nd out of this idea of "nobility" of
public character _Rosmersholm_ directly sprang.

We are not left to conjecture in this respect. In a letter to Bjoern
Kristensen (February 13, 1887), Ibsen deliberately explained, while
correcting a misconception of the purpose of _Rosmersholm_, that "the
play deals with the struggle which all serious-minded human beings have
to wage with themselves in order to bring their lives into harmony with
their convictions.... Conscience is very conservative. It has its deep
roots in tradition and the past generally, and hence the conflict." When
we come to read _Rosmersholm_ it is not difficult to see how this order
of ideas dominated Ibsen's mind when he wrote it. The mansion called by
that name is typical of the ancient traditions of Norwegian bourgeois
aristocracy, which are not to be subservient to such modern and timid
conservatism as is represented by Rector Kroll, with his horror of all
things new because they are new. The Rosmer strain, in its inherent
nobility, is to be superior to a craven horror of the democracy, and is
to show, by the courage with which it fulfils its personal destiny, that
it looks above and beyond all these momentary prejudices, and accepts,
from all hands, whatever is wise and of good report.

The misfortune is that Ibsen, in unconscious bondage to his ideas, did
not construct his drama sturdily enough on realistic lines. While not
one of his works is more suggestive than _Rosmersholm_, there is not one
which gives the unbeliever more opportunity to blaspheme. This ancestral
house of a great rich race, which is kept up by the ministrations of
a single aged female servant, stands in pure Cloud-Cuckoo Land. The
absence of practical amenities in the Rosmer family might be set down to
eccentricity, if all the other personages were not equally ill-provided.
Rebecca, glorious heroine according to some admirers, "criminal, thief
and murderess," as another admirer pleonastically describes her, is
a sort of troll; nobody can explain--and yet an explanation seems
requisite--what she does in the house of Rosmer. In his eagerness to
work out a certain sequence of philosophical ideas, the playwright
for once neglected to be plausible. It is a very remarkable feature of
_Rosmersholm_ that in it, for the first time, and almost for the last,
Ibsen, in the act of theorizing, loses his hold upon reality. He places
his ingenious, elaborate and--given the premises--inevitable den