156 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Ibsen can not be reduced to a formula. In a measure we may so 

 deal with both Emerson and Nietzsche. We can express the one with 

 some completeness in the term " the oversoul " and the other in the 

 phrase " the will to power," but it was Ibsen's nature to look more care- 

 fully at both sides of the shield. That seems to have been the conse- 

 quence not so much of any greater sureness or clarity of thinking as of 

 a wider range of human sympathies. Emerson wrote beautifully about 

 friendship, but he did not concern himself greatly about his immediate 

 relations with his friends. It was difficult to engage his interest deeply 

 in the affairs of the community or the state or the nation. It seems a 

 fairly reasonable assumption that any man who, theoretically or in fact, 

 is to determine the forms that life as a social whole shall take must be 

 a man who has a deep interest in his fellows, a man of warm social 

 instincts. Only as he is such a man can he come to understanding of 

 those things that man demands in his social order, and no social order 

 can succeed unless it founds itself as carefully upon man's instincts and 

 needs as it does upon the laws that man has discovered in nature. 

 Ibsen felt this as apparently neither Emerson nor Nietzsche did. He 

 was alive to all the political and social movements of his time, and so, 

 because the basal motives of his thinking were rather political than 

 religious or scientific, there was always in his thinking a glance at the 

 whole of society. This kept him full-visioned and sane, and it must be 

 this that Arthur Symons means when he says of him : 



He has less courage than Nietzsche, though no less logic, and is held back 

 from a complete realization of his own doctrine because he has so much worldly 

 wisdom, and is so anxious to make the best of all worlds. 



Here we have the significant thing about Ibsen, and it is in this that 

 he is a larger man than either Emerson or Metzsche, at once an indi- 

 vidualist and also a thinker conscious of that check upon the rampant 

 individualism of a Nietzsche that we now feel necessary for the making 

 of the " best of all worlds." Bernick in " The Pillars of Society," 

 seeing that he has not realized himself because he has not sufficiently 

 felt his obligations to society, says: 



Do you know what we are, we, who are reckoned the pillars of society? 

 We are the tolls of society, neither more nor less. 



Such a generalization understood as Ibsen meant it, has in it a pro- 

 founder truth than anything in either Emerson or Nietzsche and it is 

 a truth more immediately in accord with the spirit of the new century 

 whose first years saw him a weakening and a dying man. In the loss 

 of that divine made human in us of which Emerson dreamed we are 

 only men once more, and it is as men that we must make the best of our 

 world, if we do not make it the " best of all worlds." As evolutionists 

 we must at last realize, it seems clear, that the struggle for existence is 

 not and never again can be a blind struggle. Darwin made man a 



