o a place in history.
If we study her life, we find no reason to suppose that patriotic
considerations ever affected her conduct. The motive power of her
actions was on a far lower plane, and seems to have consisted mainly in
an amazingly strong instinct for adding to her wealth and her status.
We find her, for instance, on one occasion seizing the estates of a
neighbor, and holding them till she was actually forced to resign them.
When she gave her daughters in marriage to Danish noblemen, it was
to secure direct advantage from alliance with the most high-born
sons-in-law procurable. When she took a convent under her protection,
she contrived to extort a rent which well repaid her. Even for a
good action she exacted a return, and when she offered harbor to the
persecuted Chancellor, she had the adroitness to be well rewarded by a
large sum in rose-nobles and Hungarian gulden.

All this could not fail to be highly exasperating to Ibsen, who had set
out to be a realist, and was convicted by the spiteful hand of history
of having been an idealist of the rose-water class. No wonder that he
never touched the sequence of modern events any more.

There is some slight, but of course unconscious, resemblance to
_Macbeth_ in the external character of _Lady Inger_. This play has
something of the roughness of a mediaeval record, and it depicts a
condition of life where barbarism uncouthly mingles with a certain
luxury of condition. There is, however, this radical difference that in
_Lady Inger_ there is nothing preternatural, and it is, indeed, in this
play that Ibsen seems first to appreciate the value of a stiff attention
to realism. The romantic elements of the story, however, completely
dominate his imagination, and when we have read the play carefully what
remains with us most vividly is the picturesqueness and unity of
the scene. The action, vehement and tumultuous as it is, takes place
entirely within the walls of Oestraat castle, a mysterious edifice,
sombre and ancient, built on a crag over the ocean, and dimly lighted by

Magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn.

The action is exclusively nocturnal, and so large a place in it is taken
by huge and portable candlesticks that it might be called the Tragedy of
the Candelabra. Through the windows, on the landward side, a procession
of mysterious visitors go by in the moonlight, one by one, each fraught
with the solemnity of