“proved” anything was annoying to Ibsen, who said, with more than his customary firmness, “It was not my purpose to deal with what people call problems in this play. What I chiefly tried to do was to paint human beings, human emotions and human fate, against a background of some of the conditions and laws of society as it exists to-day.” The German critics, a little puzzled to find a longitude and latitude for Tesman’s “tastefully decorated” villa, declared that this time Ibsen had written an “international,” not a locally Norwegian, play. Nothing could be further from the truth. On the contrary, Hedda Gabler is perhaps the most fatally local and Norwegian of all Ibsen’s plays, and it presents, not of course the highly-civilized Christiania of to-day, but the half-suburban, half-rural little straggling town of forty years ago. When I visited Norway as a lad, I received kind but sometimes rather stiff and raw hospitality in several tastefully decorated villas, which were as like that of the Tesmans as pea is like pea. Why Ibsen chose to paint a “west end of Christiania” of 1860 rather than of 1890 I cannot guess, unless it was that to so persistent an exile the former was far more familiar than the latter.
A Russian actress of extreme talent, Madame Alla Nazimova, who has had special opportuni-
