rds
primarily as an ignominious compromise--a surrender and curtailment of
our natural rights and liberties, in return for a paltry security for
life and limb." ... "He has apparently no appreciation of the tremendous
struggle, the immense suffering, the deluge of blood and tears, it has
cost to redeem the world from that predatory liberty which he admires,
and to build up gradually the safeguards of organized society which he
so detests."

In other words, Ibsen is not what is called "an advanced thinker"; he is
really the most extreme of reactionaries, because he wants to go back to
the beginnings of civilization. He is willing to give up the chronometer
and to return to the sun-dial.

It would be unfair, of course, to sustain what is here alleged by
quoting speeches from his plays, since Ibsen is too completely a
dramatist to use any one character merely as a mask thru the mouth of
which he might voice his private opinion. But when we consider the whole
group of the social dramas and when we disengage the philosophy
underlying them and sustaining them, we may venture to deduce the
private opinion of the author. And in his letters to Georg Brandes we
find this opinion fearlessly exprest: "I have really never had any
strong feeling of solidarity; in fact, I have only in a way accepted it
as a traditional tenet of faith,--and if one had the courage to leave it
out of consideration altogether, one would perhaps be rid of the worst
ballast with which one's personality is burdened." In another letter he
wrote: "I may as well say the one thing I love in freedom is the
struggle for its attainment. Its possession does not greatly concern
me."

As Brandes points out, this attitude of Ibsen's is partly a reminiscence
of romanticism; and in Ibsen as in Balzac the romanticist is forever
wrestling with the realist. There is in Ibsen's writing an echo of that
note of revolt, which rings thruout all the romanticist clamor, a tocsin
of anarchy, and which justified the remark of Thiers that the
Romanticists of 1830 were the forerunners of the Communists of 1871. And
the Communists were only putting into practise what Ibsen was preaching
almost simultaneously in his correspondence with Brandes: "The state
must be abolished.... Undermine the idea of the commonwealth; set up
spontaneity and spiritual kinship as the sole determining points in a
union; and there will be attained the beginning of a freedom that is of
some value." This so