appropriately named Rank, who is dying of spinal disease, who is in love with Mrs. Helmer, and who calls on her every day and shows how foolish and pitiable a man can be when he is infatuated with a woman. They have a female friend, named Mrs. Linden, a widow, who drops in, from time to time, and helps Mrs. Helmer. Mr. Helmer has been appointed manager of a bank. It is Christmas Eve, and all appears to be well with the family of Helmer, save that Rank has a cough and is rickety upon his legs. But there is a skeleton in the closet. Mrs. Helmer, at an early period in her married life, has secretly borrowed money for her husband's use, making him believe that she had obtained it from her father, and she has forged her father's name, in order to obtain it. That debt, thus dishonorably and disgracefully contracted, she is endeavoring to pay. But that crime of hers is known to her creditor, Mr. Krogstad, a bank-clerk, whom Mr. Helmer has discharged from the bank; and Mr. Krogstad threatens to tell Mr. Helmer about Mrs. Helmer's forgery unless Mrs. Helmer procures his reinstatement in his official post. That reinstatement the frightened Mrs. Helmer vainly endeavors to obtain. Mr. Helmer, who is a narrowminded, opinionated, conceited person, insists on having his own way, and Mr. Krogstad remains banished. Thereupon Mr. Krogstad sends a letter, which is dropped into Mr. Helmer's letter-box, wherein are stated the facts of Mrs. Helmer's misconduct. The progress of

that letter toward the hands of Mr. Helmer is, for a time, retarded, the means whereby the delay is made constituting the one moment of dramatic action that illumines the piece. Mr. Helmer eventually opens and reads the letter, is astounded and enraged, and he announces his feelings to Mrs. Helmer in terms of violent asperity. Mr. Krogstad, in the meantime, has become mollified by the soothing influence of Mrs. Linden, who, having been his sweetheart and having jilted him in early life, has now proposed marriage to him, and he sends Mrs. Helmer's forgery to Mr. Helmer, and declares the matter settled. Mr. Helmer is delighted; but Mrs. Helmer, much displeased with her husband's conduct, declares that her eyes are at length opened to his essentially commonplace character, and that she cannot live with him any longer, and she terminates the proceedings by walking out of his house at midnight, totally regardless of her duty to their innocent children, whom she thus callously deserts, closing the door after her, with a bang. That is the play.

"A Doll's House" is not dramatic but didactic; an essay, not a play. The author undertook in it to indicate a necessity for revision of the matrimonial relation. Married women, he declares, are dolls,-meaning playthings. Married men are a combination of the Turk and the Prig. Wives are not allowed to possess identity. Husbands absorb the personality of their wives. The female sex is subjugated and extinguished. That is a dreadful

state of things, equally for the men and the women, and Ibsen could not endure it. One blow should be struck for feminine freedom. Women must no longer be brought up as dolls or treated as playthings. The woman who is reared as a doll will necessarily behave as such; that is to say, she will lie, and steal, and forge, because she knows no better. That is the way with dolls. They are dreadfully afraid of being found out when they have done wrong, but, at the same time, they never know the difference between wrong and right. Besides, they inherit things from their diseased ancestors, and no doll who has inherited anything from a sick progenitor is responsible for her conduct. No doll whose grandfather ever ate a pickle could possibly help falling into one. Judgment on dolls should be exceedingly lenient, as long as their husbands are Turks and Prigs. The crying need of the hour is perfect equality in the married state. Marriage is impossible and wrong unless the wife, equally with the husband, is acquainted with the Ten Commandments, and no woman can be considered a human being whose independent personality does not at least tower to the height of the Revised Statutes. Ibsen was firmly persuaded of those truths, and he wrote "A Doll's House" in order to assert them. "The heathen philosopher," says Touchstone, "when he had a desire to eat a grape, would open his lips when he put it into his mouth; meaning thereby that grapes were made to eat and lips to open."

The number of women, outside of Ibsen's perturbed fancy, even in the seemingly benighted Norway, who are capable of forging the signature of a dying father without being aware that they are committing a crime is, presumably, small, nor is it likely that, beyond the limit of fancy, any considerable number of husbands and wives are able to live together for years without in the least comprehending each other's character.

"GHOSTS."

According to Aubrey, the antiquary, whom Oldbuck mentions as an experienced ghost-seer, the spectral custom is to vanish with "a curious perfume and a melodious twang." In the lugubrious appearance and disappearance of the Ibsen "Ghosts," at the Manhattan Theatre, New York, on January 26, 1903, before a small and sad assemblage, chiefly female, the "melodious twang" was duly furnished by Miss Mary Shaw, and the "curious perfume," as of a dead rat in a dark cellar,—was liberally exhaled by the play. Moral obliquity and mental failure, sequent on inherited physical disease, resulting from sexual vice, is the subject of that play, and platitudinous gabble is the form. A youth, by name Oswald Alving, who has inherited a permeative taint from his profligate father, deceased, and whose condition is verging toward some unrecognizable form of mania, is shown as a suitor of his half-sister, a vulgar beauty named Regina, putatively the child of a drunken

carpenter, actually the offspring of Alving's blackguard sire and a female servant. The devoted, widowed mother of that youth is shown as the long-suffering victim of precedent years of horror and of the circumstances thus indicated, and, incidentally, as the renounced idol of a clerical ass, named Manders, with whom, however, she signifies her willingness to cohabit. The climax of this noxious postulate is the collapse of young Alving under his mysterious disease, and his afflicted mother's removal of him from this vale of suffering by means of a poisonous dose of morphine. This revolting fabric is tendered for public approval as being freighted with a "lesson," and it has been accepted and extolled as though it were new, notwithstanding the fact that centuries before the Prophet of Corruption emerged in Christiania it was recognized and recorded that the sins of the father are visited on the children, and that the human heart is deceitful and desperately wicked.

Objection to this choice gem of decadence has subjected the objectors to much contumely. Its admirers announce it as "tragic" and "terrific." It is, in fact, an indefensible and shameful vagary of a diseased fancy. Objection to it cannot be invalidated, because that objection rests on incontestable grounds. Conduct consequent on disease may be, incidentally, admissible as an expedient in drama,—as much so, for example, as conduct resultant on a broken leg. But exposition of loathsome disease resultant from sexual immorality is not