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But Ibsen, too, was a character-drawer when it suited him. One is tempted to say that there is no psychology in Brand he is a mere incarnation of intransigent idealism while Peer Gynt is as brilliant a psychological inspiration as Don Quixote. Dr. Stockmann is a vigorously-projected character, Hialmar Ekdal a piece of searching psychology.
Shaw is not, primarily, either a character-drawer or a psychologist, but a dealer in personified ideas. His leading figures are, as a rule, either his mouthpieces or his butts. When he gives us a piece of real character-drawing, it is generally in some subordinate personage. Mr. Galsworthy, I should say, shows himself a psychologist in Strife, a character-drawer in The Silver Box and Justice.
The psychologists of the modern French stage, I take it, are M. de Curel and M. de Porto-Riche. MM. Brieux and Hervieu are, like Mr. Shaw, too much concerned with ideas to probe very deep into character. In Germany, Hauptmann, and, so far as I understand him, Wedekind, are psychologists, Sudermann, a vigorous character-drawer.
The comedy of types necessarily tends to keep within the limits of the known, and Molière in spite of Alceste and Don Juan is characteristically a character-drawer, as Racine is characteristically a psychologist. Ibsen is a psychologist or he is nothing. Earl Skule and Bishop Nicholas, Hedda Gabler and John Gabriel Borkman are daring explorations of hitherto uncharted regions of the human soul.
Sir Arthur Pinero, a character-drawer of great versatility, becomes a psychologist in some of his studies of feminine types in Iris, in Letty, in the luckless heroine of Mid-Channel. Mr. Clyde Fitch had, at least, laudable ambitions in the direction of psychology.
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