W Fiske and 1, as we sat at tea on

E talked of many things, Mrs.

a wide veranda one afternoon last summer. It looked out lazily across a sunlit valley, the coziest valley in New Jersey. A huge dog that lay sprawled at her feet was unspeakably bored by the proceedings. He was a recruit from the Bide-awee Home, this fellow, a great Dane with just enough of other strains in his blood. to remind him that, like the Danes at Mr. Wopsle's Elsinore, he had but recently come up from the people. It kept him modest, anxious to please, polite. So Zak rarely interrupted, save when at times he would suggestively extract his rubber ball from the pocket of her knitted jacket and thus artfully invite her to a mad game on the lawn.

We talked of many things-of Duse and St. Teresa and Eva Booth and Ibsen.

When we were speaking casually and quite idly of Ibsen, I chanced to voice

the prevailing idea that, even with the least popular of his plays, she had always had, at all events, the satisfaction of a great succès d'estime. I could have told merely by the way her extraordinarily eloquent fan came into play at that moment that the conversation was no longer idle.

"Succès d'estime!" she exclaimed, with fine scorn. "Stuff and nonsense! Stuff, my friend, and nonsense!" And we were off.

"I have always been embarrassed by the apparently general disposition to speak of our many seasons with Ibsen as an heroic adventure, as a series of heroic adventures, just as though we had suffered all the woes of pioneers in carrying his plays to the uttermost reaches of the continent. This is a charming light to cast upon us, but it is quite unfair to a great genius who has given us money as well as inexhaustible inspiration. It is unfair to

Ibsen. I was really quite taken aback not long ago when the editor of a Western paper wrote of the fortune we had lost in introducing the Norwegian to America. I wish I knew some way to shatter forever this monstrous idea. Save for the first season of 'A Doll's House,' many years ago, our Ibsen seasons have invariably been profitable. Now and then, it is true, the engagement of an Ibsen play in this city or that would be unprofitable, but never since the first have we known an unprofitable Ibsen year.

"When I listen, as I have often had to listen, to the ill-considered comments of the unthinking and the uninformed, when I listen to airily expressed opinions based on no real knowledge of Ibsen's history in this country, no real understanding whatever, I am silent; but I like to recall a certain final matinée of 'Rosmersholm' at the huge Grand Opera House in Chicago, when the audience crowded the theater from pit to dome, when the stairways were literally packed with people standing, and when every space in the aisles was filled with chairs, for at that time chairs were allowed in the aisles. And I like to remember the quality of that great audience. It was the sort of audience one would find at a symphony concert, an audience silent and absorbed, an overwhelming rebuke to the flippant scoffers who are altogether ignorant of the everincreasing power of the great theater iconoclast."

And so quite by accident I discovered that, just as you have only to whisper Chatterton's old heresy, "Shakspere spells ruin," to move William Winter to the immediate composition of three impassioned articles, so you have only to question the breadth of Ibsen's appeal to bring Mrs. Fiske rallying to his defense. Then she, who has a baffling way of forgetting the theater's very existence and would always far rather talk of saints or dogs or the breathless magic of Adiron dack nights, will return to the stage. So it happened that that afternoon over the tea-cups we went back over the many seasons of "A Doll's House," "Hedda Ga

bler," "Rosmersholm," and "The Pillars of Society."

"As I say," she explained, "A Doll's House' in its first season was not profitable; but, then, that was my own first season as Mrs. Fiske, and it was only one of a number of plays in a financially unsuccessful repertory. And even that, I suppose, was, from the shrewdest business point of view, a sound investment in reputation. It was a wise thing to do. But the real disaster was predicted by every one for 'Rosmersholm.' There was the most somber and most complex tragedy of its period. No one would go to see that, they said, and I am still exasperated from time to time by finding evidences of a hazy notion that it did not prosper. 'Rosmersholm' was played — and not particularly well played, either-for one hundred and ninety-nine consecutive performances at a profit of $40,000. I am never greatly interested in figures, but I had the curiosity to make sure of these. Of course that is a total of many profitable weeks and some unprofitable ones, and of course it is not an overpowering reward for a half-season in the theater. ing you that Ibsen may be profitable in a money sense I am not so mad as to say other things may not be far more profitable. But $40,000 profit scarcely spells ruin.

In tell

"And I tell you all this because it is so discouraging to the Ibsen enthusiasts to have the baseless, the false idea persist that he and the box-office are at odds. Sensibly projected in the theater—"

"Instead," I suggested, "of being played by strange people at still stranger matinées-"

"Of course. Rightly projected in the theater, Ibsen always has paid and always will. And that is worth shouting from the housetops, because sensibly and rightly projected in the theater, the fine thing always does pay. Oh, I have no patience with those who descend upon a great play, produce it without understanding, and then, because disaster overtakes it, throw up their hands and say there is no public for fine art. How absurd! In New

every production in the theater there is a psychologically right moment. Move wisely in these things, and the public will not fail."

For many false, but wide-spread, impressions of Ibsen we were inclined to blame somewhat the reams of nonsense that have been written and rewritten about him, the innumerable little essays on his gloom.

"And none at all on his warmth, his

life there is in them? Where in all the world of modern drama, for instance, is there a comedy so buoyant, so dazzlingly joyous as 'An Enemy of the People'?"

"They say he is parochial," I ventured. "Let them say. They said it of Hedda, but that poor, empty, little Norwegian neurotic has been recognized all over the world. The trouble with Hedda is not that she is parochial, but that she is poor and empty. She was fascinating to play,

and I suppose that

every actress goes

through the phase of being especially attracted by such characters-a part of the phase when the eagerness to 'study life' takes the form of an interest in the eccentric, abnormal, distorted, the perverted aspects of life. As a rôle, Hedda is a marvelous portrait; as a person, she is empty, and, after all, the empty, evil, selfish persons are not worth our time, either yours or mine, in the theater any more than in life. They do not matter. They do not count. They are enormously unimportant. On the highway of life the Hedda Gablers are just so much impedimenta."

"Do you recall," I inquired, "that that is the very word Cæsar used for 'baggage'?"

Whereat Mrs. Fiske smiled so approvingly that I knew poor Hedda would be impedimenta to the end of the chapter.

"But she is universal," said Mrs. Fiske, suddenly remembering that some one had dared to call Ibsen parochial. "She was recognized all over the world. London saw her at every dinner-table, and I have watched a great auditorium in the far West-a place as large as our Metropolitan-held enthralled by that brilliant comedy."

"Which I myself have seen played as tragedy."

"Of course you have," she answered in triumph. "And that is precisely the trouble. When you think how shockingly Ibsen has been misinterpreted and mangled, it is scarcely surprising that there are not a dozen of his plays occupying theaters in New York at this time. It is only surprising that he has lived to tell the tale. Small wonder he has been roundly abused."

I mentioned one performance of "John Gabriel Borkman" in which only the central figure was adequately played and which moved one of the newspaper scribes to an outburst against, not the players, but against Ibsen as the "sick man of the theater."

"Exactly," said Mrs. Fiske. "And so it has always gone. Ibsen's plays are too majestic and too complex to be so mal

treated. To read 'Borkman' in the light of some knowledge of life is to marvel at the blending of human insight and poetic feeling. How beautiful, how wonderful is that last walk with Ella through the mists? But played without understanding, this and the others are less than nothing at all. Yet, with the published texts in every book-store, there is no excuse for any of us blaming the outrage on Ibsen. We would not attend a high-school orchestra's performance of a Wagnerian score and blame the result on Wagner. Or would we? We would have once."

And we paused to recall how curiously alike had been the advent and development of these two giants as irresistible forces.

"It was not so very long ago," said Mrs. Fiske, with great satisfaction, "that a goodly number of well-meaning people dismissed Wagner with tolerant smiles. There is a goodly number of the same sort of people who still wave Ibsen away. Extraordinary questions are still asked with regard to him. The same sort of dazing questions, I suppose, were once asked about Wagner. I myself have been asked, 'Why do you like Ibsen?' And to such a question, after the first staggering moment, one perhaps finds voice to ask in return, 'Why do you like the ocean?' Or, 'Why do you like a sunrise above the mountain peak?' Or, possibly, 'What do you find interesting in Niagara?'

"But, then, the key is given in those delightful letters after 'An Enemy of the People.' You remember Ibsen admitted there that his abhorred 'compact majority' eventually gathered and stood behind each of his drama-messages, but the trouble was that by the time it did arrive he himself was away on ahead, somewhere else."

And we went back with considerable enjoyment to the days when Ibsen was a new thing outside Germany and his own Scandinavia, when his influence had not yet transformed the entire theater of the Western world, remodeling its very architecture and reaching so far that never a