The public is without power of expression, and it felt that it was being fooled for some purpose not very apparent and perhaps anarchical.  Nor is a sudden revelation very convincing in modern times.  In the space of three minutes, Nora, who has been her husband’s sensual toy, and has taken pleasure in being that, and only that, leaves her husband and her children, as has been said, for school-books.  A more arbitrary piece of stage craft was never devised; but it was not the stage craft the critics were accustomed to, and the admirers of Ibsen did not dare to admit that he had devised Nora to cry aloud that a woman is more than a domestic animal.  It would have been fatal for an apostle or even a disciple to admit the obvious fact that Ibsen was a dramatist of moral ideas rather than of sensuous emotions; and there was nobody in the ’eighties to explain the redemption of Ibsen by his dialogue, the strongest and most condensed ever written, yet coming off the reel like silk.  A wonderful thread, that never tangles in his hands.  Ibsen is a magical weaver, and so closely does he weave that we are drawn along in the net like fishes.

But it is with the subject of the Doll’s House rather than with the art with which it is woven that we are concerned here.  The subject of A Drama in Muslin is the same as that of A Doll’s House, and for this choice of subject I take pride in my forerunner.  It was a fine thing for a young man of thirty to choose the subject instinctively that Ibsen had chosen a few years before; it is a feather in his cap surely; and I remember with pleasure that he was half through his story when Dr. Aveling read him the first translation of A Doll’s House, a poor thing, done by a woman, that withheld him from any appreciation of the play.  The fact that he was writing the same subject from an entirely different point of view prejudiced him against Ibsen; and the making of a woman first in a sensual and afterward transferring her into an educational mould with a view to obtaining an instrument to thunder out a given theme could not be else than abhorrent to one whose art, however callow, was at least objective.  In the Doll’s House Ibsen had renounced all objectivity.  It does not seem to me that further apologies are necessary for my predecessor’s remark to Dr. Aveling after the reading that he was engaged in moulding a woman in one of Nature’s moulds.  ‘A puritan,’ he said, ’I am writing of, but not a sexless puritan, and if women cannot win their freedom without leaving their sex behind they had better remain slaves, for a slave with his sex is better than a free eunuch;’ and he discoursed on the book he was writing, convinced that Alice Barton represented her sex better than the archetypal hieratic and clouded figure of Nora which Ibsen had dreamed so piously, allowing, he said, memories of Egyptian sculpture to mingle with his dreams.