him from France. It came to him, doubtless, from Germany, by way of Denmark. My point is that the conduct of the intrigue in Lady Inger shows the most unmistakable marks of his study of the great French plot-manipulators. Its dexterity and its artificiality alike are neither German nor Danish, but French. Ibsen had learnt the great secret of Scribe—the secret of dramatic movement. The play is full of those ingenious complications, mistakes of identity, and rapid turns of fortune by which Scribe enchained the interest of his audiences. Its central theme—a mother plunging into intrigue and crime for the advancement of her son, only to find that her son himself has been her victim—is as old as Greek tragedy. The secondary story, too—that of Elina's wild infatuation for the betrayer and practically the murderer of her sister—could probably be paralleled in the ballad literature of Scotland, Germany, or Denmark, and might, indeed, have been told, in verse or prose, by Sir Walter Scott. But these very un-Parisian elements are handled in a fundamentally Parisian fashion, and Ibsen is clearly fascinated, for the time, by the ideal of what was afterwards to be known as the "well-made play." The fact that the result is in reality an ill-made play in no way invalidates this theory. It is perhaps the final condemnation of the well-made play that in nine cases out of ten—and even in the hands of far more experienced playwrights than the young Bergen "theatre-poet"—it is apt to prove ill-made after all.
Far be it from me, however, to speak in pure disparagement of Lady Inger. With all its defects, it seems to me manifestly the work of a great
