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Ibsen's power and genius for touching the finer intimate realities of life close at hand, are perhaps most evident in this one of his plays. His message lies peculiarly in the circle and through the intercourse of humble almost sordid daily life. Yet critical thought almost refuses to see in the midst of ordinary life the truth of such characters as he has drawn. The world has always tried to avoid its own too intimate features, projecting them into something which it considers not of itself, or which it believes transcends or denies the pettiness and sordidness and thereby even the finer depths which lie close at hand. The dramatic message is usually looked for in the unusual or in the embodiment of the ordinary in the unusual or striking form. And so at first it is missed here.
Even the student of pathology seizes first upon the more obvious problems of inheritance, morbid development or conspicuously diseased attitudes toward life, and often overlooks, as he does in actual life, many sick souls who are struggling under psychopathic burdens and to whom there is left only an imperfect compromise with reality. Or he makes a clumsy attempt to enroll such characters as those of this play in a scheme of classification which condemns them to a static conception as meaningless as it is inapplicable to the problem of their struggle and failure or success, and therefore he destroys the interpretative value of such characters for real life.
Not so with Ibsen. His characters come from the real world and he follows in them as a rule no particular line of heredity, of degeneracy