But we may be assured that Moliere, governed by the social instinct as he was, would never have shared Ibsen’s sympathy for the combatant hero of his next play, that ‘Enemy of the People,’ with the chief figure of which the dramatist has seemed willing for once to be identified.  We may even incline to the belief that Moliere would have dismist Dr. Stockman as lacking in common-sense, and in the sense of humor, and also as a creature both conceited and self-righteous, pitiably impractical and painfully intolerant.  And we are quite at a loss even to guess what the French playwright-psychologist, who has left us the unforgetable figure of Celimene would have thought of Hedda Gabler, that strangest creation of the end of the century, anatomically virtuous, but empty of heart and avid of sensation.

In ‘Hedda Gabler’ as in the ‘Enemy of the People’ Ibsen gives up the Sophoclean form which was exactly appropriate for the theme of ‘Ghosts.’  With admirable artistic instinct the playwright returns to the framework of the “well-made play” or at least to that modification of the Scribe formula which Augier and Dumas fils had devised for their own use.  The action has not happened before the curtain rises on the first act; it takes place in the play itself, in front of the spectators, just as it does in the ‘Demi-monde.’  The exposition is contained in the first act, clearly and completely; the characters are all set in motion before us, Hedda and her husband, Mrs. Elvsted and Eilert, and the sinister figure of Inspector Brack in the background.  This first act, even to its note of interrogation hung in the air at the end, might have been constructed by Augier,—­just as the scene in the second act between Hedda and Brack recalls the manner of the younger Dumas, even in its lightness and its wit.  Yet we may doubt whether any of the modern French playwrights could have lent the same curt significance to this commonplace interview between a married demi-vierge and an homme-a-femmes;—­of their own accord these French terms come to the end of the pen to describe these French types.

Interesting as ‘Hedda Gabler’ is on the stage and in the study, suggestive as it is, it cannot be called one of Ibsen’s best-built plays.  Technically considered it falls below his higher level; it does not sustain itself even at the elevation of the ‘Demi-monde’ or of the ‘Effrontes.’  It does not compel us to accept its characters and its situations without question.  It leaves us inquiring, and, if not actually protesting, at least unconvinced.  We might accept the heroine herself as an incarnate spirit of cruel curiosity, inflicting purposeless pain, and to be explained, even if not to be justified, only by her impending maternity,—­which she recoils from and is unworthy of.  But I, for one, cannot help finding Hedda inconsistent artistically, as tho she was a composite photograph