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IBSEN 35
or his life to the ideal, moves steadily to his
inevitable doom. Whether he move in the
form of Halvard Solness, the cowardly archi-
tect of genius, fearless of ideas but fearful of
action, or in the form of the symbolical masterbuilder,
the artist who tries to have the best
of both worlds, matters not a straw. The
medium of expression changes, but the theme
is constant : the conception is whole. That
is more than can be said of The Lady from the
Sea, where the symbolism comes perilously
near padding ; or of When We Dead Awaken,
where it often expresses nothing relevant,
merely standing picturesquely for common-
places, and filling gaps.
To read one of Ibsen's great plays is always
thrilling ; to read one for the first time is an
event. If a savage who took locomotives and
motor-cars for granted, as inexplicable crea-
tures of whim and fancy, suddenly were shown,
not by vague adumbration, but by straightforward
exposition, that they were expressions
of intelligible laws controlled by comprehensible
machinery, he could not be more
amazed than was the nineteenth century by
Ibsen. For Ibsen took nothing for granted.
He saw little on the surface of life that
corresponded with reality ; but he did not
cease to believe in reality.
That was where he
differed both from the Philistines and from the