will was always on Wangel’s side; and a merely verbal undoing of the “bargain” with which she reproached herself might quite naturally suffice to turn the scale decisively in his favour.  But what may suffice for Ellida is not enough for the audience.  Too much is made to hang upon a verbally announced conversion.  The poet ought to have invented some material—­or, at the very least, some impressively symbolic—­proof of Wangel’s change of heart.  Had he done so, The Lady from the Sea would assuredly have taken a higher rank among his works.

Let me further illustrate my point by comparing a very small thing with a very great.  The late Captain Marshall wrote a “farcical romance” named The Duke of Killiecrankie, in which that nobleman, having been again and again rejected by the Lady Henrietta Addison, kidnapped the obdurate fair one, and imprisoned her in a crag-castle in the Highlands.  Having kept her for a week in deferential durance, and shown her that he was not the inefficient nincompoop she had taken him for, he threw open the prison gate, and said to her:  “Go!  I set you free!” The moment she saw the gate unlocked, and realized that she could indeed go when and where she pleased, she also realized that she had not the least wish to go, and flung herself into her captor’s arms.  Here we have Ibsen’s situation transposed into the key of fantasy, and provided with the material “guarantee of good faith” which is lacking in The Lady from the Sea.  The Duke’s change of mind, his will to set the Lady Henrietta free, is visibly demonstrated by the actual opening of the prison gate, so that we believe in it, and believe that she believes in it.  The play was a trivial affair, and is deservedly forgotten; but the situation was effective because it obeyed the law that a change of will or of feeling, occurring at a crucial point in a dramatic action, must be certified by some external evidence, on pain of leaving the audience unimpressed.

This is a more important matter than it may at first sight appear.  How to bring home to the audience a decisive change of heart is one of the ever-recurring problems of the playwright’s craft.  In The Lady from the Sea, Ibsen failed to solve it:  in Rosmersholm he solved it by heroic measures.  The whole catastrophe is determined by Rosmer’s inability to accept without proof Rebecca’s declaration that Rosmersholm has “ennobled” her, and that she is no longer the same woman whose relentless egoism drove Beata into the mill-race.  Rebecca herself puts it to him:  “How can you believe me on my bare word after to-day?” There is only one proof she can give—­that of “going the way Beata went.”  She gives it:  and Rosmer, who cannot believe her if she lives, and will not survive her if she dies, goes with her to her end.  But the cases are not very frequent, fortunately, in which such drastic methods of proof are appropriate or possible.  The dramatist must, as a rule, attain his end by less violent means; and often he fails to attain it at all.