act that only
by giving complete expression to oneself can one produce the finest
work. Duty to oneself: that was how he looked upon it; and though, in a
letter to Bjoernson, he affirmed, as the highest praise, 'his life was
his best work,' to himself it was the building-up of the artist in him
that he chiefly cared for. And to this he set himself with a moral
fervour and a scientific tenacity. There was in Ibsen none of the
abundance of great natures, none of the ease of strength. He nursed his
force, as a miser hoards his gold; and does he not give you at times an
uneasy feeling that he is making the most of himself, as the miser makes
the most of his gold by scraping up every farthing?

'The great thing,' he says in a letter of advice, 'is to hedge about
what is one's own, to keep it free and clear from everything outside
that has no connexion with it.' He bids Brandes cultivate 'a genuine,
full-blooded egoism, which shall force you for a time to regard what
concerns you as the only thing of any consequence, and everything else
as non-existent.' Yet he goes on to talk about 'benefiting society,' is
conscious of the weight which such a conviction or compromise lays upon
him, and yet cannot get rid of the burden, as Nietzsche does. He has
less courage than Nietzsche, though no less logic, and is held back from
a complete realisation of his own doctrine because he has so much
worldly wisdom and is so anxious to make the best of all worlds.

'In every new poem or play,' he writes, 'I have aimed at my own personal
spiritual emancipation and purification, for a man shares the
responsibility and the guilt of the society to which he belongs.' This
queer entanglement in social bonds on the part of one whose main
endeavour had always been to free the individual from the conventions
and restrictions of society is one of those signs of parochialism which
peep out in Ibsen again and again. 'The strongest man,' he says in a
letter, anticipating the epilogue of one of his plays, 'is he who stands
alone.' But Ibsen did not find it easy to stand alone, though he found
pleasure in standing aloof. The influence of his environment upon him is
marked from the first. He breaks with his father and mother, never
writes to them or goes back to see them; partly because he feels it
necessary to avoid contact with 'certain tendencies prevailing there.'
'Friends are an expensive luxury,' he finds, because they keep him from
doing what he wishes