the name of marriage. Love, for the idealist Ibsen, is a passion
which loses its virtue when it reaches its goal, which inspires
only while it aspires, and flags bewildered when it attains.
Marriage, for the critic Ibsen, is an institution beset with
pitfalls into which those are surest to step who enter it blinded
with love. In the latter dramas the tragedy of married life is
commonly generated by other forms of blindness--the childish
innocence of Nora, the maidenly ignorance of Helena Alving, neither
of whom married precisely "for love"; here it is blind Love alone
who, to the jealous eye of the critic, plays the part of the Serpent
in the Edens of wedded bliss. There is, it is clear, an element
of unsolved contradiction in Ibsen's thought;--Love is at once so
precious and so deadly, a possession so glorious that all other
things in life are of less worth, and yet capable of producing
only disastrously illusive effects upon those who have entered
into the relations to which it prompts. But with Ibsen--and it
is a grave intellectual defect--there is an absolute antagonism
between spirit and form. An institution is always with him, a
shackle for the free life of souls, not an organ through which
they attain expression; and since the institution of marriage
cannot but be, there remains as the only logical solution that
which he enjoins--to keep the soul's life out of it. To "those
about to marry," Ibsen therefore says in effect, "Be sure you
are not in love!" And to those who are in love he says, "Part!"

It is easy to understand the irony with which a man who thought
thus of love contemplated the business of "love-making," and the
ceremonial discipline of Continental courtship. The whole
unnumbered tribe of wooing and plighted lovers were for him
unconscious actors in a world-comedy of Love's contriving--naive