simplicity we may be.  The sympathy we feel for a distressed neighbor has none of the impotent sterility of a reader’s sympathy for a distressed character in a book.  There is always a chance to try to help, and if that fail, to try again and yet again.  Death writes the only Finis to our stories, and since a chance to start over again has been so unfailingly granted us here, we cannot but feel that Death may mean only turning over another page.

I suppose we do not appreciate the seriousness of fiction-writing, nor its importance to those who cannot get any nearer to real life.  And yet it is not that we are unprogressive.  Our young people, returning from college, or from visits to the city, freshen and bring up to date our ideas on literature as rigorously as they do our sleeves and hats; but after a short stay in Hillsboro even these conscientious young missionaries of culture turn away from the feeble plots of Ibsen and the tame inventions of Bernard Shaw to the really exciting, perplexing, and stimulating events in the life of the village grocer.

In “Ghosts,” Ibsen preaches a terrible sermon on the responsibility of one generation for the next, but not all his relentless logic can move you to the 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.