n, in the book than on the stage. Does not the play, for
instance, lose a little in its acceptance of those narrow limits of the
footlights? That is the question which I was asking myself as I saw the
performance of the Stage Society. The play is, according to the phrase,
a problem-play, but the problem is the problem of all Ibsen's plays:
the desire of life, the attraction of life, the mystery of life. Only,
we see the eternal question under a new, strange aspect. The sea calls
to the blood of this woman, who has married into an inland home; and the
sea-cry, which is the desire of more abundant life, of unlimited
freedom, of an unknown ecstasy, takes form in a vague Stranger, who has
talked to her of the seabirds in a voice like their own, and whose eyes
seem to her to have the green changes of the sea. It is an admirable
symbol, but when a bearded gentleman with a knapsack on his back climbs
over the garden wall and says: "I have come for you; are you coming?"
and then tells the woman that he has read of her marriage in the
newspaper, it seemed as if the symbol had lost a good deal of its
meaning in the gross act of taking flesh. The play haunts one, as it is,
but it would have haunted one with a more subtle witchcraft if the
Stranger had never appeared upon the stage. Just as Wagner insisted upon
a crawling and howling dragon, a Fafner with a name of his own and a
considerable presence, so Ibsen brings the supernatural or the
subconscious a little crudely into the midst of his persons of the
drama. To use symbol, and not to use it in the surprising and inevitable
way of the poet, is to fall into the dry, impotent sin of allegory.

III. "THE NEW IDOL"

It was an interesting experiment on the part of the Stage Society to
give a translation of "La Nouvelle Idole," one of those pieces by which
M. Francois de Curel has reached that very actual section of the French
public which is interested in ideas. "The New Idol" is a modern play of
the most characteristically modern type; its subject-matter is largely
medical, it deals with the treatment of cancer; we are shown a doctor's
laboratory, with a horrible elongated diagram of the inside of the human
body; a young girl's lungs are sounded in the doctor's drawing-room;
nearly every, character talks science and very little but science. When
they cease talking science, which they talk well, with earnestness and
with knowledge, and try to talk love or intrigue, they talk