Word: idealist
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...WILD DUCK-Ibsen's horrible jest at all his own life stood for. Wherein a young idealist scatters several lives upon the desert of despondency...
...Barrie, here perverted into a casual Ibsen. He makes a pretty world for himself out of nice books and brotherly love, ruling out the flesh and the devil. His hero is a young man who is both those Siamese twins of psychology, Dr. Coue and Dr. Frank Crane. The idealist returns from a year in Paris to his village and, finding his fiancee the wretched wife of a doltish sergeant, fulfills his philosophy by helping them to untangle the kinks in their jarring nervous systems...
...cast play it in a shuffling fashion. Edgar Stehli as the idealist, Walter Abel as the sergeant and Helen Freeman as the wife were like mushrooms nodding underground. The slight piece would make a shimmering curtain-raiser, if the cast were whipped up into playing it more smartly...
...Wild Duck is a symbol-a bird that, when wounded by the hunter, digs itself in the weeds and dies. The hunter of the play is a young idealist who comes to a middleclass, satisfied household and splinters their illusions. In the hope that he may lead them to a newer, finer life of honesty, he tells the husband that his wife has been another's mistress. The father shuns his child, fearing he may not really be her father. The child kills herself. The point of the play is put in the mouth of the old doctor...
...with activity, ruled by the iron hand of mob psychology how can the college of today foster genius, cherish the artist, inspire the idealist? Mr. Henry Rood, writing in the February Scribner's, would like to know. And he would like to know, too, what place the modern college would find for Emerson, Poe, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and their great contemporaries. Being a shrewd observer Mr. Rood answers his last question as every thoughtful undergraduate could answer it: the college would first force these men "to wear hats and caps of the same style, suits and overcoats...