Iconoclasts

The drama is the domain of logic and will; Henry Becque called it "the art of sacrifices." The Ibsen technic is rather tight in the social dramas, but the larger rhythms are nowhere missing. The most artificial of art forms, the drama, is in his hands a mirror of many reverberating lights. The transubstantiation of realities is so smoothly accomplished that one involuntarily remembers Whistler's remark as to art being only great when all traces of the means used are vanished. Ibsen's technic is a means to many ends.

It is effortless in the later plays-it is the speech of emotion, the portrayal of character. "Qui dit drame, dit caractère," writes André Gide. Ibsen's content conditions his form. His art is the result of constraint. He respects the unities of time, place, action, not that he admires the pseudo-classic traditions of Boileau, but because the rigorous excision of the superfluous suits his scheme. Nor is he an extremist in this question of the unities. Like Renan, the artist in him abhors "the horrible mania of certitude." The time-unit in his best plays ranges from one to two days; the locality is seldom shifted further than from room to garden. As he matured his theatrical canvas shrank, the number of his characters diminished. Even the action became less vivacious and various; the exteriorization of emotional states was substituted for the bustling, vigorous life of the earlier plays. Yet-always drama, dynamic not static.

His dialogue-a spoken, never a literary one-varies from extreme naturalism to the half-uttered sentences, broken phrases, and exclamations that disclose-as under a burning light-the sorrow and pain of his men and women. One recalls in reading the later pieces the saying of Maurice Barrès, "For an accomplished spirit there is but one dialogue-that between our two egos-the momentary ego that we are and the ideal one toward which we strive." The Ibsen plays are character symphonies. His polyphonic mastery of character is unique in the history of the drama; for, as we shall presently show, there is a second-nay, a third-intention in his dialogue that give forth endless repercussions of ideas and emotions.

The mental intensity of Ibsen is relentless. Once, Arthur Symons showing Rodin some Blake drawings, told the French sculptor, "Blake used literally to see these figures; they are not mere inventions."-"Yes," replied Rodin, "he saw them once; he should have seen them three or four times." Ibsen's art presents no such wavering vision. He saw his characters not once but for many months continuously before, Paracelsus-like, he allowed them an escape from his chemical retort to the footlights. Some of them are so powerfully realized that their souls shine like living torches.

Ibsen's symbolism is that of Baudelaire, "All nature is a temple filled with living pillars, and the pillars have tongues and speak in confused words, and man walks as through a forest of countless symbols." The dramatist does not merely label our appetites and record our manners, but he breaks down the barrier of flesh, shows the skeleton that upholds it, and makes a sign by which we recognize, not alone the poet in the dramatist, but also the god within us. The "crooked sequence of life" has its speech wherewith truth may be imaged as beauty. Ibsen loves truth more than beauty, though he does not ignore the latter. With him a symbol is an image and not an abstraction. It is not the pure idea, barren and unadorned, but the idea clothed by an image which flashes a signal upon our consciousness. Technically we know that the Norwegian dramatist employs his symbols as a means of illuminating the devious acts and speech of his humans, binding by repetitions the disparate sections and contrasted motives of his play. These symbols are not always leading motives, though they are often so construed; his leit-motiven are to be sought rather in the modulation of character and the characteristic gestures which express it. With Rosmersholm the "white horses" indicate by an image the dark forces of heredity which operate in the catastrophe. The gold and green forest in Little Eyolf is a symbol of what Rita Allmers brought her husband Alfred, and the resultant misery of a marriage to which the man, through a mistaken idealism, had sold himself. There are such symbols and catchwords in every play. In Emperor and Galilean the conquering sun is a symbol for Julian the Apostate, whose destiny, he believes, is conducted by the joyous sun; while in Ghosts the same sun is for the agonized Oswald Alving the symbol of all he has lost,-reason, hope, and happiness. Thus the tower in The Master Builder, the open door in A Doll's House, the ocean in The Lady from the Sea, give a homogeneity which the otherwise loose structure of the drama demands. The Ibsen play is always an organic whole.

It must not be forgotten that Henrik Ibsen, who was born in 1828,-surely under the sign of Saturn!-had passed through the flaming revolutionary epoch of 1848, when the lyric pessimism of his youthful poems was transformed into bitter denunciations of authority. He was regarded as a dangerous man; and while he may not have indulged in any marked act of rebellion, his tendencies were anarchic-a relic of his devotion to the French Revolution. But then he was a transcendentalist and an intellectual anarch. If he called the State the enemy of the individual, it was because he foresaw the day when the State might absorb the man. He advocated a bloodless revolution; it must be spiritual to compass victory. Unless men willed themselves free, there could be no real freedom. "In those days there was no King in Israel; every man did that which was right in his own eyes." Ibsen confessed that the becoming was better than the being-a touch of Renan and his beloved fieri. He would have agreed with Emerson, who indignantly exclaimed, "Is it not the chief disgrace in the world not to be a unit; not to be reckoned one character; not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred of thousand, of the party, the section to which we belong, and our opinion predicted geographically as the North or the South?" Lord Acton's definition that "Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is in itself the highest political end," would have pleased Ibsen. "The minority is always in the right," he asserts.

The Ibsen plays are a long litany praising the man who wills. The weak man must be educated. Be strong, not as the "blond roaming beast" of Nietzsche, but as captain of your own soul's citadel! Rémy de Gourmont sees the idea of liberty as an emphatic deformation of the idea of privilege. Good is an accident produced by man at the price of terrible labour. Nature has no mercy. Is there really free will? Is it not one of the most seductive forms of the universal fiction? True, answers in effect Ibsen; heredity controls our temperaments, the dead rule our actions, yet let us act as if we are truly free. Adjuring Brand "To thyself be true," while Peer Gynt practices "To thyself be sufficient," Ibsen proves in the case of the latter that Will, if it frees, also kills. Life is no longer an affair of the tent and tribe. The crook of a man's finger may upset a host, so interrelated is the millet-seed with the star. A poet of affirmations, he preaches in his thunder-harsh voice as did Comte, "Submission is the base of perfection"; but this submission must be voluntary. The universal solvent is Will. Work is not the only panacea. Philosophically, Ibsen stands here between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche; he has belief in the Will, though not the Frankfort philosopher's pessimism; and the Will to Power of Nietzsche without that rhapsodist's lyric ecstasy. Nietzsche asked: "For what is freedom? To have the will to be responsible for one's self." Ibsen demonstrates that a great drama must always have a great philosophic substratum. There may be no design in nature-let us believe there is. Gesture is the arrest of the flux, rendering visible the phenomena of life, for it moderates its velocity. In this hypothesis he would not be at variance with De Gourmont, who has not hesitated to ask whether intelligence itself is not an accident in the creative processes, and if it really be the goal toward which mankind finally believes itself drifting.

There is the mystic as well as the realistic chord in the Ibsen drama. His Third Kingdom, not of the flesh (Pagan) nor of the spirit (Christian), yet partaking of both, has a ring of Hegel and also of that abbot of Flores called Joachim, who was a medi?val Franciscan. The grandiloquent silhouettes of the Romantic drama, the mouthers of rhetoric, the substitution of a bric-à-brac mirage for reality, have no place in Ibsen's art. For this avoidance of the banal he has been called a perverter of the heroic. His characters are in reality the bankruptcy of stale heroisms; he replaces the old formula with a new, vital one-Truth at all hazards He discerns a Fourth Dimension of the spirit. He has said that if mankind had time to think, there would be a new world. This opposer of current political and moral values declares that reality is itself a creation of art-each individual creates his picture of the world. An idealist he is in the best sense of the word, though some critics, after reading into the plays Socialism-picture Ibsen and "regimentation," as Huxley dubbed it!-claim the sturdy individualist as a mere unmasker of conventionalism. How far all this is from Ibsen's intention-who is much more than a satirist! and social reformer-may be seen in his Brand, with its austere watchword, "All or Nothing." A prophet and a seer he is, not a glib socialist exposing municipal evils and offering ready-made prophylactics. The curve of Ibsen's art comprises all these petty minor evils of life, it reaches across the edge of the human soul; while, ardent pilgrim that he is, he slowly mounts to the peaks from which he may see his Third Kingdom. But, like a second Moses, he has never descended into that country of ineffable visions or trod its broad and purifying landscapes.

Max Stirner's radical and defiant egoism, expressed in his pithy axiom, "My truth is the truth," might be answered by Ibsen with the contradictory "Le moi est ha?ssable" of Pascal. Indeed, an ironic self-contradiction may be gleaned from a study of Ibsen; each play seems to deny the conclusions of the previous one. But when the entire field is surveyed in retrospect the smaller irregularities and deflections from the level melt into a harmonious picture. Ibsen is complex. Ibsen is confusing. In Ibsen there rage the thinker, the artist, the critic. These sometimes fail to amalgamate, and so the artistic precipitation is cloudy. He is a true Viking who always loves stormy weather; and, as Brandes said, "God is in his heart, but the devil is in his body." His is an emotional logic, if one may frame such an expression; and it would be in vain to search in his works for the ataraxia of the tranquil Greek philosopher. A dynamic grumbler, like Carlyle, he eventually contrives to orient himself; his dramas are only an escape from the ugly labyrinth of existence. If his characters are sick, so is latter-day life. The thinker often overrides the poet in him; and at times the dramatist, the pure Theatermensch, gets the bit between his teeth and nearly wrecks the psychologist. He acknowledges the existence of evil in the world, knows the house of evil, but has not tarried in it. Good must prevail in the end is the burden of his message, else he would not urge upon his fellow-beings the necessity of willing and doing.

The cold glamour of his moods is supplemented by the strong, sincere purpose underlying them. He feels, with Kierkegaard, that the average sensual man will ever "parry the ethical claim"; and if, in Flaubert's eyes, "man is bad because he is stupid," in Ibsen's "he is stupid because he is bad." "To will is to have to will," says his Maximus in Emperor and Galilean. This phrase is the capstone of the Ibsen structure. If he abhors the inflated phraseology of altruism, he is one with Herbert Spencer, who spoke of a relapse into egotism as the only thing which could make altruism enduring.

Felicity, then, with Ibsen is experience itself, not the result of experience. Life is a huge misunderstanding, and the Ibsen dramas hinge on misunderstandings-the conflict between the instinctive and the acquired, between the forces of heredity and of environment. Herein lies his preference for the drama of disordered wills. And touching on this accusation of morbidity and sickness, may there not be gleaned from Shakespeare and Goethe many mad, half-mad, and brain-sick men and women? The English poet's plays are a perfect storehouse of examples for the alienist. Hallucination that hardens into mania is delicately recorded by Ibsen; he notes with a surgeon's skilled eye the first slight decadence and the final entombment of the will. Furthermore, the chiefest malady of our age is that of the will enfeebled by lack of exercise, by inanition due to unsound education; and as he fingers our spiritual muscles he cries aloud their flabbiness. In men the pathologic symptoms are more marked than in women; hence the number of women in his dramas who assume dominant r?les-not that Ibsen has any particular sympathy with the New Woman, but because he has seen that the modern woman marks time better with the Zeitgeist than her male complement.

Will, even though your will be disastrous in its outcome, but will, he insists; and yet demonstrates that only through self-surrender can come complete self-realization. To say "I am what I am," is the Ibsen credo; but this "I" must be tested in the fire of self-abnegation. To the average theologian all this rings suspiciously like the old-fashioned doctrine of salvation by good works. The Scotch leaven is strong in Ibsen. In his bones he is a moralist, in practice an artist. His power is that of the artist doubled by the profound moralist, the philosopher doubled by the dramatist; the crystallization in the plays of these antagonistic qualities constitutes the triumph of his genius.

Students of Ibsen are deeply indebted to Mr. William Archer, not alone for his translations-colourless though they often are-but also for his illuminative critical articles on the Norwegian master. A comparatively recent one describes Ibsen's apprenticeship and destroys the notion that he owed anything to George Sand. He learned much of his stagecraft from Eugène Scribe, who was the artistic parent of Sardou. But as Mr. Archer wrote in an English periodical:-

If the French are determined to claim some share in the making of Ibsen, they must shift their ground a little. He did not get his ideas from George Sand, but he got a good deal of his stagecraft from Eugène Scribe and the playwrights of his school. Ideas he could not possibly get from Scribe, for the best of all reasons; but he can be proved to have been familiar, at the outset of his career, with the works of that great inventor and manipulator of situations, from whom there can be little doubt that he acquired the rudiments of dramatic construction. He ultimately outgrew his teacher, even in technical skill, and his later plays, from Ghosts onward, show the influence of Scribe mainly in the careful avoidance of his methods. Nevertheless it was in the Scribe gymnasium, so to speak, that he trained himself for his subsequent feats as a technician.

It is significant of Ibsen's frame of mind in his extreme youth, that his first drama was called Catilina (1850) and devoted to the Roman champion of individual rights, the hater of tyrants. He studied, says his biographer Hans Jaeger, Sallust's Catiline and Cicero's Orations against Catiline; and Vasenius is quoted to the effect that the Catilina of Ibsen is "a true representation of the historic personage"-an opinion in which Jaeger does not coincide. Two women, Aurelia and Furia, who dispute for the possession of the hero, are the two women natures that may be found in nearly all of the dramas. It is not the purpose of this study to dwell long upon the plays not in the regular repertory. Chiefly for the historic retrospect are they mentioned; particularly in the case of Catilina, the first as it sounds the key in which the master works of the poet are generally sounded, the key of individuality, "the utmost clearness of vision and fulness of power," to employ Ibsen's own words.

Twenty-six poems appeared in a slim volume. They are boyish, one dating from the nineteenth year of the author. They are immature, as might be expected, though charged with pessimism, a youthful Byronism. "He went about Grimstad like an enigma secured with seven seals," said a lady who knew him then.

The Warriors' Tomb; Norma, or a Politician's Love,-this latter a musical tragedy; St. John's Night, need not occupy our time, for the curious Jaeger and Georg Brandes tell all there is to be told. St. John's Night, though unpublished, was produced at the Bergen Theatre, January 2, 1853.

The writer confesses to deep admiration for Fru Inger of Ostraat (1857) and The Pretenders (1864), both translated by Mr. Archer. Dealing as they do with historical figures they must be of necessity interesting to Norwegians. Considered purely as stage plays they appeal, particularly Lady Inger, a Lady Macbeth in her power for evil. Nils Lykke, too, is firmly drawn and is fascinating in his ambitions and debaucheries. There is one big scene in which the pair meet, which does not soon leave the memory. We seem to see in The Pretenders "the Great King's thoughts" of Skule, the germ of Julian's character, so magnificently exposed in Emperor and Galilean. The Pretenders is full of barbaric colour and the shock of arms. Some episodes recall in atmosphere those wonderful scenes in Wagner's G?tterd?mmerung with their hoarse-throated and bloody-minded thanes.

I was lucky enough to be present at the revival of this epical composition at Berlin in the Neues Theatre, October, 1904. Previous to this the Meiningen organization had presented the piece in a worthy manner, and once at the Schiller Theatre there had been a few representations. I was amazed at the power and verisimilitude of Ibsen's characters up to the death scene-rather a theatrical one-of the wicked Bishop Nikolas. After that the action became, because of the weak interpretation of Duke Skule by Franz Wüllner, uninteresting. And then, too, the fatiguing lengths; nearly five hours were consumed in this noteworthy performance. Director Max Reinhardt was a subtly wicked ecclesiastic, Friedrich Kanzler the heroic King Hakon. Die Kronpr?tendenten, like Wagner's Ring, should be given in sections. At the Neues Theatre it was splendidly mounted, though it is doubtful if it ever will be a popular drama in Germany.

The Feast at Solhaug (1857) was a success when it was played at Bergen. Jaeger says that Olaf Lijekrans, his next but unprinted drama, is more romantic than its predecessor. St. John's Night is redolent of folk-song, and the lyric prevails in nearly all the earlier work; but prose dominates in the three historical dramas, the third being The Vikings at Helgeland, considered elsewhere.

When Henrik Ibsen celebrated his seventieth birthday, the Berlin Press Society, as an introduction to the celebration, had an Ibsen première, at which his early drama, The Warriors' Tomb, was recited. This piece exhibits him not as the psychological but as the romantic poet, in his twenty-second year. He wrote the work in 1850 while he was a poor student in Christiania. It was written immediately after Catilina, and was performed on the stage at Christiania on September 26 of the same year. When Ibsen became stage manager of tin Bergen Theatre a revised version of the play was given, January 2, 1854. A local newspaper printed it as a feuilleton, but every copy of that paper has vanished, and The Warriors' Tomb exists only in two prompter's copies, one in Christiania, the other in Bergen. The latter is the one which he regards as the authorized version.

The piece is in verse and has a good movement and swing in it. It may be called a dramatized ballad, and treats of the last great struggle between Heathendom and Christendom. Students of English history know how the Saxons wiped out Christianity from the Roman provinces they conquered, except in a petty mountainous district in Wales, and how a second wave of invaders ruined the Celtic church of Ireland and the Celtic church of Iona, and founded an empire in Russia. It seemed indeed as if the men who went to death hoping to drink mead in Valhalla, would drive back those who went to battle hoping to sing hymns among the cherubim. It is with this period of the world's history that Ibsen's juvenile play is occupied.

King Gandalf and his men sail to Sicily to avenge the death of his father, who had fallen in a Viking raid. There the rough wielder of the sword meets the Christian maiden Blanca, and is conquered by her. The word "forgiveness" overcomes him. He has sworn to die or be revenged, so now resolves to die. Then he recognizes in a Christian hermit the father whom he had believed to be dead. He buries only his sword and his Viking spirit in the tomb of warriors.

The language of the piece is decidedly juvenile, and the whole of no dramatic importance, yet it exhibits traces of the dramatic Viking of to-day. In an address delivered at the Press Society's meeting, Dr. Julius Elias points out that it contains another Ibsen motive, "the ethical mission of woman." In the Lady of Ostraat, Ibsen's character, Nils Lykke, says, "A woman is the most powerful thing on earth; in her hands it lies to lead the man where God would have him," and here Gandalf referring to an old saga says:-

'Tis said that to Valfather's share belongs

Only one-half of the slain warrior;

The other half falls into Freia's lot.

This saying I could never understand,

But now I grasp it. A slain warrior

Am I myself-and the best half of me

Belongs to Freia.

And Blanca leads Gandalf where God would have him; by her the rude sea-king has his moral feelings touched, the heathen becomes a Christian, the sea-rover a spiritual champion. She tells him that the Northland that set out over the ocean to conquer the world with fire and sword is called to "deeds of the spirit on the sea of thought."

Dr. Wicksteed in his invaluable lectures on Henrik Ibsen gives his readers some specimen translations in prose of the poem. They deal, in the main, with those themes dear to Tolstoy and Zola,-The Miner, Afraid of the Light, The Torpedo and the Ark, Burnt Ships, The Eider Duck-in this famous lyric as bitter-sweet as Heine's, Ibsen prefigured his own flight from his native land to the South. We are told by some that Ibsen was a man aloof from his country, a hater of its institutions. No man, not even Bj?rnson, has been more patriotic. He has loved his Norway so well that he has seen her faults and has not hesitated to lay on the lash. He loves the people quite as much as Tolstoy his peasants; but he would have them stand each man on his feet. Like Brand he has essayed to lead them to the heights, and never has gone down to their level.

Love's Comedy (1862) is of especial interest to the student of the prose plays. In it are floating, amorphous perhaps, the motives we know so well of the later Ibsen. The comedy is accessible to English readers, for it has been translated by C. H. Herford, with an introduction and notes. Falk and Svanhild part because they fear themselves,-she to marry a rich merchant, he to go his poetic path and attempt to fly against the wind. The cruel satire of the lines stirred all Norway. The paradox of two young folk abandoning each other just because they fear their love will end the way of most married love, is at least a rare one. As much as we admire Svanhild's resolution to remember her love as a beautiful ideal, unshattered by material realization, we cannot help suspecting that sensible old Gulstad's money bags have a charm for her practical bourgeois nature. It is Ibsen and his problem that is more interesting; we see the parent idea of a long line of children, that idea which may be embodied in one phrase,-never surrender your personality. "Nothing abides but the lost" might be a motto for the piece, as Dr. Herford says. Brandes and Wicksteed argue most interestingly from the theme. The young Ibsen had recognized the essential mockery of so-called romantic love, with its silly idealizations, its perplexed awakenings, its future filled with desperate unhappiness. He had the courage to say these things by way of a satirical parable, and there arose upon the air a burden of disgust and hatred: cynic, atheist, brutal, and shocking. Ibsen bore it as he bore his life long the attacks of press and public-in silence. He could wait, and wait he did.

When Lugné-Po? produced The Comedy of Love at his Théatre de l'?uvre, the translation by Mlle. Colleville and F. de Zepelin, Catulle Mendès, who had been quarrelling with M. Po? to the extent of a duel, wrote the following criticism of Ibsen's early work. It illustrates the real Gallic point of view in the Ibsen controversy:-

It seems that sensitive admirers of Henrik Ibsen do not class The Comedy of Love among the masterpieces of the great Norwegian. I am glad of it for the sake of those masterpieces. The thing which is displeasing above everything in this piece, where Ibsen's genius once more halts, is that one is unable to get at the initial intention of the author. What does he pretend to teach by making to evolute and chatter in the garden of a country house-what house I do not know, but for certain it is a matrimonial one-a number of engaged couples, married folks and parsons who are the fathers of a dozen children each? Those who used to love love no more; those who were romantic have become bourgeois; those who are still romantic will become bourgeois. Then there is a poet, whose lyrics we should classify in France-but we are in Lugné-Po?'s house I-as provincial, who treats like a Philistine all these poor engaged persons, these engaged lovers, of our everyday life. As for him, being a poet (Heavens I how mediocre his verses must be!)-he pursues the vague, the immaterial, the sublime. He would like very well to carry with him in this pursuit a young person, once upon a time "poetical," but all the same strongly "practical," who, after inclining for an instant toward a life of devotion and dévouement with the poet, does not hesitate to espouse a very rich merchant, who evidently has read Emile Augier, badly translated.

It is with difficulty I discover the object of Henrik Ibsen. This puzzle is, however, very excusable in a French critic, since it is shared by critics of the North. Madame Ahlberg (read Ernest Tissot's book) thinks that Ibsen desires to show the contrast between love and the caricature of it which we see in marriage. Georg Brandes, the celebrated Danish critic, in The Comedy of Love esteems it impossible to know where he would carry the poet, and says, "the only certain thing is his pessimistic, conception of love and marriage."

But Henry Jaeger, Norwegian critic, is not even sure of this, and to his mind this piece indicates that there are "sentiments of love, like those of religion; that is to say, which lose in sincerity the moment they are expressed." On which side should a Frenchman have an opinion on points which so divide much nearer judges? At the bottom I am not far from believing that Ibsen premeditated making it understood that even in love all is vanity upon this earth. Ecclesiastes was of this advice, and banality, that gray sun, shines on all the world. Is this to say that The Comedy of Love is a mediocre work? Not at all. Denuded of all dramatic interest, puerile because of its romantic philosophy, and often tedious to the point of inspiring us with the fear of a never ending yawn, this piece, all the same a dream of youth already virile, agitates in its incoherence, ideas, forces, revolts, ironies, and hopes, which a little later in more sure works, obscure but sure, will be the sad challenges of human personality. And moreover, in the lyrical language of personages too emphatically lyrical, which proceeds from that Suabianism which Heine vanquished, among all the little birds, all the little flowers, all the starlit nights, and other sillinesses of German romance, towers, flashes, and radiates resplendent the ardent soul of the true poet.

* * *

(1858)

With Dr. P. H. Wicksteed's affirmation, "Ibsen is a poet," humming in my ears, I went to the most beautiful theatre in London, the Imperial, to hear, to see, above all to see, the Norwegian dramatist's Vikings, a few days before it was withdrawn, in May, 1903. For one thing the production was doomed at the start: it was wofully miscast. The most daring imagination cannot picture Ellen Terry as the fierce warrior wife of Gunnar Headman. Once a creature capriciously sweet, tender, arch, and delightfully arrogant, Miss Terry is now long past her prime. To play Hj?rdis was murdering Ibsen outright.

But the play had its compensations. Miss Terry's son, Edward Gordon Craig, exercised full sway with the stage, lighting, costumes. He is a young man with considerable imagination and a taste for the poetic picturesque. He has endeavoured to escape the deadly monotony of London stage lighting, and, unaided, has worked out several interesting problems. Abolishing foot and border lights, sending shafts of luminosity from above, Mr. Craig secures unexpected and bizarre effects. It need be hardly added that these same effects are suitable only for plays into which the element of romance and of the fantastic largely enter. We see no "flies," no shaky unconvincing side scenes, no foolish flocculent borders, no staring back-cloths. The impression created is one of a real unreality. For example, when the curtains are parted, a rocky slope, Nordish, rugged, forbidding, is viewed, the sea, an inky pool, mist-hemmed, washing at its base. From above falls a curious, sinister light which gives purplish tones to the stony surfaces and masks the faces of the players with mysterious shadows. The entire atmosphere is one of awe, of dread.

With his second tableau Mr. Craig is even more successful. It is the feast room in Gunnar's house. It is a boxed-in set, though it gives one the feeling of a spaciousness that on the very limited stage of the Imperial is surprising. A circular platform with a high seat at the back, and a long table with rough benches, railed in, make up an interior far from promising. A fire burns in a peculiar hearth in the centre, and there are raised places for the women. Outside it is dark. The stage manager contrived to get an extraordinary atmosphere of gloomy radiance in this barbaric apartment. He sent his light shivering from on high, and Miss Terry's Valkyr dress was a gorgeous blue when she stood in the hub of the room. All the light was tempered by a painter's perception of lovely hues. This scene has been admired very much. For many, however, the third act bore off the victory. A simple space of hall, a large casement, a dais, the whole flooded by daylight. Here the quality of light was of the purest, withal hard, as befitted a northern latitude.

In the last scene of all Mr. Craig wrestled with the darkness and obtained several effects, though none startling or novel.

The Vikings was first planned for verse-a Norse tragedy of fate in the Greek style. But the theme demanded a drastic, laconic prose, with nothing unessential, and, as Jaeger points out, without monologues, or lyric outbursts; the dialogue glows with passion, but the glow never becomes flame or gives out sparks; here are caustic wit and biting repartee, but the fighting is not carried on with light rapiers; we seem to be watching a battle for life and death with the short, heavy swords which the old Vikings used-hatred and love, friendship and vengeance, scorn and grief-all are as intense as the sagas themselves.

The dramatic poet has been reproached, as his biographer asserts, for "degrading the demi-gods" of the V?lsung Saga into mere Norwegian and Icelandic Vikings of the age of Erik Blod?x-or Bloody Axe. Other critics, again, have commended him for making Vikings out of the V?lsung Saga.

Be it as it may, the result is drama of an excellent sort; romantic drama if you will, yet informed by a certain realistic quality. Here again the woman is the wielder of the power, and not the man. Hj?rdis is the very incarnation of violence, of the lust of conquest, of hate, revenge. She would overthrow kingdoms to secure the man she loved, and that man is only a tool for her passionate ambitions.

The Vikings at Helgeland, then, is not exactly a dramatic paraphrase of the V?lsung Saga. Ibsen absorbed the wisdom of the ancients of his race and made of them an organic work full of the old spirit, heroic, powerful, and informed with the harsh romance of the time. This play is not among his greatest, but it is none the less interesting as a connecting link of his youth and early manhood.

Let us follow the piece scene by scene, noting the easy grasp of character, the pithy dialogue, the atmosphere of repressed passion and ferocious cruelty. There are evidences of crude power from first to last. Upon the purple spotted rocks near the home of Gunnar Headman on the island of Helgeland-in the north of Norway-Sigurd comes up from his two war-ships which lie down in the misty cove. In the person of Oscar Asche-familiar to New York theatre-goers as the appalling Hebraic millionaire in Pinero's Iris-this Sigurd is a formidable warrior, with hair in two blond plaits, steel-spiked cap, and fighting harness.

He resembled Van Dyck's Siegmund as to girth, and with his big bare arms, his bracelets, sword, and heavy stride, he gave one the impression of clanking grandeur, of implacable phlegm. At once a row begins, for Oernulf of the Fjords, an Icelandic chieftain, bars the passage of the Viking. The pair fight. Fast from ship and cavern pour warriors, and Dagny, the wife of Sigurd. Then hostilities cease. In the young woman Oernulf recognizes a daughter wed without his consent by Sigurd; for this hero, after giving up Hj?rdis-the foster daughter of Oernulf-to Gunnar, marries Oernulf's real child, Dagny. As already indicated, this scene was managed with remarkable deftness at the Imperial. That sterling actor, Holman Clark, no stranger in America, as Oernulf, carried away the major honours in this stirring episode. His very mannerisms lent themselves to an amiable complicity with the lines and gestures. We soon learn from his words that he means to extort his pound of flesh from Gunnar for carrying off Hj?rdis. Sigurd placates him with presents, with assurances of esteem. Dagny pleads for forgiveness, and wins it.

Then enters Kara, the peasant, pursued by the house-carles of Hj?rdis, and her motive is sounded for the first time in this drama of thwarted love and hate. The wretched peasant has killed a subject of the Queen. She is revengeful. He pleads for his life and is promised protection. Hj?rdis soon appears. She looks like the traditional Valkyr and is armed with a lance. Her nature is expressed in the cold way she greets her foster sister, Dagny, though her face brightens at the sight of Sigurd.

Violently reproached by her foster father, Hj?rdis responds in kind. Let Gunnar be weak; let him renew his pact of friendship with Sigurd. She owes nothing to Oernulf. He has slain her real father in unfair fight-then she is called a wanton by the angry chieftain and her rage flames up so that the dark rocks upon which they all stand seem to be illumined. Kara, in the interim, has gone away muttering his vengeance; Hj?rdis, dissimulating, invites all to a great feast in Gunnar's house and departs. Sigurd would go. Dagny mistrusts. At last Sigurd tells his too-long-kept secret. It was he that slew the white bear and won the woman beloved of Gunnar. Dagny is amazed, and after being conjured by her husband to keep precious this story she promises. But she wistfully regards the ring upon her arm, the ring of Hj?rdis, plucked from her wrist by Sigurd (the ring of the Nibelungs!). Sigurd bids her hide it, for if Hj?rdis catches a glimpse of it the deception will be as plain as the round shield of the sun blazing on high. And then-woe to all! The curtains close.

Act II is devoted to the feast and the strange events which happened thereat. Ibsen's magic now begins to work. His psychologic bent is felt the moment after we see Dagny and Hj?rdis in conference. The mild wife of Sigurd wonders audibly at the other's depression. Why should she bemoan her fate with such a house, a fair and goodly abode? Hj?rdis turns fiercely upon her and replies, "Cage an eagle and it will bite at the wires, be they of iron or of gold." But has she not a little son, Egil? Better no son at all for a mother who is a wanton, a leman! She recalls with sullen wrath the words of Oernulf. In vain Dagny seeks to pacify her. The older woman is of the race of Titans. She tells with pride the story of the queen who took her son and sewed his kirtle fast to his flesh. So would she treat her Egil!

"Hj?rdis, Hj?rdis!" cries the tender-hearted listener. For this she is mocked. Hj?rdis further tortures her by asking if she has accompanied her husband into battle, into the halls of the mighty. "Didst thou not don harness and take up arms?" Dagny answers in the negative. Gunnar is extolled for his deed, a mighty deed as yet not excelled by Sigurd. The listener seems on the point of denying this Hj?rdis notes her agitation and presses her, but Dagny is faithful to her word; she keeps Sigurd's secret. Then in a burst, almost lyric, Hj?rdis confesses her love for combat to the sisters of Hilda, the terrible Valkyrs who fly in the sky, carrying dead warriors to Valhall. She loves, too, witchcraft, and would be a witch-wife astride of a whale and skim the storm waves. "Thou speakest shameful things," says the frightened Dagny, and is scoffed at for her timidity.

Gradually the feast begins. The warriors assemble. I cannot say that I admired their costumes, reminding me, as they did, of crazy-quilts. Sigurd and Gunnar enter arm in arm. Egil, the hope of Gunnar's house, has been sent away; his father feared the descent of Oernulf and his men. He now regrets the absence of his boy. Oernulf is not present, but is represented by his youngest son, Thorolf. After the drinking has begun the trouble-breeding Hj?rdis weaves her spell of disaster. She sets boasting the warriors, forces the hapless Gunnar to describe how he slew the great white bear, and openly proclaims him a better man than Sigurd. Even this breach of hospitality does not embitter the friends. Thorolf, however, is hot, imprudent, and at a chance word from Hj?rdis is set on fire. Miss Terry, it must be confessed, played this entire scene with great dexterity. Her broken phrases,-for she has not a prolonged note in her compass,-her scornful mien, her raucous voice, and shrewish gestures were admirable agents for the expression of ill-stifled hate. Taunted beyond his self-control, Thorolf tells the woman that Egil has been kidnapped by Oernulf and his other sons. Instantly she screams that Egil has been slain. Thorolf leaves, swearing that he will be avenged; that, "Ere eventide shall Gunnar and his wife be childless."

At this juncture Gunnar, who has hitherto seemed a lymphatic sort of person, seizes his battle-axe, and, despite Sigurd's word of warning, follows Thorolf and kills him. A moment later enter Oernulf, bearing in his arms the child Egil, happy and unharmed. It is a striking climax. To the father, already bereaved of his other sons, lost in the fight with the treacherous peasant, Kara, for the possession of the child, must be told the terrible news. Thorolf is the apple of his eye, the last of his race. Broken-hearted Gunnar explains. Outraged at the deed caused by Hj?rdis, the timid Dagny gives her the lie when Gunnar's feat is again nauseatingly dwelt upon. "It is Sigurd who won the woman; look at the ring on my arm!" Amazed, infuriated, Hj?rdis turns upon her husband. Is it true? Gunnar confesses without shame. Sigurd presses his hand and proclaims him a brave man, though he did not slay the bear. The hall empties and after Dagny-woman-like-triumphantly exults and cries, "Who is now the mightiest man at the board-my husband or thine?" Hj?rdis is left to her miserable thoughts. She soon makes up her mind, "Now have I but one thing left to do-but one deed to brood upon; Sigurd or I must die."

These words recall the fatal Siegfrieds-Tod! of G?tterd?mmerung. Both Wagner and Ibsen followed the main lines of the immortal epic.

If in this act the student, curious of those correspondences which subtly knit together ages widely asunder, discovers a modern tone, he will regain the larger air of the antique North in Act III. It belongs essentially to Hj?rdis. In the free daylight we discover her weaving a bowstring. Near her, on a table, lie a bow and some arrows. The one soliloquy of the piece begins the act. It is short, pregnant-what is to follow is incorporated in its nuances. She pulls at the bowstring. It is tough, well weighted. "Befooled, befooled by him, by Sigurd-" But ere many days have passed-!

Gunnar enters. He has had a bad night. He cannot sleep because of the murdered Thorolf. Then for a few bars of this barbaric music Ibsen relapses into pure Shakespeare. We see Lady Macbeth and her epileptic husband merge into the figures of the fiercer Brynhild and the weaker Gunther. The man is urged on to betray, to slay his friend.

Hj?rdis lies to Gunnar-as lied, when mad with jealousy, Brynhild to Gunther and Hagen; but this same Hj?rdis has hardly the excuse of her bigger-souled sister.

Gunnar weakens. He describes a dream that he has had of late. "Methought I had done the deed thou cravest; Sigurd lay slain on the earth; thou didst stand beside him and thy face was wondrous pale. Then said I, 'Art thou glad, now that I have done thy will?' But thou didst laugh and answer, 'Blither were I didst thou, Gunnar, lie there in Sigurd's stead.'" Ill at ease, Hj?rdis flouts this dream and pushes her cause to an issue. Sigurd must die. How? "Do the deed, Gunnar-and the heavy days will be past." She promises cheap joys-love. He leaves her clutched to the very heart by her baleful words. The next interview is with Dagny. No trouble now in winging this emotional bird. Already she repents of her cruelty the previous night and would make amends. Hj?rdis recognizes the malleability of the woman and pierces her armour by proving to her her own unfitness for the high position as wife of Sigurd-now the sole hero. She plays all the music there is hidden within this string, and it sounds its feeble, little, discouraged tune without further ado. Dagny feels her worthlessness, has always felt it; better let Sigurd go unattended, unhampered, and quite alone upon that shining path of glory which surely awaits him. She leaves. Treading upon her heels almost comes the redoubtable Sigurd to this exposed cavern of the wicked. Too soon he falls into the toils, not because, like Hercules with Omphale, he is merely a sensuous weakling, but because he has loved Hj?rdis from the first. The plot curdles. Explanations fall like leaves in the thick of autumn. If Sigurd has loved, Hj?rdis has anticipated him. This eagle bends curved beak and is of the lowly for the moment. She proves to Sigurd that the one unpardonable sin is the repudiation of love.

For another and a nobler motive Sigurd gives place to his beloved friend Gunnar, yet none the less is his a crime. It must be expiated, as was John Gabriel Borkman's. Curious it is to note the persistency through a half century of an idea. Like Flaubert, Ibsen did not really add to his early acquired stock of images and ideas.

Tempted almost beyond his powers, Sigurd manages to save his self-respect and remain faithful to his wife. He recognizes his mistake; he has always loved the other woman, though he never knew before that this affection was returned. Hj?rdis bids him renounce all for her; together they will win the throne of Harfager-the ultimate dream of Sigurd. Sadly he bends his back to her gibes, to her devilish suggestions. One way is open to him. He can fight Gunnar in behalf of Oernulf and thus avenge the death of Thorolf and put an end to an existence become insupportable. Hj?rdis has other plans.

Act IV is short. We see the unhappy Oernulf lamenting his murdered son before a black grave mound. He sings his Drapa over the dead body. A storm arises. It is a night of terrors. Kara, the peasant, still unappeased, burns the home of Gunnar. Hj?rdis meets Sigurd and, after entreating vainly, shoots him with the bow and arrow she has made expressly for the purpose. A strand of her hair is entwisted in the bowstring. Sigurd, dying, tells her to her horror that he is not a pagan, that even in death he will not meet her "over there," for he is a Christian man; the white God is his; King Ethelstan of England taught him to know the new religion. (The epoch of the play is A.D. 933.) Despairingly, the strong-souled woman casts herself into a chasm and is translated into Valhall by her immortal sisters, the Valkyrs. This last scene is hopelessly undramatic and, as given at the Imperial, quite meaningless. After Hj?rdis commits suicide the curtains shut out the scene.

In the play, however, Oernulf, Dagny, Gunnar, and Egil are discovered watching the storm. Gunnar claims the protection of the man whose son he has slain. The body of Sigurd is found, and the arrow of Hj?rdis. "So bitterly did she hate him," whispers Dagny to herself with true Ibsenesque irony. Gunnar says aside, "She has slain him-the night before the combat; then she loved me after all." These sly, pitiless strokes would have proved too much to a British audience, sufficiently outraged by several of Hj?rdis's very plain speeches. The little Egil sees his mother on a black horse "home-faring" with the Valkyrs. The storm passes; peacefully the moon casts its mild radiance upon this field of strange conflict.

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