n
France who have made Paris the capital of the dramatic art. Ibsen's
skill as a playwright is so consummate that his art is never obtruded.
In fact, it was so adroitly hidden that when he first loomed on the
horizon, careless theatrical critics were tempted rather to deny its
existence. He is such a master of all the tricks of the trade that he
can improve upon them or do without them, as occasion serves; and
perhaps it is only those thoroly familiar with the practises of the
accomplished French playwrights of the nineteenth century who perceive
clearly the superiority of Ibsen in the mere mechanism of the
dramaturgical art.

II

Altho it is possible to consider his stage-technic apart from his
teaching, it needs to be noted at the outset that Ibsen the playwright
owes a large portion of his power and effectiveness to Ibsen the
poet-philosopher. As it happens, the doctrine of individual
responsibility, which is the core of Ibsen's code, is a doctrine most
helpful to the dramatist. The drama, indeed, differentiates itself from
all other literary forms in that it must deal with a struggle, with a
clash of contending desires, with the naked assertion of the human will.
This is the mainspring of that action without which a drama is a thing
of naught; and perhaps the most obvious backbone for a play is the tense
contest of two human beings, each knowing clearly what he wants and each
straining to attain it, at whatever cost to his adversary, to all
others, and even to himself. Rivals fighting to the death, a hero at war
with the world, a single soul striving to wrench itself free from the
fell clutch of fate,--such is the stuff out of which the serious drama
must be compounded.

Now, as it happens, no philosopher has ever reiterated more often than
Ibsen his abhorrence of smug and complacent compromise, his belief in
the unimpeded independence of the individual, his conviction that every
creature here below owes it as a duty to himself to live his own life in
his own way. Just as _Brand_ stiffens himself once more and makes the
implacable declaration:

Beggar or rich,--with all my soul
I _will_; and that one thing's the whole!

So _Dr. Stockman_ announces his discovery that "the strongest man upon
earth is he who stands most alone"; and in every play we find characters
animated by this unhesitating determination and this unfaltering energy.
Even Ibsen's women, so subtly feminine in so many ways, are forever
re