The
absence of practical amenities in the Rosmer family might be set down to
eccentricity, if all the other personages were not equally ill-provided.
Rebecca, glorious heroine according to some admirers, "criminal, thief
and murderess," as another admirer pleonastically describes her, is a
sort of troll; nobody can explain--and yet an explanation seems
requisite--what she does in the house of Rosmer. In his eagerness to
work out a certain sequence of philosophical ideas, the playwright for
once neglected to be plausible. It is a very remarkable feature of
_Rosmersholm_ that in it, for the first time, and almost for the last,
Ibsen, in the act of theorizing, loses his hold upon reality. He places
his ingenious, elaborate and--given the premises--inevitable denouement
in a scene scarcely more credible than that of a Gilbert and Sullivan
opera, and not one-tenth as amusing. Following, as it does, immediately
on the heels of _The Wild Duck_, which was as remarkable a slice of real
life as was ever brought before a theatrical audience, the artificiality
of _Rosmersholm_ shows Ibsen as an artist clearly stepping backward that
he may leap the further forward.
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