THE CROWN INN AT OXFORD, JOHN DAVENANT PROPRIETOR, LONDON, circa A.D. 1600-1606.

NEW YORK.

VOL. IX.

SHAKESPEARIANA.

JANUARY, 1892.

No. 1.

IBSEN'S DRAMATIC CONSTRUCTION COMPARED WITH SHAKESPEARE'S. *

TWICE at least, in Shakespeare and in Molière, the world has seen how the highest skill in dramatic poetry may be developed from professional familiarity with the stage, either in acting or in managing. To these two great examples, in the opinion of many critics, a third is now to be added, the Norwegian, Ibsen. For he, too, by practical experience of theatrical management learned his art of dramatic composition.

And, indeed, his work as dramatic poet, whatever we may think of its higher merits, shows in every detail the skill that comes only from close professional study of the needs and conditions of theatrical presentation. He was, in fact, from 1851 to 1857 director of the theatre at Bergen, and from 1857 to 1861 director of the larger theatre at Christiana. And the best quality of his best work may be proved, I think, to be due to the practical knowledge thus acquired in the struggle of his large ideas against the small means of these poorly endowed Norwegian theatres-the knowledge of the ways of realizing, at the smallest expense in scenery and decoration, the highest effects of dramatic situation.

But there was in Ibsen's own nature an element that gave to the result of these ten years of practical expression a character altogether different from the result to be observed either in Shakespeare's case or in Molière's. For by force of natural talent Ibsen was not, I think, like Molière and Shakespeare, a poet of the dramatic kind, but a poet of the lyrical kind. That is, his natural strength lay, not in observing the characters nor in representing the customs and the actions of other people, but in putting his own emotions and his own thoughts before us in forms of pure lyrical imagination. When, for example, I began, in my youth, to form acquaintance with his poetry, the charm that seized me was the charm of his intense lyrical expression. There seemed to me in those early years little that was either strong or beautiful in his dramatic

*Read before the New York Shakespeare Society, May 14, 1891.

verses. Those early plays of his were deficient, we contended, in the main device of dramatic interest. But from the first, whenever I could detach the personal altruism of the man from the framework of his drama, I could feel the heart-beat of a rare poet. And when he published, in 1875, his volume of lyrical poems that side of his genius, freed at last from all obscuration, shone forth with dazzling splendor. As lyrical poet he was seen to belong to that small class of which Heine is the chief representative, a class that as yet cannot be said to include any English or American poet. It is marked among the lyrical groups of our century by the blending of a sceptical spirit of philosophy with a keen and somewhat cynical wit and great intensity of pathos. (It is as if the fierce humor of Carlyle and his fantastic imagination were wedded in a great poet with a feeling for nature as sensitive as Keats's and with a touch of poetic skill as dainty as Tennyson's.) In this peculiar form of lyrical poetry the genius of Ibsen was not, indeed, to be compared in range and grandeur with the genius of Heiné; but it came, I think, closest of the modern poets to that incomparable model. It was, above all, the rendition alone of the poet's own philosophy of life, of his own ways of thinking and of his deepest personal feeling. And this rendition of himself was sure to be made through pictures of nature that showed the most subtile knowledge of Norwegian landscape and with a sharpness of wit and a patriotic force of sentiment that only a great poet can command. This lyrical form was as different from dramatic form as any one form of poetical genius can be from another, and yet this lyrical form was the chief equipment that Ibsen received from nature; and it was the conversion of this lyrical form into dramatic form through years of painful endeavor that has produced the best of his dramatic poems. In those dramas the effort to represent the phases of human emotion, the effort to reach the springs of human action, the effort to set forth in pictures of human life large views of dreary pessimistic philosophy-these are habits of mind that Ibsen has brought into dramatic art from the practice of lyrical art. But these habits of mind have been, as we said, disciplined and modified by a stage-director's practical experience. The result of this unusual blending is a form of dramatic poem so strange in all ways, and in some ways so effective, as to count among the marvels of the century.

Now, to study dramatic method of any dramatic poet we are bound, I think, to take his best work. For this reason, although I should like to trace the movement of Ibsen's mind through the long series of his plays, and to show, step by step, the formation of his method, I pass at once to the examination of that one play which is not only his latest and most famous, but also, in my opinion, his best -Hedda Gabler. Let us, therefore, in order to see with clearness his. lines of construction in that poem, first trace the action of the story.