The play might be taken for a study in that particular kind of 'decadence' which has come to its perfection in uncivilised and overcivilised Russia; and the woman whom Ibsen studied as his model was actually half-Russian. Eleonora Duse has created Hedda over again, as a poet would have created her, and has made a wonderful creature whom Ibsen never conceived, or at least never rendered. Ibsen has tried to add his poetry by way of ornament, and gives us a trivial and inarticulate poet about whom float certain catchwords. Here the chief catchword is 'vine-leaves in the hair'; in _The Master-builder_ it is 'harps in the air'; in _Little Eyolf_ it takes human form and becomes the Rat-wife; in _John Gabriel Borkman_ it drops to the tag of 'a dead man and two shadows'; in _When we Dead Awaken_ there is nothing but icy allegory. All that queer excitement of _The Master-builder_, that 'ideal' awake again, is it not really a desire to open one's door to the younger generation? But is it the younger generation that finds itself at home there? is it not rather _Peer Gynt_ back again, and the ride through the air on the back of the reindeer? In his earlier plays Ibsen had studied the diseases of society, and he had considered the individual only in his relation to society. Now he turns to study the diseases of the individual conscience. Only life interests him now, and only life feverishly alive; and the judicial irony has gone out of his scheme of things. The fantastic, experimental artist returns, now no longer external, but become morbidly curious. The man of science, groping after something outside science, reaches back, though with a certain uneasiness, to the nursery legend of the Rat-wife in _Little Eyolf_; and the Rat-wife is neither reality nor imagination, neither Mother Bombie nor Macbeth's witches, but the offspring of a supernaturalism that does not believe in itself. In _John Gabriel Borkman_, which is the culmination of Ibsen's skill in construction, a play in four acts with only the pause of a minute between each, he is no longer content to concern himself with the old material, lies or misunderstandings, the irony of things happening as they do; but will have fierce hatreds, and a kind of incipient madness in things. In _When we Dead Awaken_ all the people are quite consciously insane, and act a kind of charade with perfectly solemn faces and a visible effort to look their parts.