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On the contrary, Hedda Gabler is perhaps the most fatally local and Norwegian of all Ibsen's plays, and it presents, not of course the highly civilized Christiania of to-day, but the half-suburban, half-rural little straggling town of forty years ago.
And now, I suppose you want to know why I took the pains to ask you here; oh, no, not to hook me up.... I didn't know you would get back so soon; I had just left word a few moments before you came.... Wasn't it great the way a dreadful disaster was averted at the Hedda Gabler performance last night?... Did you see the morning paper?" "No," said Bedient. "I was out early."
The moment had not come to bring up her name to David Cairns, who, since his talk with Beth, had of course nothing to offer. So Bedient revolved in outer darkness.... The morning after Hedda Gabler he found a very good chestnut saddle-mare in an up-town stable, and rode for an hour or two in the Park, returning to the Club after eleven. At the office, he was told that Mrs.
I asked myself; and it was only after cudgelling my brains for several minutes that I found I had re-invented Ibsen's Hedda Gabler. Thus, when we think we are choosing a plot out of the void, we are very apt to be, in fact, ransacking the store-house of memory.
Hedda is chilly enough, Mildred is distinctly frigid, yet such is the art of her creator that she comes to us invested with warmer colours; withal, about as disagreeable a girl as you may encounter in the literature of to-day. Now Mr. Moore is an outspoken defender of the few crumbling privileges of man at a time when the "ladies" are claiming the earth and adjacent planets.
In general it may be said that any pause in the action emphasises by position the speech or business that immediately preceded it. This is true not only of the long pause at the end of an act: the point is illustrated just as well by an interruption of the play in mid-career, like Mrs. Fiske's ominous and oppressive minute of silence in the last act of Hedda Gabler.
The trouble with Hedda Gabler as a play is that it contains not a single personage that the audience can love. The crowd demands those so-called "sympathetic" parts that every actor, for this reason, longs to represent. And since the crowd is partisan, it wants its favored characters to win. Hence the convention of the "happy ending," insisted on by managers who feel the pulse of the public.
She is temperamental in the sense that she lives on her nerves; without the hum and glitter of the opera, fashionable restaurants, or dances she relapses into a sullen stupor, or rages wildly at the fate that made her poor. She, too, like Hedda and Emma, lives in the moment, a silly moth enamoured of a millionaire.
The play is not so profound in its humanity as The Wild Duck, but it is Ibsen's masterpiece in the art of withdrawing veil after veil. From the technical point of view, it will repay the closest study. We need not look closely at the remaining plays. Hedda Gabler is perhaps that in which a sound proportion between the past and the present is most successfully preserved.
Untrained to cities, Bedient was astonished at the fright of the people, the fright of the men!... The lines of Hedda recurred to him, and he called out laughingly: "Now's the time for 'vine-leaves in your hair, men!" He moved among the seats free from the aisle. A body lay at his feet. Groping forward, his hand touched a woman's hair.
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