in that the stage can rise to
the loftiest heights of philosophic poetry and that it can fall also to
the lowest depths of the show-business. An audience has ears, but the
spectators who compose it have eyes also; and the born playwright never
fails to provide the picturesqueness and the visible movement which
satisfy the senses, whatever may be the more serious appeal to the mind.
In the modern theater the stage is withdrawn behind a picture-frame; and
it is the duty of the dramatist to satisfy our demand for a
stage-setting pictorially adequate. The sets of Ibsen's plays have
evidently been sharply visualized by him; they are elaborately
described; and they lend themselves effectively to the art of the
scene-painter. Sometimes they are beautiful in themselves, novel and
suggestive; always are they characteristic of the persons and of the
underlying idea of the play.

VI

When we examine carefully the earlier of his social dramas we discover
Ibsen to be a playwright of surpassing technical dexterity, whose work
is sustained and stiffened and made more valuable and more vital by the
cooeperation of the philosopher that Ibsen also is, a philosopher who is
a poet as well and who helps the playwright to find the stuff he
handles, the raw material of his art, in the naked human soul, in its
doubts and its perplexities, in its blind gropings and in its
ineffectual strivings. But in considering the later plays we are forced
to wonder whether the philosopher has not gained the upper hand and
reduced the playwright to slavery.

It was of Ibsen, no doubt, that M. Maeterlinck was thinking when he
asserted that "the first thing which strikes us in the drama of the day
is the decay, one might almost say, the creeping paralysis, of external
action. Next, we note a very pronounced desire to penetrate deeper into
human consciousness, and to place moral problems on a high pedestal."
And there is no denying that Ibsen's interest in moral problems has
grown steadily in intensity, and that he has sought to penetrate deeper
and deeper into human consciousness. His latest play, 'When We Dead
Awaken,' altho adjusted to the conditions of the modern theater and
altho perfectly actable, seems to be intended rather more for the reader
than for the spectator. Essentially dramatic as it is, its theatric
realization is less satisfactory--as tho Ibsen was chafing against the
restraints of the actual theater, restraints which are an integral
el