It was of Ibsen, no doubt, that M. Maeterlinck was thinking when he asserted that “the first thing which strikes us in the drama of the day is the decay, one might almost say, the creeping paralysis, of external action.  Next, we note a very pronounced desire to penetrate deeper into human consciousness, and to place moral problems on a high pedestal.”  And there is no denying that Ibsen’s interest in moral problems has grown steadily in intensity, and that he has sought to penetrate deeper and deeper into human consciousness.  His latest play, ’When We Dead Awaken,’ altho adjusted to the conditions of the modern theater and altho perfectly actable, seems to be intended rather more for the reader than for the spectator.  Essentially dramatic as it is, its theatric realization is less satisfactory—­as tho Ibsen was chafing against the restraints of the actual theater, restraints which are an integral element of its power as a form of expression.

In the same suggestive essay, M. Maeterlinck remarked on the steady decline of the taste for bald theatrical anecdotes,—­the taste which Scribe and Sardou were content to gratify; and he declared that “mere adventures fail to interest us because they no longer correspond to a living and actual reality.”  And yet no one has more sharply proclaimed the sovran law of the stage than the Belgian critic-poet; no one has more sympathetically asserted that “its essential demand will always be action.  With the rise of the curtain, the high intellectual desire within us undergoes transformation; and in place of the thinker, psychologist, mystic, or moralist, there stands the mere instinctive spectator, the man electrified negatively by the crowd, the man whose one desire is to see something happen.”  In his later and more poetic plays Ibsen seems to be appealing more especially to the mystic and the moralist; whereas in the earlier social dramas he was able to grip the attention of the mere instinctive spectator, while also satisfying the unexprest desires of the thinker.

The sheer symbolism of the poet-philosopher is powerfully suggestive, and these later plays have an interest of their own, no doubt; but it is in the earlier social dramas that Ibsen most clearly reveals his dramaturgic genius,—­in the ‘Pillars of Society,’ and the ’Doll’s House,’ in ‘Ghosts’ and in ‘Hedda Gabler.’  Dennery might envy the ingenuity with which Consul Bernick is tempted to insist on the fatal order that seems for a season to be the death-sentence of his own son; and Sardou would appreciate the irony of Nora’s frantic dance at the very moment when she was tortured by deadly fear.  But these theatric devices, in Dennery’s hands or in Sardou’s, would have existed for their own sake solely; but in Ibsen’s, effective as they are, they have a deeper significance.  He is able to avail himself of the complicated machinery of the “well-made play,” to flash a piercing light into the darker recesses of human nature.