Just thirty years have passed since I first put pen to paper in a translation of Ibsen. In October 1877, _Pillars of Society_ reached me hot from the press; and, having devoured it, I dashed off a translation of it in less than a week. It has since cost me five or six times as much work in revision as it originally did in translation. The manuscript was punctually returned to me by more than one publisher; and something like ten years elapsed before it slowly dawned on me that the translating and editing of Ibsen’s works was to be one of the chief labours, as it has certainly been one of the greatest privileges, of my life. Since 1887 or thereabouts, not many months have passed in which a considerable portion of my time has not been devoted to acting, in one form or another, as intermediary between Ibsen and the English-speaking public. The larger part of the work, in actual bulk, I have myself done; but I have had invaluable aid from many quarters, and not merely from those fellow workers who are named in the following pages as the original translators of certain of the plays. These “helpers and servers,” as Solness would say, are too many to be individually mentioned; but to all of them, and chiefly to one who has devoted to the service of Ibsen a good deal of the hard-won leisure of Indian official life, I hereby convey my heartfelt thanks. The task is now ended. Though it has involved not a little sheer drudgery, it has, on the whole, been of absorbing interest. And I should have been ungrateful indeed had I shrunk from drudgery in the cause of an author who had meant so much to me. I have experienced no other literary emotion at all comparable to the eagerness with which, ever since 1877, I awaited each new play of Ibsen’s, or the excitement with which I tore off the wrapper of the postal packets in which the little paper-covered books arrived from Copenhagen. People who are old enough to remember the appearance of the monthly parts of _David Copperfield_ or _Pendennis_ may have some inkling of my sensations; but they were all the intenser as they recurred at intervals, not of one month, but of two years. And it was not Ibsen the man of ideas or doctrines that meant so much to me; it was Ibsen the pure poet, the creator of men and women, the searcher of hearts, the weaver of strange webs of destiny. I can only trust that, by diligence in seeking for the best interpretation of his thoughts, I have paid some part of my debt to that great spirit, and to the glorious country that gave him birth. WILLIAM ARCHER. LADY INGER OF ÖSTRÅT INTRODUCTION