Henrik Ibsen: The Divided Consciousness by Charles R. Lyons, and: Catiline's Dream. An Essay on Ibsen's Plays by James Hurt, and: Ibsen: A Critical Study by John Northam (review)

208 BOOK REVIEWS moved from its more limited quarters in the Gar~ck Theatre (which seated only 550) to its own well-equipped building (which seated 930). Waldau suggests that despite the enlarged facilities, the new building was more of a financial drain upon the Guild's resources than it ought to have been. Another essentially detrimental factor which Waldau discusses during the period he covers was the increasing number of secondary travelling companies emanating from successful productions of the Guild in New York. Such travelling ensembles served generally to diminish the Guild's reservoir of talent in New York as well as to force the Guild to produce plays of more popular appeal for less theatrically sophisticated audiences. All of these factors, coupled with the advent of talking pictures, the problem of perhaps too large and unwieldy a Board of Managers, and the financial depression of the 1930s, forced the Guild to become less and less what its founders had originally envisioned - a theatre for the intellectual elite. By 1939 and after, the Guild was hardly to be distinguished from other commercial theatre enterprises. As Waldau states in one of two concluding chapters, this one titled "What Went Wrong? What Went Right?", the Guild's managers had allowed the organization "to drift slowly away from experimentation and artistic excitement that characterized its early days toward a more popular type of theatre which invariably must cater to mass tastes, employing all the paraphernalia of compromise: big stars, big productions, and the inevitable big budgets, with the expectations of big returns." Such, unfortunately, has been too often the story of the theatre in America. Artistic vision inevitably has had to compromise with financial necessity. Waldau's book on the Theatre Guild is an excellent one. Twenty-four full-page illustrations of important Guild productions complement the discussion. Waldau tells the story of the Guild's rise, flourishing, and eventual decline in intelligently scholarly but readable prose. ROBERT R. FINDLAY University of Kansas HENRIK IBSEN: THE DNIDED CONSCIOUSNESS, by Charles R. Lyons. Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press, 1972. CATILINE'S DREAM. AN ESSAY ON IBSEN'S PLAYS, by James Hurt. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972,206 pp., $7.95. IBSEN: A CRITICAL STUDY, by John Northam. Cambridge University Press, 1973, 237 pp., $12.50 cloth, $5.95 paper. The most notable tendency in Ibsen criticism since the Second Great War has been the promotion of the poetic and symbolic dramas as his greatest achievements and concomitantly the preservation of the realistic problem plays by embalming them in myth and symbol. At least that is what has happened in the non-Communist countries. In East Germany the problem plays remain the focus of attention, while the late plays are still seen as William Archer saw them, as a falling off of Ibsen's powers. What the Communist critics interpret as Ibsen's flight from reality and a retreat to a BOOK REVIEWS 209 dangerous individualism is seen in the capitalistic countries as a search for eternal values. In the realistic plays truths are described as relative and short-lived. Believing in a world of change, the Communist critic is not appalled by the brevity of truth, but the non-Communist worries that unless truth is eternal, art will be brief. Charles Lyons in his Henrik Ibsen: The Divided Consciousness finds that Ibsen throughout his long career was concerned with this disparity between what the truth-seeking intellect makes of the world of time and change and what time and change make of the mind's eternal truths. Ibsen's heroes formulate for themselves patterns or images of life, which Lyons calls myths since they are meant to endure forever. But these myths are crumpled and crushed by the pressure of ineluctable reality. This may sound at first like Pirandello at work on Ibsen, yet it is no more than a recasting in fashionable twentieth-century language of Ibsen's own interpretation of his works. He said he was always dealing with the conflict between one's aspirations and one's capabilities, between ideals and reality. It tells us something about the progress of Western thought that words like aspirations and ideals have...