of mysterious visitors go by in the moonlight, one by one, each fraught
with the solemnity of fate. The play is full of striking pictures,
groups in light and shade, pictorial appeals to terror and pity.

The fault of the drama lies in the uncertain conception of the
characters, and particularly of that of the Matriarch herself. Inger is
described to us as the Mother of the Norwegian People, as the one
strong, inflexible and implacable brain moving in a world of depressed
and irritated men. "Now there is no knight left in our land," says Finn,
but--and this is the point from which the play starts--there is Inger
Gyldenloeve. We have approached the moment of crisis when the fortunes
and the fates of Norway rest upon the firmness of this majestic woman.
Inger is driven forward on the tide of circumstance, and, however she
may ultimately fail, we demand evidence of her inherent greatness. This,
however, we fail to receive, and partly, no doubt, because Ibsen was
still distracted at the division of the ways.

Oehlenschlaeger, if he had attempted this theme, would have made no
attempt after subtlety of character painting and still less after
correctness of historic color. He would have given small shrift to Olaf
Skaktavl, the psychological outlaw. But he would have drawn Inger, the
Mother of her People, in majestic strokes, and we should have had a
great simplicity, a noble outline with none of the detail put in. Ibsen,
already, cannot be satisfied with this; to him the detail is every
thing, and the result is a hopeless incongruity between the cartoon and
the finished work.

Lady Inger, in Ibsen's play, fails to impress us with greatness. "The
deed no less than the attempt confounds" her. She displays, from the
opening scene, a weakness that is explicable, but excludes all evidence