vealing themselves virile in their self-assertion, in their claim to
self-ownership. His plays move us strangely in the performance, they
grip at the outset and firmly hold us to the relentless end, because his
dramaturgic skill is exerted upon themes essentially dramatic in that
they deal with this stark exhibition of the human will and with the
bitter struggle that must ensue when the human will is in revolt against
the course of nature or against the social bond.

When the poet-philosopher has suggested to the playwright one of these
essentially dramatic themes, Ibsen handles it with a directness which
intensifies its force and which is in itself evidence of his poetic
power. As Professor Butcher has pointed out, "we are perhaps inclined to
rate too low the genius which is displayed in the general structure of
an artistic work; we set it down merely as the hard-won result of labor,
and we find inspiration only in isolated splendors, in the
lightning-flash of passion, in the revealing power of poetic imagery."
In these last gifts Ibsen may seem to many, if not deficient, at least,
less abundant than some other dramatic poets; but he can attain "the
supreme result which Greek thought and imagination achieve by their
harmonious cooeperation"; he can present "the organic union of parts." He
has the sense of form which we feel to be the final guerdon of Greek
endeavor.

A play of Ibsen's is always compact and symmetrical. It has a beginning,
a middle, and an end; it never straggles, but ever moves straightforward
to its conclusion. It has unity; and often it conforms even to the
pseudo-unities proclaimed by the superingenious critics of the Italian
renascence. Sometimes a play of Ibsen's has another likeness to a
tragedy of the Greeks, in that it presents in action before the
assembled spectators only the culminating scenes of the story. 'Ghosts'
recalls 'OEdipus the King,' not only in the horror at the heart of it
and the poignancy of the emotion it evokes, but also in its being a
fifth act only, the culmination of a long and complex concatenation of
events, which took place before the point at which Sophocles and Ibsen
saw fit to begin their plays. In the Greek tragedy, as in the
Scandinavian social drama, the poet has chosen to deal with the result
of the action, rather than with the visible struggle itself; it is not
the present doings of the characters, but their past deeds, which
determine their fate.

Altho no o