Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Volume 11).djvu/32

 he dallied with the supernatural, as in ''The Master Builder and Little Eyolf'', he was always careful, as I have tried to show, not to overstep decisively the boundaries of the natural. Here, on the other hand, without any suggestion of the supernatural, we are confronted with the wholly impossible, the inconceivable. How remote is this alike from his principles of art and from the consistent, unvarying practice of his better years! So great is the chasm between John Gabriel Borkman and ''When We Dead Awaken'' that one could almost suppose his mental breakdown to have preceded instead of followed the writing of the latter play. Certainly it is one of the premonitions of the coming end. It is Ibsen's ''Count Robert of Paris''. To pretend to rank it with his masterpieces is to show a very imperfect sense of the nature of their mastery.