us and least intelligent in praise of him,--for Ibsen, like
Browning and like Maeterlinck, has suffered severely from the fulsome
adulation of the short-haired women and the long-haired men, who are
ever exuberantly uncritical. Perhaps the unwillingness of managers to
venture their money in staging these Scandinavian social dramas is due
also to a well-founded belief that "there is no money in them,"--that
they are not likely to attract American playgoers in remunerative
multitudes,--that they cannot be forced to the long runs to which the
theater is now unfortunately committed.

Ibsen is like all other great dramatists in that he has intended his
plays to be performed in the theater, by actors, before an audience;
and, therefore has he adjusted them most adroitly to the picture-frame
stage of the modern playhouse and filled them with characters amply
rewarding the utmost endeavor of ambitious players. But the influence of
the actor and of the circumstances of the theater is only upon the
outward form of the play, while the influence of the spectator is upon
its content solely. This influence has been potent upon every true
dramatist, who has had ever in mind the special audience for whom his
plays were intended, and at whom they were aimed. Sophocles composed his
stately tragedies for the cultivated citizens of Athens, seated on the
curving hillside under the shadow of the Acropolis; Shakspere prepared
his histories and his comedies to hold the interest of the turbulent
throng which stood about the jutting platform in the yard of the
half-roofed Tudor theater; and Moliere, even when he was writing to
order for Louis XIV, never forgot the likings of the fun-loving burghers
of Paris. No one of the three ever lookt beyond his own time or wasted a
thought upon any other than the contemporary audience in his own city.
Even tho their plays have proved to possess universality and permanence,
they were in the beginning frankly local in their appeal.

But who are the spectators that Ibsen saw in his mind's eye when he
imagined his plays bodied forth in the actual theater? He was not a
citizen of a great state, as Moliere was, and Shakspere; he did not
dwell in a great city, exercising his art in close contact with the
abounding life of a metropolis. He was a native of a small country, not
even independent, and without large towns; he was born in a petty
village and there he grew to manhood; in his maturity he wandered abroad
a