" Very well, then, have
it so if you please. What a fool am I to trouble about you at all. Go
down a steep place in Gadara and drown yourselves. If it amuses you, it
can amuse me also to be looked upon as Gregers Werle. _Vogue la galere_.
"But as the play is neither to deal with the Supreme Court, nor the
right of absolute veto, nor even with the removal of the sign of the
union from the flag," burning questions then and afterwards in Norwegian
politics, "it can hardly count upon arousing much interest in Norway";
it will, however, amuse me immensely to point out the absurdity of my
caring. It is in reading _The Wild Duck_ that for the first time the
really astonishing resemblance which Ibsen bears to Euripedes becomes
apparent to us. This is partly because the Norwegian dramatist now
relinquishes any other central object than the presentation to his
audience of the clash of temperament, and partly because here at last,
and for the future always, he separates himself from everything that is
not catastrophe. More than any earlier play, more even than _Ghosts_,
_The Wild Duck_ is an avalanche which has begun to move, and with a
movement unaffected by the incidents of the plot, long before the
curtain rises.
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