Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Volume 8).djvu/30

 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