is interested in what his neighbor has for dinner, is invariably more
intolerant of dissent, more tyrannical toward social rebels, than a city
of metropolitan rank." And even when Ibsen removed to Christiania he did
not get out of this atmosphere of pettiness. As Professor Boyesen
remarked, again from personal experience, "One hundred thousand village
souls do not make a city." And the same compatriot of the dramatist, in
dealing with the 'Enemy of the People' declared that "each trait bears
the indelible mark of a small society, which stunts and cripples the
sons of men, making them crabbed and crooked, when in a richer soil many
of them might have shot boldly up in the sunlight."

Norway seems to be a land of villages, with a people not yet enlarged
and awakened from stifling bigotry. Its social organization still
presses painfully on those who wish to do their own thinking; and half a
century ago in Ibsen's impressionable youth, the pressure must have been
tragic. There is no call for wonder that he should have reacted
violently against these fettering restrictions. There is no need to
speculate on the reasons why he has failed to feel the extraordinary
delicacy of the problem of the equilibrium between the opposing forces,
which have a cramping socialism on the one side and an exuberant anarchy
on the other. His choice was swift and he exerted his strength
unhesitatingly against the chains which had clanked on his limbs in his
early manhood. He knew only too well and by bitter experience the
hardness of the crust that encased the Norwegian community and he felt
the need of blows still harder to break thru and let in a little light.
And this is why he is so emphatic in his individualism; this is why he
is so fiercely violent in his assertion of the right of every man to own
himself and to obey his own will, contemptuous of the social bond which
alone holds civilization together.

It is Boyesen, a fellow Norwegian and an ardent admirer of Ibsen's, who
has most clearly stated Ibsen's position: "He seems to be in ill humor
with humanity and the plan of creation in general (if, indeed, he
recognized such a plan), and he devotes himself, with ruthless
satisfaction, to showing what a paltry contemptible lot men are, and how
aimless, futile, and irrational their existence is on this earth, with
its chaotic strivings and bewildered endeavors." ... "Furthermore, he
utterly undervalues what we call civilization, which he rega