ining
the foundations of society--their favourite phrase at the time, it
entered into every article written about the _Doll's House_--and,
looking upon themselves as the saviours of society, these
master-builders kept on staying and propping the damaged construction
till at length they were joined by some dramatists and story-tellers who
feared with them for the 'foundations of society,' and these latter set
themselves the task of devising new endings that would be likely to
catch the popular taste and so mitigate the evil, the substitution of an
educational motive for a carnal one. For Nora does not leave her husband
for a lover, but to educate herself. The critics were used to lovers,
and what we are used to is bearable, but a woman who leaves her husband
and her children for school-books is unbearable, and much more immoral
than the usual little wanton. So the critics thought in the 'eighties,
and they thought truly, if it be true that morality and custom are
interchangeable terms. The critics were right in a way; everybody is
right in a way, for nothing is wholly right and nothing wholly wrong, a
truth often served up by philosophers; but the public has ever eschewed
it, and perhaps our argument will be better appreciated if we dilute
this truth a little, saying instead that it is the telling that makes a
story true or false, and that the dramatic critics of the 'eighties were
not altogether as wrong as Mr. Archer imagined them to be, but failed to
express themselves.

The public is without power of expression, and it felt that it was being
fooled for some purpose not very apparent and perhaps anarchical. Nor is
a sudden revelation very convincing in modern times. In the space of
three minutes, Nora, who has been her husband's sensual toy, and has
taken pleasure in being that, and only that, leaves her husband and her
children, as has been said, for school-books. A more arbitrary piece of
stage craft was never devised; but it was not the stage craft the
critics were accustomed to, and the admirers of Ibsen did not dare to
admit that he had devised Nora to cry aloud that a woman is more than a
domestic animal. It would have been fatal for an apostle or even a
disciple to admit the obvious fact that Ibsen was a dramatist of moral
ideas rather than of sensuous emotions; and there was nobody in the
'eighties to explain the redemption of Ibsen by his dialogue, the
strongest and most condensed ever written, yet coming off