IBSEN'S PLAYS 733 



Ellida. Now, just listen, Wangel. What is the use of our lying to our 

 selves and to each other ? 



Wangel. Lying, do you say ? Is that what we are doing ? 



Ellida. Yes, that is what we are doing. Or, at any rate, we are hiding, 

 the truth. For the truth, the pure, clean truth, is just this, that you came 

 out there and bought me. 



Wangel. " Bought " ! do you say " bought " ? 



Ellida. Oh ! I wasn't an atom better than you were. 1 agreed to it. 1 

 went and sold myself to you. 



Wangel. Ellida! have you really the heart to call it so? 



Ellida. But what else can 1 call it? You couldn't endure the void in 

 your house. You were looking about for a new wife. 



Wangel. And a new mother for my children, Ellida. 



Ellida. Well, perhaps, incidentally, though you hadn't the least idea 

 whether I was fit for the position. You'd only seen me and talked to me 

 once or twice. And you took a fancy to me, and so 



Wangel. Yes ! call it whatever you please. 



Ellida. And i, on my side there was I, all helpless and resourceless, and 

 utterly alone. It was so natural for me to fall in when you came and 

 oiFered to look after me for all my life. 



Ellida feels that she was forced into the transaction which she calls 

 a sale, and her husband calls a marriage. At the very time she is 

 speaking thus to him, Bollette is arranging a transaction, very differ- 

 ent in its terms but identical in its nature, with Arnholm. Nora 

 Helmer and Fru Alving presumably drifted into marriage, and 

 promised to surrender themselves before they had come to any con- 

 sciousness of who and what they were. Not one of them had any real 

 choice, or knew what she was doing. If they had had a choice they 

 would have known that their problem was the problem of life to 

 find oneself by losing oneself. 



I am convinced that it is in this typical significance of marriage, 

 and not in any special interest in the so-called " woman question " 

 as such, that we are to seek the reason of Ibsen's constant recurrence 

 to this theme. Suppress individuality and you have no life; assert 

 it and you have war and chaos. The principle of life is found when 

 we can reconcile the strong utterance of self with self-abnegation; 

 and the necessity of harmonizing these two is absolutely forced upon 

 us when we think of marriage. The mere freedom of choice on which 

 Ellida Wangel and Nora Helmer lay such stress is but a condition, 

 not a principle of healthy life. Hedda Gabler neither drifted nor was 

 forced into marriage; but she deliberately and shamelessly paid the 

 flattered and delighted Tesman in the forged coinage of love for 

 opening to her a retreat from the career she had exhausted, and an 

 entry into the best career she could still think of as possible; and we 

 see the result. Without the spirit of self-surrender free choice will 

 never secure self-realization. 



Ibsen may well say that his forte is asking questions, not answer- 

 ing them ! In this particular matter his questioning began early. 



