Perhaps a letter from Ibsen to George Brandes written so long ago as 1871 and before An Enemy of Society was dreamed of, may be with advantage quoted here.

The state is the curse of the individual. How was the municipal strength of Prussia purchased? By the absorption of the individual into the political and geographical idea. The bar-keeper makes the best soldier. The opposite case may be exemplified by the Jews, the nobility of the human race. How have they maintained their individuality in isolation, in poetry, notwithstanding all the brutality of the outside world? Through the fact that they have had no municipal burdens on their shoulders. Had they remained in Palestine, they would have gone to ruin in their construction long ago, as all other peoples have done. The state must be abolished. In a revolution that would bring about so desirable a consummation, I should gladly take part. Undermine the idea of the commonwealth, set up spontaneity and spiritual kinship as the sole determining points in a union, and there will be attained the beginning of a freedom that is of some value. Changes in the form of government are nothing else than different degrees of trifling —a little more, or a little less-absurd folly. The state has its root in time; it will attain its summit in time. Greater things than it will fall. All existing forms of religion will pass away. Neither moral conceptions nor art forms have an eternity before them. To how much, after all, is it our duty to hold fast? Who will vouch for me that two and two do not make five on Jupiter?

-a

Ibsen to Brandes, Feb. 17, 1871.

What is really needed is a revolt in the human spirit.

6

Ibsen to Brandes, Dec. 20, 1870.

The Wild Duck (1884) is a sort of companion piece to An. Enemy of Society, and the two together form a foil to Nora and the Pillars of Society. The two former plays contain the portraits: of men who try to set right the false situations described in the two latter. Nora is a crusade for a true marriage;' the Wild Duck is the story of a man who tried to make his friend live such a marriage. The Pillars of Society shows an unsound condition of commercial morality; and An Enemy of Society is the man who seeks to remedy that condition.

The

In Dr. Stockmann Ibsen has drawn the portrait of a man of abundant health and strength, full of the enjoyment of life, endowed with splendid energy and endless capacity for work, and he is made to fail because he is unshaken in his devotion to the truth. man himself is invincible; but the idea, powerless against the world' arrayed against it, recoils on the man and ruins him. In Gregers: Werle-the principal character of the Wild Duck-there is nothing to admire except a certain insane disinterestedness. He is an impressionable, inexperienced young man, not over-manly, who prides himself on his common-sense. His personality is of the least impressive kind, but in the strength of his exaltation he commits acts of the most insufferable tactlessness and cruelty. The plot is, in brief, as follows. Gregers returns home after an absence of fifteen years and finds his old friend Ekdal married to a cast-off favourite of his father's. Their home is, in spite of small means and the skeleton VOL. XXVI, No. 150. S

in the closet, a happy and contented one. Ekdal is perfectly ignorant; his wife is discreet, and entirely devoted to him and their daughter of fourteen. Gregers determines to let in the light, to make them live 'a true marriage' as he says, in distressing parody of Nora's utterances. He does so with results that might have been foreseen the ruin of his friend's happiness, and the death by her own hand of their little daughter. With helpless fatuity he remarks, when all the mischief is done, 'I hope you will allow, Mrs. Ekdal, that I acted for the best.' 'Oh, yes, I dare say you did,' says the poor woman. All I can say is, God forgive you for what you've done!' Truly a most pestilent fellow! The moral of the play is drawn by Dr. Relling, the common-sense character of the piece, who openly sneers at Werle from first to last. After the catastrophe, when the latter observes that Ekdal and his wife must have travelled a long way from the ideals of their youth,' he remarks, 'Before I forget it, with your kind permission I will ask you not to use that outlandish word. We have a very good Norwegian word that means just the same thing: Lie. Life would be unbearable if it were not for its lies.'

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Dr. Relling is a comfortable robust character—in every way the peer of Dr. Stockmann, only with more knowledge of the world. He diagnoses Gregers in the following summary way: You are suffering from a complicated case. First you have this gouty fever for getting things right; and then, which is worse, you go about as if bewitched, in a sort of worshipping craze; you must always have something outside your own concerns to gape at.'

Rosmersholm was written three years ago. The play takes its name from an estate in Norway owned by Rosmer, a widowed clergyman living there with a housekeeper and one Rebecca West, who nursed Rosmer's wife during the days of mental aberration that preceded her death by suicide in the millstream. The parson's political opinions, once of the most orthodox, are-when the play opens— rapidly becoming radical. He is drawn as a good man. His life is decorous, his ambitions dignified. He seeks to ennoble those he meets, and this object, often set forth to Rebecca West, has inspired her with the warmest admiration and enthusiasm for him. Tragic though the ending to his first marriage had been, it was, in some respects, a fortunate thing for him that his wife died. They were not happy together, and there were not wanting tongues to accuse Rebecca of seeking to supply the dead wife's place, and of carelessness as to her position and reputation in the meantime. She was in this respect guiltless and always had been, but she had, in point of fact, allowed Mrs. Rosmer to suspect her, and had played upon her feelings not without the hope that her evidently suicidal bent might deepen into action. All this with the loftiest ideas-the notion, namely, that she might be to Rosmer what his wife could never be-a sharer in

his great ideals. She succeeds: and Rosmer offers her his hand. But the year and more that she has spent in his society have so far ennobled her views that she feels unworthy of the prize she has striven for so earnestly, and she declines it. How Rosmer is brought to see the fine possibilities of Rebecca's nature, and to realise that there at last, but separated for ever from him by a gulf of criminal intent, is the true and only partner for him; how all desire for life and work is shrivelled up in him, and how the two, in the end, commit suicide together, can only be rightly told in Ibsen's words. The majestic gloom that arrests our attention even for the horror of Ghosts broods over Rosmersholm from first to last. It is this power of atmospheric effect, of projecting over the whole drama the shadow of an awful, an inevitable fate, that makes Ibsen's plays what they In this solemn half light he can develop plots that no other writer would dare to handle—or at any rate that no other writer could handle-without evoking their condemnation

are.

or absurd.

as violent

The Lady of the Sea appeared about two months ago. It is remarkable as being the only play of Ibsen's where a human will at war with unfriendly fates wins the fight. It ends happily after a long and anxious development. Before she was married, Mrs. Wangelthe lady of the sea-was engaged to a sailor, who one day told her that he had murdered his captain in the preceding night. He must flee for his life and travel far and long, but in the end he would come back and fetch her. He took a ring from her finger, and one from his own, and, fastening both to his keyring, he flung the whole into the sea in token that they were both now married to each other and to the ocean. The trick sounds little enough told so-it seems only the commonplace staginess of a rascal. But the man was something more than a rascal. He was a man of pertinacity and courage. The girl was impressionable, and her former lover had gained a real ascendency over her. Thus when she had been three years married and found herself still thinking of the stranger she began to feel her disloyalty keenly. Their only child had died, and she was driven to tell her husband the whole story. He is, fortunately, a doctor and a wise man. He recognises that some of the disorder of her mind is to be physically explained, more may be accounted for by one of those mysterious affinities for the sea sometimes shown by sensitive natures, and the residuum representing any fraction of his wife's affection that is really not his, is exceedingly small. Forewarned, forearmed. The stranger appears and summons Mrs. Wangel to leave her husband's side and follow him. A sufficiently painful scene ensues; but the doctor is skilful and firm, he rides with a light hand, and the stranger is routed.

The Lady of the Sea seems to be Ibsen's answer to the charge, freely levelled at him, of pessimism. His genius had certainly led

him to presiding for the most part over gloomy and hopeless tangles, and he has confessed himself to be a pessimist as regards humanity in most of the shapes it is likely to assume. At the same time, however, he is an optimist as to its future. Witness the admirable vigour with which he clothes Dr. Stockmann, and the teachableness displayed even by the insufferable Helmer. He has the most profound and cordial admiration for all strong individualities. To take perhaps the most conspicuous figure of our time, Prince Bismarck, he reveres the mighty ruler and only regrets that he does not understand the longing of his age for beauty.

Such in faint outline is Henrik Ibsen, one who is not to be laughed down nor damned with faint praise, still less cowed into silence. He says his word and strikes his blow for righteousness, as he conceives it, and cares neither who hears nor who forbears, neither who is smitten nor who is spared. He is already a power in the world of to-day, and it is hard to see that his influence has much more than dawned.

WALTER FREWEN LORD.

MR. GLADSTONE'S 'PLAIN SPEAKING."'

6

THERE are several very remarkable points in the last article which Mr. Gladstone has penned upon the question of the Irish Union. Perhaps one of the most remarkable is the fact of its having been written at all. It is easy to understand that a certain amount of uneasiness may have disturbed the mind of a statesman who, whilst confessing that the evidence was incomplete, and that no adequate history of the Union has yet been written,' has nevertheless given his verdict against his own country, and has denounced her, or 'those who used her authority,' as having, in her treatment of Ireland, combined violence and fraud, baseness, tyranny, and cruelty, in a degree rarely, if ever, paralleled in history.' But, apart from the natural desire to show some justification for a statement so wide and so strong, there seems scarcely sufficient reason for unearthing and calling the attention of the public to the sickening and ghastly details of a period over which a veil might well be thrown by all those who really desire that there should be a' union of hearts' between England and Ireland. To support that part of his indictment against England which is based upon her alleged cruelty, Mr. Gladstone relates several harrowing instances of brutality on the part of loyalists, with only a casual allusion to the atrocities committed on the other side. In this narration he commits two not inconsiderable mistakes.

In the first place, he omits to give due, or indeed any, weight to the circumstances under which these barbarities were committed, the abnormal state of the country at the time, and the terrible consequences which would have followed if victory had fallen to the traitors and enemies of England who had risen in rebellion against her. In the second place, he identifies the said barbarities with the policy of the Act of Union; whereas, however unjustifiable they may have been, they were committed in the suppression of a rebellion of a formidable character, the nature and conduct of which had been such as to excite and inflame men's minds to a terrible pitch, and which had been accompanied by acts of cruelty upon the part of the rebels which had provoked beyond endurance the loyal population of the country.1

1 I would refer those who wish to study the details of cruelty on the rebel side, to the third volume of Mr. Froude's English in Ireland, p. 404, where commences the chapter entitled 'The Rebellion.'