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
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