The League of Youth, as we have seen, requires no exposition.  All we have to learn is the existing relations of the characters, which appear quite naturally as the action proceeds.  But let us look at Pillars of Society.  Here we have to be placed in possession of a whole antecedent drama:  the intrigue of Karsten Bernick with Dina Dorf’s mother, the threatened scandal, Johan Toennesen’s vicarious acceptance of Bernick’s responsibility, the subsidiary scandal of Lona Hessel’s outburst on learning of Bernick’s engagement to her half-sister, the report of an embezzlement committed by Johan before his departure for America.  All this has to be conveyed to us in retrospect; or, rather, in the first place, we have to be informed of the false version of these incidents which is current in the little town, and on which Bernick’s moral and commercial prestige is built up.  What device, then, does Ibsen adopt to this end?  He introduces a “sewing-bee” of tattling women, one of whom happens to be a stranger to the town, and unfamiliar with its gossip.  Into her willing ear the others pour the popular version of the Bernick story; and, this impartment effected, the group of gossips disappears, to be heard of no more.  These ladies perform the function, in fact, of the First, Second, and Third Gentlemen, so common in Elizabethan and pseudo-Elizabethan plays.[9] They are not quite so artless in their conventionality, for they bring with them the social atmosphere of the tattling little town, which is an essential factor in the drama.  Moreover, their exposition is not a simple narrative of facts.  It is to some extent subtilized by the circumstance that the facts are not facts, and that the gist of the drama is to lie in the gradual triumph of the truth over this tissue of falsehoods.  Still, explain it as we may, the fact remains that in no later play does Ibsen initiate us into the preliminaries of his action by so hackneyed and unwieldy a device.  It is no conventional canon, but a maxim of mere common sense, that the dramatist should be chary of introducing characters who have no personal share in the drama, and are mere mouthpieces for the conveyance of information.  Nowhere else does Ibsen so flagrantly disregard so obvious a principle of dramatic economy.[10]

When we turn to his next play, A Doll’s House, we find that he has already made a great step in advance.  He has progressed from the First, Second, and Third Gentlemen of the Elizabethans to the confidant[11] of the French classic drama.  He even attempts, not very successfully, to disguise the confidant by giving her a personal interest, an effective share, in the drama.  Nothing can really dissemble the fact that the long scene between Nora and Mrs. Linden, which occupies almost one-third of the first act, is simply a formal exposition, outside the action of the play.  Just as it was providential that one of the house-wives of the sewing-bee in Pillars of Society should have been a stranger to the