of solidarity, Ibsen’s doctrine was certain to be unwelcome—­even if it might be wholesome.  Outside of Scandinavia it is only in Germany that Ibsen has succeeded in winning acceptance as a popular dramatist, perhaps because it was there that the doctrine of individualism was most needed.  In Great Britain, and in the United States, where the individual has his rights, altho with no relaxing of the social bond, the performances of Ibsen’s plays have been surprisingly infrequent when we consider their delightful craftsmanship, their indisputable power and their unfailing interest.

X

After all, it is not as a philosopher that Ibsen demands attention, but as a dramatist, as a playwright who is also a poet.  If it is his weakness that his theory of life is overstrenuous, one-sided and out of date, it is his strength that he has opinions of his own and that he is willing to face the problems that insistently confront us to-day.  As Mr. Archer has put it tersely and conclusively, Ibsen is “not pessimist or optimist or primarily a moralist, tho he keeps thinking about morals.  He is simply a dramatist, looking with piercing eyes at the world of men and women, and translating into poetry this episode and that from the inexhaustible pageant.”

A moralist he must be, if his work is to have any far-reaching significance, any final value.  Morality is not something a poet can put into his work deliberately; but it can be left out only at the poet’s peril, since few works of art are likely to be worth while if they are ethically empty.  Ibsen’s inspiration is too rich for it to be void of moral purport, even tho the playwright may not have intended all that we read into his work.  There is a moral in ‘Ghosts’ as there is in ‘OEdipus,’ in the ‘Scarlet Letter,’ and in ’Anna Karenina,’—­a moral, austere and dispassionate.  It contains much that is unpleasant and even painful, but—­to quote Arnold’s praise of ’Anna Karenina’—­nothing “of a nature to trouble the senses or to please those who wish their senses troubled.”  Ibsen’s play, like the tragedy of Sophocles, like the severe stories of Hawthorne and Tolstoi, is not spoon-meat for babes; it is not for young men and maidens; but as Goethe asked nearly a century ago, “What business have our young girls at the theater?  They do not belong to it;—­they belong to the convent; and the theater is only for men and women who know something of human affairs.”  It is for these men and these women that Ibsen, with stern self-control, has written his social dramas, that he may force them to look into matters they are willing enough to ignore and to front the facts of life, ugly as these may be.