Altho no other play of Ibsen’s attains the extraordinary compactness and swiftness of ‘Ghosts,’ several of them approach closely to this standard, the ‘Master-Builder,’ for example, ‘Little Eyolf’ and more especially ’Rosmersholm,’—­in which the author did not display on the stage itself more than a half of the strong series of situations he had devised to sustain the interest of the spectator and to elucidate his underlying thesis.  But Ibsen does not hold himself restricted to any one formula; and sometimes he prefers, as in the ‘Enemy of the People,’ to let the whole story unroll itself before the audience.  Only slowly did Ibsen come to a mastery of his own methods; and he had begun, in the ‘League of Youth’ and in the ‘Pillars of Society’ by doing what every great dramatist had done before him,—­by accepting the form worked out by his immediate predecessors and adjusted to the actual theater of his own time.  Just as Shakspere followed the patterns set by Kyd and Marlowe, by Lyly and Greene, just as Moliere copied the model ready to his hand in the Italian comedy-of-masks, so Ibsen began by assimilating the formulas which had approved themselves in France, the land where the drama was flourishing most luxuriantly in the middle of the nineteenth century, formulas devised by Scribe and only a little modified by Augier and the younger Dumas.

III

For threescore years, at least, Scribe was the salient figure in the French theater; and his influence endured more than twoscore years after his death.  He can be considered from discordant standpoints; to the men of letters Scribe seems wholly unimportant, since his merits were in great measure outside of literature; to the men of the theater Scribe is a personality of abiding interest, since he put his mark on the drama of his own day in almost every one of its departments.  In the course of his active career as a playwright he made over farce, first of all, then the comedy-of-intrigue, and finally the comedy-of-manners; he tried his hand at the historical play; and he was the chief librettist of the leading French composers of opera, both grand and comic.  He might lack style; he might be barren of poetry; he might be void of philosophy; his psychology might be pitifully inadequate; his outlook on life might be petty;—­but he was pastmaster of the theater, and from him were hidden none of the secrets of that special art.

It was in Scribe’s hands that there was worked out the formula of the “well-made play,—­” la piece bien faite,—­in which the exposition was leisurely and careful, in which the interest of expectancy was aroused early and sustained to the end, in which the vital scenes of the essential struggle,—­the scenes a faire,—­were shown on the stage at the very moment of the story when they would be most effective, and in which a logical conclusion dimly foreseen, but ardently desired, was happily brought about by devices of unexpected