II.  “THE LADY FROM THE SEA”

On seeing the Stage Society’s performance of Ibsen’s “Lady from the Sea,” I found myself wondering whether Ibsen is always so unerring in his stagecraft as one is inclined to assume, and whether there are not things in his plays which exist more satisfactorily, are easier to believe in, 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 badly, as if they were talking of things which they knew nothing about.  Now, personally, this kind of