part for a “leading lady” has rendered it less of an international stock-piece than _A Doll’s House_, _Hedda Gabler_, or even _Rosmersholm_. There can be no doubt that _The Wild Duck_ marks a reaction in the poet’s mood, following upon the eager vivacity wherewith, in _An Enemy of the People_, he had flung his defiance at the “compact Liberal majority,” which, as the reception of _Ghosts_ had proved, could not endure to be told the truth. Having said his say and liberated his soul, he now began to ask himself whether human nature was, after all, capable of assimilating the strong meat of truth—whether illusion might not be, for the average man, the only thing that could make life livable. It would be too much to say that the play gives a generally affirmative answer to this question. On the contrary, its last lines express pretty clearly the poet’s firm conviction that if life cannot reconcile itself with truth, then life may as well go to the wall. Nevertheless his very devotion to truth forces him to realise and admit that it is an antitoxin which, rashly injected at wrong times or in wrong doses, may produce disastrous results. It ought not to be indiscriminately administered by “quacksalvers.” Gregers Werle is unquestionably a piece of ironic self-portraiture. In his habit of “pestering people, in their poverty, with the claim of the ideal,” the poet adumbrates his own conduct from _Brand_ onwards, but especially in _Ghosts_ and _An Enemy of the People_. Relling, again, is an embodiment of the mood which was dominant during the conception of the play—the mood of pitying contempt for that poor thing human nature, as embodied in Hialmar. An actor who, in playing the part of Relling, made up as Ibsen himself, has been blamed for having committed a fault not only of taste, but of interpretation, since Gregers (it is maintained) is the true Ibsen. But the fact is that both characters represent the poet. They embody the struggle in his mind between idealism and cynical despondency. There can be no doubt, however, that in some measure he consciously identified himself with Gregers. In a letter to Mr. Gosse, written in 1872, he had employed in his own person the very phrase, _den ideale fordring_—“the claim of the ideal”—which is Gregers' watchword. The use of this sufficiently obvious phrase, however, does not mean much. Far stronger evidence of identification is afforded by John Paulsen[3] in some anecdotes he relates of Ibsen’s habits of “self-help”—evidence which we may all the more safely accept, as Herr Paulsen seems to have been unconscious of its bearing upon the character of Gregers. “Ibsen,” he says, “was always bent upon doing things himself, so as not to give trouble to servants. His ideal was ‘the self-made man.’[4] Thus, if a button came off one of his garments he would retire to his own room, lock the door, and, after many comical and unnecessary preliminaries, proceed to sew on the button himself,