in literature. Into this period comes his one buoyant play, _An Enemy of
the People_, his rebound against the traditional hypocrisy which had
attacked _Ghosts_ for its telling of unseasonable truths; it is an
allegory, in the form of journalism, or journalism in the form of
allegory, and is the 'apology' of the man of science for his mission.
Every play is a dissection, or a vivisection rather; for these people
who suffer so helplessly, and are shown us so calmly in their agonies,
are terribly alive. _A Doll's House_ is the first of Ibsen's plays in
which the puppets have no visible wires. The playwright has perfected
his art of illusion; beyond _A Doll's House_ and _Ghosts_ dramatic
illusion has never gone. And the irony of the ideas that work these
living puppets has now become their life-blood. It is the tragic irony
of a playwright who is the greatest master of technique since Sophocles,
but who is only the playwright in Sophocles, not the poet.

For this moment, the moment of his finest achievement, that fantastic
element which was Ibsen's resource against the prose of fact is so
sternly repressed that it seems to have left no trace behind. With _The
Wild Duck_ fantasy comes back, but with a more precise and explicit
symbolism, not yet disturbing the reality of things. Here the irony is
more disinterested than even in _Ghosts_, for it turns back on the
reformer and shows us how tragic a muddle we may bring about in the
pursuit of truth and in the name of our ideals. In each of the plays
which follows we see the return and encroachment of symbolism, the
poetic impulse crying for satisfaction and offering us ever new forms of
the fantastic in place of any simple and sufficing gift of imagination.
The man of science has had his way, has fulfilled his aim, and is
discontented with the limits within which he has fulfilled it. He would
extend those limits; and at first it seems as if those limits are to be
extended. But the exquisite pathos which humanises what is fantastic in
_The Wild Duck_ passes, in _Rosmersholm_, in which the problems of
_Love's Comedy_ are worked out to their logical conclusion, into a form,
not of genuine tragedy, but of mental melodrama. In _The Lady from the
Sea_, how far is the symbol which has eaten up reality really symbol? Is
it not rather the work of the intelligence than of the imagination? Is
it not allegory intruding into reality, disturbing that reality and
giving us no spiritual reality