The later plays of Ibsen, unlike almost all other modern
dramas, depend upon nothing that happens while they are being exhibited,
but rush downwards to their inevitable close in obedience to a series of
long-precedent impulses. In order to gain this effect, the dramatist has
to be acquainted with everything that has ever happened to his
personages, and we are informed that Ibsen used to build up in his own
mind, for months at a time, the past history of his puppets. He was now
master of this practice. We are not surprised, therefore, to find one of
the most penetrating of dramatic critics remarking of _The Wild Duck_
that "never before had the poet displayed such an amazing power of
fascinating and absorbing us by the gradual withdrawal of veil after
veil from the past."
The result of a searching determination to deal with personal and not
typical forms of temperament is seen in the firmness of the portraiture
in _The Wild Duck_, where, I think, less than ever before, is to be
found a trace of that incoherency which is to be met with occasionally
in all the earlier works of Ibsen, and which seems like the effect of a
sudden caprice or change of the point of view.
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