ouement
in a scene scarcely more credible than that of a Gilbert and Sullivan
opera, and not one-tenth as amusing. Following, as it does, immediately
on the heels of _The Wild Duck_, which was as remarkable a slice of real
life as was ever brought before a theatrical audience, the artificiality
of _Rosmersholm_ shows Ibsen as an artist clearly stepping backward that
he may leap the further forward.

In other words, _Rosmersholm_ is the proof of Ibsen's desire to conquer
another field of drama. He had now for some years rejected with great
severity all temptations from the poetic spirit, which was nevertheless
ineradicable in him. He had wished to produce on the mind of the
spectator no other impression than that he was observing something which
had actually happened, exactly in the way and the words in which
it would happen. He had formulated to the actress, Lucie Wolf, the
principle that ideal dramatic poetry should be considered extinct, "like
some preposterous animal form of prehistoric times." But the soul of man
cannot be fed with a stone, and Ibsen had now discovered that perfectly
prosaic "slices of life" may be salutary and valuable on occasion, but
that sooner or later a poet asks for more. He, therefore, a poet if ever
there was one, had grown weary of the self-made law by which he had shut
himself out from Paradise. He determined, grudgingly, and hardly knowing
how to set about it, that he would once more give the spiritual and
the imaginative qualities their place in his work. These had now been
excluded for nearly twenty years, since the publication of _Peer Gynt_,
and he would not resume them so far as to write his dramas again in
verse. Verse in drama was doomed; or if not, it was at least a juvenile
and fugitive skill not to be rashly picked up again by a business-like
bard of sixty. But he would reopen the door to allegory and symbol, and
especially to fantastic beauty of landscape.

The landscape of Rosmersholm has all, or at least much, of the old
enchantment. The scene at the mill-dam links us once more with the woods
and the waters which we had lost sight of since _Peer Gynt_. But this
element was still more evident in _The Lady from the Sea_, which was.
published in 1888. We have seen that Ibsen spent long hours, in the
summer of 1885, at the end of the pier at Molde, gazing down into the
waters, or watching the steamers arriving and departing, coming from
the great sea beyond the fjord or going t