There are three stages in one’s attitude toward thesis plays of this sort. First, the thesis is new, and whether it pleases you or angers you, it rouses and stirs you. Second, you know the thesis by heart, and have accepted it and lived it. At that stage the play bores you; you say that you do not go to the theater for Sunday school lessons. The third stage comes when the thesis has become so familiar that you no longer think of the play in that way; it holds you then, if it holds you at all, by the human realness of its characters and their fates. Eighteen years ago I saw “A Doll’s House” acted. I was at the second stage of development, and it seemed to me a tiresome little sermon, I could not stay to the end. But a few days later I saw “Hedda Gabler,” and this was different; I forgot the thesis, and was interested in a psychological study of the modern parasitic female. We all know Hedda; some of us have been married to her. She has been brought up in idleness, she lives by vanity, she is bored, and preys upon men, not because she is sexual, but because she wants attention and applause, and cannot endure that anyone else should have these things in her presence. One of Hedda’s victims is a poet; he has labored to produce a manuscript, and in his despair over her he tears it up. When Hedda hears of that she is thrilled to the depths, and cries: “A deed! A deed!” Let that be a symbol of the art-for-art’s-sake attitude to life! The greatest of Ibsen’s plays is “Ghosts.” It has a thesis so wicked that the critics hardly yet dare to state it. This thesis happens to be the exact opposite of the one in “The Scarlet Letter”: that a true and good woman, unhappily married, who finds that she loves her clergyman, ought to elope with the clergyman instead of staying with her husband. In Ibsen’s play the woman stays with her husband, and helps to make him comfortable, while he gets drunk and commits infidelities. She bears him a son, and lavishes her love and devotion upon this son, only to see him go the way of his father, and eventually die of syphilis. This unpleasant disease had never before appeared upon the stage, and when “Ghosts” was produced in the pious city of London in the year 1891, the critics and newspapers went out of their minds. You may find a record of their opinions in Bernard Shaw’s “Quintessence of Ibsenism”; starting with the London “Daily Telegraph,” which called the play “an open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly; a lazar-house with all its doors and windows open ... candid foulness ... bestial and cynical ... offensive cynicism ... melancholy and malodorous world ... absolutely loathsome and fetid ... gross, almost putrid indecorum ... literary carrion ... crapulous stuff.” All this referring to a play now recognized as one of the great tragic masterpieces of all time!