town, so it was the luckiest of chances (for the dramatist’s convenience) that an old school-friend should have dropped in from the clouds precisely half-an-hour before the entrance of Krogstad brings to a sudden head the great crisis of Nora’s life.  This happy conjuncture of events is manifestly artificial:  a trick of the dramatist’s trade:  a point at which his art does not conceal his art.  Mrs. Linden does not, like the dames of the sewing-bee, fade out of the saga; she even, through her influence on Krogstad, plays a determining part in the development of the action.  But to all intents and purposes she remains a mere confidant, a pretext for Nora’s review of the history of her married life.  There are two other specimens of the genus confidant in Ibsen’s later plays.  Arnholm, in The Lady from the Sea, is little more; Dr. Herdal, in The Master Builder, is that and nothing else.  It may be alleged in his defence that the family physician is the professional confidant of real life.

In Ghosts, Ibsen makes a sudden leap to the extreme of his retrospective method.  I am not one of those who consider this play Ibsen’s masterpiece:  I do not even place it, technically, in the first rank among his works.  And why?  Because there is here no reasonable equilibrium between the drama of the past and the drama of the present.  The drama of the past is almost everything, the drama of the present next to nothing.  As soon as we have probed to the depths the Alving marriage and its consequences, the play is over, and there is nothing left but for Regina to set off in pursuit of the joy of life, and for Oswald to collapse into imbecility.  It is scarcely an exaggeration to call the play all exposition and no drama.  Here for the first time, however, Ibsen perfected his peculiar gift of imparting tense dramatic interest to the unveiling of the past.  While in one sense the play is all exposition, in another sense it may quite as truly be said to contain no exposition; for it contains no narrative delivered in cold blood, in mere calm retrospection, as a necessary preliminary to the drama which is in the meantime waiting at the door.  In other words, the exposition is all drama, it is the drama.  The persons who are tearing the veils from the past, and for whom the veils are being torn, are intensely concerned in the process, which actually constitutes the dramatic crisis.  The discovery of this method, or its rediscovery in modern drama,[12] was Ibsen’s great technical achievement.  In his best work, the progress of the unveiling occasions a marked development, or series of changes, in the actual and present relations of the characters.  The drama of the past and the drama of the present proceed, so to speak, in interlacing rhythms, or, as I said before, in a rich, complex harmony.  In Ghosts this harmony is not so rich as in some later plays, because the drama of the present is disproportionately meagre.  None the less, or all the more, is it a conspicuous example of Ibsen’s method of raising his curtain, not at the beginning of the crisis, but rather at the beginning of the catastrophe.