doing in that bag?

But, seriously, need we bother about the Rat-Wife? If you must know, she symbolises Death, and she has no business to. The champions of Passive Acceptance, my Ibsen right or wrong, need not trouble to re-harness the Ghost of Hamlet's Father. Ibsen himself has set his seal to it that the only ghost admissible to the theatre in these days is the inherited characteristic. In any case Death the Assuager does not take the fiord steamer down to Christiania, nor would any pure-bred hell-hound condescend to be led round cottages by a string. The unpitied fate of The Master Builder is proof enough that drama to-day must either be natural or else make it quite plain that it means to be imperturbably supernatural. It is enough to say that northern fairy-tales will play such tricks with northern imaginations as they glide into old age. The beldam has strayed out of Brand or Peer Gynt into society where there is no place for her.

As for the Problem and the Lesson, it is gratifying to be able, for once, to assure the public that they may be approached without suspicion. There are more lessons come out of Ibsen's plays than ever went into them. The human mind could extract a lesson out of the Nibelungenlied if it thought fit; it habitually draws precepts from the Song of Solomon. It is true that Ibsen lends currency to the superstition by taking for his characters men under the influence of dominant ideas-specialising upon one side of them, as with the optimist and the pessimist in The Wild Duck. But to deduce therefrom that Ibsen is a pessimist rather than an optimist is much the same as inferring from the superiority of la Bête Humaine to le Rêve that M. Zola thinks a locomotive engine is better than a cathedral. For the Problem, that is, of course, a serious matter. Playgoers-how often must you go to the play to become a playgoer?-are divided into their camps under the banners of the Problem Play and the other sort of play. Perhaps the exactest possible definition of the Problem Play is a play like The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. It seems cruel to stamp upon the laudable efforts of the public and The Daily Telegraph to differentiate between kinds of plays, but it should be explained, with respect, that every play is either a problem play or not a play at all. The heathen Aristotle himself was able to point out that every play is divided into two parts, the binding and the loosing, the problem and the solution. If there is no problem there is no situation, no difficulty, no play of character, no drama. Problem is common to Philoctetes and Charley's

Aunt; and if there could be such a thing as a play in virtue, not of problem, but of the fact that it is spoken from a stage into a theatre, then Money would be a play: which is absurd. What the man in the pit regards as a problem play is a play that makes him think, which he justly regards as a phenomenon deserving of wonder. But every play makes a man think, if it goes deep enough into nature. Not necessarily at the time, for if it is a good play you must follow it to the end. But afterwards it does; and this means that the playwright sees deeper into human character than the audience. He ought to otherwise what business has he to come out in front of the curtain instead of cheering from the house? Now Ibsen has succeeded in making more people think, or thereabouts, than most men of our time. In this play he makes you think of the way it hits a man and woman to lose an only child, more or less by their own fault. That is the problem, and he works it out to his own satisfaction; maybe not to yours.

That brings us on to the psychology of Little Eyolf. Now the psychological play is just such a bloodless, Daily Telegraphic apparition as the problem play. Psychology being in the popular languages understood as the investigation of what goes on in the human mind, plays, being written in words, which are the expression of thoughts, must needs either be psychological or else a kind of things-in-themselves with no significations that may be apprehended of man. The only true distinction is between good psychology and bad, between much psychology-which means much stripping naked of the human heart and little. In Little Eyolf Ibsen's psychology is much and good. There could hardly be anything better than the first act, except the second. The first act states the case. Here is a mother and a father, both weak-the mother in intellect, the father in purpose and feeling. With both it is the weakness, the unequipped incapacity for life, of the unbalanced mind. The mother, as it turns out, is the straighter, the more respectable, and the commoner type. Her small heart choked up with an appetent love of Alfred Allmers, she has no room for anything else, and she has an explosive courage that lets her say so. Alfred would have the courage also, but he has not the self-knowledge. In width, not in depth, there is more of him to know; he does not know it. He talks much of his life-work, which is always a bad sign in a man: he should be ready with it when anybody pays to see, but not too garrulous of it to himself. So the wretched Allmers at one minute feels himself capable of

a batch of new life-works besides his book; next moment he can on no terms have another life-work than Eyolf; and the next he is quite cheerfully prepared to bisect it and apportion the other half to Rita. Then the crash comes and the remorseless analysis begins. Ibsen digs up the soul by the roots to see how it grows. And if any stronger, truer, and profounder picture was ever made of the bereavement of weak natures and incompetent parents-and they have many points of coincidence with the strong and able-the world seems somehow to have lost count of it. The inarticulate anguish, the compelled self-scourgings, the conscious cowardice, the impious, imperious call to fling out on the world all the pettiness at command-it strikes deep down because it comes from deep down. Through this Valley of Humiliation the parents win to the tardy hour of self-collection, the gathering up of the fragments and the wandering, slow steps out of Paradise into the desolate beyond. There is a kind of transformation of both at the end-though mark that it is in each case agreeable to character-and this can be taken as untrue to life. People don't change their whole being so, you can hear the critic say. They do not. Nothing transmutes a character, but everything changes it. That is what is meant by saying that Ibsen's plays wind up with a note of interrogation. Ibsen winds up with a question because he knows this. Every episode in a life ends so; there is always the change, but experience only shall show how great a change; the full stop comes only with death. Nora banged the door, and doubtless she came back again within the month, only she did not come back the same Nora, and that change of Noras is the nett result of The Doll's House. So Allmers will almost certainly go up North to his favourite gushing-grounds again, only not altogether the same Allmers. And Rita will stay down at the villa and live a new life, yet still in great part the same Rita.

This story of Alfred and Rita would have been better told in a novel. But it is a masterpiece none the less, and it is better to have it in a play than not to have it at all.

G. W. STEEVENS.

LES SENTIMENTS DE LA FRANCE POUR

LE

L'ANGLETERRE.

E plus grand péril qui puisse compromettre l'amitié de deux nations ne naît pas du dissentiment sur un intérêt contradictoire précis et bien déterminé. La controverse s'enflammâtelle à ce sujet, on peut, à force de s'expliquer, de débattre, finir par trouver une solution transactionnelle qui, accordant un peu à chacun, désintéresse les amours-propres et produit la pacification. Ce qui est à craindre, c'est ce mauvais vouloir vague, mais continu parce qu'il a une cause permanente, qui ne s'attache à rien de particulier mais se glisse dans tout, duquel résulte un désaccord invincible, même quand on ne se l'avoue pas. Dans une telle disposition réciproque les grandes questions ne s'arrangent pas, et les petites se transforment tout à coup en grandes. Telle était la situation entre la Prusse et la France après 1866. Telle est celle entre l'Allemagne et la France depuis que la première détient deux lambeaux du territoire français. Telle aussi celle entre l'Italie et la France depuis que l'Italie a garanti par traité la possession de Metz et de Strasbourg à l'Allemagne, contre la France sans l'appui de qui elle n'aurait jamais obtenu ni Milan, ni Venise.

Nous nous rencontrons avec l'Angleterre sur un trop grand nombre de points du globe pour que nos intérêts ne se heurtent point quelquefois et que des dissentiments partiels ne surgissent entre les deux diplomatics. Mais existe-t-il, entre les deux grands peuples les plus civilisés de l'Univers, une de ces causes latentes, organiques, irrémédiables de division et de haine, présage et cause d'une hostilité déclarée ? Je n'ai pas autorité pour savoir ce que pense à ce sujet l'opinion anglaise. Mais je sais qu'on s'efforce de lui faire accroire que le peuple français nourrit contre l'Angleterre une antipathie presque générale qui cherche, attend, une occasion de se déchaîner. C'est contre cette bourde, faussetté et imposture que je veux protester avec l'expérience d'un vieux politique, qui, depuis quarante ans, suit d'un regard attentif les remuements qui s'opèrent dans le monde.

Une fois, dans ma jeunesse, j'ai constaté un violent mouvement d'exaspération contre l'Angleterre. C'est en 1840, à la suite de notre expulsion du concert européen par Palmerston. Cet état d'esprit ne s'est apaisé qu'à la suite de la révolution de février; il s'est absolument évanoui lors de la guerre de Crimée, et, depuis, il n'a plus reparu. Il existe moins que jamais aujourd'hui. L'occupation de l'Egypte ne nous plaît pas. Mais deux considérations empêchent notre déplaisir de devenir une colère. La première, c'est qu'avant d'aller en Egypte, l'Angleterre nous a offert de l'accompagner: M. de Freycinet, après avoir hésité, avait fini par se résoudre à envoyer des troupes à Suez, ce qui était, en fait, les mettre au Caire; mais Gambetta, impatient de satisfaire l'animosité que lui avait inspirée le refus de son ancien collaborateur d'entrer dans son ministère, sacrifia l'intérêt d'une patrie à laquelle il n'appartenait point par le sang, à un calcul emporté de politicien, et détermina le renversement de Freycinet, et, par suite, le renoncement à notre intervention en Egypte. Ce fut par sa faute, par la faute de la Chambre qui le suivit, que le champ fut laissé libre à l'Angleterre. La seconde des considérations qui nous calme, c'est que nous regardons l'Angleterre comme un pays de loyauté et d'honneur. Elle a promis de se retirer, elle le fera, et d'autant plus, que notre gouvernement, en ne la pressant pas de s'y décider n'intéresse pas notre amour-propre à ne pas le faire. L'Egypte est un pays capable et digne de se gouverner. Elle a à sa tête un jeune souverain doué des plus nobles qualités de l'esprit et du cœur; son premier ministre, Nubar, serait remarquable partout; Riaz-Pacha, Tigrane, d'autres encore, sont des hommes d'état de sérieuse valeur, et n'ont pas besoin de tutèle pour bien régir leur pays. Les ministres anglais le reconnaissent; ils savent aussi que nous ne leur demandons pas de nous laisser prendre la place qu'ils quitteront, et que tout ce que nous souhaitons, c'est que l'Egypte n'appartienne qu'à elle-même. Sa condition devrait être celle de la Belgique, indépendante et libre sous la garantie de l'Europe. Le seul privilège que l'Angleterre a le droit de réclamer et d'obtenir est d'être constituée, de concert avec la Turquie, puissance suzeraine, le gardien et le protecteur spécial de cette neutralité. Nous sommes convaincùs que tôt ou tard c'est ainsi que cette question se règlera à la satiefaction générale. Aussi la France ne s'émeut-elle pas d'une situation qu'elle persiste à considérer comme transitoire.

Nous tenons compte au gouvernement anglais de son attitude correcte et amicale dans les affaires de Madagascar. Il a reconnu le