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John Gabriel Borkman

Creator: Ibsen, Henrik, 1828-1906
Translator: Archer, William, 1856-1924
Contributor: -
Editor: -


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plan, too, we may possibly trace what I take to be the one serious flaw in the the play--the comparative weakness of the second half of the third act. The scene of Erhart's rebellion against the claims of the mother, aunt, and father strikes one as the symmetrical working out of a problem rather than a passage of living drama. All this means, of course, that there is a certain looseness of fibre in _John Gabriel Borkman_ which we do not find in the best of Ibsen's earlier works. But in point of intellectual power and poetic beauty it yields to none of its predecessors. The conception of the three leading figures is one of the great things of literature; the second act, with the exquisite humour of the Foldal scene, and the dramatic intensity of the encounter between Borkman and Ella, is perhaps the finest single act Ibsen ever wrote, in prose at all events; and the last scene is a thing of rare and exalted beauty. One could wish that the poet's last words to us had been those haunting lines with which Gunhild and Ella join hands over Borkman's body: We twin sisters--over him we both have loved. We two shadows--over the dead man. Among many verbal difficulties which this play presents, the greatest, perhaps, has been to find an equivalent for the word "opreisning," which occurs again and again in the first and second acts. No one English word that I could discover would fit in all the different
Dorian

CHAPTER ONE. Dorian Trent was going to town to buy himself a pair of shoes. He had some other errands to perform for himself and his mother, but the reason for his going to town was the imperative need of shoes. It was Friday afternoon. The coming Sunday he must appear decently shod, so his mother had told him, at the same time hinting at some other than the Sunday reason. He now had the money, three big, jingling silver dollars in his pocket. Dorian whistled cheerfully as he trudged along the road. It was a scant three miles to town, and he would rather walk that short distance than to be bothered with a horse. When he took Old Nig, he had to keep to the main-traveled road straight into town, then tie him to a post--and worry about him all the time; but afoot and alone, he could move along as easily as he pleased, linger on the canal bank or cut cross-lots through the fields to the river, cross it on the footbridge, then go on to town by the lower meadows. The road was dusty that afternoon, and the sun was hot. It would be
contexts; so I have had to employ three: "redemption," "restoration," and in one place "rehabilitation." The reader may bear in mind that these three terms represent one idea in the original. Borkman in Act II. uses a very odd expression--"overskurkens moral," which I have rendered "the morals of the higher rascality." I cannot but suspect (though for this I have no authority) that in the word "overskurk," which might be represented in German by "Ueberschurke," Borkman is parodying the expression "Uebermensch," of which so much has been heard of late. When I once suggested this to Ibsen, he neither affirmed nor denied it. I understood him to say, however, that in speaking of "overskurken" he had a particular man in view. Somewhat pusillanimously, perhaps, I pursued my inquiries no further. *Copyright, 1907, by Charles Scribner's Sons. JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN (1896) PERSONS. JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN, formerly Managing Director of a Bank. MRS. GUNHILD BORKMAN, his wife.