"international," not a
locally Norwegian, play. Nothing could be further from the truth. On the
contrary, _Hedda Gabler_ is perhaps the most fatally local and Norwegian
of all Ibsen's plays, and it presents, not of course the highly
civilized Christiania of to-day, but the half-suburban, half-rural
little straggling town of forty years ago. When I visited Norway as a
lad, I received kind but sometimes rather stiff and raw hospitality
in several tastefully decorated villas, which were as like that of the
Tesmans as pea is like pea. Why Ibsen chose to paint a "west end of
Christiania" of 1860 rather than of 1890 I cannot guess, unless it was
that to so persistent an exile the former was far more familiar than the
latter.

A Russian actress of extreme talent, Madame Alla Nazimova, who has had
special opportunities of studying the part of Hedda Gabler, has lately
(1907) depicted her as "aristocratic and ill-mated, ambitious and doomed
to a repulsive alliance with a man beneath her station, whom she
had mistakenly hoped would give her position and wealth. In other
circumstances, Hedda would have been a power for beauty and good." If
this ingenious theory be correct, _Hedda Gabler_ must be considered as
the leading example of Ibsen's often-repeated demonstration, that evil
is produced by circumstances and not by character. The portrait becomes
thrillingly vital if we realize that the stains upon it are the impact
of accidental conditions on a nature which might otherwise have been
useful and fleckless. Hedda Gabler is painted as Mr. Sargent might
paint a lady of the London fashionable world; his brush would divine
and emphasize, as Ibsen's pen does, the disorder of her nerves, and
the ravaging concentration of her will in a sort of barren and impotent
egotism, while doing justice to the superficial attractiveness of her
cultivated physical beauty. He would show, as Ibsen shows, and with an
equal lack of malice prepense, various detestable features which the
mask of good manners had concealed. Each artist would be called a
caricaturist because his instinctive penetration had taken him into
regions where the powder-puff and the rouge-pot lose their power.

CHAPTER VIII

LAST YEARS

With the publication of _Hedda Gabler_ Ibsen passed into what we may
call his final glory. Almost insensibly, and to an accompaniment of his
own growls of indignation, he had taken his place, not merely as the
most eminent imaginative writer