me of the picture. But in the two following
plays, _The Wild Duck_ and _Rosmersholm_, he touched the highest point
of technical mastery in his interweaving of the past with the present. I
shall not attempt any analysis of the fabric of these plays. The process
would be long, tedious, and unhelpful; for no one could hope to employ a
method of such complexity without something of Ibsen's genius; and
genius will evolve its methods for itself. Let me only ask the reader to
compare the scene between old Werle and Gregers in the first act of _The
Wild Duck_ with the scene between Nora and Mrs. Linden in the first act
of _A Doll's House_, and mark the technical advance. Both scenes are, in
a sense, scenes of exposition. Both are mainly designed to place us in
possession of a sequence of bygone facts. But while the _Doll's House_
scene is a piece of quiet gossip, brought about (as we have noted) by
rather artificial means, and with no dramatic tension in it, the _Wild
Duck_ scene is a piece of tense, one might almost say fierce, drama,
fulfilling the Brunetiere definition in that it shows us two characters,
a father and son, at open war with each other. The one scene is outside
the real action, the other is an integral part of it. The one belongs to
Ibsen's tentative period, the other ushers in, one might almost say, his
period of consummate mastery.[13]

_Rosmersholm_ is so obviously nothing but the catastrophe of an
antecedent drama that an attempt has actually been made to rectify
Ibsen's supposed mistake, and to write the tragedy of the deceased
Beata. It was made by an unskilful hand; but even a skilful hand would
scarcely have done more than prove how rightly Ibsen judged that the
recoil of Rebecca's crime upon herself and Rosmer would prove more
interesting, and in a very real sense more dramatic, than the somewhat
vulgar process of the crime itself. The play is not so profound in its
humanity as _The Wild Duck_, but it is Ibsen's masterpiece in the art of
withdrawing veil after veil. From the technical point of view, it will
repay the closest study.

We need not look closely at the remaining plays. _Hedda Gabler_ is
perhaps that in which a sound proportion between the past and the
present is most successfully preserved. The interest of the present
action is throughout very vivid; but it is all rooted in facts and
relations of the past, which are elicited under circumstances of high
dramatic tension. Here again it is in