Mrs. Evje. Any mother or any wife knows that.
Evje (standing with his back to the fire). You want to bring back the age of romance, doctor!
The Doctor (with a laugh). Not its errors—because in those days unclean minds brought to birth a great deal that was unclean. (Seriously.) But what is it, when all is said and done, but a violent protest on the part of the Teutonic people against the Romanesque spirit and school—a remarkable school, but not ours. To us it seems a barren, merely intellectual school—a mere mass of formulas which led to a precocious development of the mind. And that was the spirit it bred—critical and barren. But these schools of thought are now all we have, and both of them are bad for us! They have no use for the heart or the imagination; they do not breed faith or a longing for high achievement. Look at our life! Is our life really our own?
Mrs. Evje. No. You have only to think of our language, our tastes, our society, our—
The Doctor (interrupting her). Those are the externals of our life, merely the externals! No, look within—look at such a view of life as we were talking about, clamouring for "hardening"—is that ours? Can we, for all our diligence, make as much way in it as, for instance, a born Parisian journalist?—become like a bar of steel with a point at each end, a pen-point and a sword-point? We can't do that; the Teutonic temperament is not fitted for it.
Evje. Oh, we are well on the way towards it. Look at the heartless intolerance in our politics; it will soon match what you were describing.
Harald. Everyone that disagrees with you is either an ambitious scoundrel, or half mad, or a blockhead.
The Doctor (laughing). Yes, and here in the north, in our small communities, where a man meets all his enemies in the same barber's shop, we feel it as keenly as if we were digging our knives into each other! (Seriously.) We may laugh at it, but if we could add up the sum of suffering that has been caused to families and to individuals—if we could see the concrete total before us—we should be tempted to believe that our liberty had been given to us as a curse! For it is a cursed thing to destroy the humanity that is in us, and make us cruel and hard to one another.
Harald (getting up, but standing still). But, my good friends, if you are of the same mind about that, and I with you—what is the next thing to do?
The Doctor. The next thing to do?