Page:Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West.djvu/92

 generalities of disenchanted philosophers, and continue, like Pilate, to rub their hands and smile skeptically, may I not recommend to your distinguished consideration that Cometographer of the spirit-world, Henrik Ibsen? He it was who turned the pockets of the soul inside out and found in them only a bullet and a little cyanide of mercury. For the underlying idea of Ibsen's Art and Philosophy seems to be that one should conceive the beautiful and the true in this terrestrial existence and wait to realize them in another. Or, apply the bullet or the cyanide, if you can not wait. Sow in your soul the seeds of the ideal, which is one way of answering Pilate, and let death shield them from the frost of life. In other words, as soon as the ideal begins to germinate, in order to preserve it in its vigor and purity, hasten hence to some more friendly clime beyond the valleys of the moon. I do not think it would be far from the truth to picture those Ibsen souls as comets sweeping through this world to