of irreconcilable figures.  For example, she shrinks from scandal, yet she burns Eilert’s manuscript, she gives him one of her pistols, and finally she commits suicide herself, than which nothing could more certainly provoke talk.  The pistols themselves seem lugged in solely because the playwright needed to have them handy for two suicides,—­just as Brack walks into Hedda’s house in the early morning, not of his own volition, but because the playwright insisted on it.  So at the end Mrs. Elvsted could not have had with her all the notes of Eilert’s bulky book, tho she might have had a rough draft; and she would never have sat down calmly to look over these notes instead of rushing madly to the hospital to Eilert’s bedside.  Again, Inspector Brack, when he hears of Eilert’s death, has really little or no warrant in jumping to the conclusion that Hedda is an accessory before the fact; and even if she was, this would not give him the hold on her which she admits too easily.  More than once, we find a summary swiftness in the motives alleged, for things done before the spectators have time to grasp the reasons for these deeds, which therefore appear to be arbitrary.  There is a hectic flush of romanticism in this play, not discernible in any other of Ibsen’s social dramas, a perfervidness, an artificiality, which may not interfere with the interest of the story but which must detract from its plausibility at least and from its ultimate value.

VII

Whatever inconsistencies may be detected now and again by a minute analysis of motive,—­and after all these inconsistencies are slight and infrequent,—­the characters that Ibsen has brought upon the stage have one unfailing characteristic:  they are intensely interesting.  They are not mere puppets moved here and there by the visible hand of the playwright; they are human beings, alive in every nerve, and obeying their own volition.  The breath of life has been breathed into them; they may be foolish or morbid, headstrong or perverse, illogical or fanatic, none the less are they real, vital, actual.  And this is the reason why actors are ever eager for the chance to act them.  Where Scribe and Sardou and the manufacturers of the “well-made play” give the performers only effective parts, to be presented as skilfully as might be, Ibsen has proffered to them genuine characters to get inside of as best they could,—­characters not easy to personate, indeed, often obscure and dangerous.  Because of this danger and this doubt, they are all the more tempting to the true artist, who is ever on the alert for a tussle with technical difficulty.  The men and women who people Ibsen’s plays are never what the slang of the stage terms “straight parts”; they are never the traditional “leading man” and “leading woman”; in a sense they are all of them, male and female, young and old, “character parts,” complex, illusive, alluring.  They are not readily mastered, for they keep on revealing fresh possibilities the more searchingly they are studied; and this is why the reward is rich, when the actor has been able at last to get inside of them.