Students of Ibsen are deeply indebted to Mr. William Archer, not alone for his translations--colourless though they often are--but also for his illuminative critical articles on the Norwegian master. A comparatively recent one describes Ibsen's apprenticeship and destroys the notion that he owed anything to George Sand. He learned much of his stagecraft from Eugène Scribe, who was the artistic parent of Sardou. But as Mr. Archer wrote in an English periodical:-- If the French are determined to claim some share in the making of Ibsen, they must shift their ground a little. He did not get his ideas from George Sand, but he got a good deal of his stagecraft from Eugène Scribe and the playwrights of his school. Ideas he could not possibly get from Scribe, for the best of all reasons; but he can be proved to have been familiar, at the outset of his career, with the works of that great inventor and manipulator of situations, from whom there can be little doubt that he acquired the rudiments of dramatic construction. He ultimately outgrew his teacher, even in technical skill, and his later plays, from Ghosts onward, show the influence of Scribe mainly in the careful avoidance of his methods. Nevertheless it was in the Scribe gymnasium, so to speak, that he trained himself for his subsequent feats as a technician. It is significant of Ibsen's frame of mind in his extreme youth, that his first drama was called Catilina (1850) and devoted to the Roman champion of individual rights, the hater of tyrants. He studied, says his biographer Hans Jaeger, Sallust's Catiline and Cicero's Orations against Catiline; and Vasenius is quoted to the effect that the Catilina of Ibsen is "a true representation of the historic personage"--an opinion in which Jaeger does not coincide. Two women, Aurelia and Furia, who dispute for the possession of the hero, are the two women natures that may be found in nearly all of the dramas. It is not the purpose of this study to dwell long upon the plays not in the regular repertory. Chiefly for the historic retrospect are they mentioned; particularly in the case of Catilina, the first as it sounds the key in which the master works of the poet are generally sounded, the key of individuality, "the utmost clearness of vision and fulness of power," to employ Ibsen's own words. Twenty-six poems appeared in a slim volume. They are boyish, one dating from the nineteenth year of the author. They are immature, as might be expected, though charged with pessimism, a youthful Byronism. "He went about Grimstad like an enigma secured with seven seals," said a lady who knew him then.