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38
IBSEN
excuses for not bothering about conscience.
But Ibsen, being an artist, knew that he who
would save his soul must do what he feels to
be right, not what is said to be so. Feeling
is the only guide, and the man who does
what he feels to be wrong does wrong,
whatever the State may say.
The plain, though by no means frank, determination
of society to suppress the individual
conscience lest it should clash with the interests
of the community seems positively to have
shocked him. To be fine, he believed, men
must think and feel for themselves and live
by their own sense of truth and beauty, not
collective wisdom or reach-me-down ideals.
by
" What sort of truths do the majority rally
round ? Truths so stricken in years that they
are sinking into decrepitude. When a truth
is so old as that, gentlemen, it's in a fair way
to become a lie (Laughter and jeers)."
How could Ibsen help being something of a
politician ? He seems really to have wished
his fellow-creatures to be fine, and to have
been angry with them because they wished to
be nothing of the sort. He did not understand
that this passionate individualism, this sense
of personal responsibility, this claim to private
judgment, is what no modern State, be it
democratic, bureaucratic or autocratic, can