religion and morality, were it only a criticism.

Therefore on coming back to this Irrational Knot as a stranger after 25
years, I am proud to find that its morality is not readymade. The
drunken prima donna of a bygone type of musical burlesque is not
depicted as an immoral person, but as a person with a morality of her
own, no worse in its way than the morality of her highly respectable
wine merchant in _its_ way. The sociology of the successful inventor is
his own sociology too; and it is by his originality in this respect that
he passes irresistibly through all the readymade prejudices that are set
up to bar his promotion. And the heroine, nice, amiable, benevolent, and
anxious to please and behave well, but hopelessly secondhand in her
morals and nicenesses, and consequently without any real moral force now
that the threat of hell has lost its terrors for her, is left destitute
among the failures which are so puzzling to thoughtless people. "I
cannot understand why she is so unlucky: she is such a nice woman!":
that is the formula. As if people with any force in them ever were
altogether nice!

And so I claim the first order for this jejune exploit of mine, and
invite you to note that the final chapter, so remote from Scott and
Dickens and so close to Ibsen, was written years before Ibsen came to
my knowledge, thus proving that the revolt of the Life Force against
readymade morality in the nineteenth century was not the work of a
Norwegian microbe, but would have worked itself into expression in
English literature had Norway never existed. In fact, when Miss Lord's
translation of A Doll's House appeared in the eighteen-eighties, and so
excited some of my Socialist friends that they got up a private reading
of it in which I was cast for the part of Krogstad, its novelty as a
morally original study of a marriage did not stagger me as it staggered