Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/215

Rh of Ibsen's strangest and most enigmatical plays, The Wild Duck. What I have elsewhere written about this extraordinary work bears so directly upon the issue now before us that I may be pardoned for reproducing a portion of it here: "After all, I do not think that it is very difficult to see the point of connection between this play and the body of Ibsen's work. It seems to me to have been the writer's purpose to clinch the ideas already set forth in Hedda Gabler, though allowance must be made for the presence and coloring of an even more dejected mood. Truth may prove destructive; but then it will be the fault not of truth but of ourselves. Its boasted liberty is a blessing to those only who are fit for liberty; to many it may prove nothing more than a short cut to ruin. Men must be educated, not only in truth, but for truth. You can not make people free from the outside. They must achieve freedom for themselves, by inward growth. You may strike off their shackles, but this will only give a man who is a slave by nature an open chance to plunge into a still more desperate servitude. It is useless, worse than useless, to offer new knowledge where the recipient lacks spiritual strength and flexibility to adjust himself to the larger claims which it will undoubtedly force upon him. Gregers Werle, in the play, makes ideal demands upon an individual mentally and morally unable to rise to the level of the occasion; what marvel, then, that the experiment proves fatal to all concerned? It is, therefore, perhaps fair to regard The Wild Duck as a kind of complement or sequel to An Enemy of Society. In the latter drama, Ibsen boldly proclaimed his right to speak out, come what might of it; in the present work, on the other hand, he mournfully acknowledges that the gospel he brings to the world—true gospel though he conceives it to be—may none the less be fraught with vast and incalculable dangers for a society made up for the most part of people like those we meet in the play. . . . Is it not best, he seems to ask, just to leave them as they are? Who shall shoulder the responsibility of uttering the new word, knowing that while it is potent to save, it is also potent to destroy?"

Thus, as well as I am able to read it, runs Ibsen's thought; and the doubt which it expresses must from time to time have been felt by most of us. To proceed further with the discussion of the question thus opened up would here commit us to an unwarrantable digression into casuistry. It therefore must for the present be left where it is. I have raised it with a view only to completeness—that is, to show that the full conception of veracity implies faith in truth as well as love for truth; whether we can any of us declare