“I have really never had any strong feeling of solidarity; in fact, I have only in a way accepted it as a traditional tenet of faith,—­and if one had the courage to leave it out of consideration altogether, one would perhaps be rid of the worst ballast with which one’s personality is burdened.”  In another letter he wrote:  “I may as well say the one thing I love in freedom is the struggle for its attainment.  Its possession does not greatly concern me.”

As Brandes points out, this attitude of Ibsen’s is partly a reminiscence of romanticism; and in Ibsen as in Balzac the romanticist is forever wrestling with the realist.  There is in Ibsen’s writing an echo of that note of revolt, which rings thruout all the romanticist clamor, a tocsin of anarchy, and which justified the remark of Thiers that the Romanticists of 1830 were the forerunners of the Communists of 1871.  And the Communists were only putting into practise what Ibsen was preaching almost simultaneously in his correspondence with Brandes:  “The state must be abolished....  Undermine the idea of the commonwealth; set up spontaneity and spiritual kinship as the sole determining points in a union; and there will be attained the beginning of a freedom that is of some value.”  This sounds very like a return to Rousseau, almost a century after the futility of Rousseau’s theories had been made manifest to all.

There is no denying, however, that Ibsen’s doctrine is most appealing to a dramatist, whose business it is to set on the stage the strivings of the individual.  Perhaps the drama would be the one surviving art if anarchy should come,—­just as it would be certain to die slowly if socialism should succeed.  The self-subordination of socialism would be as deadening as the self-surrender of fatalism to that will-power which must ever be the mainspring of a play to move the multitude.  Altho it cannot formulate what it feels, the multitude has no relish for extreme measures; it may be making up its mind to turn toward either anarchy or socialism; but it means to move very slowly and it refuses to be hurried.

Here is a reason why Ibsen’s plays are never likely to be broadly popular in the theater.  The anarchistic element they contain helps to make them more dramatic, no doubt, more vigorous and more vital; but it is dimly perceived by the plain people who form the crowd of theater-goers, and by them it is dumbly resented.  The excessive individualism which gives to Ibsen’s best plays their tensity of interest is also the cause of their inacceptability to the multitude shrinking from any surrender of the hard won conquests of civilization.  There is significance in the fact that Ibsen’s plays have totally failed to establish themselves permanently in France, where the esthetic appreciation of his mastery of his art has been keenest and most competent, but where also the value of the social compact is most clearly understood.  Not only in France, but in all other countries governed by the Latin tradition