ABSTRACT
HAD any one, half a century ago, undertaken to draw up a list of contemporary masterpieces of drama which possessed a European vogue, his task would have soon been despatched. The theatre was everywhere sufficiently prolific of new things; but those who supplied them were either, like Scribe and Augier, accomplished playwrights whose work passed current everywhere by virtue, in the main, of clever technique; or, like Halm and Grillparzer, men of genius, whose masterpieces scarcely passed the frontiers of their own land; or else, like our own Taylors and Lyttons and Boucicaults, they united with the restricted reputations of the one class, the restricted merits of the other. If things are otherwise to-day, if there exists in several countries the nucleus of a drama of first-rate significance, captivating in the study and alluring on the stage, it is largely through a combination of fortunate circumstances in a single remote and thinly peopled province of the European republic of letters. Norway has led the way among the nations in acquiring possession of a living drama of classical rank as literature, for which the barriers of language and race have ceased to exist.
