He would have given small shrift to Olaf
Skaktavl, the psychological outlaw. But he would have drawn Inger, the
Mother of her People, in majestic strokes, and we should have had a
great simplicity, a noble outline with none of the detail put in. Ibsen,
already, cannot be satisfied with this; to him the detail is every
thing, and the result is a hopeless incongruity between the cartoon and
the finished work.
Lady Inger, in Ibsen's play, fails to impress us with greatness. "The
deed no less than the attempt confounds" her. She displays, from the
opening scene, a weakness that is explicable, but excludes all evidence
of her energy. The ascendency of Nils Lykke, over herself and over her
singularly and unconvincingly modern daughter, Elima, in what does it
consist? In a presentation of a purely physical attractiveness; Nils
Lykke is simply a voluptuary, pursuing his good fortunes, with impudent
ease, in the home of his ancestral enemies. In his hands, and not in his
only, the majestic Inger is reduced from a queen to a pawn. All manhood,
we are told, is dead in Norway; if this be so, then what a field is
cleared where a heroine like Inger, not young and a victim to her
passions, nor old and delivered to decrepit fears, may show us how a
woman of intellect and force can take the place of man.
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