I have called Lona Hessel a composite character, because she embodies in a concentrated form the two different strains of feeling that run through the whole play. Beyond the general attack on social pharisaism announced in the very title, we have a clear assertion of the claim of women to moral and economical individuality and independence. Dina, with her insistence on “becoming something for herself” before she will marry Johan, unmistakably foreshadows Nora and Petra. But at the same time the poet is far from having cleared his mind of the old ideal of the infinitely self-sacrificing, dumbly devoted woman, whose life has no meaning save in relation to some more or less unworthy male—the Ingeborg-Agnes-Solveig ideal we may call it. In the original edition of _The Pretenders_, Ingeborg said to Skule: “To love, to sacrifice all, and be forgotten, that is woman’s saga;” and out of that conception arose the very tenderly touched figure of Martha in this play. If Martha, then, stands for the old ideal—the ideal of the older generation—and Dina for the ideal of the younger generation, Lona Hessel hovers between the two. At first sight she seems like an embodiment of the “strong-minded female,” the champion of Woman’s Rights, and despiser of all feminine graces and foibles. But in the end it appears that her devotion to Bernick has been no less deep and enduring than Martha’s devotion to Johan. Her “old friendship does not rust” is a delightful speech; but it points back to the Ibsen of the past, not forward to the Ibsen of the future. Yet this is not wholly true: for the strain of sentiment which inspired it never became extinct in the poet. He believed to the end in the possibility and the beauty of great self-forgetful human emotions; and there his philosophy went very much deeper than that of some of his disciples.