t
fail to find a striking similarity of structure. Set even 'A Doll's
House' by the side of any one of a dozen contemporary French comedies,
and it is easy to understand why Sarcey declared that play to be
Parisian in its construction,--up to the moment of _Nora's_ revolt and
self-assertion, so contrary to the social instinct of the French. And
this explains also why it was that Ibsen, as Herr Lindau has told us,
made little or no impression on the German dramatists until after the
appearance of 'Ghosts,' altho the preceding plays had been acted
frequently in the German theaters. The scenes of these early plays are
laid in Norway, it is true, and the characters are all Norwegian, and
altho it is easy enough for us, to-day, with our knowledge of what Ibsen
has become, to find in them the personal equation of the author, still
he was then frankly continuing the French tradition of stage-craft, with
a willing acceptance of the formula of the "well-made play" and with no
effort after novelty in his dramaturgic method. Not until he brought
forth the 'Ghosts' is there any overt assertion of his stalwart and
aggressive personality.

In the beginning Ibsen was no innovator. So far at least as its
external form is concerned, the kind of play he proffered at first was
very much what actors and audiences alike had been accustomed to,--a
kind of play perfectly adjusted to the existing customs of the stage.
What he did was to take over the theater as a going concern, holding
himself free to modify the accepted formula only after he had mastered
it satisfactorily. Considering Ibsen's inexperience as a writer of
prose-plays dealing with contemporary life, the 'League of Youth' is
really very remarkable as a first attempt. Indeed, its defects are those
of its models; and it errs chiefly in its excess of ingenuity and in the
manufactured symmetry of the contrivance whereby the tables are turned
on _Stensgard_, and whereby he loses all three of the women he has
approached.

As Lowell has said: "It is of less consequence where a man buys his
tools than what use he makes of them"; but it so happened that Ibsen
acquired his stage-craft in the place where it is most easily attained,
in the place where Shakspere and Moliere had acquired it,--in the
theater itself. In 1851, when he was only twenty-three, he had been
appointed "theater-poet" to the newly opened playhouse in Bergen; and
after five years there he had gone to Christiania to be d