combines with our previous knowledge of the author’s idiosyncrasy to assure us that she is his heroine; but so far as the evidence actually before us goes, we have no means of forming even the vaguest provisional judgment as to her true character.  This is almost certainly a mistake in art.  It is useless to urge that sympathy and antipathy are primitive emotions, and that we ought to be able to regard a character objectively, rating it as true or false, not as attractive or repellent.  The answer to this is twofold.  Firstly, the theatre has never been, and never will be, a moral dissecting room, nor has the theatrical audience anything in common with a class of students dispassionately following a professor’s demonstration of cold scientific facts.  Secondly, in the particular case in point, the dramatist makes a manifest appeal to our sympathies.  There can be no doubt that we are intended to take Lona’s part, as against the representatives of propriety and convention assembled at the sewing-bee; but we have been vouchsafed no rational reason for so doing.  In other words, the author has not taken us far enough into his action to enable us to grasp the true import and significance of the situation.  He relies for his effect either on the general principle that an eccentric character must be sympathetic, or on the knowledge possessed by those who have already seen or read the rest of the play.  Either form of reliance is clearly inartistic.  The former appeals to irrational prejudice; the latter ignores what we shall presently find to be a fundamental principle of the playwright’s art—­namely, that, with certain doubtful exceptions in the case of historical themes, he must never assume previous knowledge either of plot or character on the part of his public, but must always have in his mind’s eye a first-night audience, which knows nothing but what he chooses to tell it.

My criticism of the first act of Pillars of Society may be summed up in saying that the author has omitted to place in it the erregende Moment.  The issue is not joined, the true substance of the drama is not clear to us, until, in the second act, Bernick makes sure there are no listeners, and then holds out both hands to Johan, saying:  “Johan, now we are alone; now you must give me leave to thank you,” and so forth.  Why should not this scene have occurred in the first act?  Materially, there is no reason whatever.  It would need only the change of a few words to lift the scene bodily out of the second act and transfer it to the first.  Why did Ibsen not do so?  His reason is not hard to divine; he wished to concentrate into two great scenes, with scarcely a moment’s interval between them, the revelation of Bernick’s treachery, first to Johan, second to Lona.  He gained his point:  the sledge-hammer effect of these two scenes is undeniable.  But it remains a question whether he did not make a disproportionate sacrifice; whether he did not empty his first act in order to