e essay on _The Quintessence of Ibsenism_, the collection which the
author has made of the adverse notices of _Ghosts_ which appeared in the
London newspapers on the occasion of the first performance of the play in
England. Unanimously they commit the fallacy of condemning the piece as
immoral because of the subject that it deals with. And, on the other hand,
it must be recognised that most of the critical defenses of the same piece,
and of other modern works of similar nature, have been based upon the
identical fallacy,--that morality or immorality is a question of
subject-matter. But either to condemn or to defend the morality of any work
of art because of its material alone is merely a waste of words. There is
no such thing, _per se_, as an immoral subject for a play: in the treatment
of the subject, and only in the treatment, lies the basis for ethical
judgment of the piece. Critics who condemn _Ghosts_ because of its
subject-matter might as well condemn _Othello_ because the hero kills his
wife--what a suggestion, look you, to carry into our homes! _Macbeth_ is
not immoral, though it makes night hideous with murder. The greatest of all
Greek dramas, _Oedipus King_, is in itself sufficient proof that morality
is a thing apart from subject-matter; and Shelley's _The Cenci_ is another
case in point. The only way in which a play may be immoral is for it to
cloud, in the spectator, the consciousness of those invariable laws of life
which say to man "Thou shalt not" or "Thou shalt"; and the one thing
needful in order that a drama may be moral is that the author shall
maintain throughout the piece a sane and truthful insight into the
soundness or unsoundness of the relations between his characters. He must
know when they are right and know when they are wrong, and must make clear
to the audience the reasons for his judgments. He cannot be immoral unless
he is untrue. To make us pity his characters when they are vile or love
them when they are noxious, to invent excuses for them in situations where
they cannot be excused--in a single word, to lie about his characters--this
is for the dramatist the one unpardonable sin. Consequently, the only sane
course for a critic who wishes to maintain the thesis that _Ghosts_, or any
other modern play, is immoral, is not to hurl mud at it, but to prove by
the sound processes of logic that the play tells lies about life; and the
only sane way to defend such a piece is not to prate about the