roitness of construction; but it is never allowed to
crush or to keep out human nature.

_Consul Bernick_ is one of Ibsen's most veracious characters, with his
cloaking morality, his unconscious egotism, and his unfaltering
selfishness, disclosed so naively and so naturally. Less boldly drawn
but not the less truthful is _Helmer_, that inexpugnable prig, with his
shallow selfishness, his complacent conceit, and his morality for
external use only. Ibsen is never happier, and never is his scalpel more
skilful, than when he is laying bare the hollowness of shams like these.
Never is his touch more delicate or more caressing than when he is
delineating a character like _Bernick's_ sister _Martha_, with her
tender devotion and her self-effacing simplicity. Not even _Helmer's_
wife, _Nora_, is more truthfully conceived. _Nora_ is veraciously
feminine in never fathoming _Dr. Rank's_ love for her, or at least in
her refusal to formulate it, content to take his friendship and ask
herself no questions. Truly womanly again is her attitude when he speaks
out at last and thrusts upon her the knowledge of his passion,--her
shrinking withdrawal, her instant ordering in of the lights, and her
firm refusal then, in her hour of need, to profit by the affection he
has just declared.

It must be regretted that Ibsen does not dismiss either _Nora_ or
_Bernick_ with the final fidelity that might have been expected.
_Bernick's_ unexpected proclamation of his change of heart, so contrary
to his habits, is a little too like one of those fantastic wrenchings of
veracity of which Dickens was so often guilty in the finishing chapters
of his stories. Character is never made over in the twinkling of an eye;
and this is why the end of the 'Doll's House' seems unconvincing.
_Nora_, the morally irresponsible, is suddenly endowed with clearness
of vision and directness of speech. The squirrel who munches macaroons,
the song-bird who is happy in her cage, all at once becomes a raging
lioness. And this is not so much an awakening or a revelation, as it is
a transformation; and the _Nora_ of the final scenes of the final act is
not the _Nora_ of the beginning of the play. The swift unexpectedness of
this substitution is theatrically effective, no doubt; but we may doubt
if it is dramatically sound. Ibsen has rooted _Nora's_ fascination, felt
by every spectator, in her essential femininity, only at the end to send
her forth from her home, because she seeme