al to his desire to be a poet; and, when he revolted
against verse and deliberately adopted as his material 'the common order
of things,' when he set himself, for the first time in the history of
the drama, to produce an illusion of reality rather than a translation
or transfiguration of reality, he discovered his own strength, the
special gift which he had brought into the world; but at the same time
he set, for himself and for his age, his own limits to drama.

It is quite possible to write poetic drama in prose, though to use prose
rather than verse is to write with the left hand rather than with the
right. Before Ibsen, prose had been but a serving-maid to verse; and no
great dramatist had ever put forward the prose conception of the drama.
Shakespeare and the Elizabethans had used prose as an escape or a
side-issue, for variety, or for the heightening of verse. Moliere had
used prose as the best makeshift for verse, because he was not himself a
good craftsman in the art. And, along with the verse, and necessarily
dependent upon it, there was the poetic, the romantic quality in drama.
Think of those dramatists who seem to have least kinship with poetry;
think, I will not say of Moliere, but of Congreve. What is more romantic
than _The Way of the World_? But Ibsen extracts the romantic quality
from drama as if it were a poison; and, in deciding to write
realistically in prose, he gives up every aim but that which he defines,
so early as 1874, as the wish 'to produce the impression on the reader
that what he was reading was something that had really happened.' He is
not even speaking of the effect in a theatre; he is defining his aim
inside the covers of a book, his whole conception of drama.

The art of imitation has never been carried further than it has been
carried by Ibsen in his central plays; and with him, at his best, it is
no mere imitation but a critical interpretation of life. How greatly
this can be done, how greatly Ibsen has done it, there is _Ghosts_ to
show us. Yet at what point this supreme criticism may stop, what remains
beyond it in the treatment of the vilest contemporary material, we shall
see if we turn to a play which seems at first sight more grossly
realistic than the most realistic play of Ibsen--Tolstoi's _Powers of
Darkness_. Though, as one reads and sees it, the pity and fear seem to
weigh almost intolerably upon one, the impression left upon the mind
when the reading or the performance i