ement of its power as a form of expression.

In the same suggestive essay, M. Maeterlinck remarked on the steady
decline of the taste for bald theatrical anecdotes,--the taste which
Scribe and Sardou were content to gratify; and he declared that "mere
adventures fail to interest us because they no longer correspond to a
living and actual reality." And yet no one has more sharply proclaimed
the sovran law of the stage than the Belgian critic-poet; no one has
more sympathetically asserted that "its essential demand will always be
_action_. With the rise of the curtain, the high intellectual desire
within us undergoes transformation; and in place of the thinker,
psychologist, mystic, or moralist, there stands the mere instinctive
spectator, the man electrified negatively by the crowd, the man whose
one desire is to see something happen." In his later and more poetic
plays Ibsen seems to be appealing more especially to the mystic and the
moralist; whereas in the earlier social dramas he was able to grip the
attention of the mere instinctive spectator, while also satisfying the
unexprest desires of the thinker.

The sheer symbolism of the poet-philosopher is powerfully suggestive,
and these later plays have an interest of their own, no doubt; but it is
in the earlier social dramas that Ibsen most clearly reveals his
dramaturgic genius,--in the 'Pillars of Society,' and the 'Doll's
House,' in 'Ghosts' and in 'Hedda Gabler.' Dennery might envy the
ingenuity with which _Consul Bernick_ is tempted to insist on the fatal
order that seems for a season to be the death-sentence of his own son;
and Sardou would appreciate the irony of _Nora's_ frantic dance at the
very moment when she was tortured by deadly fear. But these theatric
devices, in Dennery's hands or in Sardou's, would have existed for their
own sake solely; but in Ibsen's, effective as they are, they have a
deeper significance. He is able to avail himself of the complicated
machinery of the "well-made play," to flash a piercing light into the
darker recesses of human nature. However clever he may be in his
handling of these scenes, his cleverness is a means only; it is not an
end in itself. He never gives over "his habit of dealing essentially
with the individual caught in the fact,"--to borrow an apt phrase from
Mr. Henry James. The mechanism may be almost as elaborate as it is in a
play of Scribe's, wherein there is ultimately nothing but ingenuity of
invention and ad