But in the two following
plays, _The Wild Duck_ and _Rosmersholm_, he touched the highest point
of technical mastery in his interweaving of the past with the present. I
shall not attempt any analysis of the fabric of these plays. The process
would be long, tedious, and unhelpful; for no one could hope to employ a
method of such complexity without something of Ibsen's genius; and
genius will evolve its methods for itself. Let me only ask the reader to
compare the scene between old Werle and Gregers in the first act of _The
Wild Duck_ with the scene between Nora and Mrs. Linden in the first act
of _A Doll's House_, and mark the technical advance. Both scenes are, in
a sense, scenes of exposition. Both are mainly designed to place us in
possession of a sequence of bygone facts. But while the _Doll's House_
scene is a piece of quiet gossip, brought about (as we have noted) by
rather artificial means, and with no dramatic tension in it, the _Wild
Duck_ scene is a piece of tense, one might almost say fierce, drama,
fulfilling the Brunetiere definition in that it shows us two characters,
a father and son, at open war with each other.
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