Welsh Journals

architectonic power is essential, where all depends upon the collision of genuine personalities, upon sound ethics and skill in language. Imagine the law thus laid down for the writer who is to practise such an art. You shall not discuss religion, though you may occasionally employ its more othodox forms as part of your upholstery. Politics are to be eschewed. unless you wish to remind your hearers of the glory of Britain-we shall not object to a few honest tars or even to a comic soldier, provided he is of non- commissioned rank. Satire of course is permitted, except that you must satirize only people who have been satirized already-a lawyer, provided he is only an attorney a politician, so long as he is not of Cabinet rank a farmer, but mind you demonstrate the good- ness of his heart. What ? You complain that we are shackling your inventive genius ? Nothing of the kind You can portray society. Show us the great heart of the English people-of course without hurting anyone's feelings, for you will remember that you are a gentleman. Literature should uplift. Therefore you will teach us that love is always un- selfish, that men in high positions have characters to correspond, that dramatic heroes are unswervingly muscular, tall, brave, and generous. Marriages are always happy children are always obedient, except in farces, and then, fortunately, they have idiotic fathers, whom you can't expect them to take seriously; there are only two sorts of women — (a) ladies, who invariably behave as ladies, and (b) females, who can be relied upon for a little comic relief." Finally conceive this difficult art practised under such poisonous instructions, by men of third or fourth-rate talent. One pretentious writer after another came forward, not with a slice of life as the saying now is, not even with a self-consistent romantic phantasy, but with an exercise in the thea- trical manner. That is the real vice of the stage to copy the latest successful play instead of looking at men and women. That is what is meant by stagey- ness-not merely the striking of attitudes Shakes- peare is full of them not simply long speeches Mr. Shaw revels in them, and Mr. Barker's Trebell is a leading article on two legs. No; it is the unmis- takable imitation of an imitation. Those who objected to stage plays as immoral would have stood on much firmer ground had they accused them of paralizing dulness. Precisely one hundred years after Sheridan's success with The Critic, Copenhagen witnessed the production of A Doffs House. Ten years later, after triumph in Scandinavia and Germany, the play was given in London by Mr Charles Charrington and Miss Janet Achurch. It was this production that really made Ibsen known to the English speaking peoples," says Mr. William Archer. By this play and by his other realist work, such as An Enemy of the People, Rosmersholm, The Wild Duck. Ibsen. single-handed, saved English drama at the moment. I say at the moment for even had there been no Ibsen, one cannot believe that the English nation would have battened upon works like Caste or The Hobbyhorse till the battle of Armageddon. But to Ibsen, alone of individual men, belongs the credit of the fact that we now possess real dramatists. What are his special virtues. the lineaments of his genius ? I naturally confine myself to the realist dramas, which have made far more impression here than historical plays, like Emperor and Galilean, or mystical works, like When we dead awal^en. His innovations fall into two classes, artistic qualities and specific new ideas. As a dramatic poet, Ibsen stands beyond question in the front rank. Setting himself to produce a certain form of art, he has reached an achievement as near perfection as that of Sophocles or Shakespeare. Hedda G abler, in its genre, is as great as Oedipus Rex or Macbeth in theirs. We are, of course, to note that the genre is different. Neglect of this simple fact vitiated all the judgements which English critics offered upon the new writer, in the last years of the nineteenth century. What they meant was that Ibsen is not like Robertson, to say nothing of Shakespeare. In the same way French critics, who worshipped Greek tragedy and Aristotle's canons of tragic art declared that Shakespeare was a drunken savage. You remember the even more idiomatic savage in Punch There's a stranger Eave arf a brick at im In Ibsen's case, however, the bricks were whole ones. Every insulting adjective, that the printer could be induced to put into type, was hurled at the stranger, when Ghosts was performed in 1891. People were simply blaming him for not possessing qualities, which would have prevented them from ever hearing about him, for not following a fashion which it was his chief aim to eradicate. The genre of Hedda Gabler is different from that of any other school. Whether it is as sublime and edifying a type as that of the Elizabethan and of the Greek tragedians is quite a different matter. It is, in any case, a magnificent creation, capable of values which can be attained in no other way. In brief, the aim of Sophocles was to make man accommodate his intellect to his spiritual environment; the aim of Shakespeare to entertain by chastening the emotions the aim of Ibsen to instruct by a new appeal to ethical facts. This brings us to the first salient characteristic of the Norwegian-his courage. He never runs away from