Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Volume 11).djvu/26

 come of it, and that, when the poet abandoned the idea, he did not think it worth while to remove the scaffolding. To this change of plan, too, we may possibly trace what I take to be the one serious flaw in the play—the comparative weakness of the second half of the third act. The scene of Erhart's rebellion against the claims of 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 have both 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.