er another comes forth out of
the night, and confuses her with pretensions and traps her with deceits
against which her intellect protests but her will is powerless to
contend.

Another feature in the conduct of _Lady Inger_ portrays the ambitious
but the inexperienced dramatist. No doubt a pious commentator can
successfully unravel all the threads of the plot, but the spectator
demands that a play should be clearly and easily intelligible. The
audience, however, is sorely puzzled by the events of this awful third
night after Martinmas, and resents the obscurity of all this intrigue by
candlelight. Why do the various persons meet at Oestraat? Who sends
them? Whence do they come and whither do they go? To these questions,
no doubt, an answer can be found, and it is partly given, and very
awkwardly, by the incessant introduction of narrative. The confused and
melodramatic scene in the banquet-hall between Nils Lykke and Skaktavl
is of central importance, but what is it about? The business with
Lucia's coffin is a kind of nightmare, in the taste of Webster or
of Cyril Tourneur. All these shortcomings are slurred over by the
enthusiastic critics of Scandinavia, yet they call for indulgence. The
fact is that _Lady Inger_ is a brilliant piece of romantic extravagance,
which is extremely interesting in illuminating the evolution of Ibsen's
genius, and particularly as showing him in the act of emancipating
himself from Danish traditions, but which has little positive value as a
drama.

The direct result of the failure of _Lady Inger_--for it did not please
the play-goers of Bergen and but partly satisfied its author--was,
however, to send him back, for the moment, more violently than ever to
the Danish tradition. Any record of this interesting phase in Ibsen's
career is, however, complicated by the fact that late in his life (in
1883) he did what was very unusual with him: he wrote a detailed account
of the circumstances of his poetical work in 1855 and 1856. He denied,
in short, that he had undergone any influence from the Danish poet
whom he had been persistently accused of imitating, and he traced the
movement of his mind to purely Norwegian sources. During the remainder
of his lifetime, of course, this statement greatly confounded criticism,
and there is still a danger of Ibsen's disclaimer being accepted for
gospel. However, literary history must be built on the evidence
before it, and the actual text of _The Feast at So