Beggar or rich,—­with all my soul
  I will; and that one thing’s the whole!

So Dr. Stockman announces his discovery that “the strongest man upon earth is he who stands most alone”; and in every play we find characters animated by this unhesitating determination and this unfaltering energy.  Even Ibsen’s women, so subtly feminine in so many ways, are forever revealing themselves virile in their self-assertion, in their claim to self-ownership.  His plays move us strangely in the performance, they grip at the outset and firmly hold us to the relentless end, because his dramaturgic skill is exerted upon themes essentially dramatic in that they deal with this stark exhibition of the human will and with the bitter struggle that must ensue when the human will is in revolt against the course of nature or against the social bond.

When the poet-philosopher has suggested to the playwright one of these essentially dramatic themes, Ibsen handles it with a directness which intensifies its force and which is in itself evidence of his poetic power.  As Professor Butcher has pointed out, “we are perhaps inclined to rate too low the genius which is displayed in the general structure of an artistic work; we set it down merely as the hard-won result of labor, and we find inspiration only in isolated splendors, in the lightning-flash of passion, in the revealing power of poetic imagery.”  In these last gifts Ibsen may seem to many, if not deficient, at least, less abundant than some other dramatic poets; but he can attain “the supreme result which Greek thought and imagination achieve by their harmonious cooeperation”; he can present “the organic union of parts.”  He has the sense of form which we feel to be the final guerdon of Greek endeavor.

A play of Ibsen’s is always compact and symmetrical.  It has a beginning, a middle, and an end; it never straggles, but ever moves straightforward to its conclusion.  It has unity; and often it conforms even to the pseudo-unities proclaimed by the superingenious critics of the Italian renascence.  Sometimes a play of Ibsen’s has another likeness to a tragedy of the Greeks, in that it presents in action before the assembled spectators only the culminating scenes of the story.  ‘Ghosts’ recalls ‘OEdipus the King,’ not only in the horror at the heart of it and the poignancy of the emotion it evokes, but also in its being a fifth act only, the culmination of a long and complex concatenation of events, which took place before the point at which Sophocles and Ibsen saw fit to begin their plays.  In the Greek tragedy, as in the Scandinavian social drama, the poet has chosen to deal with the result of the action, rather than with the visible struggle itself; it is not the present doings of the characters, but their past deeds, which determine their fate.