They have grown sensibly didactic, are at times almost reproachful in their tone, and, so far from striving to yield us pleasure, to increase our “sweet content” with life, they endeavor, with very tolerable success, to prevent our being happy after our own limited fashion. Their principal mission is to worry us vaguely about our souls or our neighbors’ souls, or the social order which we did not establish, and the painful problems that we cannot solve. Our spirits, at all times restless and troubled, respond with quick alarm to these dismal agitations; our serenity is not proof against the strain; our sense of humor is not keen enough to cure us with wholesome laughter; and nineteenth-century cultivation consists in being miserable for misery’s sake, and in saying solemnly to one another at proper intervals, “This is the eternal progress of the ages.” [3] _Quarterly Review._ It was a curious and rather melancholy experience, a year ago, to hear the comments of those patient women who devoted their afternoons to Ibsen readings, and to turning over in their minds the new and unprofitable situations thus suggested. The discussions that followed were in variably ethical, never critical; they had reference always to some moral conundrum offered by the play, never to the artistic or dramatic excellence of the play itself. Was Nora Helmer justified, or was she not, in abandoning her children with explicit confidence to the care of Mary Ann? Had Dr. Wangel a right, or had he not, to annul his own marriage tie with the primitive simplicity of the king of Dahomey? To answer such questions as these has become our notion of literary recreation, and there is something pathetically droll in the earnestness with which we bend our wits to the task. Indeed, poor little Nora’s matrimonial infelicities threatened to become as important in their way as those of Catherine of Aragon or Josephine Beauharnais, and we talked about them quite seriously and with a certain awe. The unflinching manner in which Ibsen has followed Sir Thomas Browne’s advice, “Strive not to beautify thy corruption!” commends him, naturally, to that large class of persons who can tolerate sin only when it is dismal; and Baudelaire, praying for a new vice, was jocund in comparison with our Norwegian dramatist, unwearyingly analyzing the old one. Yet what have we gained from the rankness of these disclosures, from these horrible studies of heredity, these hospital and madhouse sketches, these incursions of pathology into the realms of art? What shall we ever gain by beating down the barriers of reserve which civilized communities have thought fit to rear, by abandoning that wholesome reticence which is the test of self-restraint? We try so hard to be happy,--we have such need, each of his little share of happiness; yet Ibsen, troubling the soul more even than he troubles the senses, has chosen to employ his God-given genius in deliberately lessening our small sum of human joy. When shall