of the 'importance' of your subject? If it's important by any other
critical measure than the little foot-rule the 'produced' piece has to
conform to, it is predestined to be a muddle. When it has escaped being
a muddle the note it has succeeded in striking at the furthest will be
recognised as one of those that are called high but by the courtesy, by
the intellectual provinciality, of theatrical criticism, which, as we
can see for ourselves any morning, is--well, an abyss even deeper than
the theatre itself. Don't attempt to crush us with Dumas and Ibsen, for
such values are from any informed and enlightened point of view, that is
measured by other high values, literary, critical, philosophic, of the
most moderate order. Ibsen and Dumas are precisely cases of men, men in
their degree, in their poor theatrical straight-jacket, speculative, who
have HAD to renounce the finer thing for the coarser, the thick, in
short, for the thin and the curious for the self-evident. What earthly
intellectual distinction, what 'prestige' of achievement, would have
attached to the substance of such things as 'Denise,' as 'Monsieur
Alphonse,' as 'Francillon' (and we take the Dumas of the supposedly
subtler period) in any other form? What virtues of the same order would
have attached to 'The Pillars of Society,' to 'An Enemy of the People,'
to 'Ghosts,' to 'Rosmersholm' (or taking also Ibsen's 'subtler period')
to 'John Gabriel Borkmann,' to 'The Master-Builder'? Ibsen is in fact
wonderfully a case in point, since from the moment he's clear, from the
moment he's 'amusing,' it's on the footing of a thesis as simple and
superficial as that of 'A Doll's House'--while from the moment he's by
apparent intention comprehensive and searching it's on the footing of an
effect as confused and obscure as 'The Wild Duck.' From which you easily
see ALL the conditions can't be met. The dramatist has to choose but
those he's most capable of, and by that choice he's known."

So the objector concludes, and never surely without great profit from