her
actresses--quite recently by a Russian actress, Madame Alla Nazimova,
who (playing in English) seems to have made a notable success both in
this part and in Nora. The first French Hedda Gabler was Mlle. Marthe
Brandes, who played the part at the Vaudeville Theatre, Paris, on
December 17, 1891, the performance being introduced by a lecture by M.
Jules Lemaitre. In Holland, in Italy, in Russia, the play has been acted
times without number. In short (as might easily have been foretold) it
has rivalled _A Doll's House_ in world-wide popularity.

It has been suggested,(4) I think without sufficient ground, that Ibsen
deliberately conceived _Hedda Gabler_ as an "international" play, and
that the scene is really the "west end" of any European city. To me
it seems quite clear that Ibsen had Christiania in mind, and the
Christiania of a somewhat earlier period than the 'nineties. The
electric cars, telephones, and other conspicuous factors in the life of
a modern capital are notably absent from the play. There is no electric
light in Secretary Falk's villa. It is still the habit for ladies to
return on foot from evening parties, with gallant swains escorting them.
This "suburbanism," which so distressed the London critics of 1891,
was characteristic of the Christiania Ibsen himself had known in the
'sixties--the Christiania of _Love's Comedy_--rather than of the
greatly extended and modernised city of the end of the century. Moreover
Lovborg's allusions to the fiord, and the suggested picture of Sheriff
Elvsted, his family and his avocations are all distinctively Norwegian.
The truth seems to be very simple--the environment and the subsidiary
personages are all thoroughly national, but Hedda herself is an
"international" type, a product of civilisation by no means peculiar to
Norway.

We cannot point to any individual model or models who "sat to" Ibsen for
the character of Hedda.(5) The late Grant Allen declared that Hedda was
"nothing more nor less than the girl we take down to dinner in London
nineteen times out of twenty"; in which case Ibsen must have suffered
from a superfluidity of models, rather than from any difficulty in
finding one. But the fact is that in this, as in all other instances,
the word "model" must be taken in a very different sense from that in
which it is commonly used in painting. Ibsen undoubtedly used models for
this trait and that, but never for a whole figure. If his characters can
be called po