It would be tiresome to go minutely into the proofs of unreality Nordau finds in Ibsen’s pieces, and the bare mention of the following examples will suffice to show the futility of his attempt. He considers it impossible for a man of forty-three to inspire love, and this in Norway, where people develop and ripen so slowly. He thinks it unreal for an excitable girl to describe as a storm on the sea the passion which induces her to encourage her rival’s suicide, and then when the rival is out of the way patiently to devote a year and a half to gaining the love for which her sin was committed. Our alienist, who displays throughout his book an utter lack of the sense of the ridiculous, finds the scene between Ellida, Wangel, and the Stranger in _The Lady from the Sea_ ridiculous, a scene which thousands of audiences have followed in breathless silence and with deep emotion. The puzzle is why Nordau is so anxious to show that Ibsen is not a realist, and how his not being a realist can possibly be construed into an argument in favour of his insanity. Are then all the people who, as a matter of taste or as a matter of business, supply the public with unrealistic dramas to be considered more or less demented? If this is the case, what becomes of the mental sanity of Nordau’s great model, Goethe, the author of the intensely unreal _Faust_? Referring to the theory of heredity, frequently alluded to in Ibsen’s works, Nordau says he cannot preserve his gravity when Ibsen displays his scientific or medical knowledge. Here again we are tempted to refer to the sandal-maker and the sandal-strings; but there is actually no occasion to do so, because Ibsen displaying his medical knowledge is a picture conjured up by Nordau’s own imagination. We do not know what Ibsen does in his private life, but in his dramatic works he does not display his medical knowledge. What suits Nordau’s purpose to give as Ibsen’s opinions are the opinions of his characters, who, being true to nature, speak as their prototypes in reality speak. It suits Ibsen’s dramatic purposes to make use of certain views on heredity, and he is all the more entitled to do so as such opinions are very prevalent nowadays, and not without exercising a considerable influence on people’s minds. Ibsen may have exactly the same opinion as his characters give expression to, or he may think the very opposite, but those who thoroughly understand Ibsen’s method will be convinced that he would not commit the mistake, so common among dramatists, of allowing his characters to reflect the author’s personality. When Regina, in _Ghosts_, in reply to Mrs. Alving, who is harping on heredity, says, “What must be, must be... I take after my mother I dare say,” she does not express Ibsen’s opinion about heredity, but that fatalistic notion which is unfortunately extremely common among women, especially when in trouble or at fault, and a reference to her mother