for her, is left destitute
among the failures which are so puzzling to thoughtless people. "I
cannot understand why she is so unlucky: she is such a nice woman!":
that is the formula. As if people with any force in them ever were
altogether nice!

And so I claim the first order for this jejune exploit of mine, and
invite you to note that the final chapter, so remote from Scott and
Dickens and so close to Ibsen, was written years before Ibsen came to
my knowledge, thus proving that the revolt of the Life Force against
readymade morality in the nineteenth century was not the work of a
Norwegian microbe, but would have worked itself into expression in
English literature had Norway never existed. In fact, when Miss Lord's
translation of A Doll's House appeared in the eighteen-eighties, and so
excited some of my Socialist friends that they got up a private reading
of it in which I was cast for the part of Krogstad, its novelty as a
morally original study of a marriage did not stagger me as it staggered
Europe. I had made a morally original study of a marriage myself, and
made it, too, without any melodramatic forgeries, spinal diseases, and
suicides, though I had to confess to a study of dipsomania. At all
events, I chattered and ate caramels in the back drawing-room (our
green-room) whilst Eleanor Marx, as Nora, brought Helmer to book at the
other side of the folding doors. Indeed I concerned myself very little
about Ibsen until, later on, William Archer translated Peer Gynt to me
_viva voce_, when the magic of the great poet opened my eyes in a flash
to the importance of the social philosopher.

I seriously suggest that The Irrational Knot may be regarded as an early
attempt on the part of the Life Force to write A Doll's House in English
by the instrumentality of a very immature writer aged 24. And though I
say it that should not, the choice was not such a bad shot for a stupid
instinctive force that has to work and become conscious of itself by
means of human brains. If we could only realize that though the Life
Force supplies us with its own purpose, it has no other brains to work
with than those it has painfully and imperfectly evolved in our heads,
the peoples of the earth would learn some pity for their gods; and we
should have a religion that would not be contradicted at every turn by
the thing that is giving the lie to the thing that ought to be.

WELWYN, _Sunday, June_ 25, 1905.

BOOK I

THE IRR