What of this hysterical Fru Ellida who waits expectantly for some one else, who lives on Platonic terms with her husband and ends by sending her--very grown-up--stepdaughter into an educational establishment? What does Fru Ellida do? She indulges in bold fancies and exalted dreams, and when the subject of her dreams stands before her, and when the great happiness comes, which is always equally the great danger--she does not recognise him, she is afraid of him, and she takes refuge with her safe and trustworthy spouse, the patient Wangel. Can’t we see Ibsen’s eyes twinkling behind his spectacles? III One of the first principles, on which Ibsen’s glorification of woman rests, is that woman is noble. Nora is noble, but Rebecca is not. Another of his principles is that woman is courageous and well fitted for life. Rebecca is courageous, but Ellida is cowardly. ... Let us turn to Hedda Gabler. She is what used, in older days, to be called a “dragon.” All that she says and does, all her smiles and her kisses are wicked, she is tormented by a love of mischief, she is filled with an impotent, cowardly greed which incessantly turns to an envious hatred of all things living, extending even to her own offspring. But she is something more, she is a symbol. Ibsen has resumed the thread which he allowed to drop since the appearance of _The Wild Duck_. Hedda Gabler is a daughter of the upper middle class, the class whose moral bankruptcy has afforded a subject for his social dramas. Hedda Gabler has the courage and the soul of the bankrupt daughter of a race of bankrupts, whose only rule of life is a hollow form, and she, in the guise of a woman, represents the unfruitfulness of this exhausted class. But Hedda Gabler is something more. She is the reverse of Fru Alving. Fru Alving is a good woman destined to be ruined by men, Hedda Gabler is a bad woman by whom men are ruined. There is yet another point about her. She is the destruction of the “ideal” in woman, the ideal which Ibsen incarnated in woman as the absolutely good, strong, clever, pure, courageous, etc.; in her he repudiates the worship of woman; in her he repudiates the vanguard of women who were armed by himself, the women’s rights women and opponents of men; all the deformities of the modern woman are concentrated in Hedda, who hates and rejects her own offspring. This accounts for the mysterious silence which pervaded the north when the great prophet, “le célèbre bas-bleuiste,” began to speak with tongues. IV If we glance over the work of Ibsen’s life-time, we see that every single ideal of the day which he dealt with in his writings was by him destroyed. First came that absolute faith which was the fundamental Christian ideal in _Brand_: he destroyed it. Then came the romantic capriciousness of a bourgeois soul in _Per Gynt_: he destroyed that also. In his social dramas he dealt with the conventions of society, and them he also destroyed. Afterwards came woman....