The exaltation which the romanticist failed to achieve, the scientific naturalist did not even attempt. Ibsen, apart from his great intrinsic importance, is interesting because he shows the transition from the one mode to the other. His early plays were modelled after Scribe and Schiller; and use of the sagas links him with the heroic tradition. Though sceptically, he exalted the will and prophesied the superman. But his mature work shows the effect of science: men are portrayed more as victims than shapers of events, and responsibility is shifted from the individual to society. His transition from romanticism to scientific naturalism was made easy by the fact that romanticism had already identified man with nature. Disillusion concerning the latter brought about degradation of the former. Though the increasing use of symbolism gives Ibsen’s later work a romantic tone, the plays are built on studies of mental abnormalities which seem almost intended to demonstrate the non-existence of heroism. The fall of the master builder is indeed a symbol of the falsity of what Shaw calls “ideals.” But Ibsen’s anti-heroic tendency is seen perhaps most forcefully in the famous tragedy of his middle period. In _Ghosts_ the formal resemblances to Greek tragedy and the element of human error obscure the essential differences. The animus vitalising the action is the attack upon a false code of morals--or “ideals”--of which the heroine is the victim. And, as is proper in a naturalist tragedy, the _Spirocheta pallida_ is made the _deus ex machina_. The emotional effect, furthermore, is not elevation but horror. We can admire the author for honesty and daring, but not the characters. The best of them, Mrs. Alving, is admirable only in intention, and false to her convictions, as the author makes a point of showing. She is at the curtain so far from a “spiritual victory” that there remains for her a dilemma which is probably the cruelest in dramatic literature: killing her own son or letting him live an idiot. The contrast between this play and, let us say, _Hamlet_ is plain when we compare Oswald’s cry, “The sun--the sun,” and the final speech of Fortinbras: Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage; For he was likely, had he been put on, To have prov’d most royally; and for his passage, The soldiers’ music and the rites of war Speak loudly for him. The former is the bitter irony of disillusion, the very mockery of the romantic cliché, “Then came the dawn.” The latter ends the play with eloquent praise.[39] III