credible than that of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, and not one-tenth as amusing. Following, as it does, immediately on the heels of The Wild Duck, which was as remarkable a slice of real life as was ever brought before a theatrical audience, the artificiality of Rosmersholm shows Ibsen as an artist clearly stepping backward that he may leap the further forward.
In other words, Rosmersholm is the proof of Ibsen’s desire to conquer another field of drama. He had now for some years rejected with great severity all temptations from the poetic spirit, which was nevertheless ineradicable in him. He had wished to produce on the mind of the spectator no other impression than that he was observing something which had actually happened, exactly in the way and the words in which it would happen. He had formulated to the actress, Lucie Wolf, the principle that ideal dramatic poetry should be considered extinct, “like some preposterous animal form of prehistoric times.” But the soul of man cannot be fed with a stone, and Ibsen had now discovered that perfectly prosaic “slices of life” may be salutary and valuable on occasion, but that sooner or later a poet asks for more. He, therefore, a poet if ever there was one, had grown weary of the self-made law by which he had shut himself out from Paradise.
