in its place?

_Hedda Gabler_ is closer to life; and Ibsen said about it in a letter:

It was not really my desire to deal in this play with so-called
problems. What I principally wanted to do was to depict human
beings, human emotions, and human destinies, upon a groundwork of
certain of the social conditions and principles of the present
day.'

The play might be taken for a study in that particular kind of
'decadence' which has come to its perfection in uncivilised and
overcivilised Russia; and the woman whom Ibsen studied as his model was
actually half-Russian. Eleonora Duse has created Hedda over again, as a
poet would have created her, and has made a wonderful creature whom
Ibsen never conceived, or at least never rendered. Ibsen has tried to
add his poetry by way of ornament, and gives us a trivial and
inarticulate poet about whom float certain catchwords. Here the chief
catchword is 'vine-leaves in the hair'; in _The Master-builder_ it is
'harps in the air'; in _Little Eyolf_ it takes human form and becomes
the Rat-wife; in _John Gabriel Borkman_ it drops to the tag of 'a dead
man and two shadows'; in _When we Dead Awaken_ there is nothing but icy
allegory. All that queer excitement of _The Master-builder_, that
'ideal' awake again, is it not really a desire to open one's door to the
younger generation? But is it the younger generation that finds itself
at home there? is it not rather _Peer Gynt_ back again, and the ride
through the air on the back of the reindeer?

In his earlier plays Ibsen had studied the diseases of society, and he
had considered the individual only in his relation to society. Now he
turns to study the diseases of the individual conscience. Only life
interests him now, and only life feverishly alive; and the judicial
irony has gone out of his scheme of things. The fantastic, experimental
artist returns, now no longer external, but become morbidly curious. The
man of science, groping after something outside science, reaches back,
though with a certain uneasiness, to the nursery legend of the Rat-wife
in _Little Eyolf_; and the Rat-wife is neither reality nor imagination,
neither Mother Bombie nor Macbeth's witches, but the offspring of a
supernaturalism that does not believe in itself. In _John Gabriel
Borkman_, which is the culmination of Ibsen's skill in construction, a
play in four acts with only the pause of a minute between each, he is no
longer content t