The question how far an audience ought to be carried towards the heart of a dramatic action in the course of the first act is always and inevitably one of proportion.  It is clear that too much ought not to be told, so as to leave the remaining acts meagre and spun-out; nor should any one scene be so intense in its interest as to outshine all subsequent scenes, and give to the rest of the play an effect of anti-climax.  If the strange and fascinating creations of Ibsen’s last years were to be judged by ordinary dramaturgic canons, we should have to admit that in Little Eyolf he was guilty of the latter fault, since in point of sheer “strength,” in the common acceptation of the word, the situation at the end of the first act could scarcely be outdone, in that play or any other.  The beginner, however, is far more likely to put too little than too much into his first act:  he is more likely to leave our interest insufficiently stimulated than to carry us too far in the development of his theme.  My own feeling is that, as a general rule, what Freytag calls the erregende Moment ought by all means to fall within the first act.  What is the erregende Moment?  One is inclined to render it “the firing of the fuse.”  In legal parlance, it might be interpreted as the joining of issue.  It means the point at which the drama, hitherto latent, plainly declares itself.  It means the germination of the crisis, the appearance on the horizon of the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand.  I suggest, then, that this erregende Moment ought always to come within the first act—­if it is to come at all There are plays, as we have seen, which depict life on so even a plane that it is impossible to say at any given point, “Here the drama sets in,” or “The interest is heightened there.”

Pillars of Society is, in a sense, Ibsen’s prentice-work in the form of drama which he afterwards perfected; wherefore it affords us numerous illustrations of the problems we have to consider.  Does he, or does he not, give us in the first act sufficient insight into his story?  I am inclined to answer the question in the negative.  The first act puts us in possession of the current version of the Bernick-Toennesen family history, but it gives us no clear indication that this version is an elaborate tissue of falsehoods.  It is true that Bernick’s evident uneasiness and embarrassment at the mere idea of the reappearance of Lona and Johan may lead us to suspect that all is not as it seems; but simple annoyance at the inopportune arrival of the black sheep of the family might be sufficient to account for this.  To all intents and purposes, we are completely in the dark as to the course the drama is about to take; and when, at the end of the first act, Lona Hessel marches in and flutters the social dovecote, we do not know in what light to regard her, or why we are supposed to sympathize with her.  The fact that she is eccentric, and that she talks of “letting in fresh air,”