[13. Kringsjaa.  Vol.  XII, pp. 777 ff.  The article upon which
    this reply was based was from the Quarterly Review.]

It is a relief to turn from puerilities of this sort to Theodor Caspari’s article in For Kirke og Kultur (1895)[14]—­Grunddrag ved den Shakespeareske Digtning, i saerlig Jevnfoerelse med Ibsens senere Digtning.

    [14.  Vol.  I, pp. 38 ff.]

This article must be read with caution, partly because its analysis of the Elizabethan age is conventional, and therefore superficial, and partly because it represents a direction of thought which eyed the later work of Ibsen and Bjornson with distrust.  These men had rejected the faith of their fathers, and the books that came from them were signs of the apostasy.  But For Kirke og Kultur has been marked from its first number by ability, conspicuous fairness, and a large catholicity, which give it an honorable place among church journals.  And not even a fanatical admirer of Ibsen will deny that there is more than a grain of truth in the indictment which the writer of this article brings against him.

The central idea is the large, general objectivity of Shakespeare’s plays as contrasted with the narrow, selfish subjectivity of Ibsen’s.  The difference bottoms in the difference between the age of Elizabeth and our own.  Those were days of full, pulsing, untrammeled life.  Men lived big, physical lives.  They had few scruples and no nerves.  Full-blooded passions, not petty problems of pathological psychology, were the things that interested poets and dramatists.  They saw life fully and they saw it whole.  So with Shakespeare.  His characters are big, well-rounded men; they are not laboratory specimens.  They live in the real Elizabethan world, not in the hothouse of the poet’s brain.  It is of no consequence that violence is done to “local color.”  Shakespeare beheld all the world and all ages through the lens of his own time and country, but because the men he saw were actual, living beings, the characters he gives us, be they mythological figures, Romans, Greeks, Italians, or Englishmen, have universal validity.  He went to Italy for his greatest love-story.  That gave him the right atmosphere.  It is significant that Ibsen once thought it necessary to seek a suggestive background for one of his greatest characters.  He went to Finmarken for Rebecca West.

Shakespeare’s characters speak in loud, emphatic tones and they give utterance to clear, emphatic thoughts.  There is no “twilight zone” in their thinking.  Ibsen’s men and women, like the children at Rosmersholm, never speak aloud; they merely whimper or they whisper the polite innuendos of the drawing room.  The difference lies largely in the difference of the age.  But Ibsen is more decadent than his age.  There are great ideas in our time too, but Ibsen does not see them.  He sees only the “thought.”  Contrast with this Shakespeare’s colossal scale.