In order to show how unreal Ibsen is, Nordau asks whether it is probable that the joiner, Engstrand (in _Ghosts_), wishing to open a tavern for sailors, should call upon his own daughter to be the odalisque of his “establishment.” By using the word “odalisque,” and by placing the word “establishment” between inverted commas, he gives a distorted idea of the tavern Engstrand is going to open. It is a question of a real tavern, not of an “establishment.” Girls in similar taverns in Norway are of course exposed to temptations and sometimes to insults, but they are by no means necessarily unchaste. In selecting the employment in the tavern, Ibsen succeeds in giving an insight into the Philistine character of Engstrand, who for the sake of money would risk his daughter’s reputation, but who could always fall back on the excuse that he did not intend to ruin her. Nordau may be right when he says that no Paris doctor would have told Oswald Alving in _Ghosts_ that he had softening of the brain. But Ibsen does not say “softening of the brain”; he makes Alving say “a kind of softening of the brain,” an expression which might very well be Oswald’s interpretation of what the doctor had told him in very guarded words. Moreover it is not as an alienist that Ibsen has gained his fame; it is as a dramatist. Nordau quotes as another example of unreality, the sense in which the term “society” is used by the characters in the _Pillars of Society_. This is an error into which Nordau has evidently been led by reading a bad German translation of the piece. Ibsen’s characters do not mean “social edifice,” as Nordau pedantically will have it, but the well-to-do people in the community. Again, he thinks that excuse very unreal which Berneck gives to his foreman, whom he has not taken into his confidence. But this unreality is precisely what Ibsen wishes the public to see, and he has evidently not accentuated the unreality sufficiently, as this has escaped even Nordau. Nordau does not find the speech of Pastor Rörlund realistic enough. The fact is that the speech is a delightful parody, in no way exaggerated, of those addresses which toadying sycophants all the world over are in the habit of delivering to a magnate whom they desire to propitiate. Any one who has heard such a speech in Norway will be amusedly surprised by its comic realism.