Are not the memories of youth abiding? and can any one of us free himself wholly from the bonds of early environment?  The audience that Ibsen has ever had in view when he was making his most searching tragedies of modern life, the audience he has always wisht to move and to rouse, morally and intellectually, was such a group of spectators as might gather in the tiny and isolated village where he had spent his boyhood.  Ibsen himself may not have been conscious that this was the audience he was seeking to stimulate; indeed, he may never have suspected it; and he might even deny it in good faith.  But the fact remains, nevertheless, obvious and indisputable; and it helps to explain not a little that might otherwise remain obscure.  It enables us to suggest a reason for a certain closeness of atmosphere sometimes felt in this play or that, and for a certain lack of largeness of outlook, in spite of the depth of insight.  It makes us more tolerant toward a certain narrowness, which is often provincial and sometimes almost parochial.

It is not merely that Ibsen’s social dramas are all of them intensely Norwegian, peopled solely with natives and having the fiords ever present in the background.  It is not merely that he has shrunk from all international contrasts, and from all cosmopolitanism;—­and here, no doubt, he has chosen the better part.  It is not that he himself has not shaken off the pettiness of the little village where he received his first impression of his fellow-man.  It is that altho he has seen the world outside and altho he is thereby enabled to measure the smallness of what he left behind, he cannot forget the inhabitants of Grimstad, individually and collectively.  They supply the constituent elements of the audience which he is ever addressing, consciously or unconsciously.  It is their limited horizon he wants to enlarge; and it is their lethargy he is longing to shatter.

IX

Perhaps there is no injustice in holding that much of Ibsen’s arrogant and aggressive individualism and self-assertion, is the result of his own youthful solitude and struggle in the little village where the druggist’s ambitious apprentice who wrote poetry and who had opinions of his own, soon managed to get on a war-footing with most of his neighbors,—­as the late Professor Boyesen recorded from his own observations at the time, explaining that “a small town, where everybody is interested in what his neighbor has for dinner, is invariably more intolerant of dissent, more tyrannical toward social rebels, than a city of metropolitan rank.”  And even when Ibsen removed to Christiania he did not get out of this atmosphere of pettiness.  As Professor Boyesen remarked, again from personal experience, “One hundred thousand village souls do not make a city.”  And the same compatriot of the dramatist, in dealing with the ‘Enemy of the People’ declared that “each trait bears the indelible mark of a small society, which stunts and cripples the sons of men, making them crabbed and crooked, when in a richer soil many of them might have shot boldly up in the sunlight.”