the reel like
silk. A wonderful thread, that never tangles in his hands. Ibsen is a
magical weaver, and so closely does he weave that we are drawn along in
the net like fishes.

But it is with the subject of the _Doll's House_ rather than with the
art with which it is woven that we are concerned here. The subject of _A
Drama in Muslin_ is the same as that of _A Doll's House_, and for this
choice of subject I take pride in my forerunner. It was a fine thing for
a young man of thirty to choose the subject instinctively that Ibsen had
chosen a few years before; it is a feather in his cap surely; and I
remember with pleasure that he was half through his story when Dr.
Aveling read him the first translation of _A Doll's House_, a poor
thing, done by a woman, that withheld him from any appreciation of the
play. The fact that he was writing the same subject from an entirely
different point of view prejudiced him against Ibsen; and the making of
a woman first in a sensual and afterward transferring her into an
educational mould with a view to obtaining an instrument to thunder out
a given theme could not be else than abhorrent to one whose art, however
callow, was at least objective. In the _Doll's House_ Ibsen had
renounced all objectivity. It does not seem to me that further apologies
are necessary for my predecessor's remark to Dr. Aveling after the
reading that he was engaged in moulding a woman in one of Nature's
moulds. 'A puritan,' he said, 'I am writing of, but not a sexless
puritan, and if women cannot win their freedom without leaving their sex
behind they had better remain slaves, for a slave with his sex is better
than a free eunuch;' and he discoursed on the book he was writing,
convinced that Alice Barton represented her sex better than the
archetypal hieratic and clouded figure of Nora which Ibsen had dreamed
so piously, allowing, he said, memories of Egyptian sculpture to mingle
with his dreams.

My ancestor could not have understood the _Doll's House_ while he was
writing _A Drama in Muslin_, not even in Mr. Archer's translation; he
was too absorbed in his craft at that time, in observing and remembering
life, to be interested in moral ideas. And his portrait of Alice Barton
gives me much the same kind of pleasure as a good drawing. She keeps her
place in the story, moving through it with quiet dignity, commanding our
sympathy and respect always, and for her failure to excite our wonder
like Nora we may say