For we cannot repeat too often that in the drama "literary merit" is a by-product,--as it is in oratory also. And we cannot assert too emphatically that the drama has an independent existence--that it does not lie wholly within the domain of literature. "The art of the drama," so M. Emile Faguet has assured us, "touches all the other arts and includes them." The drama is not intended primarily to be read in the study; it is devised to be performed on the stage by actors before spectators. It has a right, therefore, to avail itself of the aid of all other arts and to enlist them all in its service. This is one of the reasons why those who have studied the secrets of this art are inclined to esteem it as the noblest and most powerful of them all. As M. Faguet has declared, with that sympathetic understanding of the essential principles of the drama which is common enough in France and only too rare elsewhere--"it is not contradictory to the definition of dramatic art that it can synthesize in space like painting, that it can synthesize in time like poetry, that it can synthesize outside of time and space like music, that it can unite all the arts without forcing them to interfere the one with the other, and, therefore, without taking from any one aught of its force or aught of its dignity; that it can unite them all in a vast, powerful, and harmonious synthesis embracing the whole of life and the whole of art." (1903.) IBSEN THE PLAYWRIGHT I One indisputable service has Ibsen rendered to the drama: he has revealed again that it may be an incomparable instrument in the hands of a poet-philosopher who wishes to make people think, to awaken them from an ethical lethargy, to shock them into asking questions for which the complacent morality of the moment can provide no adequate answer. In the final decades of the nineteenth century,--when the novel was despotic in its overwhelming triumph over all the other forms of literary expression, and when arrogant writers of fiction like Edmond de Goncourt did not hesitate to declare that the drama was outworn at last, that it was unfitted to convey the ideas interesting to the modern world, and that it had fallen to be no more than a toy to amuse the idle after dinner,--Ibsen brought forth a succession of social dramas as tho to prove that the playhouse of our own time could supply a platform whereon a man might free his soul and boldly deliver his message, if only he had first mastered the special conditions of the playwright's art. Of course, Ibsen has solved none of the problems he has propounded; nor was it his business as a dramatist to provide solutions of the strange enigmas of life, but rather to force us to exert ourselves to find each of us the best answer we could.