In other
circumstances, Hedda would have been a power for beauty and good." If
this ingenious theory be correct, _Hedda Gabler_ must be considered as
the leading example of Ibsen's often-repeated demonstration, that evil
is produced by circumstances and not by character. The portrait becomes
thrillingly vital if we realize that the stains upon it are the impact
of accidental conditions on a nature which might otherwise have been
useful and fleckless. Hedda Gabler is painted as Mr. Sargent might paint
a lady of the London fashionable world; his brush would divine and
emphasize, as Ibsen's pen does, the disorder of her nerves, and the
ravaging concentration of her will in a sort of barren and impotent
egotism, while doing justice to the superficial attractiveness of her
cultivated physical beauty. He would show, as Ibsen shows, and with an
equal lack of malice prepense, various detestable features which the
mask of good manners had concealed. Each artist would be called a
caricaturist because his instinctive penetration had taken him into
regions where the powder-puff and the rouge-pot lose their power.
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