True, the poetic aspiration is plain enough in his
Emperor or Galilean; but it is one of Ibsen's distinctions that nothing
was valid for him but science; and he left that vision of the future
which his Roman seer calls 'the third Empire' behind him as a Utopian
dream when he settled down to his serious grapple with realities in
those plays of modern life with which he overcame Europe, and broke
the dusty windows of every dry-rotten theatre in it from Moscow to
Manchester.
MY OWN PART IN THE MATTER
In my own activities as a playwright I found this state of things
intolerable. The fashionable theatre prescribed one serious subject:
clandestine adultery: the dullest of all subjects for a serious author,
whatever it may be for audiences who read the police intelligence
and skip the reviews and leading articles. I tried slum-landlordism,
doctrinaire Free Love (pseudo-Ibsenism), prostitution, militarism,
marriage, history, current politics, natural Christianity, national
and individual character, paradoxes of conventional society, husband
hunting, questions of conscience, professional delusions and impostures,
all worked into a series of comedies of manners in the classic fashion,
which was then very much out of fashion, the mechanical tricks of
Parisian 'construction' being _de rigueur_ in the theatre.
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