Perhaps the main cause of Ibsen's offending is his irony. The world forgives much, irony never, for irony is the ivory tower of the intellectual, the last refuge of the original. It is not the intellectual irony of Meredith, nor the playful irony of Anatole France, but a veiled corrosive irony that causes you to tread suspiciously every yard of his dramatic domain. The "second intention," the secondary dialogue, spoken of by Maeterlinck, in the Ibsen plays is very disconcerting to those who prefer their drama free from enigma. Otherwise his dialogue is a model for future dramatists. It is clarity itself and, closely woven, it has the characteristic accents of nature. Read, we feel its gripping logic; spoken by an actor, it tingles with vitality.
For the student there is a fascination in the cohesiveness of these dramas. Ibsen's mind was like a lens; it focussed the refracted, scattered, and broken lights of opinions and theories of his day upon the contracted space of his stage. In a fluid state the ideas that crystallised in his prose series are to be found in his earliest work; there is a remorseless fastening of link to link in the march-like movement of his plays. Their author seems to delight in battering down in Ghosts what he had preached in A Doll's House; The Enemy of the People exalted the individual man, though Ghosts taught that a certain kind of personal liberty is deadly; The Wild Duck, which follows, is another puzzle, for in it the misguided idealist is pilloried for destroying homes by his truth-telling, dangerous tongue; Rosmersholm follows with its portrayal of lonely souls; and the danger of filling old bottles with the fermenting wines of new ideas is set forth; in The Lady from the Sea free-will, the will to love, is lauded, though Rebekka West and Rosmersholm perished because of their exercise of this same will; Hedda Gabler shows the converse of Ellida Wangel's "will to power." Hedda is a creature wholly alive and shocking. Ibsen stuns us again, for if it is healthy to be individual and to lead your own life, in neurasthenic Hedda's case it leads to a catastrophe which wrecks a household. This game of contradiction is continued in The Master-Builder, a most potent exposition of human motives. Solness is sick-brained because of his loveless egoism. Hilda Wangel, the "younger generation," a Hedda Gabler _à rebours_, that he so feared would come knocking at his door, awakens in him his dead dreams, arouses his slumbering self; curiously enough, if the ordinary standards of success be adduced, he goes to his destruction when he again climbs the dizzy spire. In John Gabriel Borkman the allegory is clearer. Sacrificing love to a base ambition, to "commercialism," Borkman at the close of his great and miserable life discovers that he has committed the one unpardonable offence: he has slain the love-life in the woman he loved, and for the sake of gold. So he is a failure, and, like Peer Gynt, he is ready for the Button-Moulder with his refuse-heap, who lies in wait for all cowardly and incomplete souls. The Epilogue returns to the mountains, the Ibsen symbol of freedom, and there we learn for the last time that love is greater than art, that love is life. And the dead of life awake.