hole
play.

Millions of women are, like Solveig, capable of renouncing all for
love, of surrendering self altogether; and, as I read Ibsen, it is
precisely on this power of renunciation that he builds his hope of
man's redemption. So that, unless I err greatly, the scene in _Peer
Gynt_ which Mr. Archer calls a shirking of the ethical problem, is
just the solution which Ibsen has been persistent in presenting to the
world.

Let it be understood, of course, that it is only your Solveigs and
Mrs. Lindens who can thus save a brother's soul: women who have made
their own way in the world, thinking for themselves, working for
themselves, freed from the conventions which man would impose on them.
I know Mr. Archer will not retort on me with Nora, who leaves her
husband and children, and claims that her first duty is to herself.
Nora is just the woman who cannot redeem a man. Her Doll's House
training is the very opposite of Solveig's and Mrs. Linden's. She is a
silly girl brought up amid conventions, and awakened, by one blow, to
the responsibilities of life. That she should at once know the right
course to take would be incredible in real life, and impossible in a
play the action of which has been evolved as inevitably as real life.
Many critics have supposed Ibsen to commend Nora's conduct in the last
act of the play. He neither sanctions nor condemns. But he does
contrast her in the play with Mrs. Linden, and I do not think that
contrast can be too carefully studied.

MR. SWINBURNE'S LATER MANNER

May 5, 1894. Aloofness of Mr. Swinburne's Muse.

There was a time--let us say, in the early seventies--when many young
men tried to write like Mr. Swinburne. Remarkably small success waited
on their efforts. Still their numbers and their youth and (for a while
also) their persistency seemed to promise a new school of poesy, with
Mr. Swinburne for its head and great exemplar: exemplar rather than
head, for Mr. Swinburne's attitude amid all this devotion was rather
that of the god than of the priest. He sang, and left the worshippers
to work up their own enthusiasm. And to this attitude he has been
constant. Unstinting, and occasionally unmeasured, in praise and
dispraise of other men, he has allowed his own reputation the noble
liberty to look after itself. Nothing, for instance, could have been
finer than the careless, almost disdainful, dignity of his bearing in
the months that followed Tennyson's death. The cats w