In “The Wild Duck” Ibsen approaches in his own manner, without, however, much insistence, the mural aspects of the equality of the sexes. Is a woman, who has had no relationships with a man before marriage, entitled to expect the same in her husband? Is a man, who has had relationships with other women before marriage, entitled to complain if his wife has also had such relationships? These are the sort of questions which the Scandinavian and Danish dramatists--Björnson, Eduard Brandes, Charlotte Edgren, Benzon--seem never tired of discussing. Eduard Brandes makes his admirable little drama “Et Besög,” published about the same time as “Vildanden,” hang on this problem, and although he brings no new idea into the play, he settles the question in the same spirit as his great fellow-dramatist. “En Hanske,” also published about the same time, gives us Björnson’s contribution to the question. In this play a young woman is in love with a young man who, as she learns accidentally at the moment of formally engaging herself to him, has had previous relationships with other women. At the same time she discovers that her own father, an amiable old _élégant_, has been frequently unfaithful to his wife, and that her mother still carries about a suppressed bitterness. The girl realizes that life is not like what she has been brought up to believe; she rejects her lover, and after some unexpected and quite unnecessary brutalities from him, flings her glove in his face. All Björnson’s genial vivacity and emotional expansiveness come out in the earlier scenes of this play, and there is some pleasant comedy, especially when the easy-going father tries to lecture his daughter, to the accompaniment of her acute comments and the wife’s sarcastic exclamations, on a wife’s privileges. “Here,” he says, “is woman’s noblest calling.” “As what?” asks the daughter. “As what?--Have you not listened? As--as the ennobling influence in marriage, as that which makes man purer, as, as----” “Soap?” “Soap? what on earth makes you think of soap?” “You make out that marriage is a great laundry for men. We girls are to stand ready, each at her wash-tub, with her piece of soap. Is that how you mean it?” On this ground, however, it is difficult to avoid comparisons with Ibsen, and we miss here both the artistic and moral grip of the greater dramatist. Ibsen’s solution of the matter in “The Wild Duck” seems to be that there can be no true marriage without mutual knowledge and mutual confession.