et. If it is his
weakness that his theory of life is overstrenuous, one-sided and out of
date, it is his strength that he has opinions of his own and that he is
willing to face the problems that insistently confront us to-day. As Mr.
Archer has put it tersely and conclusively, Ibsen is "not pessimist or
optimist or primarily a moralist, tho he keeps thinking about morals. He
is simply a dramatist, looking with piercing eyes at the world of men
and women, and translating into poetry this episode and that from the
inexhaustible pageant."

A moralist he must be, if his work is to have any far-reaching
significance, any final value. Morality is not something a poet can put
into his work deliberately; but it can be left out only at the poet's
peril, since few works of art are likely to be worth while if they are
ethically empty. Ibsen's inspiration is too rich for it to be void of
moral purport, even tho the playwright may not have intended all that we
read into his work. There is a moral in 'Ghosts' as there is in
'OEdipus,' in the 'Scarlet Letter,' and in 'Anna Karenina,'--a moral,
austere and dispassionate. It contains much that is unpleasant and even
painful, but--to quote Arnold's praise of 'Anna Karenina'--nothing "of a
nature to trouble the senses or to please those who wish their senses
troubled." Ibsen's play, like the tragedy of Sophocles, like the severe
stories of Hawthorne and Tolstoi, is not spoon-meat for babes; it is not
for young men and maidens; but as Goethe asked nearly a century ago,
"What business have our young girls at the theater? They do not belong
to it;--they belong to the convent; and the theater is only for men and
women who know something of human affairs." It is for these men and
these women that Ibsen, with stern self-control, has written his social
dramas, that he may force them to look into matters they are willing
enough to ignore and to front the facts of life, ugly as these may be.

More than once in the course of this essay has there been occasion to
evoke the names of Sophocles, of Shakspere and of Moliere, the supreme
masters of the dramatic art. To venture upon any comparison with them is
to measure Ibsen by the loftiest standard. In his technic alone can he
withstand the comparison, for he is the latest and he has profited by
all the experiments and achievements of the strong men who came before
him; in mere craftsmanship he is beyond question the foremost of all the
moderns. It mu