Dina. You don’t understand me. What I want is just that they should not be so very proper and moral (p. 92). I am sick of all this goodness.
Martha Bernick. Oh, how we writhe under this tyranny of custom and convention! Rebel against it, Dina. Do something to defy all this use-and-wont!
In An Enemy of the People (p. 278) Stockmann declares: ‘I detest leading men ... they stand in the path of a free man wherever he turns—and I should be glad if we could exterminate them like other noxious animals.’ (p. 280) ‘The most dangerous enemies of truth and freedom in our midst are the compact majority. Yes, this execrable compact, Liberal majority—they it is.... The majority is never right.... The minority is always right.’ Where Ibsen does not seriously attack the majority he derides it—e.g., when he entrusts the maintenance of society to grotesque Philistines, or makes self-styled Radicals betray the hypocrisy of their Liberal views. In An Enemy of the People (p. 238):
Burgomaster. You want to fly in the face of your superiors; and that’s an old habit of yours. You can’t endure any authority over you
In Rosmersholm (p. 53):
Mortensgaard [the journalist who poses as a Freethinker]. We have plenty of Freethinkers already, Pastor Rosmer—I almost might say too many. What the party requires is a Christian element—something that everyone must respect. That’s what we’re sadly in need of.
With the same purpose of anarchistic ridicule he always personifies the sense of duty in idiots or contemptible Pharisees only. In Ghosts the blockhead, Pastor Manders, thus preaches (p. 142): ‘What right have we human beings to happiness? No, we have to do our duty! And your duty was to hold firmly to the man you had once chosen, and to whom you are bound by a holy tie.’ In The Pillars of Society it is the rogue Bernick who is made to proclaim the necessity of the subordination of the individual to the community (p. 58): ‘People must learn to moderate their personal claims if they are to fulfil their duties in the community in which they are placed.’ In An Enemy of the People the not less pitiable burgomaster sermonizes his brother Stockmann in this fashion (p. 209): ‘Anyhow, you’ve an ingrained propensity for going your own way. And that in a well-ordered community is almost always dangerous. The individual must submit himself to the whole community.’
The trick is evident: to make the conception of the necessary subordination of the individual ridiculous and contemptible, Ibsen appoints as its mouthpieces ridiculous and contemptible beings. On the other hand, it is the characters on whom he lavishes all the wealth of his affection to whom he entrusts the duty of defending rebellion against duty, the aspersion or derision of laws, morals, institutions, self-discipline, and the proclaiming of unscrupulous ego-mania as the sole guide of life.
The psychological roots of Ibsen’s anti-social impulses are well known. They are the degenerate’s incapacity for self-adaptation, and the resulting discomfort in the midst of circumstances to which, in consequence of his organic deficiencies, he cannot accommodate himself. ‘The criminal,’ Lombroso[356] says, ‘in consequence of his neurotic and impulsive nature, and his hatred of the institutions which have punished or imprisoned him, is a perpetual latent political rebel, who finds in insurrection the means not only of satisfying his passions, but of even having them countenanced for the first time by a numerous public.’ This utterance is exactly applicable to Ibsen, with the slight change, that he is merely a theoretic criminal, his motor centres not being powerful enough to transmute his anarchically criminal ideas into deeds, and that he finds the satisfaction of his destructive impulses not in the insurrection, but in the activity of dramatic composition.
His incapacity for self-adaptation makes him not only an anarchist, but also a misanthrope, and fills him with a profound weariness of life. The doctrine of An Enemy of the People is contained in Stockmann’s exclamation (p. 315): ‘The strongest man on earth is he who stands most alone’; and in Rosmersholm (p. 24), Brendel says: ‘I like to take my pleasures in solitude, for then I enjoy them doubly.’ The same Brendel subsequently laments (p. 105): ‘I am going homewards; I am home-sick for the mighty Void.... Peter Mortensgaard never wills more than he can do. Peter Mortensgaard is capable of living his life without ideals. And that, do you see, that is just the mighty secret of action and of victory. It is the sum of the whole world’s wisdom.... The dark night is best. Peace be with you!’ Brendel’s words have a peculiar significance, for, on the evidence of Ehrhard,[357] Ibsen wished to portray himself in that personage. That which is expressed in these passages is the dégoût des gens and the tedium vitæ of alienists, phenomena never absent in depressed forms of mental alienation.