Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Heinemann Volume 2).djvu/21

 still young (29), who had, moreover, developed very slowly. It is still steeped in romanticism, though not in the almost boyish lyricism of its predecessors. The poet is not yet intellectually mature—very far from it. But here, for the first time, we are unmistakably face to face with a great imagination and a specifically dramatic endowment of the first order. The germs of promise discernible in Lady Inger have ripened into rare technical mastery.

Ibsen was doubtless right in feeling that the superhuman figures of the mythical sagas were impossible on the non-musical stage, just as Wagner was right in feeling that the world of myth could be embodied only in an atmosphere of music. The reduction, then, of the Volsungs and Niblungs to the stature of the men of the family-sagas was not only judicious, but necessary. But was it judicious to go to the myth-sagas for the initial idea of a play which had to be developed in terms of the family-sagas? Scarcely, I think. The weak points in the structure of the story are precisely those at which the poet has had to replace supernatural by natural machinery. To slay a dragon and to break through a wall of fire, even with magical aid, are exploits which we can accept, on the mythic plane, as truly stupendous. But it is impossible to be really impressed by the slaying of Hiördis's bear, or to share in the breathless admiration with which that achievement is always mentioned. If the bear is to be regarded as a fabulous monster, it might just as well be a dragon at once; if it is to be accepted as a real quadruped, the killing of it is no such mighty matter. We feel it, in fact, to be a mere substitute, a more or less ludicrous makeshift. And in the same way, Sigurd's renunciation of Hiördis becomes very difficult to accept when all supernatural agency—magic potion,