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Updated: June 13, 2025
One may cite as characteristic examples the hurried colloquy between Engstrand and Regina in Ghosts; Rebecca and Madam Helseth in Rosmersholm, watching to see whether Rosmer will cross the mill-race; and in The Master Builder, old Brovik's querulous outburst, immediately followed by the entrance of Solness and his mysterious behaviour towards Kaia.
Genius can manifest itself equally in either form. But each form has its peculiar advantages. You cannot, in a retrospective play like Rosmersholm, attain anything like the magnificent onward rush of Othello, which moves "Like to the Pontick sea Whose icy current and compulsive course Ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on To the Propontick and the Hellespont."
But in 'Rosmersholm, strong as the drama is and fine as its technic is, Ibsen's method seems to be at fault in that we learn too late what it would have interested us greatly to know earlier. It is only at the end almost that we are allowed to perceive what were Rebecca West's real intentions in coming to Rosmersholm and how the influence of the house itself has transformed her.
In An Enemy of the People, as already stated, he momentarily deserted that method, and gave us an action which begins, develops, and ends entirely within the frame of the picture. But in the two following plays, The Wild Duck and Rosmersholm, he touched the highest point of technical mastery in his interweaving of the past with the present.
It has its deep roots in tradition and the past generally, and hence the conflict." When we come to read Rosmersholm it is not difficult to see how this order of ideas dominated Ibsen's mind when he wrote it.
This was quite a new creed in Norway, and it bewildered his hearers, but it is remarkable to notice how the best public feeling in Scandinavia has responded to the appeal, and how little surprise the present generation would express at a repetition of such sentiments. And out of this idea of "nobility" of public character Rosmersholm directly sprang. We are not left to conjecture in this respect.
Take, for instance, what in this respect is perhaps the masterpiece, Rosmersholm. Few spectators consider it closely enough to appreciate the wonderful skill shown in conveying to the audience the vast number of facts and ideas necessary to explain the exact relations between Rosmer and Rebecca West when the play begins.
Finally, my point could scarcely be better illustrated than by a comparison cruel but instructive between Rebecca in Rosmersholm and the heroine in Bella Donna. Each is, in effect, a murderess, though it was a moral, not a mineral, poison that Rebecca employed. But while we know nothing whatever of Mrs.
Altho no other play of Ibsen's attains the extraordinary compactness and swiftness of 'Ghosts, several of them approach closely to this standard, the 'Master-Builder, for example, 'Little Eyolf' and more especially 'Rosmersholm, in which the author did not display on the stage itself more than a half of the strong series of situations he had devised to sustain the interest of the spectator and to elucidate his underlying thesis.
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.
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