Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Volume 6).djvu/24

 incomparable master-hand. One of these touches is the scene between Bernick and Rörlund in the third act, in which Bernick's craving for casuistical consolation meets with so painful a rebuff. Only a great dramatist could have devised this scene; but to compare it with a somewhat similar passage in ''The Pretenders''—the scene in the fourth act between King Skule and Jatgeir Skald—is to realise what is meant by the difference between dramatic poetry and dramatic prose.

I have called Lona Hessel a composite character, because she embodies in a concentrated form the two different strains of feeling that run through the whole play. Beyond the general attack on social pharisaism announced in the very title, we have a clear assertion of the claim of women to moral and economical individuality and independence. Dina, with her insistence on "becoming something for herself" before she will marry Johan, unmistakably foreshadows Nora and Petra. But at the same time the poet is far from having cleared his mind of the old ideal of the infinitely self-sacrificing, dumbly devoted woman, whose life has no meaning save in relation to some more or less unworthy male—the Ingeborg-Agnes-Solveig ideal we may call it. In the original edition of The Pretenders, Ingeborg said to Skule: "To love, to sacrifice all, and be forgotten, that is woman's saga;" and out of that conception arose the very tenderly touched figure of Martha in this play. If Martha, then, stands for the old ideal—the ideal of the older generation—and Dina for the ideal of the younger generation, Lona Hessel hovers between the two. At first sight she seems like an embodiment of the "strong-minded female," the champion of