most overpowering of woman’s characteristics—­the maternal instinct.  It may be that she did right in leaving her children; it may even be that she would have left them; but up to the moment when she declared her intention to go, nothing in the play has prepared the spectator for this strange move.  Ibsen has failed to make us feel when the unexpected happened that this, however unforeseen, was exactly what we ought to have expected.

No fault of this kind can be found with ‘Ghosts,’ that drastic tragedy of a house built on the quicksands of falsehood, that appalling modern play with the overwhelming austerity of an ancient tragic drama, that extraordinarily compact and moving piece, in which the Norwegian playwright accomplished his avowed purpose of evoking “the sensation of having lived thru a passage of actual life.”  A few years only before Ibsen brought forth his ‘Ghosts,’ Lowell had asserted that “That Fate which the Greeks made to operate from without, we recognize at work within, in some vice of character or hereditary disposition”; and Greek this play of Ibsen’s is in its massive simplicity, in the economy of its bare structure with five characters only, with no change of scene, with no lapse of time, and with an action that rolls forward irresistibly with inevitable inexorability.  As there was something AEschylean in ‘Brand’ so there is something Sophoclean in ‘Ghosts’; altho Ibsen lacks the serenity of the great Greek and Sophocles had a loftier aim than that of evoking “the sensation of having lived thru a passage of actual life.”  There is no echo in ‘OEdipus’ of the cry of revolt which rings thru ‘Ghosts,’ and yet there was a strange similarity in the impression made on at least one spectator of the actual performances of these tragedies, the ancient and the modern, the one after the other, at a few days’ interval here in New York,—­an impression of deepening horror that graspt the throat and gript the heart with fingers of ice.

The most obvious resemblance between the Greek tragedy and the Scandinavian social drama is in their technic, in that the two austere playwrights have set before us the consequences of an action, rather than the action itself.  Here Ibsen has thrown aside the formula of the “well-made play,” using the skill acquired by the study of Scribe in achieving a finer form than the French playwright was capable of, a form seemingly simple but very solidly put together.  The structure of ‘Ghosts’ recalls Voltaire’s criticism of one of Moliere’s plays that it seemed to be in action, altho it was almost altogether in narrative.  Ibsen has here shown a skill like Moliere’s in making narrative vitally dramatic.  Ibsen has none of Moliere’s breadth of humor, none of his large laughter, none of his robust fun; indeed, Ibsen’s humor is rarely genial; grim and almost grotesque, it is scarcely ever playful; and there is sadly little laughter released by his satiric portrayals of character.  But the Scandinavian playwright has not a little of the great Frenchman’s feeling for reality, and even more of his detestation of affectation and his hatred of sham.  The creator of Tartuffe would have appreciated Pastor Manders, an incomparable prig, with self-esteem seven times heated, engrossed with appearances only and ingrained with parochial hypocrisy.