Therefore let us beware the pitfalls dug by some Ibsen exegetists; the genius of the dramatist is too vast and versatile to be pinned down to a single formula. If you believe that he is dangerous to young people, let it be admitted--but so are Thackeray, Balzac, and Hugo. So is any strong thinker. Ibsen is a powerful dissolvent for an imagination clogged by theories of life, low ideals, and the facile materialism that exalts the letter but slays the spirit. He is a foe to compromise, a hater of the half-way, the roundabout, the weak-willed, above all, a hater of the truckling politician--he is a very Torquemada to politicians. At the best there is ethical grandeur in his conceptions, and if the moral stress is unduly felt, if he tears asunder the veil of our beloved illusions and shows us as we are, it is because of his righteous indignation against the platitudinous hypocrisy of modern life. His unvarying code is: "So to conduct one's life as to realise oneself." Withal an artist, not the evangelist of a new gospel, not the social reformer, not the exponent of science in the drama. These titles have been thrust upon him by his overheated admirers. He never posed as a prophet. He is poet, psychologist, skald, dramatist, not always a soothsayer. The artist in him preserved him from the fate of the didactic Tolstoy. With the Russian he shares the faculty of emptying souls. Ibsen, who vaguely recalls Stendhal in his clear-eyed vision and dry irony, is without a trace of the Frenchman's cynicism or dilettantism. Like all dramatists of the first rank, the Norwegian has in him much of the seer, yet he always avoided the pontifical tone; he may be a sphinx, but he never plays the oracle. His categorical imperative, however, "All or nothing," does not bear the strain of experience. Life is simpler, is not to be lived at such an intolerable tension. The very illusions he seeks to destroy would be supplanted by others. Man exists because of his illusions. Without the "life-lie" he would perish in the mire. His illusions are his heritage from aeons of ancestors. The classic view considered man as the centre of the universe; that position has been ruthlessly altered by science--we are now only tiny points of consciousness in unthinkable space. Isolated then, true children of our inconsiderable planet, we have in us traces of our predecessors. True, one may be disheartened by the pictures of unheroic meanness and petty corruption, the ill-disguised instincts of ape and tiger, in the prose plays, even to the extent of calling them--as did M. Melchior de Vogüé, Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet--a grotesque Iliad of Nihilism. But we need not despair. If Ibsen seemed to say for a period, "Evil, be thou my good," his final words in the Epilogue are those of pity and peace: _Pax vobiscum!_ II