but for those who demand that a
dramatic poet shall be a playwright, Ibsen is a rival of Scribe and of
the younger Dumas and of all the school of accomplished craftsmen i