FERDINAND BRUNETIÈRE has declared that
"there can be no tragedy without a struggle;
nor can there be genuine emotion for the spec-
tator unless something other and greater than
life is at stake." This so exactly defines the
dramas of Henrik Ibsen that it might have
been specifically written to describe their dra-
matic and ethical content. Whatever else
Ibsen's works may be, they are first soul dra-
mas; the human soul is not only their shadowy
protagonist, but it is the stake for which his
characters breathlessly game throughout the
vast halls of his poetic and historic plays and
within those modern middle-class apartments,
where the atmosphere seems rarefied by the
intensity of the struggle. "Greater than life"
means for Ibsen the immortal soul--immortal
not in the theologic, but generic sense; the soul
of the species, which never had a beginning
and never can have an end. With this precious

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