Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Volume 9).djvu/21

 Hedda Gabler; but it is as individuals, not as members of a class, that they interest us; nor is their fate conditioned, like that of Nora or Mrs. Alving, by any social prejudice or pressure. But in Rosmersholm man is still considered as a "political animal." The play, as we have seen, actually took its rise as a protest against a morbid condition of the Norwegian public mind, as observed by the poet at a particular point of time. George Brandes, indeed, has very justly contended that it ought to rank with An Enemy of the People and The Wild Duck as a direct outcome of that momentous incident in Ibsen's career, the fierce attack upon Ghosts. "Rosmer," says Dr. Brandes, "begins where Stockmann left off. He wants to do from the very first what the doctor only wanted to do at the end of An Enemy of the People—to make proud, free, noble beings of his countrymen. At the beginning of the play, Rosmer is believed to be a decided Conservative (which the Norwegian considered Ibsen to be for many years after The League of Youth), and as long as this view is generally held, he is esteemed and admired, while everything that concerns him is interpreted in the most favourable manner. As soon, however, as his complete intellectual emancipation is discovered, and especially when it appears that he himself does not attempt to conceal the change in his views, public opinion turns against him Ibsen had been almost as much exposed as Rosmer to every sort of attack for some time after the publication of Ghosts, which (from the Conservative point of view) marked his conversion to Radicalism." The analogy between Ibsen's experience and Rosmer's is far too striking not to have been present to the poet's mind.

But, though the play distinctly belongs to the social