Consider, then, how Ibsen was misunderstood. Setting aside the historical and poetic works, we are confronted in the social plays by the average man and woman of every-day life. They live, as a rule, in mediocre circumstances; they are harried by the necessities of quotidian existence. Has this undistinguished _bourgeoisie_ the potentialities of romance, of tragedy, of beauty? Wait, says Ibsen, and you will see your own soul, the souls of the man and woman who jostle you in the street, the same soul in palace or hovel, that orchestra of cerebral sensations, the human soul. And it is the truth he speaks. We follow with growing uneasiness his exposition of a soul. The spectacle is not pleasing. In his own magical but charmless way the souls of his people are turned inside out during an evening. No monologues, no long speeches, no familiar machinery of the drama, are employed. But the miracle is there. You face yourself. Is it any wonder that public and critic alike waged war against this showman of souls, this new psychologist of the unflattering, this past master of disillusionment? For centuries poets, tragic and comic, satiric and lyric, have been exalting, teasing, mocking, and lulling mankind. When Aristophanes flayed his victims he sang a merry tune; Shakespeare, with Olympian amiability, portrayed saint and sinner alike to the accompaniment of a divine music. But Ibsen does not cajole, amuse, or bribe with either just or specious illusions. He is determined to tell the truth of our microcosmic baseness. The truth is his shibboleth. And when enounced its sound is not unlike the chanting of a _Nox Irae_. He lifted the ugly to heroic heights; the ignoble he analysed with the cold ardour of a moral biologist--the ignoble, that "sublime of the lower slopes," as Flaubert has it. This psychological method was another rock of offence. Why transform the playhouse into a school of metaphysics? But Ibsen is not a metaphysician and his characters are never abstractions; instead, they are very lively humans. They offend those who believe the theatre to be a place of sentimentality or clowning; these same Ibsen men and women offend the lovers of Shakespeare and the classics. We know they are real, yet we dislike them as we dislike animals trained to imitate humanity too closely. The simian gestures cause a feeling of repulsion in both cases; surely we are not of such stock! And we move away. So do we sometimes turn from the Ibsen stage when human souls are made to go through a series of sorrowful evolutions by their stern trainer. To what purpose such revelations? Is it art? Is not our ideal of a nobler humanity shaken?