plan, too, we may possibly trace what I take to be the one serious
flaw in the the play--the comparative weakness of the second half of
the third act. The scene of Erhart's rebellion against the claims
of the mother, aunt, and father strikes one as the symmetrical
working out of a problem rather than a passage of living drama.

All this means, of course, that there is a certain looseness of fibre
in _John Gabriel Borkman_ which we do not find in the best of Ibsen's
earlier works. But in point of intellectual power and poetic beauty
it yields to none of its predecessors. The conception of the three
leading figures is one of the great things of literature; the second
act, with the exquisite humour of the Foldal scene, and the dramatic
intensity of the encounter between Borkman and Ella, is perhaps the
finest single act Ibsen ever wrote, in prose at all events; and the
last scene is a thing of rare and exalted beauty. One could wish
that the poet's last words to us had been those haunting lines with
which Gunhild and Ella join hands over Borkman's body:

We twin sisters--over him we both have loved.
We two shadows--over the dead man.

Among many verbal difficulties which this play presents, the greatest,
perhaps, has been to find an equivalent for the word "opreisning,"
which occurs again and again in the first and second acts. No one
English word that I could discover would fit in all the different
contexts; so I have had to employ three: "redemption," "restoration,"
and in one place "rehabilitation." The reader may bear in mind that
these three terms represent one idea in the original.

Borkman in Act II. uses a very odd expression--"overskurkens moral,"