arlier scenes of the play. Anything
which confuses the spectator, which leaves him in doubt, which keeps him
guessing, is contrary to Spencer's principle of "economy of attention,"
as important in the other arts as it is in rhetoric.

Altho he is ever seeking to awaken curiosity, to arouse the interest of
expectancy, and to excite in the spectators a desire to see the thing
through, Ibsen refrains from any mere mystery-mongering for its own
sake. He wishes his audience to give attention not so much to the bare
happenings of his story, however startling they may be in themselves, as
to the effect which these happenings are certain to have on the
characters. He is abundant in inventive ingenuity and in devising
effective situations; and the complications of the plot of the 'Pillars
of Society' would probably have hugely pleased Scribe. But he has also
the larger imagination which can people situation with character and
which can make situation significant as an opportunity for character to
express itself. Ingenious as he is in plot-building, with him character
always dominates situation. To Ibsen character is destiny, and the
persons of his plays seem to have created, by their own natural
proceeding, the predicaments in which they are immeshed.

Ibsen is particularly happy in the subordinate devices by which he
reveals character,--for example, _Maia's_ taking off the green shade
when the _Master-Builder_ enters the room. And another device, that of
the catchword, which he took over from Scribe and the younger Dumas, and
which, even in his hands, remains a mere trick in the early 'League of
Youth,' is so delicately utilized in certain of the later
plays--witness, the "vine-leaves in his hair" of 'Hedda Gabler' and the
"white horses" in 'Rosmersholm'--that these recurrent phrases are
transformed into a prose equivalent of Wagner's leading-motives. So,
too, Ibsen does without the _raisonneur_ of Dumas and Augier, that
condensation of the Greek chorus into a single person, who is only the
mouthpiece of the author himself and who exists chiefly to point the
moral, even tho he may sometimes also adorn the tale. Ibsen so handles
his story that it points its own moral; his theme is so powerfully
presented in action that it speaks for itself.

It must also be noted that Ibsen, like all born playwrights, like Scribe
and Dumas and Augier, like Sophocles and Shakspere and Moliere, is well
aware of the double aspect of the theater,