However clever he may be in his handling of these scenes, his cleverness is a means only; it is not an end in itself.  He never gives over “his habit of dealing essentially with the individual caught in the fact,”—­to borrow an apt phrase from Mr. Henry James.  The mechanism may be almost as elaborate as it is in a play of Scribe’s, wherein there is ultimately nothing but ingenuity of invention and adroitness of construction; but it is never allowed to crush or to keep out human nature.

Consul Bernick is one of Ibsen’s most veracious characters, with his cloaking morality, his unconscious egotism, and his unfaltering selfishness, disclosed so naively and so naturally.  Less boldly drawn but not the less truthful is Helmer, that inexpugnable prig, with his shallow selfishness, his complacent conceit, and his morality for external use only.  Ibsen is never happier, and never is his scalpel more skilful, than when he is laying bare the hollowness of shams like these.  Never is his touch more delicate or more caressing than when he is delineating a character like Bernick’s sister Martha, with her tender devotion and her self-effacing simplicity.  Not even Helmer’s wife, Nora, is more truthfully conceived. Nora is veraciously feminine in never fathoming Dr. Rank’s love for her, or at least in her refusal to formulate it, content to take his friendship and ask herself no questions.  Truly womanly again is her attitude when he speaks out at last and thrusts upon her the knowledge of his passion,—­her shrinking withdrawal, her instant ordering in of the lights, and her firm refusal then, in her hour of need, to profit by the affection he has just declared.

It must be regretted that Ibsen does not dismiss either Nora or Bernick with the final fidelity that might have been expected. Bernick’s unexpected proclamation of his change of heart, so contrary to his habits, is a little too like one of those fantastic wrenchings of veracity of which Dickens was so often guilty in the finishing chapters of his stories.  Character is never made over in the twinkling of an eye; and this is why the end of the ‘Doll’s House’ seems unconvincing. Nora, the morally irresponsible, is suddenly endowed with clearness of vision and directness of speech.  The squirrel who munches macaroons, the song-bird who is happy in her cage, all at once becomes a raging lioness.  And this is not so much an awakening or a revelation, as it is a transformation; and the Nora of the final scenes of the final act is not the Nora of the beginning of the play.  The swift unexpectedness of this substitution is theatrically effective, no doubt; but we may doubt if it is dramatically sound.  Ibsen has rooted Nora’s fascination, felt by every spectator, in her essential femininity, only at the end to send her forth from her home, because she seemed to be deficient in the most permanent and