class all
the later plays as social dramas. Some of them, more especially the
latest of them all, 'When We Dead Awaken,' seem to be symbolical rather
than social, allegorical in intent even if they remain realistic in
treatment. Brandes long ago declared that Ibsen had had a Pegasus killed
under him; but when we consider the 'Lady from the Sea' and 'When We
Dead Awaken' and perhaps one or two other of their later companions, we
may well believe that the winged steed was not actually slain. Wounded
it may have been, only to recover its strength again and to proffer its
back once more for the poet to bestride.

V

These more poetic of Ibsen's plays in prose seem at times almost
surcharged with a meaning which is nevertheless often so mockingly
intangible and evasive, that we dare to wonder at last whether the
secret they persist in hiding in this tantalizing fashion would really
reward our efforts to grasp it; and we find comfort in Lowell's apt
saying that "to be misty is not to be mystic." Ibsen is mystic, no
doubt, but on occasion he can be misty also. And not only the plays that
are merely misty but even those that are truly mystic, are less likely
than the plainer-spoken social dramas to hold our attention in the
theater itself, where the appeal is to the assembled multitude, and
where all things need to be clearly defined so that the spectators can
follow understandingly every phase of the changing action.

In the most of his social dramas Ibsen makes his meaning transparently
clear; and there is never any undue strain on the attention of the
average playgoer. Especially is he a master of the difficult art of
exposition. It is the plain duty of the playwright to acquaint the
audience with the antecedent circumstances upon which the plot is
based,--to inform the spectators fully as to that part of the story
which has gone before and which is not to be displayed in action on the
stage,--to explain the relation of the several characters to each
other,--and to arouse interest in what is about to happen. Scribe, than
whom no one ever had a wider knowledge of the necessities of the
theater, held the exposition to be so important that he often sacrificed
to it the whole of his first act, introducing his characters one by one,
setting forth clearly what had happened before the play, and sometimes
postponing the actual beginning of the action to the end of the first
act, if not to the earlier scenes of the second. Scrib