Regarding The Vikings as Ibsen’s first mature production, and surveying the whole series of his subsequent works in which he had stage presentation directly in view,[8] we find that in only two out of the fifteen plays does the whole action come within the frame of the picture.  These two are The League of Youth and An Enemy of the People.  In neither of these have any antecedents to be stated; neither turns upon any disclosure of bygone events or emotions.  We are, indeed, afforded brief glimpses into the past both of Stensgaard and of Stockmann; but the glimpses are incidental and inessential.  It is certainly no mere coincidence that if one were asked to pick out the pieces of thinnest texture in all Ibsen’s mature work, one would certainly select these two plays.  Far be it from me to disparage An Enemy of the People; as a work of art it is incomparably greater than such a piece as Pillars of Society; but it is not so richly woven, not, as it were, so deep in pile.  Written in half the time Ibsen usually devoted to a play, it is an outburst of humorous indignation, a jeu d’esprit, one might almost say, though the jeu of a giant esprit.

Observing the effect of comparative tenuity in these two plays, we cannot but surmise that the secret of the depth and richness of texture so characteristic of Ibsen’s work, lay in his art of closely interweaving a drama of the present with a drama of the past. An Enemy of the People is a straightforward, spirited melody; The Wild Duck and Rosmersholm are subtly and intricately harmonized.

Going a little more into detail, we find in Ibsen’s work an extraordinary progress in the art of so unfolding the drama of the past as to make the gradual revelation no mere preface or prologue to the drama of the present, but an integral part of its action.  It is true that in The Vikings he already showed himself a master in this art.  The great revelation—­the disclosure of the fact that Sigurd, not Gunnar, did the deed of prowess which Hioerdis demanded of the man who should be her mate—­this crucial revelation is brought about in a scene of the utmost dramatic intensity.  The whole drama of the past, indeed—­both its facts and its emotions—­may be said to be dragged to light in the very stress and pressure of the drama of the present.  Not a single detail of it is narrated in cold blood, as, for example, Prospero relates to Miranda the story of their marooning, or Horatio expounds the Norwegian-Danish political situation.  I am not holding up The Vikings as a great masterpiece; it has many weaknesses both of substance and of method; but in this particular art of indistinguishably blending the drama of the present with the drama of the past, it is already consummate. The Pretenders scarcely comes into the comparison.  It is Ibsen’s one chronicle-play; and, like Shakespeare, he did not shrink from employing a good deal of narrative, though his narratives, it must be said, are always introduced under such circumstances as to make them a vital part of the drama.  It is when we come to the modern plays that we find the poet falling back upon conventional and somewhat clumsy methods of exposition, which he only by degrees, though by rapid degrees, unlearns.