Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Volume 8).djvu/15

 conditions can be attained in Norway before the intellectual soil has been thoroughly turned up and cleansed, and all the swamps drained off." Here we have clearly the germ of An Enemy of the People. The image so took hold of Ibsen that after applying it to social life in this play, he recurred to it in The Wild Duck, in relation to the individual life.

The mood to which we definitely owe An Enemy of the People appears very clearly in a letter to George Brandes, dated January 3, 1882, in which Ibsen thanks him for his criticism of Ghosts. "What are we to say," he proceeds, "of the attitude taken up by the so-called Liberal press—by those leaders who speak and write about freedom of action and thought, and at the same time make themselves the slaves of the supposed opinions of their subscribers? I am more and more confirmed in my belief that there is something demoralising in engaging in politics and joining parties. I, at any rate, shall never be able to join a party which has the majority on its side. Björnson says, 'The majority is always right'; and as a practical politician he is bound, I suppose, to say so. I, on the contrary, of necessity say, 'The minority is always right.' Naturally I am not thinking of that minority of stagnationists who are left behind by the great middle party, which with us is called Liberal; I mean that minority which leads the van, and pushes on to points which the majority has not yet reached. I hold that that man is in the right who is most closely in league with the future."

The same letter closes with a passage which foreshadows not only An Enemy of the People, but Rosmersholm: "When I think how slow and heavy and dull the general intelligence is at home, when I notice the low standard by which everything is judged, a deep