THE WILD DUCK. There are no
cardinal virtues of Ibsenism. There is no ideal man of Ibsen. All this
is not only admitted, but vaunted in the most valuable and thoughtful
of all the eulogies upon Ibsen, Mr. Bernard Shaw's QUINTESSENCE OF
IBSENISM. Mr. Shaw sums up Ibsen's teaching in the phrase, "The golden
rule is that there is no golden rule." In his eyes this absence of an
enduring and positive ideal, this absence of a permanent key to virtue,
is the one great Ibsen merit. I am not discussing now with any fullness
whether this is so or not. All I venture to point out, with an
increased firmness, is that this omission, good or bad, does leave us
face to face with the problem of a human consciousness filled with very
definite images of evil, and with no definite image of good. To us
light must be henceforward the dark thing--the thing of which we cannot
speak. To us, as to Milton's devils in Pandemonium, it is darkness
that is visible. The human race, according to religion, fell once, and
in falling gained knowledge of good and of evil. Now we have fallen a
second time, and only the knowledge of evil remains to us.

A great silent collapse, an enormous unspoken disappointment, has in
our time fallen on our Northern civilization. All previous ages have
sweated and been crucified in an attempt to realize what is really the
right life, what was really the good man. A definite part of the modern
world has come beyond question to the conclusion that there is no
answer to these questions, that the most that we can do is to set up a
few notice-boards at places of obvious danger, to warn men, for
instance, against drinking themselves to death, or ignoring the mere
existence of their neighbours. Ibsen is the first to return from the
baffled hunt to bring us the tidings of great failure.

Every one of the popular modern phrases and ideals is a dodge in order
to shirk the problem of what is good. We are fond of talking about
"liberty"; that, as we talk of it, is a dodge to avoid discussing what
is good. We are fond of talking about "progress"; that is a dodge to
avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about
"education"; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. The
modern man says, "Let us leave all these arbitrary standards and
embrace liberty." This is, logically rendered, "Let us not decide what
is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it." He says,
"Away with your old moral formulae