I confess I do not know quite definitely what Ibsen had in mind when he spoke of _The Wild Duck_ holding “a place apart” among his productions and exemplifying a technique (for he is evidently thinking of its technical development) “divergent” from that of its predecessors. I should rather say that it marked the continuation and consummation of the technical method which he had been elaborating from _Pillars of Society_ onward. It is the first example of what we may term his retrospective method, in its full complexity. _Pillars of Society_ and _A Doll’s House_ may be called semi-retrospective; something like half of the essential action takes place before the eyes of the audience. _Ghosts_ is almost wholly retrospective; as soon as the past has been fully unravelled, the action is over, and only the catastrophe remains; but in this case the past to be unravelled is comparatively simple and easy of disentanglement. _An Enemy of the People_ is scarcely retrospective at all; almost the whole of its action falls within the frame of the picture. In _The Wild Duck_, on the other hand, the unravelling of the past is a task of infinite subtlety and elaborate art. The execution of this task shows a marvellous and hitherto unexampled grasp of mind. Never before, certainly, had the poet displayed such an amazing power of fascinating and absorbing us by the gradual withdrawal of veil after veil from the past; and as every event was also a trait of character, it followed that never before had his dialogue been so saturated, as it were, with character-revelation. The development of the drama reminds one of the practice (in itself a very bad practice) of certain modern stage-managers, who are fond of raising their curtain on a dark scene, and then gradually lighting it up by a series of touches on the electric switchboard. First there comes a glimmer from the right, then a flash from the left; then the background is suffused with light, so that we see objects standing out against it in profile, but cannot as yet discern their details. Then comes a ray from this batten, a gleam from that; here a penetrating shaft of light, there a lambent glow; until at last the footlights are turned on at full, and every nook and cranny of the scene stands revealed in a blaze of luminosity. But Ibsen’s switchboard is far more subtly subdivided than that of even the most modern theatre. At every touch upon it, some single, cunningly-placed, ingeniously-dissembled burner kindles, almost unnoticed save by the most watchful eye; so that the full light spreads over the scene as imperceptibly as dawn grows into day. It seems to me, then, that _The Wild Duck_ is a consummation rather than a new departure. Assuredly it marks the summit of the poet’s achievement (in modern prose) up to that date. Its only possible rival is _Ghosts_; and who does not feel the greater richness, depth, suppleness, and variety of the later play? It gives us, in a word, a larger segment of life.