works, but in their company at least,--that is, supposing yourself so
highly privileged as to be admitted within the innermost circle of the
Inner Ibsen Brotherhood,--_not_ to know IBSEN would be proof positive
of your being in the outer darkness of ignorance, and in need, however
unworthy, of the grace of Ibsenitish enlightenment. Recruits are
wanted in the Ibsenite ranks, so as to strengthen numerically the one
party against the other; for the Ibsenitish sect has so for progressed
as to be at loggerheads amongst themselves; not indeed on any really
essential question, such as would be, for example, any doubt as to
the position of IBSEN as a Dramatist, or as to the order of merit and
precedence to be assigned to his works. No, on such matters they are
apparently at one; but in other matters they are at one another. Thus
the unity appears to be only superficial, a decent plaster hiding the
rift occasioned by one of their number having literally translated
into English IBSEN's latest Norwegian drama, of which translation the
verbal correctness is impugned by another learned Ibsenite.

Not being "a hardy Norseman," and having neither a reading nor
speaking acquaintance with the Norse language, I am unable to decide
abstruse points on which such learned doctors disagree; but not being
altogether without some practical experience of English and French
drama, I venture to call in question not only the dramatic ability of
the dramatist himself, but also, after perhaps allowing him some merit
as a type-writer or character-sketcher, to assert that the style and
matter of most of his work is always tiresome, frequently childish,
and the subject often morbid and unhealthy; and, further, that his
method is tedious to the last degree of boredom; for, as a writer, if
I may judge him fairly by his translators, he is didactic and prosy,
and never more tedious than when his dialogue is intended to be at its
very crispest. As a playwright his construction is faulty. Here and