ty. The whole drama of the past,
indeed--both its facts and its emotions--may be said to be dragged to
light in the very stress and pressure of the drama of the present. Not a
single detail of it is narrated in cold blood, as, for example, Prospero
relates to Miranda the story of their marooning, or Horatio expounds the
Norwegian-Danish political situation. I am not holding up _The Vikings_
as a great masterpiece; it has many weaknesses both of substance and of
method; but in this particular art of indistinguishably blending the
drama of the present with the drama of the past, it is already
consummate. _The Pretenders_ scarcely comes into the comparison. It is
Ibsen's one chronicle-play; and, like Shakespeare, he did not shrink
from employing a good deal of narrative, though his narratives, it must
be said, are always introduced under such circumstances as to make them
a vital part of the drama. It is when we come to the modern plays that
we find the poet falling back upon conventional and somewhat clumsy
methods of exposition, which he only by degrees, though by rapid
degrees, unlearns.

_The League of Youth_, as we have seen, requires no exposition. All we
have to learn is the existing relations of the characters, which appear
quite naturally as the action proceeds. But let us look at _Pillars of
Society_. Here we have to be placed in possession of a whole antecedent
drama: the intrigue of Karsten Bernick with Dina Dorf's mother, the
threatened scandal, Johan Toennesen's vicarious acceptance of Bernick's
responsibility, the subsidiary scandal of Lona Hessel's outburst on
learning of Bernick's engagement to her half-sister, the report of an
embezzlement committed by Johan before his departure for America. All
this has to be conveyed to us in retrospect; or, rather, in the first
place, we have to be informed of the false version of these incidents
which is current in the little town, and on which Bernick's moral and
commercial prestige is built up. What device, then, does Ibsen adopt to
this end? He introduces a "sewing-bee" of tattling women, one of whom
happens to be a stranger to the town, and unfamiliar with its gossip.
Into her willing ear the others pour the popular version of the Bernick
story; and, this impartment effected, the group of gossips disappears,
to be heard of no more. These ladies perform the function, in fact, of
the First, Second, and Third Gentlemen, so common in Elizabethan and
pseudo-Elizabethan