zation. In the same way he was a
politician; it is impossible to care passionately about art without
caring about the fate of mankind. But Mr. Roberts is certainly right in
holding that to appreciate Ibsen we must consider him as an artist.

Ibsen approached humanity in the spirit of an artist. He sought that
essential thing in men and women by which we should know them if the
devil came one night and stole away their bodies; we may call it
character if we choose. He imagined situations in which character would
be revealed clearly. The subjects of his plays are often "problems,"
because he was interested in people who only when "problems" arise are
seen to be essentially different from one another, or, indeed, from the
furniture with which they live. There is no reason to suppose that Ibsen
had any love for "problems" as such; and we are tempted to believe that
some modern "problems" are nothing more than situations from Ibsen's
plays. Ibsen's method is the true artist's method. The realist writing
about people tends to give an inventory of personal peculiarities, and a
faithful report of all that is said and done. The romantic hopes,
somehow, to "create an atmosphere" by suggesting what he once felt for
something not altogether unlike the matter in hand. Ibsen sets himself
to discover the halfpennyworth of significance in all this intolerable
deal of irrelevance. Which is the word, which the gesture, that,
springing directly from the depths of one character, penetrates to the
depths of another? What is the true cause of this hubbub of inconsequent
words and contradictory actions? Nothing less remote than the true cause
will serve, nothing else is firmly rooted in reality. Is that man
expressing what he feels or is he paying out what he thinks he is
expected to feel? Have I pushed simplification as far as it will go? Are
there no trappings, no overtones, nothing but what is essential to
express my vision of reality? And, above all, is my vision absolutely
sharp and sure? These were the questions Ibsen had to answer. When he
succeeded he was a great artist, not, as Mr. Roberts suggests, in the
manner of Shakespeare, but in the manner of Aeschylus.

There is no more obvious proof of the greatness of Ibsen's art than the
perfection of its form. To assert that fine form always enfolds fine
thought and feeling would imply a knowledge of literature to which it
would be effrontery in a critic to pretend. He may be allowed, how