It
may be alleged in his defence that the family physician is the
professional confidant of real life.
In _Ghosts_, Ibsen makes a sudden leap to the extreme of his
retrospective method. I am not one of those who consider this play
Ibsen's masterpiece: I do not even place it, technically, in the first
rank among his works. And why? Because there is here no reasonable
equilibrium between the drama of the past and the drama of the present.
The drama of the past is almost everything, the drama of the present
next to nothing. As soon as we have probed to the depths the Alving
marriage and its consequences, the play is over, and there is nothing
left but for Regina to set off in pursuit of the joy of life, and for
Oswald to collapse into imbecility. It is scarcely an exaggeration to
call the play all exposition and no drama. Here for the first time,
however, Ibsen perfected his peculiar gift of imparting tense dramatic
interest to the unveiling of the past. While in one sense the play is
all exposition, in another sense it may quite as truly be said to
contain no exposition; for it contains no narrative delivered in cold
blood, in mere calm retrospection, as a necessary preliminary to the
drama which is in the meantime waiting at the door.
Pages:
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150