There has been quite a discussion in the Chicago press about Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler" as it was produced here in Chicago recently. Now for our opinion.

Henrik Ibsen's "Hedda Gabler" was played at Powers' Theater last week for the first time in Chicago by an English-speaking cast, We did not see the performance, but to judge by the newspaper reviews, we lost nothing thereby.

But the reviewers got busy, and the next morning they told all about Ibsen's pessimism and morbid despair, of his lack of moral intent; they referred to the characters in his plays as "bloated wrecks of humanity dripping with slime and corruption"; and they brought in all the other phrases that have been used ninety-nine times before. The critics all agree; they all reveal that they are not any too familiar with Ibsen's works and have probably never tried to 2understand any of them. It is hardly to the credit of the Chicago critics that not one of them should be able to give an intelligent review of Ibsen's play.

In his last drama, "When We Dead Awake," which he called "an epilogue," Ibsen asked that all his social dramas be judged as a whole; but even without this request students of his plays can see the moral which like a scarlet thread runs through them all.

Ibsen is a satirist; he is paradoxical; it is his right and his privilege to depict his personages as drastically and as forcibly as he chooses. He does not have to draw his characters as he finds them; he may represent them as they would be if they had been let alone to develop as they chose and allowed to foster one predominant characteristic. Many of his personages are classics in their way. And then he has pictured the vices and the passions that rule the people of these days,--greed, lust, ambition,--and has shown how vain all these passions are, and how they all lead to sorrow and remorse and misery and 3self-destruction, and how the only thing that makes life worth living is love, true love and devotion to the one whom the heart has chosen.

In "Hedda Gabler" the prevailing passion is social ambition. "Hedda" has been educated for society; to shine in society, in her circle, is all that she cares for. Yet in the bottom of her heart there is still a spark of womanhood; she finds her manly ideal in the dissipated but gifted "Eilert Lovberg"; she plays with him, flirts with him, but when he begins to take it seriously, she jilts him and marries "Tessman," whose wealth and influence will insure her a permanent position at the top of the social ladder. But she is cruelly disappointed. "Tessman" loses all that she married him for.

Years afterward she meets "Eilert Lovberg" again, whose better self is gaining the upper hand, thanks to the love of "Thea Elvsted". "Thea" is in every other respect inferior to "Hedda," but she has one thing which "Hedda" has not, and that is the capacity for true love; and "Thea" is making a man of "Lovberg".

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Now all the evil instincts in "Hedda" awaken: remorse for her own wasted life, hate, and jealousy; she wants to try her hand and to do more for "Lovberg" than that little thing "Thea". But "Hedda" spoils and ruins everything; with all her gifts she cannot accomplish so much as little "Thea," who has nothing but her love. And "Hedda" finds that she has nothing left but selfish ambition.

This has been Ibsen's reiterated theme, from the time when forty years ago he wrote his great work "Peer Gynt," up to last year, when he wrote his epilogue.

Led by his mad ambition, "Peer Gynt" leaves his home expecting to find the blue flower somewhere. He makes and loses fortunes, becomes a slave-trader in America and an emperor in Africa. Then, when he has grown to be an old man, he returns and meets the woman whom he betrayed and deserted, but who has faithfully been waiting for him in the hovel where he left her. He sinks at her feet and sobs:

"Here was my empire!"

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And yet with no dissenting voice these critics say that Ibsen has no moral purpose!

We believe that there is no one in Chicago, Norwegian or American, who can play the role of "Hedda Gabler"; that is one of the reasons why Ibsen is not understood.