Hedda Gabler

“ A greater contrast could scarcely be imagined than that between the hard, cold, precise outlines of Hedda Gabler and the vague mysterious atmosphere of The Master Builder, in which, though the dialogue is sternly restrained within the limits of prose, the art of drama seems for ever on the point of floating away to blend with the art of music. Substantially, the play is one long dialogue between Solness and Hilda ”

“ 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. Sargent might paint a lady of the London fashionable world; his brush would divine and emphasize, as Ibsen's pen does, the disorder of her nerves, and the ravaging concentration of her will in a sort of barren and impotent egotism, while doing justice to the superficial attractiveness of her cultivated physical beauty. ”

“ HEDDA.
Uh—the rooms all seem to smell of lavender and dried rose-leaves.—But perhaps it's Aunt Julia that has brought that scent with her.
BRACK.
[Laughing.] No, I think it must be a legacy from the late Mrs. Secretary Falk.
HEDDA.
Yes, there is an odour of mortality about it. It reminds me of a bouquet—the day after the ball. [Clasps her hands behind her head, leans back in her chair and looks at him.] Oh, my dear Judge—you cannot imagine how horribly I shall bore myself here.
BRACK.
Why should not you, too, find some sort of vocation in life, Mrs. Hedda? ”

“ He never succeeded in being more objective in drama, he never kept more closely to the bare facts of nature nor rejected more vigorously the ornaments of romance and rhetoric than in this amazing play. There is no poetic suggestion here, no species of symbol, white horse, or gnawing thing, or monster from the sea. I am wholly in agreement with Mr. Archer when he says that he finds it impossible to extract any sort of general idea from Hedda Gabler, or to accept it as a satire of any condition of society. Hedda is an individual, not a type, and it was as an individual that she interested Ibsen. ”

“ My fancy, indeed, is very active. But it always wanders away. It wanders where it has no business to wander during working hours. I cannot repress my summer memories—nor do I wish to. I live through my experiences again and again and yet again. To transmute it all into a poem, I find, in the meantime, impossible.“ Clearly, then, he felt that his imagination ought to have been engaged on some theme having no relation to his summer experiences—the theme, no doubt, of Hedda Gabler. ”

“ MRS. ELVSTED.
[Terrified.] Hedda—oh Hedda—!
HEDDA.
You can see for yourself! You haven't the slightest reason to be in such mortal terror— [Interrupting herself.] There! Now we can all three enjoy ourselves!
LOVBORG.
[Who has given a start.] Ah—what is all this, Mrs. Tesman?
MRS. ELVSTED.
Oh my God, Hedda! What are you saying? What are you doing?
HEDDA.
Don't get excited! That horrid Judge Brack is sitting watching you. ”

“ Time is so short, the nerves so fragile and so finite, the dreadful illusion, the maia, so irresistible, that the old man gives way to it, and would sooner die at once than not make one grasp at happiness.
It will have been remarked that Ibsen's habit was to store up an impression, but not to use it immediately on creative work. 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. ”

“ The Lessing Theater, Berlin, followed suit on February 10. Not till February 25 was the play seen in Copenhagen, with Fru Hennings as Hedda. On the following night it was given for the first time in Christiania, the Norwegian Hedda being Fröken Constance Bruun. It was this production which the poet saw when he visited the Christiania Theater for the first time after his return to Norway, August 28, 1891. It would take pages to give even the baldest list of the productions and revivals of Hedda Gabler in Scandinavia and Germany, where it has always ranked among Ibsen’s most popular works. ”

“ HEDDA.
Can I not help you in any way?
MISS TESMAN.
Oh, you must not think of it! Hedda Tesman must have no hand in such mournful work. Nor let her thought dwell on it either—not at this time.
HEDDA.
One is not always mistress of one's thoughts—
MISS TESMAN.
[Continuing.] Ah yes, it is the way of the world. At home we shall be sewing a shroud; and here there will soon be sewing too, I suppose—but of another sort, thank God!
GEORGE TESMAN enters by the hall door.
HEDDA.
Ah, you have come at last!
TESMAN.
You here, Aunt Julia? With Hedda? Fancy that! ”

“ Ibsen had come to Berlin in February 1891 for the first performance of Hedda Gabler. Such experiences were always a trial to him, and he felt greatly relieved when they were over. Packing, too, he detested; and Elias having helped him through this terrible ordeal, the two sat down to lunch together, while awaiting the train. An expansive mood descended upon Ibsen, and chuckling over his champagne-glass, he said: ”Do you know, my next play is already hovering before me—of course in vague outline. But of one thing I have got firm hold. An experience: a woman’s figure. ”

“ HEDDA GABLER: A Drama in Four Acts. By Henrik Ibsen. Translated from the Norwegian by Edmund Gosse. Small 4to, cloth, with Portrait, 5s. Vaudeville Edition, paper, 1s. Also a Limited Large Paper Edition, 21s. net.
Times.—"The language in which this play is couched is a model of brevity, decision, and pointedness.... Every line tells, and there is not an incident that does not bear on the action immediate or remote. As a corrective to the vapid and foolish writing with which the stage is deluged 'Hedda Gabler' is perhaps entitled to the place of honour." ”

“ HEDDA.
Yes, I have. I want for once in my life to have power to mould a human destiny.
MRS. ELVSTED.
Have you not the power?
HEDDA.
I have not—and have never had it.
MRS. ELVSTED.
Not your husband's?
HEDDA.
Do you think that is worth the trouble? Oh, if you could only understand how poor I am. And fate has made you so rich! [Clasps her passionately in her arms.] I think I must burn your hair off after all.
MRS. ELVSTED.
Let me go! Let me go! I am afraid of you, Hedda!
BERTA.
[In the middle doorway.] Tea is laid in the dining-room, ma'am. ”

“ 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. Björnson, in a very moving passage in his novel, The Paths of God, did actually, though indirectly, make that accusation. Certainly, there is no more heartrending incident in fiction; and certainly it is a thing that only consummate genius can justify. ”

“ Hedda Gabler is a lady who belongs to the higher middle class, and so carefully has Ibsen analysed her that every one devoted to the study of natural phenomena and class-distinction may, with the help of some preliminary knowledge, study and probe her nature down to the secret structure of her soul. ”

“ Hedda is a creature wholly alive and shocking. Ibsen stuns us again, for if it is healthy to be individual and to lead your own life, in neurasthenic Hedda's case it leads to a catastrophe which wrecks a household. This game of contradiction is continued in The Master-Builder, a most potent exposition of human motives. Solness is sick-brained because of his loveless egoism. Hilda Wangel, the "younger generation," a Hedda Gabler à rebours, that he so feared would come knocking at his door, awakens in him his dead dreams, arouses his slumbering self ”

“ I think without sufficient ground, that Ibsen deliberately conceived Hedda Gabler as an "international" play, and that the scene is really the "west end" of any European city. To me it seems quite clear that Ibsen had Christiania in mind, and the Christiania of a somewhat earlier period than the 'nineties. The electric cars, telephones, and other conspicuous factors in the life of a modern capital are notably absent from the play. There is no electric light in Secretary Falk's villa. It is still the habit for ladies to return on foot from evening parties, with gallant swains escorting them. ”

“ The German critics, a little puzzled to find a longitude and latitude for Tesman's "tastefully decorated" villa, declared that this time Ibsen had written an "international," not a locally Norwegian, play. Nothing could be further from the truth. 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. ”

“ But neither Ibsen nor Zola, after they once took in hand the work of unmasking the idols of the bourgeoisie, ever again wrote a happy or pleasant play or novel. Ibsen’s suicides and catastrophes at last produced the cry of ‘People don’t do such things,’ which he ridiculed through Judge Brack in Hedda Gabler. This was easy enough: Brack was so far wrong that people do do such things occasionally. But on the whole Brack was right. The tragedy of Hedda in real life is not that she commits suicide but that she continues to live. ”

“ Her eyes are red with weeping, and she has black ribbons in her cap. She goes quietly and circumspectly out to the right. HEDDA goes up to the glass door, lifts the curtain a little aside, and looks out into the darkness. Shortly afterwards, MISS TESMAN, in mourning, with a bonnet and veil on, comes in from the hall. HEDDA goes towards her and holds out her hand. ”

“ You know Tesman and I made a tour in the Tyrol on our way home?
[She takes up an album, and places it on the table beside the sofa, in the further corner of which she seats herself. EILERT LOVBORG approaches, stops, and looks at her. Then he takes a chair and seats himself to her left.
HEDDA.
[Opening the album.] Do you see this range of mountains, Mr. Lovborg? It's the Ortler group. Tesman has written the name underneath. Here it is: "The Ortler group near Meran."
LOVBORG.
[Who has never taken his eyes off her, says softly and slowly:] Hedda—Gabler! ”

“ BRACK.
Why—what satisfaction could you find in that? If he is not fitted for that sort of thing, why should you want to drive him into it?
HEDDA.
Because I am bored, I tell you! [After a pause.] So you think it quite out of the question that Tesman should ever get into the ministry?
BRACK.
H'm—you see, my dear Mrs. Hedda—to get into the ministry, he would have to be a tolerably rich man.
HEDDA.
[Rising impatiently.] Yes, there we have it! It is this genteel poverty I have managed to drop into—! [Crosses the room.] That is what makes life so pitiable! ”

“ In Hedda Gabler it is Miss Tesman, aunt of the imbecile Tesman, who plays the pathetic part of the sacrificial mother. She has brought him up, and when he marries gives him the largest part of her modest income. ”

“ MRS. ELVSTED.
Oh yes, at least let us try—
TESMAN.
We will manage it! We must! I will dedicate my life to this task.
HEDDA.
You, George? Your life?
TESMAN.
Yes, or rather all the time I can spare. My own collections must wait in the meantime. Hedda—you understand, eh? I owe this to Eilert's memory.
HEDDA.
Perhaps.
TESMAN.
And so, my dear Mrs. Elvsted, we will give our whole minds to it. There is no use in brooding over what can't be undone—eh? We must try to control our grief as much as possible, and—
MRS. ELVSTED.
Yes, yes, Mr. Tesman, I will do the best I can. ”

“ It gives me a sense of freedom to know that a deed of deliberate courage is still possible in this world,—a deed of spontaneous beauty.
BRACK.
[Smiling.] H'm—my dear Mrs. Hedda—
HEDDA.
Oh, I know what you are going to say. For you are a kind of specialist too, like—you know!
BRACK.
[Looking hard at her.] Eilert Lovborg was more to you than perhaps you are willing to admit to yourself. Am I wrong?
HEDDA.
I don't answer such questions. I only know that Eilert Lovborg has had the courage to live his life after his own fashion. And then—the last great act, with its beauty! Ah! ”

“ And I say, too, the way he smiled and glanced at Tesman when you dared not accept his invitation to this wretched little supper-party of his.
LOVBORG.
Dared not! Do you say I dared not?
HEDDA.
I don't say so. But that was how Judge Brack understood it.
LOVBORG.
Well, let him.
HEDDA.
Then you are not going with them?
LOVBORG.
I will stay here with you and Thea.
MRS. ELVSTED.
Yes, Hedda—how can you doubt that?
HEDDA.
[Smiles and nods approvingly to LOVBORG.] Firm as a rock! Faithful to your principles, now and for ever! Ah, that is how a man should be! ”

“ BRACK.
That was what everybody thought.
TESMAN.
But I cannot imagine what he will take to now! How in the world will he be able to make his living? Eh?
[During the last words, HEDDA has entered by the hall door.
HEDDA.
[To BRACK, laughing with a touch of scorn.] Tesman is for ever worrying about how people are to make their living.
TESMAN.
Well you see, dear—we were talking about poor Eilert Lovborg.
HEDDA.
[Glancing at him rapidly.] Oh, indeed? [Sets herself in the arm-chair beside the stove and asks indifferently:] What is the matter with him? ”