d to be deficient in the most
permanent and most overpowering of woman's characteristics--the maternal
instinct. It may be that she did right in leaving her children; it may
even be that she would have left them; but up to the moment when she
declared her intention to go, nothing in the play has prepared the
spectator for this strange move. Ibsen has failed to make us feel when
the unexpected happened that this, however unforeseen, was exactly what
we ought to have expected.

No fault of this kind can be found with 'Ghosts,' that drastic tragedy
of a house built on the quicksands of falsehood, that appalling modern
play with the overwhelming austerity of an ancient tragic drama, that
extraordinarily compact and moving piece, in which the Norwegian
playwright accomplished his avowed purpose of evoking "the sensation of
having lived thru a passage of actual life." A few years only before
Ibsen brought forth his 'Ghosts,' Lowell had asserted that "That Fate
which the Greeks made to operate from without, we recognize at work
within, in some vice of character or hereditary disposition"; and Greek
this play of Ibsen's is in its massive simplicity, in the economy of its
bare structure with five characters only, with no change of scene, with
no lapse of time, and with an action that rolls forward irresistibly
with inevitable inexorability. As there was something AEschylean in
'Brand' so there is something Sophoclean in 'Ghosts'; altho Ibsen lacks
the serenity of the great Greek and Sophocles had a loftier aim than
that of evoking "the sensation of having lived thru a passage of actual
life." There is no echo in 'OEdipus' of the cry of revolt which rings
thru 'Ghosts,' and yet there was a strange similarity in the impression
made on at least one spectator of the actual performances of these
tragedies, the ancient and the modern, the one after the other, at a few
days' interval here in New York,--an impression of deepening horror that
graspt the throat and gript the heart with fingers of ice.

The most obvious resemblance between the Greek tragedy and the
Scandinavian social drama is in their technic, in that the two austere
playwrights have set before us the consequences of an action, rather
than the action itself. Here Ibsen has thrown aside the formula of the
"well-made play," using the skill acquired by the study of Scribe in
achieving a finer form than the French playwright was capable of, a form
seemingly simple but very s