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And we are quite at a loss even to guess what the French playwright-psychologist, who has left us the unforgetable figure of Célimène would have thought of Hedda Gabler, that strangest creation of the end of the century, anatomically virtuous, but empty of heart and avid of sensation.
Here is another one, which begins as beautifully as Hedda Gabler could desire, and ends in blankness. The fact is, of course, that inspiration is no guarantee of perfection. The limitations of inspiration vary with the limitations of the writer a proposition that may be commended to the theologians. Genius can no more safeguard a man against his own ignorance than it can find a rhyme to "silver."
She pulled it whenever she got a chance, just as she pulled from its hiding-place the secret of the timid Thea. Simply to say that Hedda is the incarnation of selfishness is but a half-truth. She is that and much more. Charmless never, disagreeable always, she had the serpent's charm, the charm that slowly slays its victim.
Again, Inspector Brack, when he hears of Eilert's death, has really little or no warrant in jumping to the conclusion that Hedda is an accessory before the fact; and even if she was, this would not give him the hold on her which she admits too easily.
It is the instinct of self-preservation and self-amelioration which leads to every manifestation of revolt against stereotyped formulas of conduct. Between the excessive ideality of Rebecca and the decadent sterility of Hedda Gabler comes another type, perhaps more sympathetic than either, the master-builder Solness.
Thirdly, and to make it short, lastly, the late Henrik Ibsen, nourished upon Munich beer, wrote "Hedda Gabler," not to mention "Rosmersholm" and "The Lady from the Sea" wrote them in his flat in the Maximilianstrasse overlooking the palace and the afternoon promenaders, in the late eighties of the present, or Christian era wrote them there and then took them to the Café Luitpold, in the Briennerstrasse, to ponder them, polish them and make them perfect.
Both are scenes of exposition: and each is, in its way, character-revealing; but the earlier scene is a passage of quite unemotional narrative; the later is a passage of palpitating drama. In the plays subsequent to Hedda Gabler, it cannot be denied that the past took the upper hand of the present to a degree which could only be justified by the genius of an Ibsen.
All those who have denied their souls, all those who had the seed of work within them, and have not brought it forth rather to accept the security of an easy, honorable life, think: "Since I could not do the thing I dreamed, why should they do the things they dream? I will not have them do it." How many Hedda Gablers are there among men!
Hedda Gabler was constitutionally fated to suicide: a woman of low vitality, overmastering egoism, and acute supersensitiveness, placed in a predicament which left her nothing to expect from life but tedium and humiliation. The one case left that of Hedvig is the only one in which Ibsen can possibly be accused of wanton bloodshed.
As for Hedda, her psychological index is clear reading. In Peer Gynt one of the characters is described thus: "He is hermetically sealed with the bung of self, and he tightens the staves in the wells of self. Each one shuts himself in the cask of self, plunges deep down in the ferment of self."
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