IBSEN, EMERSON AND NIETZSCHE 155 



makes it significant. A decade or two makes now such an addition to 

 the body of facts that come into the range of human knowledge that the 

 effect may be complete subversion of previously entertained opinions 

 except in the case of men whose sentiments are so strong that they cling 

 to what they have believed the more tenaciously the more it is assailed. 

 Public opinion as a whole shapes itself in agreement with the new facts. 

 It is new facts and fuller interpretation of the old facts, not merely a 

 refluent wave of human feeling, that is responsible for the current trend 

 away from individualism. 



Ibsen died in nineteen hundred and six, and so he must be reckoned 

 as of both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. He was an old 

 man then, however, over twenty years older than Nietzsche was when 

 he died, and naturally the real body of Ibsen's work was done by the end 

 of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, he was a man whose thoughts 

 looked forward to our day as Emerson's did not and as Nietzsche's did 

 not. He was an individualist as they were, but he was not an extremist, 

 he was not a man to see the world from one view-point only, he was not 

 narrow or intellectually provincial. That he went with the current 

 ideas of his time as fully as either Emerson or Nietzsche, however, is 

 easily apparent, and it is quite as clear that he was intensely an indi- 

 vidualist. What could be more thoroughly individualistic than the 

 words with which Dr. Stockmann ends " An Enemy of the People " ? 

 "You see," he tells his wife and children after the utter defeat of all 

 his plans for the good of the community, " You see, the fact is that the 

 strongest man upon earth is he who stands most alone." The two plays 

 that probably more than any others have interested the general reading 

 and play-going public, " Ghosts " and " A Doll's House," are both of 

 them declarations — positive and negative, of the same thing, the right 

 of the individual to develop his own life in his own way according to 

 the needs of his own nature without too close a regard for the demands 

 of society. When at the end of " A Doll's House " Nora is leaving her 

 husband and children and Helmer protests that before all else she is 

 wife and mother, she answers : "I no longer think so. I think that 

 before all else I am a human being just as you are ; or at least, I have to 

 try to become one." It is in fact just the individualism in this play 

 and in these words that has made it in a sense the distinctive and 

 notable play of the nineteenth century. It is a human cry for emanci- 

 pation, for freedom, for self-realization, and it is a cry that Ibsen 

 reiterates again and again through his dramas, demanding that man 

 shall realize himself, but also that he shall realize his best self. It is 

 his peculiar virtue as an individualist that he is held back more or less 

 by the feeling that no man realizes his best self without taking his 

 fellows very largely into account. That is the summing up of his word 

 in " Brand." 



