Muslin | Page 2

who was (may we say
therefore) a little over anxious to possess himself of a vocabulary which
would suffer him to tell all he saw, heard, smelt and touched.
Upon this sudden sympathy the book, of which I had read but twenty
pages, dropped on my knees, and I sat engulfed in a reverie of the
charming article I should have written about this book if it had come to
me for review. 'But it couldn't have come to me,' I reflected, 'for myself
and the young man that wrote it were not contemporaries.' It would be
true, however, to say that our lives overlapped; but when did the author
of the Drama in Muslin disappear from literature? His next book was
Confession of a Young Man. It was followed by Spring Days; he must

have died in the last pages of that story, for we find no trace of him in
Esther Waters! And my thoughts, dropping away from the books he
had written, began to take pleasure in the ridiculous appearance that the
author of A Drama in Muslin presented in the mirrors of Dublin Castle
as he tripped down the staircases in parly morning. And a smile played
round my lips as I recalled his lank yellow hair (often standing on end),
his sloping shoulders and his female hands--a strange appearance which
a certain vivacity of mind sometimes rendered engaging.
He was writing at that time A Mummer's Wife in his bedroom at the
Shelbourne Hotel, and I thought how different were the two visions, A
Mummer's Wife and A Drama in Muslin and how the choice of these
two subjects revealed him to me. 'It was life that interested him rather
than the envelope' I said. 'He sought Alice Barton's heart as eagerly as
Kate Ede's;' and my heart went out to the three policemen to whose
assiduities I owed this pleasant evening, all alone with my cat and my
immediate ancestor; and as I sat looking into the fire I fell to wondering
how it was that the critics of the 'eighties could have been blind enough
to dub him an imitator of Zola. 'A soul searcher, if ever there was one,'
I continued, 'whose desire to write well is apparent on every page, a
headlong, eager, uncertain style (a young hound yelping at every trace
of scent), but if we look beneath the style we catch sight of the young
man's true self, a real interest in religious questions and a hatred as
lively as Ibsen's of the social conventions that drive women into the
marriage market. It seems strange,' I said, abandoning myself to
recollection, 'that the critics of the 'eighties failed to notice that the
theme of A Drama in Muslin is the same as that of the Doll's House; the
very title should have pointed this put to them.' But they were not
interested in themes; but in morality, and how they might crush a play
which, if it were uncrushed by them, would succeed in undermining the
foundations of society--their favourite phrase at the time, it entered into
every article written about the Doll's House--and, looking upon
themselves as the saviours of society, these master-builders kept on
staying and propping the damaged construction till at length they were
joined by some dramatists and story-tellers who feared with them for
the 'foundations of society,' and these latter set themselves the task of
devising new endings that would be likely to catch the popular taste

and so mitigate the evil, the substitution of an educational motive for a
carnal one. For Nora does not leave her husband for a lover, but to
educate herself. The critics were used to lovers, and what we are used
to is bearable, but a woman who leaves her husband and her children
for school-books is unbearable, and much more immoral than the usual
little wanton. So the critics thought in the 'eighties, and they thought
truly, if it be true that morality and custom are interchangeable terms.
The critics were right in a way; everybody is right in a way, for nothing
is wholly right and nothing wholly wrong, a truth often served up by
philosophers; but the public has ever eschewed it, and perhaps our
argument will be better appreciated if we dilute this truth a little, saying
instead that it is the telling that makes a story true or false, and that the
dramatic critics of the 'eighties were not altogether as wrong as Mr.
Archer imagined them to be, but failed to express themselves.
The public is without power of expression, and it felt that it was being
fooled for some purpose not very apparent and perhaps anarchical. Nor
is a sudden revelation very convincing in modern times. In the space of
three minutes, Nora,