Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Volume 8).djvu/19

 1884, before it had even been seen in Germany; and in Italy, Un Nemico del Popolo holds a place in the repertory of the distinguished actor Ermete Novelli.

Of all Ibsen's plays, An Enemy of the People is the least poetical, the least imaginative, the one which makes least appeal to our sensibilities. Even in The League of Youth there is a touch of poetic fancy in the character of Selma; while Pillars of Society is sentimentally conceived throughout, and possesses in Martha a figure of great, though somewhat conventional, pathos. In this play, on the other hand, there is no appeal either to the imagination or to the tender emotions. It is a straightforward satiric comedy, dealing exclusively with the everyday prose of life. We have only to compare it with its immediate predecessor, Ghosts, and its immediate successor, The Wild Duck, to feel how absolutely different is the imaginative effort involved in it. Realising this, we no longer wonder that the poet should have thrown it off in half the time he usually required to mature and execute one of his creations.

Yet An Enemy of the People takes a high place in the second rank of the Ibsen works, in virtue of its buoyant vitality, its great technical excellence, and the geniality of its humour. It seems odd, at first sight, that a distinctly polemical play, which took its rise in a mood of exasperation, should be perhaps the most amiable of all the poet's productions. But the reason is fairly obvious. Ibsen's nature was far too complex, and far too specifically dramatic, to permit of his giving anything like direct expression to a personal mood. The very fact that Dr. Stockmann was to utter much of his own indignation and many of his own ideas forced him to make the worthy Doctor in temperament and manner as unlike himself