critical, relentlessly solvent intelligence, she combines a morbid
shrinking from all the gross and prosaic detail of the sensual life.
She has nothing to take her out of herself--not a single intellectual
interest or moral enthusiasm. She cherishes, in a languid way, a
petty social ambition; and even that she finds obstructed and
baffled. At the same time she learns that another woman has had
the courage to love and venture all, where she, in her cowardice,
only hankered and refrained. Her malign egoism rises up uncontrolled,
and calls to its aid her quick and subtle intellect. She ruins the
other woman's happiness, but in doing so incurs a danger from which
her sense of personal dignity revolts. Life has no such charm for
her that she cares to purchase it at the cost of squalid humiliation
and self-contempt. The good and the bad in her alike impel her to
have done with it all; and a pistol-shot ends what is surely one of
the most poignant character-tragedies in literature. Ibsen's brain
never worked at higher pressure than in the conception and adjustment
of those "crowded hours" in which Hedda, tangled in the web of Will
and Circumstance, struggles on till she is too weary to struggle any
more.

It may not be superfluous to note that the "a" in "Gabler" should be
sounded long and full, like the "a" in "Garden"--NOT like the "a" in
"gable" or in "gabble."


W. A.



FOOTNOTES.