l pictures and secret passages, with shifting conspiracies,
constant mystery-mongering and contorted characters. The inexpert
playwright uses soliloquy not merely to unveil the soul of the speaker
(its eternally legitimate use), but also to convey information to the
audience as to the facts of the intrigue (an outworn expedient Ibsen
never condescended to use in the later social dramas). The plot of
'Mistress Inger' is not veracious or convincing or even plausible; and
the play lacks the broad simplicity of story to be found in the later
'Vikings,' a saga-like drama, a tale of blood and fate, which recalls
Wagnerian opera in its primitive massiveness, in the vigor of its
legend, in its tragic pathos, and in its full-blooded characters larger
than life and yet pitifully human. Power again there is in a third drama
dealing with the historic past of Norway, the 'Pretenders' (1864), which
has a savage nobility of spirit. It is true that the masterful figure of
_Bishop Nicholas_ is enigmatic enough to have stalked out of one of
Hugo's lyrical melodramas, but to counterbalance this there is a pithy
wisdom in the talk of the _Skald_ which one would seek in vain in the
French romanticist drama.

Nowadays many of us are inclined to regard the historical drama as a
bastard form and to agree with Maeterlinck in dismissing even the most
meritorious attempts as "artificial poems that arise from the impossible
marriage of past and present." Already between the 'Vikings' and the
'Pretenders' had Ibsen undertaken a play dealing with contemporary
social usages. 'Love's Comedy' (1862) made its way on the stage; and it
has found an English translator. But in this rendering it reveals itself
as an attempt to commingle romance and satire; it appears to us as
hopelessly unfunny; and there is an artistic inconsistency between a
stern realism seeking to handle actual life with rigorous tensity and a
soaring idealism which keeps obtruding itself.

'Love's Comedy' is in verse, irregular and rimed, well-nigh impossible
to render satisfactorily into another tongue. Ibsen never again
undertook to use rime or even meter in handling the manners of his own
time. "I cannot believe that meter will be employed to any considerable
extent in the drama of the near future, for the poetic intentions of the
future cannot be reconciled with it," so Ibsen declared in 1883, thus
passing judgment on 'Love's Comedy.' And he added that he had written
scarcely any v