Amongst us it was murmured that the wise augur had not been quite as happy on this occasion. The strings of the dramatic puppet-show were a little more visible than usual, and the two pistol shots fired in the midst of a phlegmatic bourgeois milieu put an end to all illusion. Then the different degrees of beauty in the death-scenes! Life with or without vine-leaves in the hair!—Where, in the name of wonder, do people speak like that, and where in the upper or lower world do they feel like it?
You, most honoured master, you should carry away the scaffolding and lay aside your tools as soon as the house is finished.
Yet the story is not easily disposed of! There is something hidden away which is not expressed in words, though it sometimes beats and palpitates like an injured nerve, and if anyone were to succeed in touching it, he would hold the secret in his hand. But with Ibsen we never know whether or not we are really touching the central nerve, perhaps because the nerve is not a true vibration of the soul with which the author’s entire ego is in sympathy, but only a thought palpitating in the brain which owes its origin to other causes.
The point in Hedda Gabler on which the whole piece turns is mainly this: the dissection of an ideal.
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.