It is therefore difficult to see why Nordau should consider Ibsen’s influence so dangerous to society as to deem it necessary to hold him up as a degenerate. The enigma becomes more puzzling when we find that Nordau frankly allows that Ibsen has great merits and great talents. He says, for instance: “Henrik Ibsen is a poet of great verve and power.” “He has the gift of depicting in an exceptionally lifelike and impressive manner that which has excited his feelings.” “He has the capacity for imagining situations in which the characters are forced to turn inside out their inmost nature, in which abstract ideas transform themselves into deeds, and moods of opinion and of feeling, imperceptible to the senses but potent as causes, are made patent to sight and hearing in attitudes and gestures, in the play of feature, and in words.” “He knows how to group events into living frescoes possessing the charm of significant pictures... not like Wagner, with strange costumes and properties, architectural splendour, mechanical magic, gods and fabulous beasts, but with penetrating vision into the background of souls and the conditions of humanity.... But he does not allow the imagination of the spectator to run riot in mere spectacles; he forces them into moods, he binds them by his spell in circles of ideas, through the pictures which he unrolls before them.” “The power with which Ibsen, in a few rapid strokes, sketches a situation, an emotion, a dim-lit depth of the soul, is very much higher than his skill, so much extolled, of foreshortening in time... Each of the terse words which suffice him has something of the nature of a peep-hole, through which limitless vistas are obtained. The plays of all peoples of all ages have few situations at once so perfectly simple and so irresistibly affecting.” Further on he again says: “It must be acknowledged that Ibsen has created some characters possessing a truth to life and a completeness such as are not to be met with in any poet since Shakespeare... None the less no poet since the illustrious Spanish master (Cervantes) has succeeded in creating such an embodiment of plain, jolly, healthy common-sense, of practical tact without anxiety as to things eternal, and of honest fulfilment of all proximate, obvious duties without a suspicion of higher moral obligations, as this Gina.... Hjalmar also is a perfect creation, in which Ibsen has not once succumbed to the cogent temptation to exaggerate, but has exercised most entrancingly that ‘self-restraint’ in every word which, as Goethe says, ‘reveals the master.’”