d, while some of it reminds one of _Salammbo_ in its attempt to
treat remote ages realistically, other parts are given up wholly to the
exposition of theories, and yet others to a kind of spectacular romance,
after the cheap method of George Ebers and the German writers of
historical fiction. The satire is more serious, the criticism of ideas
more fundamental than anything in _The League of Youth_; but, as in
almost the whole of Ibsen's more characteristic work up to this point,
satire strives with realism; it is still satire, not irony, and is not
yet, as the later irony is to be, a deepening, and thus a
justification, of the realism.

Eight years passed between _The League of Youth_ and _The Pillars of
Society_; but they are both woven of the same texture. Realism has made
for itself a firmer footing; the satire has more significance; the
mechanism of the stage goes much more smoothly, though indeed to a more
conventionally happy ending; melodrama has taken some of the place of
satire. Yet the 'state satirist' is still at his work, still concerned
with society and bringing only a new detail of the old accusation
against society. Like every play of this period, it is the unveiling of
a lie. See yourselves as you are, the man of science seems to be saying
to us. Here are your 'pillars of society'; they are the tools of
society. Here is your happy marriage, and it is a doll's house. Here is
your respected family, here is the precept of 'honour your father and
your mother' in practice; and here is the little voice of heredity
whispering 'ghosts!' There is the lie of respectability, the lie hidden
behind marriage, the lie which saps the very roots of the world.

Ibsen is no preacher, and he has told us expressly that _Ghosts_
'preaches nothing at all.' This pursuit of truth to its most secret
hiding-place is not a sermon against sin; it sets a scientific dogma
visibly to work, and watches the effect of the hypothesis. As the dogma
is terrible and plausible, and the logic of its working-out faultless,
we get one of the deeper thrills that modern art has to give us. I would
take _A Doll's House_, _Ghosts_, and _The Wild Duck_ as Ibsen's three
central plays, the plays in which his method completely attained its
end, in which his whole capacities are seen at their finest balance; and
this work, this reality in which every word, meaningless in itself, is
alive with suggestion, is the finest scientific work which has been done