org is
represented as carrying his manuscript around, and especially in Mrs.
Elvsted's production of his rough draft from her pocket; but these are
mechanical trifles, on which only a niggling criticism would dream of
laying stress.

Of all Ibsen's works, _Hedda Gabler_ is the most detached, the most
objective--a character-study pure and simple. It is impossible--or so
it seems to me--to extract any sort of general idea from it. One cannot
even call it a satire, unless one is prepared to apply that term to the
record of a "case" in a work of criminology. Reverting to Dumas's dictum
that a play should contain "a painting, a judgment, an ideal," we may
say the _Hedda Gabler_ fulfils only the first of these requirements. The
poet does not even pass judgment on his heroine: he simply paints her
full-length portrait with scientific impassivity. But what a portrait!
How searching in insight, how brilliant in colouring, how rich in
detail! Grant Allen's remark, above quoted, was, of course, a whimsical
exaggeration; the Hedda type is not so common as all that, else the
world would quickly come to an end. But particular traits and tendencies
of the Hedda type are very common in modern life, and not only among
women. Hyperaesthesia lies at the root of her tragedy. With a keenly
critical, relentlessly solvent intelligence, she combines a morbid
shrinking from all the gross and prosaic detail of the sensual life.
She has nothing to take her out of herself--not a single intellectual
interest or moral enthusiasm. She cherishes, in a languid way, a petty
social ambition; and even that she finds obstructed and baffled. At the
same time she learns that another woman has had the courage to love and
venture all, where she, in her cowardice, only hankered and refrained.
Her malign egoism rises up uncontrolled, and calls to its aid her quick
and subtle intellect. She ruins the other woman's happiness, but in
doing so incurs a danger from which her sense of personal dignity
revolts. Life has no such charm for her that she cares to purchase it at
the cost of squalid humiliation and self-contempt. The good and the bad
in her alike impel her to have done with it all; and a pistol-shot
ends what is surely one of the most poignant character-tragedies in
literature. Ibsen's brain never worked at higher pressure than in the
conception and adjustment of those "crowded hours" in which Hedda,
tangled in the web of Will and Circumstance, struggles on