eir manner at least to the
modern French stage, and to the pamphleteer's prose world of Dumas
_fils_; yet, though they may illustrate problems, they no longer recite
them. They are seen, not as the poet sees his people, naked against a
great darkness, but clothed and contemporary, from the level of an
ironical observer who sits in a corner of the same room. It is the
doctor who sits there, watching his patients, and smiling ambiguously as
he infers from his knowledge of their bodies what pranks their souls are
likely to play.

If Ibsen gets no other kind of beauty, does he not get beauty of
emotion? Or can there be beauty in an intensity of emotion which can be
at least approached, in the power of thrilling, by an Adelphi
melodrama? Is the speech of his people, when it is most nearly a
revelation of the obscure forces outside us or within us, more than a
stammering of those to whom unconsciousness does not lend distinction
but intensifies idiosyncrasy? Drama, in its essence, requires no speech;
it can be played by marionettes, or in dumb show, and be enthralling.
But, speech once admitted, must not that speech, if it is to collaborate
in supreme drama, be filled with imagination, be itself a beautiful
thing? To Ibsen beauty has always been of the nature of an ornament, not
an end. He would concentrate it into a catchword, repeated until it has
lost all emotional significance. For the rest, his speech is the
language of the newspaper, recorded with the fidelity of the phonograph.
Its whole aim is at economy, as if economy were an end rather than a
means.

Has not Ibsen, in the social dramas, tried to make poems without words?
There is to be beauty of motive and beauty of emotion; but the words are
to be the plainest of all the plain words which we use in talking with
one another, and nothing in them is to speak greatly when great
occasions arise. Men's speech in great drama is as much higher than the
words they would use in real life as their thoughts are higher than
those words. It says the unuttered part of our speech. Ibsen would
suppress all this heightening as he has suppressed the soliloquy and the
aside. But here what he suppresses is not a convention but a means of
interpretation. It is suppressing the essence for the sake of the
accident.

Ibsen's genius for the invention of a situation has never been
surpassed. More living characters than the characters of Ibsen have
never moved on the stage. His women are