As we look down this list, we see that it is perhaps unfair to class all the later plays as social dramas.  Some of them, more especially the latest of them all, ‘When We Dead Awaken,’ seem to be symbolical rather than social, allegorical in intent even if they remain realistic in treatment.  Brandes long ago declared that Ibsen had had a Pegasus killed under him; but when we consider the ‘Lady from the Sea’ and ’When We Dead Awaken’ and perhaps one or two other of their later companions, we may well believe that the winged steed was not actually slain.  Wounded it may have been, only to recover its strength again and to proffer its back once more for the poet to bestride.

V

These more poetic of Ibsen’s plays in prose seem at times almost surcharged with a meaning which is nevertheless often so mockingly intangible and evasive, that we dare to wonder at last whether the secret they persist in hiding in this tantalizing fashion would really reward our efforts to grasp it; and we find comfort in Lowell’s apt saying that “to be misty is not to be mystic.”  Ibsen is mystic, no doubt, but on occasion he can be misty also.  And not only the plays that are merely misty but even those that are truly mystic, are less likely than the plainer-spoken social dramas to hold our attention in the theater itself, where the appeal is to the assembled multitude, and where all things need to be clearly defined so that the spectators can follow understandingly every phase of the changing action.

In the most of his social dramas Ibsen makes his meaning transparently clear; and there is never any undue strain on the attention of the average playgoer.  Especially is he a master of the difficult art of exposition.  It is the plain duty of the playwright to acquaint the audience with the antecedent circumstances upon which the plot is based,—­to inform the spectators fully as to that part of the story which has gone before and which is not to be displayed in action on the stage,—­to explain the relation of the several characters to each other,—­and to arouse interest in what is about to happen.  Scribe, than whom no one ever had a wider knowledge of the necessities of the theater, held the exposition to be so important that he often sacrificed to it the whole of his first act, introducing his characters one by one, setting forth clearly what had happened before the play, and sometimes postponing the actual beginning of the action to the end of the first act, if not to the earlier scenes of the second.  Scribe seems to have believed that it did not matter much how dull the first act might be, since the spectators had paid their money and would not abandon hope until they had seen at least the second act, in which he sought always to grip their interest.