dramas, we should have had confusion thrice confounded. The day after his death the entire civilised world wrote of him as the great man he was: great man, great artist, great moralist. And A Doll's House only saw the light in 1879--so potent a creator of critical perspective is Death. There were, naturally, many dissonant opinions in this symphony of praise. Yet how different it all read from the opinions of a decade ago. Adverse criticism, especially in America, was vitiated by the fact that Ibsen the dramatist was hardly known here. Ibsen was eagerly read, but seldom played; and rarely played as he should be. He is first the dramatist. His are not closet dramas to be leisurely digested by lamp-light; conceived for the theatre, actuality their key-note, his characters are pale abstractions on the printed page--not to mention the inevitable distortions to be found in the closest translation. We are all eager to tell what we think of him. But do we know him? Do we know him as do the goers of Berlin, or St. Petersburg, Copenhagen, Vienna, or Munich? And do we realise his technical prowess? In almost every city of Europe Ibsen is in the regular repertory. He is given at intervals with Shakespeare, Schiller, Dumas, Maeterlinck, Hauptmann, Grillparzer, Hervieu, Sudermann, and with the younger dramatists. That is the true test. Not the isolated divinity of a handful of worshippers, with an esoteric message, his plays are interpreted by skilled actors and not for the untrained if enthusiastic amateur. There is no longer Ibsenism on the Continent; Ibsen is recognised as the greatest dramatist since Racine and Molière. Cults claim him no more, and therefore the critical point of view at the time of his death had entirely shifted. His works are played in every European language and have been translated into the Japanese.