Few can swiftly rip apart particularly fervent strains of idealism like Ibsen can. The Wild Duck is a great case in point.
*****
Relling: You’re a sick man you are. You know that.
Gregers: There you’re right.
Relling: Oh yes. Your case has complications. First there’s this virulent moralistic fever; and then something worse – you keep going off in deliriums of hero worship; you always have to have something to admire that’s outside of yourself.
Gregers: Yes I certainly have to look for it outside myself.
Rellings: But you’re so woefully wrong about these great miraculous beings you think you see and hear around you. You’ve simply come back to a cotter’s cabin with your summons to the ideal; there’s no one but fugitives here.
Gregers: Hedvig did not die in vain. Did you notice how grief freed the greatness in him?
Relling: The grief of death brings out greatness in almost everyone. But how long do you think this glory will last with him?
Gregers: I should think it would last and grow all his life.
Relling: Before a year is over, little Hedvig will be nothing to him but a pretty declamation.
…
Gregers: If you are right and I am wrong, then life is not worth living.
Relling: Oh life would be quite tolerable after all, if only we could be rid of the confounded duns that keep on pestering us, in our poverty, with the claim of the ideal.
