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HENRIK IBSEN.
ii.
IN a former article on Henrik Ibsen in the November number of this Review, an attempt was made to describe his method as a dramatist in general terms, and, by way of example, an outline was given of one of his best-known dramas, Nora, or the Doll’s House. The principle of heredity incidentally touched in Nora is worked out most strikingly in Ghosts.
Ghosts, like Nora, is a domestic drama. Captain Alving, a full-blooded young man, to whom 'the joy of life' wears the complexion of sensual enjoyment, has married a woman as refined as he is gross. When she discovers his unfaithfulness she leaves him, but returns on the advice of her pastor, who has formerly been also her admirer. He convinces her that it is her duty to go back, and to seek to keep her husband from ill courses. She does so, and for years she carries on an unavailing struggle against her husband's self-indulgence, concealing his laches from the public eye, nursing him ultimately in his idleness and imbecility. Finally he dies, and she is left with a son whom she had sent abroad. nominally for education, really to keep him from being corrupted by his father. The result of one of his father's intrigues with one of his own servants, is a girl whom Mrs. Alving takes, when she grows up, into her house as a maid, the girl herself being ignorant of her real parentage. The son returns after his father's death full of animal spirits, and apparently in robust health. He has just returned, and his mother has been rehearsing with Parson Manders, during her son's momentary absence, the history of her married life, when voices are heard in the conservatory — those of Oswald, her son, and Regina, her husband's daughter. These words, 'Oswald! let me go!' disclosed a hideous gulf, and drew from Mrs. Alving the cry, ' Ghosts ! the couple from the conservatory have risen again.'
The relationship between them is disclosed, and confidence thus being fully established between mother and son, she learns to her horror that the sins of his father had, without any fault of his own, been visited upon him, and that he had softening of the brain. The end of the drama is unpleasantly
