critic's conjecture that "the series which ends with the Epilogue
really began with _The Master Builder." As the last confession, so
to speak, of a great artist, the Epilogue will always be read with
interest. It contains, moreover, many flashes of the old genius, many
strokes of the old incommunicable magic. One may say with perfect
sincerity that there is more fascination in the dregs of Ibsen's mind
than in the "first sprightly running" of more common-place talents.
But to his sane admirers the interest of the play must always be
melancholy, because it is purely pathological. To deny this is, in
my opinion, to cast a slur over all the poet's previous work, and in
great measure to justify the criticisms of his most violent detractors.
For _When We Dead Awaken_ is very like the sort of play that haunted
the "anti-Ibsenite" imagination in the year 1893 or thereabouts. It
is a piece of self-caricature, a series of echoes from all the earlier
plays, an exaggeration of manner to the pitch of mannerism. Moreover,
in his treatment of his symbolic motives, Ibsen did exactly what he
had hitherto, with perfect justice, plumed himself upon never doing:
he sacrificed the surface reality to the underlying meaning. Take,
for instance, the history of Rubek's statue and its development
into a group. In actual sculpture this development is a grotesque
impossibility. In conceiving it we are deserting the domain of
reality, and plunging into some fourth dimension where the properties
of matter are other than those we know. This is an abandonment of the
fundamental principle which Ibsen over and over again emphatically
expressed--namely, that any symbolism his work might be found to
contain was entirely incidental, and subordinate to the truth and
consistency of his picture of life. Even when he dallied with the
supernatural, as in _The Master Builder_ and _Little Eyolf_, he was
always careful, as I have tried to show, not to overstep decisively
the boundaries of the natural. Here, on the other hand, without any