he sharp throb of horrified sympathy you feel as you see Nelse
Pettingrew's poor mother run down the street, her shawl flung hastily over
her head, framing a face of despairing resolve, such as can never look at
you out of the pages of a book. Somebody has told her that Nelse has been
drinking again and "is beginning to get ugly." For Hillsboro is no model
village, but the world entire, with hateful forces of evil lying in wait
for weakness. Who will not lay down "Ghosts" to watch, with a painfully
beating heart, the progress of this living "Mrs. Alving" past the house,
pleading, persuading, coaxing the burly weakling, who will be saved from a
week's debauch if she can only get him safely home now, and keep him quiet
till "the fit goes by."

At the sight everybody in Hillsboro realizes that Nelse "got it from his
father," with a penetrating sense of the tragedy of heredity, quite as
stimulating to self-control in the future as Ibsen is able to make us feel
in "Ghosts." But we know something better than Ibsen, for Mrs. Pettingrew
is no "Mrs. Alving." She is a plain, hard-featured woman who takes in
sewing for a living, and she is quite unlettered, but she is a general in
the army of spiritual forces. She does not despair, she does not give up
like the half-hearted mother in "Ghosts," she does not waste her strength
in concealments; she stands up to her enemy and fights. She fought the
wild beast in Nelse's father, hand to hand, all his life, and he died a
better man than when she married him. Undaunted, she fought it in Nelse as
a boy, and now as a man; and in the flowering of his physical forces when
the wind of his youth blows most wildly through the hateful thicket of
inherited weaknesses she generally wins the battle.

And this she has done with none of the hard, consistent strength and
intelligence of your make-believe heroine in a book, so disheartening an
example to our faltering impulses for good. She has been infinitely human
and pathetically fallible; she has cried out and hesitated and complained
and done the wrong thing and wept and failed and still fought on, till to
think of her is, for the weakest of us, like a bugle call to high
endeavor. Nelse is now a better man than his father, and we shut up
"Ghosts" with impatience that Ibsen should have selected that story to
tell out of all the tales there must have been in the village where _he_
lived.

Now imagine if you can ... for I cannot even faintly indicat