irector of a
new theater, where he was to remain yet another five years. In this
decade of his impressionable and plastic youth Ibsen had taken part in
the production of several score plays, some of them his own, others also
original in his native tongue by Holberg and Oehlenschlaeger, and many
more translated from Scribe, from Scribe's collaborators and from
Scribe's contemporaries. In his vacation travels, to Copenhagen and to
Dresden, he had opportunity to observe a wider variety of plays; but
even in these larger cities the influence of Scribe was dominant, as it
was all over the civilized world in the mid-years of the century.

As Fenimore Cooper, when he determined to tell the fresh story of the
backwoods and the prairies, found a pattern ready to his hand in the
Waverley novels, so Ibsen availed himself of the "well-made play" of
Scribe when he wrote the 'League of Youth,' which is his earliest piece
in prose presenting contemporary life and character in Norway. There is
obvious significance in the fact that of all Ibsen's dramas, those which
have won widest popularity in the theater itself are those which most
frankly accept the Gallic framework,--the 'Pillars of Society,' the
'Doll's House,' and 'Hedda Gabler.' Yet it is significant, also, that
even in the least individual of Ibsen's earlier pieces, the action is
expressive of character; and we cannot fail to see that Ibsen's
personages control the plot; whereas, in the dramas of Scribe, the
situations may be said almost to create the characters, which, indeed,
exist only for the purposes of that particular story.

IV

In spite of Ibsen's ten years of apprenticeship in two theaters, in
daily contact with the practical business of the stage, it was not with
prose-dramas of contemporary life that he first came forward as a
dramatist. In fact, his juvenile 'Katilina' (1850) was written when he
was but just of age, before he was attached to the theater
professionally, before he had read any dramatists except Holberg and
Oehlenschlaeger, and before he had had the chance to see much real acting
on the stage itself. It was while he was engaged in producing the plays
of others that he brought out also his own 'Mistress Inger at Ostraat'
(1855), and the 'Vikings at Helgeland' (1858), both of them actable and
often acted. They are romanticist in temper, suggesting now Schiller and
now Hugo.

'Mistress Inger' is a historical melodrama, with a gloomy castle,
spectra