tion of self through the passion for attainment. But right here their salient differences are marked with red ink for the reader....Hedda must be Hedda; Mrs. Elvsted is quite willing to be the reflection of a well-beloved being......she hopes for a little glory, through it nevertheless.....self is there! Ellida, the lady from the sea, that exquisite pastel, is a study in pure psychology. .....a soul, not a body, a person, not a class. She has her prototype perhaps, but she is none the less a rare flower.....a blossom of the salt marshes! She appears to us, as is fitting, without a background, illusive, charming.....above all interesting: that is the Ibsen touch. Water rather than the earth is her natural element....there is about her a savor of the sea, a freshness as of salt-hung breezes. Her individualism is almost that of a mermaid. She is unhappy through an unfulfilled desire for personal freedom. Love of her husband, the gentle Doctor Wangel, is obscured by remembrance of the stranger who had come from the sea and returned again to its mysterious keeping with the promise, which contained a threat, that he would come again for her. Of course he comes.....it is quite necessary to the dramatic development......her psychic control waivers she hesitates between two minds, feeling that without the exercise of free will she can never come to a decision that will give her wholly to her husband, even should she refuse to go with the stranger, whose very lawlessness and freedom call to her. She is not to be judged by the commonplace standard; she is hardly of the earth.....rather a creature of wind and tides, moonlight and sunrise mists. At the last moment Wangel, sharpened by his physician's knowledge that demands that he save his patient even though he may lose his wife, strikes the one note necessary to salvation. Ellida cries to him: "You have the power and no doubt you will use it! But all my mind-all my thoughts-irresistible longings and desiresthese you cannot fetter!" and he answers fearlessly: "Choose your own path in full freedom!" The whole fabric of misery and superstition which has encased her falls to pieces. The alluring call of the unknown strikes upon deaf ears: she has attained the thing for which she has striven-complete personal freedom! One of the charms of Ibsen is that he does not demand of us an absolute belief in his creations, but only a sympathetic understanding, and it is through this sympatica that we grasp his most subjective moments.....his most cosmic ideals. Hilda for me is a portrait quite alone.... she is essentially Ibsen's own creation....the wonder-child of his brain. So psychical and at the same time so elemental, she defies analysis. A being of rare brilliancy and transcendental charm.....an exquisite fusing of the spirits of earth, air, fire and water. The psyche of The Master Builder had called to her from the time when as a child she heard songs in the air, and saw him stand at the top of the tall church tower. Too late she realizes that she saw him not as he was but as he willed her to see him, and for ten years she awaited the coming of the prince to make a kingdom for the princess, the Princess Orangia. Irresistibly drawn to go in search of him, behold! the Master Builder does not expect her, does not even remember the sensitive, highly strung child! However it is her turn now . . . . .her influence increases as his recedes. That little touch of the vampire which we see in her sucks out a confession.....the fatal confession of fear, and she demands that instead of locking the door against the Younger Generation which he hears knocking, he shall welcome it and then soar above the heights to which it may aspire. Ibsen with his love of comparison shows us the Master Builder as the creature with the weak or "sickly" conscience .looking in retrospect at the things he has failed to do or done badly, while Hilda is the realistic exponent of the "robust" conscience. A being who knows no fear and demands her kingdom with an insistence which will not be gainsaid and a radicalism lessening only when she sees the evil result for an innocent person. Her tenderness for Mrs. Solness makes her capable of the supreme sacrifice, but she refuses to allow the Master Builder to remain at the level of the common-place. He must aspire to the summit of the "castle in the air", even though the princess may not dwell there with him. By the greater strength of her personality she sends him to scale the building of the new home, that building which his spirit has imagined as a greater thing than his physical endurance can compass. The result is of course death, but for Hilda it is the best answer to the conundrum. ...the sacrifice of the physical to the psychical....the triumph of spirit over matter. The drama leaves us thrilled by the intense individualism of Hilda. Her glorious transcendentalism, so perfectly delineated, makes the opposite of Hedda, the cold materialist. We needs must believe in the unique perfection of Hedda's portrait, but there is in this picture of Hilda an essential quality: it is the distillation of a great genius for portraiture. She stands for me like a subtle and winged Mercury, poised for flight into a rarefied atmosphere, whither we cannot follow her and so quickened are we by her illusiveness, even as was the Master Builder, that we cannot bear to let her go, but prefer to venture into the impenetrable mists, there to be lost rather than return to the prosaic. Little Eyolf is a drama of symbolism, mystic suggestion and echoes of unearthly chords: it has no place in an exposition of women's portraits: the Rat-Wife is at once the protagonist and the symbol of death....Asta and Rita are a blur on her background. Once again, in John Gabriel Borkman we meet the strong and masterful woman with her opposite the tender and devoted one. It is of course the strong one who marries Borkman while his heart is given to the gentle one. Life is a struggle between the two, even for the affection of the younger generation in the person of Erhart Borkman. And at the end, when these two women stand with a retrospect of ruined lives, looking back as grim ghosts from the realm of mists, there is a scene as profoundly moving as anything that Ibsen has left us, a climax as dramatic as only the most poignant tragedy can evolve: Mrs. Borkman's words, "We twin sisters-over him we both loved," finds the echo in Ella Rentheim's reply: "We two shadows over the dead man." Ibsen himself has said that When We Dead Awaken is a dramatic epilogue......It is the feverish finale of a life of great literary achievement......but it is something more. Through a long life Ibsen has poured his libation to art and now, when his taper is burning low and he hears singing in his ears the insistent call of the siren,-death-it is life, not art that he desires, and out of this intense desire for life again there arose this drama-epilogue,—what you will... Here the women fail us, because once more, as in Ghosts, he is more concerned with a theory, in this instance quickened by a longing intense to the point of pain....than he is with the characters who portray it. The irresponsible Maia is not a type: she may be a phase of life; certainly Ulfheim is life itself, while I am sure that Ibsen intended Irene as the symbol of death, a more alluring one than the Rat-Wife......His very keenness for life would have induced him to seek something in death to make it appear less undesirable and Irene is a voice in the air-a psychic influence. To treat her as the portrait of a woman would be to despoil the drama of its most subtle idea. If this is the outcome of the dregs of Ibsen's mind, as has been said, we must agree with Mr. Archer that these dregs are more stimulating than the spring-time outpourings of a lesser intellect. |