In _Nora_, Ibsen gives us the ideal of the modern woman; in _Hedda Gabler_ he dissects it. All that lies between is the slow, laborious work of digging. The miner[1] climbs down into the depths where he digs and hammers in the dark. No daylight reaches him there, he does not know what he is looking for, and he does not know what he finds. Are they diamonds or coals? In the darkness of the pit the “oppressed woman” meets him, he takes hold of her and believes that he has raised a treasure and discovered the diamond. But when he begins to cut it, he thinks that it is only rock-crystal, and when he examines it more carefully, he sees that he is holding in his hand a piece of coal. _Nora_ is the rough diamond, _The Lady from the Sea_ is the rock-crystal, _Hedda Gabler_ is a piece of coal, and a bad kind of coal too. How did Henrik Ibsen, “le célèbre bas-bleuiste,” as an equally celebrated fellow-countryman called him, become a misogynist _à la_ Strindberg? “Man created woman--out of what?” says Nietzsche. “Out of a rib of his god, the Ideal.” It seems to me that this one little sentence contains the concentrated essence of everything that has ever been said, thought, felt and sung by man about woman. All his vanities and all his wants, from the tenderest melodies of his soul to the most brutal demands of his senses, all his capabilities and his incapabilities, his entire cleverness and his entire stupidity, all these man has immortalised in his songs on woman. Woman was silent. Or if she made herself heard there was not much sense in what she said. In olden times there occasionally arose a chirping sound like that of a little bird; in later times--in the times of the celebrated writers, George Sand, George Eliot, Fru Edgren-Leffler, etc.--they moralised on the subject of man. But as the sex of modern authoresses shows a certain natural disposition to attire itself in knickerbockers, one really cannot place them under the heading of “women,” they seem rather to belong to a state of transition. The woman who is completely a woman has never betrayed herself, has never told tales out of school; and why? Because she was not so stupid. She loved and made herself loved to the best of her ability, she hated and teased, and that was an art she understood right well; while the happy or unhappy object of her attentions wrote and sang poems about her, rejoiced and suffered, wrote and sang poems.... Everything that man has written about woman is merely the description of woman such as he imagines her, it is the expression of what man expects of her, seeks for in her, asks of her, and finds or does not find in her. It is a reflection of the varying play of man’s soul throughout all ages. Every man, every nation, every age has created its own particular type of woman.