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Her situation was dramatic in the ordinary sense of the word, very much as Nora's situation is dramatic when she knows that Krogstad's letter is in Helmer's hands. But in Chains there is not even this simple form of excitement and suspense.
Ibsen is never happier, and never is his scalpel more skilful, than when he is laying bare the hollowness of shams like these. Never is his touch more delicate or more caressing than when he is delineating a character like Bernick's sister Martha, with her tender devotion and her self-effacing simplicity. Not even Helmer's wife, Nora, is more truthfully conceived.
When Tom Helmer's father died, his mother, who had never been able to manage him, sent him to school to get rid of him, lamented his absence till he returned, then writhed and fretted under his presence until again he went. Never thereafter did those two, mother and son, meet, whether from a separation of months or of hours, without at once tumbling into an obstinate difference.
Lansing by storm; and the first deadly grace he pictured for her was his macaroni manner of taking snuff with which fascinating ceremony he had turned many a silly head in New York ere we marched out and the British marched in. I talked for a while with Mrs. Bleecker of this and that, striving the while to catch Lana Helmer's eye.
"The moment I see you anywhere upon the road that moment I shall turn back. Do you think," she added with half-amused indignation, "I would put up with having all the gossips of Testbridge talk of my going out on a Sunday evening with a boy like you?" Tom Helmer's face flushed. He caught up the gloves, threw the price of them on the counter, and walked from the shop, without even a good night.
But when, in the wonderful last act, Nora issues from her bedroom, dressed to go out, to Helmer's and the audience's stupefaction, and when the agitated pair sit down to "have it out," face to face across the table, then indeed the spectator feels that a new thing has been born in drama, and, incidentally, that the "well-made play" has suddenly become as dead as Queen Anne.
In A Doll's House there are two peripeties: Nora's fall from elation to despair in the first scene with Krogstad, and the collapse of Helmer's illusions in the last scene of all. A good instance of the "great scene" which involves a marked peripety occurs in Sardou's Dora, once famous in England under the title of Diplomacy.
I was pricing a bag of rough ones at Van Helmer's to-day, and he is reckoned a good judge. He said that no expert could have done it better. Lord bless you! pure or splints, or cracked, or off colour, or spotted, or twin stones, I'm up to them all. I wasn't a pound out in the market value of any one of them." "You deserve great credit for your quickness and perseverance," replied his father.
No other eyes would ever look upon her thus; never again could she hope for such perfect sympathy as she had once known. "Does that make up for 'Robin Adair, Colonel Ormonde?" she said when the song was ended. "A very good song and very well sung, but it's not equal to 'Robin Adair." "Lady Alice, will you try that duet of Helmer's?" asked Katherine; and Lady Alice graciously assented.
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