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soul, cannot even win the world. these dramas, and in all his later work, the poet is fascinated by the problem of the sick will. It is as though Shakespeare had become so possessed by the idea of Hamlet, that he could no longer conceive any other type. In all Ibsen's later plays, there is hardly, I think, a man-there are several women -who is not divided against himself. But the problem of the sick will is bound up with the problem of society; and upon society Ibsen fastens, as a pathologist upon a disease. Business, professions, marriage-he finds a taint in everything. "The ship," he says in one of his letters, "carries a corpse in the hold." Living men are haunted by ghosts. Dead ideas, dead habits, dead institutions, overlie and smother the free soul. Or, in another of his metaphors, the modern man is like a wild duck shot in the wing, who has dived down and "bitten itself fast in the sea weed." Such men are not heroes; they do not confront Fate; they are not even aware of Fate, unless it be in the form of hereditary disease. They cannot stir the ocean-roll of verse, or kindle it with the light of rhetoric. They speak as we speak, live as we live, in rooms and streets and churches and conventicles. That Ibsen has shown them living so, with such consummate art, is his title to fame as a dramatist. No plays hold a modern audience as these do. They hold it as dramas; but they hold it also as problem-plays. Sick men and women are there, contemplating their own sick world. And they leave the theatre, not indeed "urged by pity and fear"-that is the work of the poetic drama-but racked with self-questioning, tortured with regret, perplexed, despairing, or enraged.

Now, that the development exemplified by Ibsen is not peculiar to him, seems to be shown by the general trend of the best modern drama. Witness, for example, Sudermann in Germany

and Mr. Bernard Shaw in England. This kind of drama somehow belongs to this age, just as Socialism does; and for the same reason. There is a very general, very profound and constantly increasing sense, that our social institutions are wrong; and this sense is preoccupying all our best intelligence. There was no such sense in the age of Shakespeare, nor in the age of Æschylus. Both those poets, indeed, give abundant expression to a sense of injustice and cruelty in the world. But this is part of their general sense of the Tragic. They conceive it as Fate, or as individual guilt; but the modern dramatist conceives it as social evil. He sees man involved in injustice, of which he is himself the author. He sees him the creator and perpetuator of the very system by which he is destroyed. He sees him vicious, not guilty; contemptible, not sublime. Pitiful victims and mean oppressors creep across the stage. Strength disgusts; weakness exasperates. Men and women are cracked and flawed, like the system in which they live. They make it; and it mars them. Drama of this kind is revolutionary. It leaves a man saying, not: "How tragic, and yet how great, is Man"; but: "How mean and how intolerable is Society!"

It is, of course, just because Ibsen is revolutionary that Mr. Bernard Shaw places him among the prophets, along with Bunyan, and Hogarth, and Blake, and Nietzsche. But he can hardly.deserve a place among these if his work be simply negative. A prophet is a prophet, not by what he denounces, but by what he affirms. What, then does Ibsen affirm? Does he affirm anything? His ideal, of course, is the free man with the sound will. But does he believe in this ideal, and make us believe in it, as a thing not only desirable but possible, nay, necessary? Has he faith in Man? On that question, I suppose, his claim to be a philosopher, in

Mr. Shaw's sense, must turn. Different people, perhaps, will answer it differently. But, for my own part, what I feel in Ibsen is a progressive disillusionment. The Wild Duck and When We Dead Awaken are Mephistophelian commentaries on Brand and The Master Builder. More and more the plays. seem to become pathological demonstrations; less and less a challenge to healthy life. The high mountains luring us in the background dissolve in the universal illusion. Man is a mean creature, with a broken will. That seems to me to be the last message of this poet.

It is otherwise with Shakespeare. Him Mr. Shaw will not count among the prophets, for reasons which I appreciate. I am inclined to agree that he had no positive view of the world; that, in many of his moods, "he saw no sense in living at all." But I deny that that is the effect produced by his tragedies. On the contrary, even those in which the tragedy is most unredeemed, even Lear, and Hamlet, and Othello, leave one with a sense of the tremendous worth-whileness of life. "Yet do I not repent me:" it is the characters of Shakespeare, not of Ibsen, that one can imagine using those great words. His tragedies do somehow deliver, and elate, and inspire. Why? Not because he has shown us a purpose in the world; but because he has shown us Man "noble in reason, infinite in faculty, in form and moving express and The Independent Review.

admirable, in action like an angel, in apprehension like a god;" and has hung above and about him "this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire." It is not he, it is Ibsen, who reduces Man to a "quintessence of dust," and Heaven to "a pestilent congregation of vapors." After seeing Othello, we feel: "So it was, and so it is well that it was"; after seeing The Wild Duck, we feel: "Would that it had never been!"

All this has nothing to do with the question of religion, in the sense in which Mr. Shaw uses the word. I can imagine a greater than Shakespeare seeing all he saw, and yet seeing a purpose and meaning in the world. But I know, and need not imagine, so many lesser men who have seen a purpose so inadequate. Shakespeare could never have been contented with the religion of Dante, still less with that of Bunyan, or of Nietzsche. Ought he to have found a religion that would have been greater than theirs, in proportion as his vision was wider and deeper? Such "oughts" do not help us. Shakespeare was a poet, not a prophet. But what a poet! We need not complain that our modern dramatists are not poets too. it to them as a merit. Their drama is "social criticism; and we need social criticism. But we need poetry too; and without it we shall not make much of the new society to which we are moving.

But neither need we count

G. Lowes Dickinson.

The curtain is finally rung down on the most poignant melodrama of our times, and Major Dreyfus and General Picquart have reaped the reward of suffering and constancy. "La vérité est en marche, rien ne l'arrêtera,” proclaimed and predicted Zola. His words have come inevitably true, and in their triumph the dead have a share even greater than the living. A regenerated France accepts with placidity and relief a verdict that seven years ago might have plunged her into civil war; and a case which touched some of the deepest problems of human government, divided a great nation for many years into fierce and irreconcilable sections, and enthralled the minds and rasped the conscience of the entire outer world, comes tranquilly to an end.

It

is doubtful whether we in England ever really understood the Dreyfus affair. Some features of it we grasped perhaps more clearly and quickly than did the French themselves, and their inability to share our standpoint seemed to us something more malign than the mere madness of perversity. There is no need to linger on all that was said against France and the French character, and the French army and judiciary by English commentators whose ardent insularity was at once embittered and redeemed by an outraged sense of justice. It was for most Englishmen enough that a man had been condemned on evidence and by methods that looked like a revival of Star Chamber procedure. The personal tragedy absorbed them; in the political intrigues that revolved around it they were less concerned; and to the momentous conflict of ideas of which it became the symbol they remained throughout quite singularly indifferent and impervious. Dreyfus and the horror of his fate they

could and did sympathize with in a deep fanaticism of partisanship; but the Dreyfus affair and the complex problems of political psychology it raised remained, and probably still remain, to most Englishmen a chaotic and unintelligible puzzle. It was characteristic of them and of their strong passion for individual justice that the man from first to last was the pre-eminent issue. It was not less characteristic of the French that Dreyfus himself should soon be swallowed up in the controversy that raged around him, or should hold his own in it merely as a battleground for prejudices, principles, ideas, and inveterate instincts to contend on. The attitude of each people was a faithful reflection of its national temperament, and neither could wholly appreciate the other's point of view. There was nothing more difficult for Englishmen to understand in the Dreyfus affair than why the French did not understand it. There was nothing more bewildering to the French than the failure of other nations to put themselves in their place.

"I would rather," said Goethe, "endure an injustice than see a disorderly act committed." It was between those who accepted and those who opposed this principle that the struggle to which Dreyfus gave his name was at first most bitterly sustained. Order seemed ranged on one side, justice on the other, and France had suddenly to make her choice. Order included, or appeared to include, everything that a Frenchman held dear-the honor of the army, which to a degree we cannot realize is the honor of the nation and of every man and woman in the nation, internal peace, the pressing necessities of national defence, the very existence of the Republic. It was inevitable that

tens of thousands should invoke the safety of the State as the supreme law, and declare that the interests of one man could not require the sacrifice of the interests of all. The resultant conflict was the most harrowing of all struggles in which a democracy can engage, it was a conflict not merely of opinions, interests, or even instincts, but of fundamental duties. Patriotism, the highest expediency, the love of flag and fatherland, and a jealous care for the prestige and efficiency of that great institution which is a monument of national renunciation combined with a hundred less worldly motives to stifle the voice of justice. Nor were these the only factors in the combat. Developing from them came another and wider conflict between forces that have vibrated throughout French history, and have rendered it the most interesting and suggestive of all national annals. With a reverence for authority derived from her Latin past, and still pervading her Catholicism and her military and civil organization, France has unceasingly combined a spirit of free inquiry, of independent and rationalistic interpretation, of progress by revolution. The Dreyfus affair flung these tendencies into deadly antagonism. Even those who were brought to admit that justice must be preferred to order maintained that the admission had no reference to the prisoner on Devil's Island, that he was not innocent, that seven officers had condemned him, that five ministers of war had successively pronounced him guilty, and that their words and verdicts were to be implicitly trusted. Thus the struggle broadened out into a convulsive conflict between authority and the spirit of free inquiry. It was the old religious issue fought out anew on a secular battlefield. In England we have never been tried by such an issue under circumstances that in any way parallel those of France, and there was

something not wholly generous in our reproaches when France for a moment quailed before it. Everything that could distract and terrify the mind and nerves of the Republic and becloud its judgment a venomous outburst of anti-semitism, militarism scarcely less. subversive than in Boulanger's day, clericalism and royalism fomenting every discord, and chauvinism preying upon the popular suspicions and unrest -contributed to the dethronement of reason and the installation of blind and furious passion.

Yet through that terrible ordeal France has forced a wayward but triumphant path. She is stronger and not weaker for the Dreyfus affair. She has passed through a crisis that tortured men's hearts and consciences not indeed unscathed but with firmer fibre, a greater knowledege of herself, some reasons for shame and many more for pride. In nearly everything that makes for national well-being the France of 1906 is incomparably better off than the France of 1894. At the time of the first court-martial the country was betraying the exhaustion of its gallant reconstruction. A profound lassitude and pessimism had penetrated the national mind. The Panama scandals had strained all but the most robust faith in the Republican theory. The soul of France, one might have said, was dormant, if not dying. The national decadence was accepted as a clear if curious fact, just worth the trouble of analyzing and tracing back to this cause and to that. The smiling genius of the land had passed, it seemed, into a total eclipse of hopelessness. Sincerity, earnestness, originality had all perished. It was a time when France from sheer ennui might have welcomed a pretender. There came, instead, the Dreyfus affair, probing and stirring the most heedless conscience, hurling men against naked realities, shattering parties, raising everywhere the extremes of

The Russian Girondins have fallen. The moderate majority in the Duma, who have hitherto displayed great selfcontrol, and who, it is well understood, would have furnished a competent Ministry if the Court would have promised them its sincere support, have at length irritated the reactionaries into action which, though legal in form, in practice involves a coup d'état. The Czar in his Ukase dissolving the Duma states that the Deputies have "strayed into spheres beyond their competence," and blames them for making inquiries into the acts of local authorities-who, it would seem, are not even to be censured by the representatives of the people-and for "making comments" upon the imperfections of fundamental laws. Nicholas II., it is clear, does not even comprehend what representatives are for. There is, however, another story in circulation which is at least more probable than the one shadowed forth in the Ukase. The Duma might have gone on talking with impunity but that the great officers at headquarters discovered that the soldiers were beginning to attend to its talk, and that in consequence there was an increasing readiness to mutiny against grievances, and to refuse in many cases to fire upon unarmed "rebels." Even the Cossacks were beginning to think that obedience could be stretched too far, so much so that a special garrison was despatched to the Cossack centre, Taganrog. The same officers perceived

that the peasants were hoping everything from the Duma, and feared that if time were allowed, the recruits, who come in large proportion from among the peasantry, would all show themselves disaffected. They therefore represented to the Czar that if the autocracy were to be preserved the Duma must be dissolved at once. It is probable, also, though not yet certain, that these representations were strengthened by the arrival in St. Petersburg of the Grand Duke Vladimir, who had just escaped assassination on his railway journey from Paris, and who is believed to be the most reactionary as well as the most determined of his nephew's immediate circle. The stroke was therefore struck; the Tauris Palace, where the Duma sat, was occupied by troops; and the Deputies retired, a few of them to the districts which elected them, but a large proportion to Viborg, in Finland, whence they issued a Proclamation which is undoubtedly an open incitement to revolution. They call upon all Russia not only to support the Duma, without which, they say, no legislation can be legal, but to refuse payment of taxes and the regular demands for recruits. The former device is rather futile, for the Russian Government can issue paper to an unlimited extent; and the latter cannot be carried out unless over the vast extent of Russia unarmed men are prepared to risk encounters with the soldiery. Both, however, signify a