"The dead cling to Rosmersholm"--that is the
keynote of the play. The answer to the second question is interwoven with
an attempt to rationalise the fatality that broods over Rosmersholm. The
dead cling to it because a subtle and nameless wrong has been committed
against them. And that sin has been committed by the woman who could save
Rosmer. At the end of the second act Rebecca refuses to be his wife. The
reason for that refusal, dimly prefigured, absorbs his thoughts, and
through two acts of consummate dramaturgic suspense the sombre history is
gradually unfolded. And no vague phrases concerning the ennobling of
humanity can conceal the central fact: the play derives its power from a
traditional plot and a conventional if sound motive--crime and its
discovery, sin and its retribution.
In _Lonely Lives_ the two questions apparently treated in _Rosmersholm_
are answered, not in the terms of effective dramaturgy, but of life
itself. Johannes Vockerat lives in the midst of the world that must undo
him--subtly irritated by all to which his heart clings. Out of that world
he has grown and he cannot liberate himself from it. His good wife and
his admirable parents are bound to the conventional in no base or
fanatical sense.
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