though there was no doubt whatever
about which side he supported, there was much that was individual in the
line he took. It is not our business here to explore that extinct
volcano. You may say that anti-Ibsenism is dead, or you may say that
Ibsen is dead; in any case, that controversy is dead, and death, as the
Roman poet says, can alone confess of what small atoms we are made. The
opponents of Ibsen largely exhibited the permanent qualities of the
populace; that is, their instincts were right and their reasons wrong.
They made the complete controversial mistake of calling Ibsen a
pessimist; whereas, indeed, his chief weakness is a rather childish
confidence in mere nature and freedom, and a blindness (either of
experience or of culture) in the matter of original sin. In this sense
Ibsen is not so much a pessimist as a highly crude kind of optimist.
Nevertheless the man in the street was right in his fundamental
instinct, as he always is. Ibsen, in his pale northern style, is an
optimist; but for all that he is a depressing person. The optimism of
Ibsen is less comforting than the pessimism of Dante; just as a
Norwegian sunrise, however splendid, is colder than a southern night.

But on the side of those who fought for Ibsen there was also a
disagreement, and perhaps also a mistake. The vague army of "the
advanced" (an army which advances in all directions) were united in
feeling that they ought to be the friends of Ibsen because he also was
advancing somewhere somehow. But they were also seriously impressed by
Flaubert, by Oscar Wilde and all the rest who told them that a work of
art was in another universe from ethics and social good. Therefore many,
I think most, of the Ibsenites praised the Ibsen plays merely as _choses
vues_, aesthetic affirmations of what can be without any reference to
what ought to be. Mr. William Archer himself inclined to this view,
though his strong sagacity kept him in a haze of healthy doubt on the
subject. Mr. Walkley certainly took this view. But this view Mr. George
Bernard Shaw abruptly and violently refused to take.

With the full Puritan combination of passion and precision he informed
everybody that Ibsen was not artistic, but moral; that his dramas were
didactic, that all great art was didactic, that Ibsen was strongly on
the side of some of his characters and strongly against others, that
there was preaching and public spirit in the work of good dramatists;
and that if this were