VERACITY. 201 



of Ibsen's strangest and most enigmatical plays, The Wild Duck. 

 What I have elsewhere written about this extraordinary work bears 

 so directly upon the issue now before us that I may be pardoned for 

 reproducing a portion of it here : " After all, I do not think that it 

 is very difficult to see the point of connection between this play and 

 the body of Ibsen's work. It seems to me to have been the writer's 

 purpose to clinch the ideas already set forth in Hedda G abler, though 

 allowance must be made for the presence and coloring of an even 

 more dejected mood. Truth may prove destructive; but then it will 

 be the fault not of truth but of ourselves. Its boasted liberty is a 

 blessing to those only who are fit for liberty; to many it may prove 

 nothing more than a short cut to ruin. Men must be educated, not 

 only in truth, but for truth. You can not make people free from the 

 outside. They must achieve freedom for themselves, by inward 

 growth. You may strike off their shackles, but this will only give 

 a man who is a slave by nature an open chance to plunge into a 

 still more desperate servitude. It is useless, worse than useless, to 

 offer new knowledge where the recipient lacks spiritual strength and 

 flexibility to adjust himself to the larger claims which it will un- 

 doubtedly force upon him. Gregers Werle, in the play, makes ideal 

 demands upon an individual mentally and morally unable to rise to 

 the level of the occasion; what marvel, then, that the experiment 

 proves fatal to all concerned ? It is, therefore, perhaps fair to regard 

 The Wild Duck as a kind of complement or sequel to An Enemy of 

 Society. In the latter drama, Ibsen boldly proclaimed his right to 

 speak out, come what might of it; in the present work, on the other 

 hand, he mournfully acknowledges that the gospel he brings to the 

 world — true gospel though he conceives it to be — may none the 

 less be fraught with vast and incalculable dangers for a society 

 made up for the most part of people like those we meet in the 

 play. ... Is it not best, he seems to ask, just to leave them as 

 they are? Who shall shoulder the responsibility of uttering the 

 new word, knowing that while it is potent to save, it is also potent 

 to destroy? " 



Thus, as well as I am able to read it, runs Ibsen's thought; and 

 the doubt which it expresses must from time to time have been felt 

 by most of us. To proceed further with the discussion of the ques- 

 tion thus opened up would here commit us to an unwarrantable 

 digression into casuistry. It therefore must for the present be left 

 where it is.* I have raised it with a view only to completeness — 

 that is, to show that the full conception of veracity implies faith in 

 truth as well as love for truth; whether we can any of us declare 



* The reader desirous of following; up this part of the subject will be glad to be reminded 

 of John Morley's extremely able essay On Compromise. 



