presentment of the case is certainly not dependent on its absolute
scientific accuracy. The flaws above alluded to are of another nature.
One of them is the prominence given to the fact that the Asylum
is uninsured. No doubt there is some symbolical purport in the
circumstance; but I cannot think that it is either sufficiently clear or
sufficiently important to justify the emphasis thrown upon it at the
end of the second act. Another dubious point is Oswald's argument in
the first act as to the expensiveness of marriage as compared with free
union. Since the parties to free union, as he describes it, accept all
the responsibilities of marriage, and only pretermit the ceremony, the
difference of expense, one would suppose, must be neither more nor less
than the actual marriage fee. I have never seen this remark of Oswald's
adequately explained, either as a matter of economic fact, or as a
trait of character. Another blemish, of somewhat greater moment, is the
inconceivable facility with which, in the third act, Manders suffers
himself to be victimised by Engstrand. All these little things, taken
together, detract, as it seems to me, from the artistic completeness of
the play, and impair its claim to rank as the poet's masterpiece. Even
in prose drama, his greatest and most consummate achievements were yet
to come.

Must we, then, wholly dissent from Bjoernson's judgment? I think not. In
a historical, if not in an aesthetic, sense, _Ghosts_ may well rank as
Ibsen's greatest work. It was the play which first gave the full measure
of his technical and spiritual originality and daring. It has done
far more than any other of his plays to "move boundary-posts." It has
advanced the frontiers of dramatic art and implanted new ideals, both
technical and intellectual, in the minds of a whole generation of
playwrights. It ranks with _Hernani_ and _La Dame aux Camelias_ among
the epoch-making plays of the nineteenth century, while in point of
essential originality it towers above them. We cannot, I think, get
nearer to the truth than Georg Brandes did in the above-quoted phrase
from his first notice of the play, describing it as not, perhaps, the
poet's greatest work, but certainly his noblest deed. In another essay,
Brandes has pointed to it, with equal justice, as marking Ibsen's final
breach with his early-one might almost say his hereditary romanticism.
He here becomes, at last, "the most modern of the moderns." "This, I am
co