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All Hedda can actually do, to assert her energy, is to burn the MS. of Lövborg, and to kill herself with General Gabler's pistol. The race must be reformed or die; the Hedda Gablers which adorn its latest phase do best to die. We have seen that Ibsen's theory was that love of self is the fundamental principle of all activity.
A few days' search, however, disgusted her and brought her back completely to the mood of the salon, and led her deeply to appreciate Hedda Gabler, and to condemn American morality and the "good" people. Of Hedda she wrote: "Her character always did appeal to me, but last night I was in the mood especially to understand and sympathise with Hedda, to be Hedda, in fact.
In a more intellectual degree Eiljert, her first admirer, is her counterpart. Both could have consorted with Emma Bovary and found her "ideals" sympathetic. Emil Reich has called Hedda Gabler the tragedy of mésalliance. It is a memorial phrase. George Tesman and Charles Bovary are brothers in misfortune. They belong to those husbands "predestined" to betrayal, as Balzac puts it.
He had promised her the Falk villa the scene plays up in Christiania and he expected a professorship; these, with a little ready money and the selflessness of Aunt Julia, were so many bribes for the anxious Hedda, whose first youth had been heedlessly danced away without matrimonial success. Mark what follows: Ibsen, the sternest moralist since old John Knox, doesn't spare his heroine.
The portrait becomes thrillingly vital if we realize that the stains upon it are the impact of accidental conditions on a nature which might otherwise have been useful and fleckless. Hedda Gabler is painted as Mr.
Hilda Wangel, Nora, Hedda Sir Robert would never even have spoken to such baggages! Mon sieur Bergeret an amiable weak thing! D'Artagnan a true swashbuckler! Tom Jones, Faust, Don Juan we might not even think of them: And those poor Greeks: Prometheus shocking rebel. OEdipus for a long time banished by the Censor.
To every play it is possible, at a pinch, to assign a theme; but in many plays it is evident that no theme expressible in abstract terms was present to the author's mind. Nor are these always plays of a low class. It is only by a somewhat artificial process of abstraction that we can formulate a theme for As You Like It, for The Way of the World, or for Hedda Gabler.
The late Grant Allen once said to William Archer that Hedda was "nothing more nor less than the girl we take down to dinner in London, nineteen times out of twenty," which, to put it mildly, is an exaggeration. The truth is, Hedda is less a type than a "rare case," but to diagnose her as merely neurasthenic is also to go wide of the mark.
Patrick conjectures that he became a bishop, but does not name his diocese. There is no certainty about the dates at which these early abbots entered upon their office; and possibly some names have been altogether lost. But all accounts agree that the last Abbot of Medeshamstede was =Hedda=; and that he perished when the monastery was destroyed and its inmates killed by the Danes in 870.
We need, therefore, feel no surprise that there is not a trace of the Bardach episode in Hedda Gabler, although the composition of that play immediately followed the hohes, schmerzliches Glück at Gossensass.
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