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.

In _An Enemy of the People_, as already stated, he momentarily deserted
that method, and gave us an action which begins, develops, and ends
entirely within the fra