struggles, she is human, and by that fact exposed to a dozen different interpretations, to the importunity of our suspense...." This seems to be a final judgment--if judgments of Ibsen can be final--upon a woman, who, all said, is human enough to suffer, suffer principally because she feared to sin. She is not a caricature of the "modern" woman. If she had become conscious of the claims of others, in a word the modern, unselfish, emancipated woman, her life would have been different--and the theatre deprived of a most fascinating and enigmatic figure, with her pallid skin, her haunting gray eyes, her sweet, studied languor, and her delicate air of one to whom life owes its richest gifts. Dr. Wicksteed, in his admirable lectures on Ibsen, remarks: "I am convinced that it is in this typical significance of marriage, and not in any special interest in the so-called woman question as such, that we are to seek the reason of Ibsen's constant recurrence to this theme. Suppress individuality and you have no life; assert it, and you have war and chaos.... Hedda Gabler neither drifted nor was forced into marriage, but she deliberately and shamelessly paid the flattered and delighted Tesman in the forged coinage of love for opening to her a retreat from the career she had exhausted, and entry into the best career she could still think of as possible, and we see the result. Without the spirit of self-surrender, free choice will never secure self-realization." Her death, sought because of cowardly reasons, is yet the one real fact in Hedda's shallow, feverish existence. Death could alone solve the discords of her life's cruel music. * * * * * XIV THE MASTER BUILDER (1892) The doctor of the madhouse at Cairo, in which Peer Gynt crowns himself Emperor of Himself, said of his "patients": "Each one shuts himself up in the cask of self, plunges down deep in the ferment of self. He's hermetically sealed with the bung of self, and he tightens the staves in the well of self. None has a tear for another's woes, none has a sense for another's ideas. Ourselves--that's what we are in thought and in speech; ourselves to the outmost plank of the springboard." Such a sealed soul was that of Halvard Solness before Hilda Wangel knocked at his door to demand of him the fulfilment of his promise. Ten years earlier he had promised to make her a princess. She was then a child and had excitedly waved a flag when she saw Solness in the pride of his manhood, the greatest of the architects, climb to the top of the scaffolding that surrounded the newly completed church and hang a wreath on the weather-vane. Her enthusiasm had pleased the artist, and a kiss was given with the promise. Her knock is as revolutionary as the open door of Nora's house of dolls. As Hilda enters she brings with her brilliant young womanhood, the fresh breeze of the new century. It was needed in the unhappy Solness household.