"A DOLL'S HOUSE." T BSEN'S play, about which every one is
talking, is a rather high-flown attempt to make men realise how grave a wrong it is to women to treat them as if they were mere toys made for men's pleasure, rather than for companionship in study, duty, and responsibility. That is no doubt a very wholesome and necessary lesson ; but the Norwegian dramatist, whose play is by no means remarkable for either intellectual or dramatic force, has urged it in a spirit and applied it in a form which is more likely to bring it into discredit than to make sober converts to his teaching. It is hard to conceive a less ideal character than that of a wife and mother who suddenly finds all her love for her husband extinguished after eight years of tender affection, because she discovers his nature to be less generous and un- selfish than she had supposed it, and who severs all the ties by which she is bound to him and her children,—pending a complete revolution in his character,—on the ground that he has treated her in the same unreal and fanciful manner in which a child makes-believe very much about her doll. What- ever the shortcoming of the husband's shallow and almost ogreish passion for his wife may be in Ibsen's play,—and no doubt it is the ordinary shortcoming of a selfish and somewhat ignoble nature,—it is impossible to make it out more serious than the shortcoming in the devotion of a wife who is disenchanted in a moment of an eight years' love by the discovery that her husband's love for her is of a poorer and vulgarer type than she had imagined it. If his love for her was little more than the passion for a beautiful toy, what was hers for him ? At best, the love for an illusion of her own, and anything but a deep desire to give up herself in order to make him more and more nearly what she had imagined him to be. Whatever she might properly have felt, or rather failed to feel, if the disillusion had come during the first days of betrothal, no one who has lived happily as a wife for many years together, is worth much if her love does not survive the evidence that its object is less noble than she thought, and if she is not capable of a great self-sacrifice to make her own overflowing affection do double duty and make up for the deficiencies in that of which she is the object. In Ibsen's play, if the husband's love is the love for a toy or a source of sensuous pleasure, the wife's is the love for a dream which vanishes with the dream. Neither one nor the other has much in it of the disinterested devotion which is eager to give more than it receives. That delight in an ideal phantom which disappears when the phantom vanishes, may be and is less ignoble than the delight in a beautiful toy which pleases the senses and gratifies the instinct of ownership ; but it has quite as little in it. of the divine quality of love, of which it is the very essence to bestow gladly more than has been earned, and to transmute and transfigure in the very lavishness of its bestowing. Nora's complete success in getting rid of her love in the very act of getting rid of her fanciful dream, is almost more disenchanting in the reader's eyes, than Helmer's success in convincing the reader how selfish and poor his passion had been. We suppose that neither tragedy nor comedy ever before ended in a more com- plete clearing of the stage of everything heroic. The close is a douche of double disenchantment. The hero comes out a rather selfish man of the world who has found himself out ; the heroine a hero-worshipper without either a hero or the mag- nanimity to make a hero where she had failed to find one. That slam of the door behind the heroine with which the last scene ends, leaves as complete a moral vacuum in the reader's mind as if an anti-climax were the approved literary ideal of dramatic fiction. If Ibsen's play of A Doll's House means anything, it means that any marriage which springs out of a poor and superficial sort of love is without significance and without sacredness, and is incapable of bearing any fruit better than the vanity or vulgar passion in which it had its origin. Indeed, his teaching is that the marriage must be wholly cancelled, and all the relations it has brought with it must be broken through, if ever the ground is to be cleared for anything better in the future. Indeed, on Ibsen's principle, every imperfect relation should be eradicated in order to make way for a better. But as every relation of life is more or less inadequate, as fathers and mothers seldom reach per- fection, as brotherly and sisterly love is very seldom of the highest possible kind, as religious devotion itself is always short of what it might be, analogy would suggest that we must always be uprooting the only plants from which anything could grow, in order to put in their place some higher specimen of the same species, which, again, in its turn, must be displaced by something else. In fact, we should have to shut up our churches until we could open them for perfect worship. More thoroughgoing pessimism than Ibsen's conception of the only conceivable remedy for a marriage not founded on the highest kind of love, it would be impossible to imagine. If a man makes a toy of his wife, and the wife indulges in fanciful illusions about her husband, the only chance of reforming these false relations is, according to Ibsen's teaching, to sweep the board of them altogether, and let hearts and lives lie fallow till some nobler feeling springs up,—or fails to spring up, which would be much the more probable event.
The mistake made in the attempt to teach the useful lesson intended in Ibsen's play, is that instead of so painting the atti- tude of a man who makes a toy of his wife as to represent power- fully but not unfairly the distorted character of this relation between man and wife in the great majority of cases in which such distorted relations exist, Ibsen has so exaggerated both the selfishness of the feeling on the husband's side, and the mis- chief which it causes in dwarfing and disillusionising the wife, that it is impossible to accept the drama as suggesting any general lesson at all. That there is often a tendency, to which men and women perhaps equally contribute, to minimise the deeper sphere of co-operation and sympathy between them, and to magnify the less real and lighter aspects of the relation of husband and wife, no one who knows life will deny. But then, no one who knows life will deny that amongst Englishmen and Germans at least, and probably amongst Norwegians and Danes, to say nothing of the French, this tendency is seen very seldom indeed in such a repulsive form as that in which Ibsen paints it. In the first place, in a very unpleasant scene, Ibsen gives a relative importance to th.e grosser side of Helmer's nature, which is thoroughly untrue if it is to be taken as repre- sentative of the type of man who is most disposed to exag- gerate the lighter and more protective, as well as the more play- ful aspect of the relation between husbands and wives. We venture to say that it is quite false to represent this disposition as resting chiefly on passion of that vulgar kind. It rests chiefly, we believe, on the poetical and imaginative nature, on the feeling for the delicacy, the grace, the ethereal element in women, and though often drifting into unreal sentiment of which the moral significance is very slight indeed, it is not a disposition of ignoble origin, and admits at least of very high and noble forms. The women who are so infuriated at the notion of being treated as mere toys, are, of course, perfectly in the right ; but they should beware of confounding the feelings of men who look to them for nothing better than pleasant sensations and mental distraction, with the feelings of men who look to them to raise their ideal of mental and moral grace and beauty. Women who despise the sort of reverence and tenderness which this side of the feminine character inspires, are very much in the wrong indeed. The realism which would expunge this feeling from the highest relation between the sexes, would exclude a vast deal of what is best in human nature, and still more of that which leads to what is best, by refining and spiritualising what needs refining and spiritualising. Ibsen is right, of course, in resenting on behalf of women the treatment which makes playthings of them ; but he is quite wrong in supposing that that treatment springs chiefly from what is coarse and frivolous in man. It is almost impossible for the ideal imagination to work at all without a certain freedom and playfulness in its movements, and if you severely frown down this freedom and playfulness of movement, the chances are that you will reduce the relation between man and woman to one of dreary and almost weary co-operation. Men are intended to find rest and refreshment in women, and women to find rest and refreshment in men ; and though the rest and refreshment to be found should spring from the deepest kind of sympathy and the highest common faith, yet it should be rest and refreshment after all, and not mere laborious esteem and solid trust. The tendency of A Doll's House is to ignore this, and therefore we regard it as a play that is, on the whole, misleading and mischievous in drift, especially as it teaches, if it teaches anything, that the way to improve life is to root up the good wheat that has begun to grow, because there are tares intertwined with it.
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