Iconoclasts

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aces by the sturdy arm of Dr. Ibsen. Now, he said, in effect,-though he has never condescended to pulpit polemics or café ?sthetics,-here is a wife who resolves

nd in music analogous examples are not wanting. Probably the most poignant emotional music thus far written is to be found in the last movement of Tschaikowsky's Pathetic Symphony. It is cosmi

he blasphemy. The ancients, Racine, Shakespeare, and the rest, softened their tragic situations by great art. As in a vast mirror the souls o

?sthetik. Art in old times is at two removes from life. I'll place it at one. I'll ba

therein lies one secret of Ibsen's power. It is his aloofness that his audiences resent the most of all. If, like another master showman, Thackeray, Ibsen would occasionally put his tongue in his cheek, or wink his eye in an aside, or whi

rance? Possibly he represents a type of evangelical and very parochial clergyman, but a type, we hope, long since obsolete. It is not well, either, to pry deeply into the sources of Oswald's insanity. Thus far it has not been accurately diagnosed.

is writer. To call Ghosts immoral is a silly and an illogical proceeding, for it is, if it is anything at all within the domain of morals, a dramatic setting of

y what his ideals have taught him. He refuses her refuge and sends her back to her husband, admonishing her that her duty is to accept the cross which God has imposed upon her and to reclaim her husband. Frozen up in heart and soul, Mrs. Alving begins a long fight with the beasts of appetite which rule her husband's nature. She sends away her son Oswald, she even adopts a bastard daughter of her husband's, and marries off the mother-a servant in her employ-to a carpente

the conversation between mother and son, and the horrible confession which follows. It is like a blast from a charnel house; but then, what power, what lucidity! The poor, tortured mother unburthens her heart to her pastor, and of course receives scant consolation. How could he, according to his lights, t

r she almost hesitates about revealing the birth of Regina, and wavers on the question of Oswald marrying her. She has been too indulgent to the boy, and Manders does not scruple to tell her so. He is one of your iron-minded men who have a rigid sense of what is right and wrong, and one who would have no sympathy with fluttering souls like Amiel, Lamenais, Clough, or any of the spiritual band to whom dogmas are as steel clamp

a consecrated building against fire would be questioning Providence. But his human respect plays him into the hands of Jacob Engst

in life, and turns her back on the poor mumbling wretch Oswald. She then walks off defiantly and to her putative father's home, a sailors' dance house. Oswald's mind is completely unhinged by this dénouement, and he confides to his mother in stuttering, stam

reached. He is a hapless lunatic, and his wretched, half-crazed mother, remembering her promise to him, searches frantically in his pocket for the morphine, and then a merciful curtain bars out from further view the finale. If Ibsen's scalpel digs down too deep and jars some hidden and diseased nerves, what shall we say? Rather can he no