him. I suffer most from his impatience, his restlessness. I begin to feel it now even when we are in the salon, quite apart from each other."

It is not strange that she should examine her conscience, and yet she must acquit herself of having led him on. She herself was the fascinated one, a child amazed at a flame.

"It all came to me so suddenly! I noticed first how he began to change his regular ways of life, but I did n't know what it meant. Of course I was flattered at his sympathy, at being distinguished among the many who surround him, eager for a word."

But this natural sense of being honored is all the guilt of which she can accuse herself. The village at the foot of the volcano cannot be to blame because the mountain breaks into fire.

The days went on. Gossensass is high among the eastern Alps. There was an early snow-storm. The guests began to leave. We have the first hint of separation.

"And I have nothing to give him, not even my picture, when he is giving me so much. But we both feel that it is best to remain outwardly as strangers."

Remaining outwardly as strangers, there were no family suspicions.

"His wife shows me much attention. Yesterday I had a long talk with his son." There might have been some of the dramatist's own symbolism in the next brief entry: "I am reading Ibsen's Love's Comedy, but if any one comes I am seen holding Beaconsfield's Endymion in my hands. Nearly every one has gone. The days we have still to spend here can now be counted. don't think about the future. The present is too much. We had a long talk together in the forenoon, and

I

after lunch he came again and sat with me. What am I to think? He says it is to be my life's aim to work with him. We are to write to each other often; but what am I to write?"

If Fru Ibsen and Frau Bardach saw nothing, other guests in Gossensass were more perspicacious. The Titan began to let himself go. One sensitive lady in whom he confided was so overcome at sight of a god's passion that she fainted. A younger and calmer woman, whose eyes were opened at last, spoke to Emilie Bardach of whatever incident she had witnessed as "beautiful and terrible as an Alpine thunderstorm. She wonders that I do not lose my head. She says that she herself would have been absolutely overcome. This consoles me. I do not seem so weak."

We reach the middle of September. I cannot but guess that on the nineteenth of that month something of a special nature must have happened. In "The Master Builder," where this whole episode is transmuted into a dramatic song, Hilda reminds Solness that it was on the nineteenth of September that he had come to her when she was a child, taken her in his arms, bent back her head, kissed her many times, and promised her a kingdom of joy and triumph with himself. Twice in this play, based on what happened at Gossensass, the date is oddly stressed. On the following day, the twentieth, he summed up the whole situation in a cry which uttered not only his own personal tragedy, but all that is most poignant in the tragedy of man. In her album he wrote:

"High, unhappy happiness, to strive for the unattainable-Hohes, schmerzliches Gluck um das Unerreichbare zu ringen!"

To strive for the unattainable was a high, unhappy happiness-true; but he could n't give up so striving. The only goal he could take as a goal was the impossible. The more obviously impossible an aim appeared, the more he was driven by that dæmon which the Norsemen call a troll to struggle toward it.

"Have you never noticed, Hilda,' Solness, who more than any other character in his plays was Ibsen himself, asks in "The Master Builder," "how the Impossible seems to beckon and cry aloud to one?"

It was the temptation of these autumn days in the Alps, to achieve the impossible, to reach the unattainable. Madly and blindly this man, outwardly so cold and selfcentered, was urged to it, as his own Solness was urged to it, by a spirit stronger than himself.

anything hysterical or morbid in her nature, it would have betrayed itself here. We have had enough of the diaries of girls in the stress of emotion, the Marie Bashkirtseffs of the race, to know that in this secret confessional they pour out everything. But all Emilie Bardach's statements were honest and matter-of-fact. She was not an over-romantic young creature making much out of little. Still less was she a baleful young Vivien weaving her spells about Merlin in his old age. I lay some stress on this, because there is another version of the story, accredited to Ibsen himself, which gives another color to the incident. It is told by William Archer in his preface to "The Master Builder," and that the reader may be aware of it I repeat it here.

In February, 1891, Ibsen was waiting for a train at Berlin, and while waiting lunched with Dr. Julius Elias. "An expansive mood descended upon Ibsen, and chuckling over his champagne glass, he said: 'Do you know, my next play is already hovering before me of course in vague outline. But of one thing I have got firm hold; an experience; a woman's figure. Very interesting, very interesting indeed. Again a spice of deviltry in it.' Then he related how he had met in the Tyrol a Viennese girl of very remarkable character. She had at once made him her confidant. The gist of her confessions was that she did not care a bit about one day marrying a well brought up young man-most likely she would never marry. What tempted and charmed and delighted her was to lure other women's husbands away from them. She was a little demonic wrecker; she often appeared to him like a little bird of prey,

that would fain have made him too her booty. He had studied her very, very closely. For the rest she had no great success with him. 'She did not get hold of me, but I got hold of her— for my play. Then I fancy she consoled herself with someone else.""

It is not my object to defend Emilie Bardach. In her story I am trying to find nothing but its literary and dramatic value. But I am obliged to say that of the "demonic wrecker," of the "bird of prey," there is no more trace in her diary than in her personality. Of the diary I am giving every line in which Ibsen is mentioned, except for some occasional reference to trivial happenings. I repeat again that it is an honest little diary, much more like that of a child than of the lurid temptress of the German scholar's tale, and with much more of amazement in it than of satisfied feminine vanity.

"These things are very complex," Edmund Gosse observes, in connection with Dr. Elias's anecdote, "and not to be readily dismissed, especially on the rough and ready English system. There would be give and take in such a complicated situation, when the object was, as Ibsen says, out of reach, unversichtbar. There was no question that for every pang Hilda made her ancient lover suffer, he would enrich his imagination with a dozen points of experience. There is no paradox in saying that the poet was overwhelmed with a passion, and yet made it serve as material for his plays."

It is the poet's passion we are now considering, reserving his use of it till we come to his letters on the subject, and so we return to that twenty-seventh of September, 1889, at Gossensass.

"Last evening when mama went to talk to his wife he came over and sat at our table. We were quite alone. He talked about his plans. I alone am in them-I, and I again. I feel quieter because he is quieter, though yesterday he was terrible."

That was still in the forenoon. During the day the poet must have descried more clearly the end to which he was so recklessly rushing on. As we get his side of the story, guardedly as he tells it, we find it referred to again. The impossible was to be achieved at all costs. achieved at all costs. The entry is late at night.

"He means to possess me. This is his absolute will. He intends to overcome all obstacles. I do what I can to keep him from feeling this, and yet I listen as he describes what is to lie before us going from one country to another I with him-enjoying his triumphs together."

In my own reading of this entry the pathos lies in the fact that while the older heart was very nearly breaking, the younger remained essentially untouched. The imagination was aflame, as how should it not be? and at eighteen heart and imagination lie so near together that they often cannot be told apart. The man, for one wild moment at least, was ready to go all lengths, while the girl remained sweet, virginal, remote, hardly comprehending the depths within the words she was writing in her diary. As a woman she knew what they implied; but as a child they were outside her range. In her very next sentences, without a change of paragraph, as if all were on the same level of emotion, she goes on to state that Dr. T— had amused them much with his high spirits, and mama had been afraid

0

HE beautiful, sunny South is afflicted with a plague, a white plague cotton. This is the outstanding fact about the South, especially the rural South, and it is mainly rural. Indeed, cotton, instead of being a blessing, a beneficent, fortunate thing, is almost a curse. It certainly is a burden and a drag upon the life and spirit of the people in the South. Cotton is not only king; it is tyrant, and the people of the South, old and young, are its slaves. I say this deliberately, purposefully, and say it despite the fact that cotton has been the pride and the boast, almost the worship, of the people whom it has taxed beyond mercy.

To the cotton crop is to be charged not only the poverty of the rural community, not only much of the difficulty of the race problem, not only the spoliation of one of the richest soils in America, not only farm tenancy, not only the low standards of living and the small money income, but the eternal friction between debtor and creditor, the laziness, near-peonage, monotonous diet and its influence upon health, the lack of proper schooling, really the impossibility of maintaining schools, the constant migration of the farmer, the lack of civic interest and of civic pride, the neglect of politics, the migration to

the mills, the absence of attractive homes, the lack of cattle, and the shortage of milk for growing children. All of these evils are chargeable to the cotton crop, directly or indirectly.

The list is not complete. One must add another thing-spiritual stagnation. Cotton-growing limits interest, limits technic, limits spiritual growth, makes people narrow, single-grooved, helpless, and subjects them to what one man has called "the new slavery"-a slavery of whites as well as of colored.

The cotton-grower of the South is not a farmer.. He thinks he is; but this is mainly a delusion-a delusion shared by other people. The fact of the matter is that the cotton-producer is either a petty speculator staking his fortunes upon the price of cotton, or a laborer working for a meager and indefinite money income. The majority of cotton-growers are tenants, and a tenant is a laborer who has sold his heritage for the doubtful privilege of being "run" by another human being, a more fortunate one.

We think of the American farmer as an independent, upstanding, self-sufficient person. We picture a family unit living on its own land and asking favors from no man, except that of being let alone. This picture is not descriptive of the cotton tenant.