THE HESPERIAN
s
I I
laid bare. Ho failed to sou how closely men
hug these lies to thoir bosoms, how indeed
they are entwined about one's very heart
strings, how little short of death it is to pull
them out. His mind was so permeated by
reverence that it postulated equal reverence
in everybody else. In his openness and
frankness, he failed to comprehend how
abusive the respectable, liberal,public-spirited
portion of the public in Europe and America
could be. He supposed that his discoveries
in the domain of lies would be hailed with
gratitude. How a lie could be preferred
to truth because it carried with it glory and
honor and riches, ho could not understand.
"When he did finally understand it, the iron
entered his soul.
Ibsen groups all lies under the head of
ideals. "Let us not say ?77t'fo," he pleads.
"Let us rather use the good old Teutonic
word '.' By ideals ho does not mean
that progressive series of elevated types,
which lives in our imagination, and without
which progress would be impossible in this
world. To Ibsen, the ideal man is the man
without ideals. But he means the mass of
false, conventional, inorganic conceptions of
goodness to which we are all slaves. The
courage to live our lives without ideals is the
sum and substance of all earthly wisdom.
By what right is our life glorified, and an
other made a by-word and a scorning ? By
what right do certain conventional require
ments make an unholy thing holy I Surely
not by public opinion not by the decision
of any majority. A majority represents
force simply. It is never right. Whatever
is in full harmony with any human soul in
its normal condition is right. The approval
or condemnation of the public at large has
nothing to do with it. Each man's own soul
is the court of last appeal. There was a
blessed time back in the dim past when indi
vidual freedom was not hampered by 4 ' ideals' '
lies. Then a man did not hesitate to live
as his conscience prompted him. He did
wrong not because his acts conflicted with
a conventional type of goodness, but because
they were not in harmony with the true type
in his soul. Such is the philosophy of Ilenrik
Ibsen simple and straightforward enough.
Jt means simply, "Bo true to yourself."
But to be true to one's self falls glibly enough
from the tongue. To drag ourselves out of
the bog of lies, into which wo have all sunk,
is a very different thing.
But the practical execution of such a
theory the abolition of all restraint on so
ciety would be suicidal. If so, well and
good! If modern society cannot endure
truth, modern society is a lie and should be
Hung into outer darkness. Let us go back
to first principles. The assumption that
modern society an aggregation of lies
cowardice and faint-heartedncss is the ideal
of the ages, is itself a lie. But it is not Ib
sen and the realists that arc pessimists. On
the contrary, it is the idealists. It is the
man that has no confidence in the native in
tegrity of humanity that fears to abolish re
straint. Ibsen never doubts that integrity.
It is the man that doubts the capacity of the
stream to purify itself, if only loft free to
flow, that fears to remove the dam. Ib
sen never doubts that capacity. ' 'Where law
is supported by the dagger and the sword"
he says "daylight is much more certain than
here where wo murder with words." Above
all, let us be sure that what we condemn as
impure and unholy really is so. Our
thinking so on grounds of expediency or
even decency does not make it so. Our
forms of speech, our habits of thought, our
very consciousness, are so hedged about with
lies that true judgments are no longer possi
ble. Our only salvation lies in getting back
to chaos, back to first principles behind
ideals. But it is vain to attempt accelera
tion. The shell will never crack until the
worm has hollowed it out. The lies of the
nineteenth century no more than the lies of
the fifth will ever come rattling down until
their appointed time. Wickedness and ty
ranny must first be apotheosized.
In his earlier work, Ibsen certainly does
not display the gruifness he does in his later.
He was a man of pure ideals in his youth
is yet, for tho matter of that. He isa Goth,
a
"3"r"