he at
first designed to pursue.

The traces of a change of scheme in _John Gabriel Borkman_ seem to me
almost unmistakable. The first two acts laid the foundation for a
larger and more complex superstructure than is ultimately erected.
Ibsen seems to have designed that Hinkel, the man who "betrayed"
Borkman in the past, should play some efficient part in the
alienation of Erhart from his family and home. Otherwise, why this
insistence on a "party" at the Hinkels', which is apparently to serve
as a sort of "send-off" for Erhart and Mrs. Wilton? It appears in
the third act that the "party" was imaginary. "Erhart and I were
the whole party," says Mrs. Wilton, "and little Frida, of course."
We might, then, suppose it to have been a mere blind to enable Erhart
to escape from home; but, in the first place, as Erhart does not live
at home, there is no need for any such pretext; in the second place,
it appears that the trio do actually go to the Hinkels' house (since
Mrs. Borkman's servant finds them there), and do actually make it their
starting-point. Erhart comes and goes with the utmost freedom in Mrs.
Wilton's own house; what possible reason can they have for not setting
out from there? No reason is shown or hinted. We cannot even imagine
that the Hinkels have been instrumental in bringing Erhart and Mrs.
Wilton together; it is expressly stated that Erhart made her
acquaintance and saw a great deal of her in town, before she moved out
to the country. The whole conception of the party at the Hinkels' is,
as it stands, mysterious and a little cumbersome. We are forced to
conclude, I think, that something more was at one time intended to
come of it, and that, when the poet abandoned the idea, he did not
think it worth while to remove the scaffolding. To this change of
plan, too, we may possibly trace what I take to be the one serious
flaw in the the play--the comparative weakness of the second half of
the third act. The scene of Erhart's rebellion against the claims
of the mother, aunt, and father strikes one as the symmetrical
working out of a problem rather than a passage of living drama.

All this means, of course, that there is a certain looseness of fibre
in _John Gabriel Borkman_ which we do not find in the best of Ibsen's
earlier works. But in point of intellectual power and poetic beauty
it yields to none of its predecessors. The conception of the three
leading figures is one of the great things of lite