ABSTRACT
In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man we read of Stephen Daedalus that 'as he went by Baird's stonecutting works in Talbot Place the spirit of Ibsen would blow through him like a keen wind, a spirit of wayward boyish beauty'. This spirit blows through Exiles with a super-Ibsen keenness over a colder-than-Ibsen structure of cut stone. In Ibsen and Exiles the newness is the point, and in Exiles the point is the finality also. The difficulty with the genre of modern drama is that the characters are obliged to debate their rights and wrongs more self-consciously than is either credible or dramatic. Exiles is thus a 'drama to end dramas'. And it invokes to this end the authority of life 'caught in the fact', an ultimate fact, we are supposed to feel, not the mere real circumstances, which is what Henry James had in mind when he applied this phrase to Ibsen.
