Read Jennette
Lee's "The Ibsen Secret,"[4] perhaps the most successful of all the
Ibsen gemaras in English, if you would know the virulence of the
national appetite for bogus revelation. And so in all the arts.
Whatever is profound and penetrating we stand off from; whatever is
facile and shallow, particularly if it reveal a moral or mystical color,
we embrace. Ibsen the first-rate dramatist was rejected with indignation
precisely because of his merits--his sharp observation, his sardonic
realism, his unsentimental logic. But the moment a meretricious and
platitudinous ethical purpose began to be read into him--how he
protested against it!--he was straightway adopted into our flabby
culture. Compare Hauptmann and Brieux, the one a great artist, the other
no more than a raucous journalist. Brieux's elaborate proofs that two
and two are four have been hailed as epoch-making; one of his worst
plays, indeed, has been presented with all the solemn hocus-pocus of a
religious rite. But Hauptmann remains almost unknown; even the Nobel
Prize did not give him a vogue.
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