One feels instinctively that more could be done with Lona and Bernick, more utilized from the strong scenes between Aune and Bernick. But in John Gabriel Borkman, Ibsen later realized the wicked grandeur inherent in the character of a tremendous financial scoundrel; like Balzac's Mercadet, his Borkman is a figure hewn from the native rock. Bernick is a man you may meet in Wall Street, and certainly on any Sunday in any given church you enter. He is proud, pious, fat as to paunch, and lean-souled; and he drives a hard bargain with God, man, and devil. In a word, the average pillar of any society, one who believes in making religion and patriotism pay; a good father, a good husband, a good fellow, is the inscription chiselled on his marble mortuary shaft--and then the worms stop to smile archly at their eternal banquet! Truth is always at the bottom of a grave. And Ibsen is a terrible digger of graves when he so wills it. As a matter of record it would not be amiss to state that Pillars of Society, written in 1877, was produced in America at the Irving Place Theatre, December 26, 1889, with Ernest Possart as Bernick, Frau Christien as Mrs. Bernick, and Frl. Leithner as Lona. In English it was first heard at the Lyceum Theatre, March 6, 1891, with George W. Fawcett as Bernick, Alice Fischer as Lona, and Dina Dorf played by Bessie Tyree. There was a third performance at Hammerstein's Opera House three days later. Wilton Lackaye and his company revived the piece at the Lyric Theatre, New York, April 15, 1904. * * * * * VII A DOLL'S HOUSE (1879) Ibsen has been persistently confounded with those mannish women who, averse from marriage, furiously denounce it as a tyrannical institution. Strindberg, who was half mad at the time, accused the Norwegian poet of being a woman's rights advocate. Dr. Brandes has told us the contrary. Ibsen was never a woman's man; he did not like women's society, preferring men's. He did not admire John Stuart Mill's book on the woman question, and entertained an antipathy for those writers who declare, gallantly enough, that they owe much in their books to their wives. A sheer sense of justice impelled him to view the institution of matrimony as not always being made above. A woman is an individual. She has, therefore, her rights, not alone because of her sex, but because she is a human being. So he wrote A Doll's House to show a woman's soul in travail beset by obstacles of her own and others' making.