Ibsen took Hedda Gabler, the daughter of an officer whom he describes with considerable humour, for the profession of commanding officer in Norway is the favourite resource of the superfluous sons of tradesmen, and it has of late been proved by the autumn manœuvres that the Norwegian peasant soldier can do everything, whereas his commanding officer can accomplish very little. Therefore Ibsen took this daughter of the upper commercial class with her superior morals, analysed her and proved her to be what she was--a sexless nonentity who stupidly sells herself with utter disregard to her future offspring, and who retains nothing of a woman’s nature beyond a weak, impotent desire. He takes her and throws her to the dead with an æsthetic formula on her lips--takes her and permeates her entire being with that exhausted vitality which leads to suicidal mania. Björnson takes as his heroine Svava, the daughter of a rich but very dissipated merchant, who falls in love with a young man while conversing with him on old-maidish and philanthropic topics, but throws her glove into his face in consequence of some backstair gossip through which she discovers that instead of living like herself, he has acted the part of Don Juan after the example of her father. Björnson contrasts the vulgar frivolity of the male bourgeois with the vulgar sexlessness of the superior girl, and he extols the latter as being the only salutary system of morals. Of course Björnson’s _Gauntlet_ was received on the bourgeois stage with great pomp, but not so Ibsen’s _Hedda Gabler_. And while the middle class was unanimous in regarding Ibsen with curiosity mingled with horror, as the angel of death whose sign is on his door, it greeted Björnson as a renowned and fashionable physician who is always able to effect a cure so long as the illness is not positively fatal.