Charmless never, disagreeable always, she had the serpent's charm, the charm that slowly slays its victim. Her father succumbed to it, else would he have permitted her to sit in corners with poet Eiljert Loevborg and not only hold hands but listen to far from edifying discourses? Not a nice trait in Hedda--though a human, therefore not a rare one--is her curiosity concerning forbidden themes. She was sly. She was morbid. Last of all she was cowardly. Yes, largely cerebral was her interest in nasty things, for when Eiljert attempted to translate his related adventures into action she promptly threatened him with a pistol. A demi-vierge before Marcel Prevost. Not as admirable as either Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina, Hedda Gabler married George Tesman for speculation. He had promised her the Falk villa--the scene plays up in Christiania--and he expected a professorship; these, with a little ready money and the selflessness of Aunt Julia, were so many bribes for the anxious Hedda, whose first youth had been heedlessly danced away without matrimonial success. Mark what follows: Ibsen, the sternest moralist since old John Knox, doesn't spare his heroine. He places her between the devil of Justice Brack, libertine and house friend, and the deep sea of the debauched genius, Loevborg. To make a four-square of ineluctable fate she is flanked on either side by her mediocre husband and the devoted bore, Thea Rysing--Elvsted. Like a high-strung Barbary mare--she was of good birth and breeding--her nerves tugging in their sheaths, her heart a burnt-out cinder, Hedda saw but one way to escape--suicide. She took that route and really it was the most profound and significant act of her life, cowardly as was the motive. She was discontented, shallow, the victim of her false upbringing. In a more intellectual degree Eiljert, her first admirer, is her counterpart. Both could have consorted with Emma Bovary and found her "ideals" sympathetic. Emil Reich has called Hedda Gabler the tragedy of mesalliance. It is a memorial phrase. George Tesman and Charles Bovary are brothers in misfortune. They belong to those husbands "predestined" to betrayal, as Balzac puts it. Councillor Karenin completes the trio and Anna hated his large ears; but before Karenin, Charles Bovary was despised by Emma because of his clumsy feet and inexpressive bearing, and his habit of breathing heavily during dinner. George Tesman with his purblind faculties, amiable ways, and semi-idiotic exclamations will go down in the history of fiction with Georges Dandin, Bovary, and Karenin. As for Hedda, her psychological index is clear reading. In Peer Gynt one of the characters is described thus: "He is hermetically sealed with the bung of self, and he tightens the staves in the wells of self. Each one shuts himself in the cask of self, plunges deep down in the ferment of self." Imperfect sympathies, misplaced egoism--for there is a true as well as a false egoism--a craze for silly