p At Ibsen’s funeral one of his admirers called him a Moses. This is hardly an apt comparison.

p Ibsen, perhaps as no other figure in world literature during his day, was able to lead the reader out of the Egypt of philistinism. But he did not know where the Promised Land was, and even thought that there was no need for one, because it was all a matter of man’s inner liberation. This Moses was condemned to wander hopelessly in the wilderness of abstraction. For him it was a tremendous misfortune. He said of himself that his life had been "one long, long Passion Week".  [457•*  One is bound to believe this. For his honest and integrated nature the constant wandering in the labyrinth of insoluble questions must [have] become a source of intolerable suffering.

p He owed this suffering to the lack of development of Norwegian social life. Ugly petty-bourgeois reality showed him what toshun, but could not show him where to go.  [457•** 

p True, after leaving Norway, having shaken the dust of bourgeois vulgarity from his feet and settled abroad, he had every apparent external possibility of finding the path that leads to the true elevation of the human spirit and the true victory over base philistinism. In Germany at that time the liberation movement of the working class, the movement about which even its enemies say that it alone is capable of engendering a true and lofty moral idealism now, was already advancing in a mighty stream. But Ibsen no longer had any inner possibility of becoming acquainted with this movement. His questing mind was too absorbed with the tasks which the social life of his native land had set him and 458 which remained insoluble for him precisely because the life which had presented him with them had not yet developed the premises necessary for their solution.  [458•* 

p Ibsen has been called a pessimist.  And he was in fact one. But given his position and his serious attitude to the questions that tormented him he could not possibly have become an optimist.  He would have become an optimist only when he succeeded in solving the enigma of the sphinx of our time, and he was not fated to do so.

p He himself says that one of the main motifs of his work was the contrast between desire and possibility. He might have said that this was the main motif of his work and that herein lay the key to his pessimism. This contrast was in its turn the product of the environment. In a petty-bourgeois society the "human poodles" may have very extensive plans. But they are "not fated" to " accomplish" anything for the simple reason that there is no objective support for their will.

p It is also said that Ibsen’s cult was the cult of individualism.  This is also true. But this cult arose in him only because his morality did not find an outlet into politics. And this was a manifestation not of the strength of his personality, but of its weakness which he owed to the social environment that had brought him up. After that judge for yourselves about the perspicacity of La Chesnais, who in the above-mentioned article in the Mercure de France maintains that it was a stroke of good fortune for Ibsen to have been born in such a small country, "where, it is true, things were difficult for him at first, but where at least not one of his efforts could remain unnoticed, drown in the mass of other publications”. This is, so to say, the viewpoint of literary competition. How ironically contemptuous Ibsen himself would have teen of it!

p De Golleville and Zepelin rightly call Ibsen a master of modern •drama. But if the job, as the saying goes, fears the master, it also reflects at the same time all of his weaknesses.

Ibsen’s weakness, which consisted of his inability to find an outlet from morality into politics, was "absolutely bound" to affect his works by introducing into them an element of symbolism and rationality, tendentiousness, if you like. It rendered some 459 of his literary characters lifeless, and it was precisely his "ideal people”, his "human poodles" that suffered. This is why I maintain that as a dramatist he would have been inferior to Shakespeare even if he had possessed the latter’s talent. It is extremely interesting to see how and why this undoubted major defect in his works could have been taken by the reading public for their merit. There must be a social reason for that too.