Freedom is a mystical truth \x97 Its expressed best in The Brothers Karamazov, the chapter when the Grand Inquisitor confronted the returned Christ. The freedom that Christ gave the world was the freedom of being an individual, in a collectivity, of basing ones life on love, as distinct from power, of seeking the good of others rather than nourishing ones own ego. That was liberation. And the Chief Inquisitor, who speaks for every dictator, every millionaire, every ideologue that's ever been, says we can't have it. Go away. Stay away.
If your “love” has an opposite, then it is not love but a strong ego-need for a more complete and deeper sense of self, a need that the other person temporarily meets.
As long as the “I” is there, love cannot be. All that we call love is only desire, longing, passion and attachment; as long as ego is there, all these bind one.
All religions speak about death during this life on earth. Death must come before rebirth. But what must die? False confidence in ones own knowledge, self-love and egoism. Our egoism must be broken.
The love season is the carnival of egoism, and it brings the touchstone to our natures.
Consider how many times you have gossiped about the person you love the most to gain the support of others for your point of view. How many times have you hooked other people’s attention, and spread poison about your loved one in order to make your opinion right? Your opinion is nothing but your point of view. It is not necessarily true. Your opinion comes from your beliefs, your own ego, and your own dream. We create all this poison and spread it to others just so we can feel right about our own point of view.
He passed hours in watching her dressing and undressing her doll, and in listening to her prattle. Life, henceforth, appeared to him to be full of interest; men seemed to him good and just; he no longer reproached any one in thought; he saw no reason why he should not live to be a very old man, now that this child loved him. He saw a whole future stretching out before him, illuminated by Cosette as by a charming light. The best of us are not exempt from egotistical thoughts. At times, he reflected with a sort of joy that she would be ugly.
"I ask your permission to drop this subject altogether," Miüsov repeated. "I will tell you instead, gentlemen, another interesting and rather characteristic anecdote of Ivan Fyodorovitch himself. Only five days ago, in a gathering here, principally of ladies, he solemnly declared in argument that there was nothing in the whole world to make men love their neighbors. That there was no law of nature that man should love mankind, and that, if there had been any love on earth hitherto, it was not owing to a natural law, but simply because men have believed in immortality. Ivan Fyodorovitch added in parenthesis that the whole natural law lies in that faith, and that if you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannibalism. That's not all. He ended by asserting that for every individual, like ourselves, who does not believe in God or immortality, the moral law of nature must immediately be changed into the exact contrary of the former religious law, and that egoism, even to crime, must become not only lawful but even recognized as the inevitable, the most rational, even honorable outcome of his position. From this paradox, gentlemen, you can judge of the rest of our eccentric and paradoxical friend Ivan Fyodorovitch's theories."
"Pity, Jane, from some people is a noxious and insulting sort of tribute, which one is justified in hurling back in the teeth of those who offer it; but that is the sort of pity native to callous, selfish hearts; it is a hybrid, egotistical pain at hearing of woes, crossed with ignorant contempt for those who have endured them. But that is not your pity, Jane; it is not the feeling of which your whole face is full at this moment--with which your eyes are now almost overflowing--with which your heart is heaving--with which your hand is trembling in mine. Your pity, my darling, is the suffering mother of love: its anguish is the very natal pang of the divine passion. I accept it, Jane; let the daughter have free advent--my arms wait to receive her."
Let us admit without bitterness, that the individual has his distinct interests, and can, without forfeiture, stipulate for his interest, and defend it; the present has its pardonable dose of egotism; momentary life has its rights, and is not bound to sacrifice itself constantly to the future. The generation which is passing in its turn over the earth, is not forced to abridge it for the sake of the generations, its equal, after all, who will have their turn later on.--"I exist," murmurs that some one whose name is All. "I am young and in love, I am old and I wish to repose, I am the father of a family, I toil, I prosper, I am successful in business, I have houses to lease, I have money in the government funds, I am happy, I have a wife and children, I have all this, I desire to live, leave me in peace."--Hence, at certain hours, a profound cold broods over the magnanimous vanguard of the human race.
The point which we consider it our duty to note is, that outside of and beyond his faith, as it were, the Bishop possessed an excess of love. It was in that quarter, quia multum amavit,--because he loved much--that he was regarded as vulnerable by "serious men," "grave persons" and "reasonable people"; favorite locutions of our sad world where egotism takes its word of command from pedantry. What was this excess of love? It was a serene benevolence which overflowed men, as we have already pointed out, and which, on occasion, extended even to things. He lived without disdain. He was indulgent towards God's creation. Every man, even the best, has within him a thoughtless harshness which he reserves for animals. The Bishop of D---- had none of that harshness, which is peculiar to many priests, nevertheless. He did not go as far as the Brahmin, but he seemed to have weighed this saying of Ecclesiastes: "Who knoweth whither the soul of the animal goeth?" Hideousness of aspect, deformity of instinct, troubled him not, and did not arouse his indignation. He was touched, almost softened by them. It seemed as though he went thoughtfully away to seek beyond the bounds of life which is apparent, the cause, the explanation, or the excuse for them. He seemed at times to be asking God to commute these penalties. He examined without wrath, and with the eye of a linguist who is deciphering a palimpsest, that portion of chaos which still exists in nature. This revery sometimes caused him to utter odd sayings. One morning he was in his garden, and thought himself alone, but his sister was walking behind him, unseen by him: suddenly he paused and gazed at something on the ground; it was a large, black, hairy, frightful spider. His sister heard him say:--
"Oh, gentlemen of the jury, why need we look more closely at this misfortune, why repeat what we all know already? What did my client meet with when he arrived here, at his father's house, and why depict my client as a heartless egoist and monster? He is uncontrolled, he is wild and unruly--we are trying him now for that--but who is responsible for his life? Who is responsible for his having received such an unseemly bringing up, in spite of his excellent disposition and his grateful and sensitive heart? Did any one train him to be reasonable? Was he enlightened by study? Did any one love him ever so little in his childhood? My client was left to the care of Providence like a beast of the field. He thirsted perhaps to see his father after long years of separation. A thousand times perhaps he may, recalling his childhood, have driven away the loathsome phantoms that haunted his childish dreams and with all his heart he may have longed to embrace and to forgive his father! And what awaited him? He was met by cynical taunts, suspicions and wrangling about money. He heard nothing but revolting talk and vicious precepts uttered daily over the brandy, and at last he saw his father seducing his mistress from him with his own money. Oh, gentlemen of the jury, that was cruel and revolting! And that old man was always complaining of the disrespect and cruelty of his son. He slandered him in society, injured him, calumniated him, bought up his unpaid debts to get him thrown into prison.
The discourses of Mencius, who followed Confucius after an interval of a hundred years, 372-289 B.C., form another of the Four Books, the remaining two of which are short philosophical treatises, usually ascribed to a grandson of Confucius. Mencius devoted his life to elucidating and expanding the teachings of the Master; and it is no doubt due to him that the Confucian doctrines obtained so wide a vogue. But he himself was more a politician and an economist (see below) than a simple preacher of morality; and hence it is that the Chinese people have accorded to him the title of The Second Sage. He is considered to have effectually "snuffed out" the heterodox school of Mo Ti, a philosopher of the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. who propounded a doctrine of "universal love" as the proper foundation for organized society, arguing that under such a system all the calamities that men bring upon one another would altogether disappear, and the Golden Age would be renewed. At the same time Mencius exposed the fallacies of the speculations of Yang Chu, 4th century B.C., who founded a school of ethical egoism as opposed to the exaggerated altruism of Mo Ti. According to Mencius, Yang Chu would not have parted with one hair of his body to save the whole world, whereas Mo Ti would have sacrificed all. Another early philosopher is Hsün Tz[)u], 3rd century B.C. He maintained, in opposition to Mencius, who upheld the Confucian dogma, and in conformity with Christian doctrine, that the nature of man at his birth is evil, and that this condition can only be changed by efficient moral training. Then came Yang Hsiung, 53-18 B.C., who propounded an ethical criterion midway between the rival positions insisted on by Mencius and Hsün Tz[)u], teaching that the nature of man at birth is neither good nor evil, but a mixture of both, and that development in either direction depends wholly upon circumstances. Entry: 9
Mary Stuart was in many respects the creature of her age, of her creed, and of her station; but the noblest and most noteworthy qualities of her nature were independent of rank, opinion or time. Even the detractors who defend her conduct on the plea that she was a dastard and a dupe are compelled in the same breath to retract this implied reproach, and to admit, with illogical acclamation and incongruous applause, that the world never saw more splendid courage at the service of more brilliant intelligence, that a braver if not "a rarer spirit never did steer humanity." A kinder or more faithful friend, a deadlier or more dangerous enemy, it would be impossible to dread or to desire. Passion alone could shake the double fortress of her impregnable heart and ever-active brain. The passion of love, after very sufficient experience, she apparently and naturally outlived; the passion of hatred and revenge was as inextinguishable in her inmost nature as the emotion of loyalty and gratitude. Of repentance it would seem that she knew as little as of fear, having been trained from her infancy in a religion where the Decalogue was supplanted by the Creed. Adept as she was in the most exquisite delicacy of dissimulation, the most salient note of her original disposition was daring rather than subtlety. Beside or behind the voluptuous or intellectual attractions of beauty and culture, she had about her the fresher charm of a fearless and frank simplicity, a genuine and enduring pleasure in small and harmless things no less than in such as were neither. In 1562 she amused herself for some days by living "with her little troop" in the house of a burgess of St Andrews "like a burgess's wife," assuring the English ambassador that he should not find the queen there,--"nor I know not myself where she is become." From Sheffield Lodge, twelve years later, she applied to the archbishop of Glasgow and the cardinal of Guise for some pretty little dogs, to be sent her in baskets very warmly packed,--"for besides reading and working, I take pleasure only in all the little animals that I can get." No lapse of reconciling time, no extent of comparative indulgence, could break her in to resignation, submission, or toleration of even partial restraint. Three months after the massacre of St Bartholomew had caused some additional restrictions to be placed upon her freedom of action, Shrewsbury writes to Burghley that "rather than continue this imprisonment she sticks not to say she will give her body, her son, and country for liberty"; nor did she ever show any excess of regard for any of the three. For her own freedom of will and of way, of passion and of action, she cared much; for her creed she cared something; for her country she cared less than nothing. She would have flung Scotland with England into the hell fire of Spanish Catholicism rather than forgo the faintest chance of personal revenge. Her profession of a desire to be instructed in the doctrines of Anglican Protestantism was so transparently a pious fraud as rather to afford confirmation than to arouse suspicion of her fidelity to the teaching of her church. Elizabeth, so shamefully her inferior in personal loyalty, fidelity and gratitude, was as clearly her superior on the one all-important point of patriotism. The saving salt of Elizabeth's character, with all its wellnigh incredible mixture of heroism and egotism, meanness and magnificence, was simply this, that, overmuch as she loved herself, she did yet love England better. Her best though not her only fine qualities were national and political, the high public virtues of a good public servant; in the private and personal qualities which attract and attach a friend to his friend and a follower to his leader, no man or woman was ever more constant and more eminent than Mary Queen of Scots. (A. C. S.) Entry: MARY
To a man of Johnson's strong understanding and irritable temper, the silly egotism and adulation of Boswell must have been as teasing as the constant buzz of a fly. Johnson hated to be questioned; and Boswell was eternally catechizing him on all kinds of subjects, and sometimes propounded such questions as, "What would you do, sir, if you were locked up in a tower with a baby?" Johnson was a water-drinker and Boswell was a wine-bibber, and indeed little better than an habitual sot. It was impossible that there should be perfect harmony between two such companions. Indeed, the great man was sometimes provoked into fits of passion, in which he said things which the small man, during a few hours, seriously resented. Every quarrel, however, was soon made up. During twenty years the disciple continued to worship the master; the master continued to scold the disciple, to sneer at him, and to love him. The two friends ordinarily resided at a great distance from each other. Boswell practised in the Parliament House of Edinburgh, and could pay only occasional visits to London. During those visits his chief business was to watch Johnson, to discover all Johnson's habits, to turn the conversation to subjects about which Johnson was likely to say something remarkable, and to fill quarto notebooks with minutes of what Johnson had said. In this way were gathered the materials out of which was afterwards constructed the most interesting biographical work in the world. Entry: A
Berlin was the only town in Germany open to him. His residence there from 1799 to 1806 was unbroken save for a course of lectures during the summer of 1805 at Erlangen, where he had been named professor. Surrounded by friends, including Schlegel and Schleiermacher, he continued his literary work, perfecting the _Wissenschaftslehre_. The most remarkable of the works from this period are--(1) the _Bestimmung des Menschen_ (Vocation of Man, 1800), a book which, for beauty of style, richness of content, and elevation of thought, may be ranked with the Meditations of Descartes; (2) _Der geschlossene Handelsstaat_, 1800 (The Exclusive or Isolated Commercial State), a very remarkable treatise, intensely socialist in tone, and inculcating organized protection; (3) _Sonnenklarer Bericht an das grössere Publicum über die neueste Philosophie_, 1801. In 1801 was also written the _Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre_, which was not published till after his death. In 1804 a set of lectures on the _Wissenschaftslehre_ was given at Berlin, the notes of which were published in the _Nachgelassene Werke_, vol. ii. In 1804 were also delivered the noble lectures entitled _Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters_ (Characteristics of the Present Age, 1804), containing a most admirable analysis of the _Aufklärung_, tracing the position of such a movement of thought in the natural evolution of the general human consciousness, pointing out its inherent defects, and indicating as the ultimate goal of progress the life of reason in its highest aspect as a belief in the divine order of the universe. The philosophy of history sketched in this work has something of value with much that is fantastic. In 1805 and 1806 appeared the _Wesen des Gelehrten_ (Nature of the Scholar) and the _Anweisung zum seligen Leben oder Religionslehre_ (Way to a Blessed Life), the latter the most important work of this Berlin period. In it the union between the finite self-consciousness and the infinite ego or God is handled in an almost mystical manner. The knowledge and love of God is the end of life; by this means only can we attain blessedness (_Seligkeit_), for in God alone have we a permanent, enduring object of desire. The infinite God is the all; the world of independent objects is the result of reflection or self-consciousness, by which the infinite unity is broken up. God is thus over and above the distinction of subject and object; our knowledge is but a reflex or picture of the infinite essence. Being is not thought. Entry: FICHTE
IBSEN, HENRIK (1828-1906), Norwegian dramatic and lyric poet, eldest son of Knud Henriksen Ibsen, a merchant, and of his wife Marichen Cornelia Altenburg, was born at Skien on the 20th of March 1828. For five generations the family had consisted on the father's side of a blending of the Danish, German and Scottish races, with no intermixture of pure Norwegian. In 1836 Knud Ibsen became insolvent, and the family withdrew, in great poverty, to a cottage in the outskirts of the town. After brief schooling at Skien, Ibsen was, towards the close of 1843, apprenticed to an apothecary in Grimstad; here he remained through seven dreary years of drudgery, which set their mark upon his spirit. In 1847, in his nineteenth year, he began to write poetry. He made a gloomy and almost sinister impression upon persons who met him at this time, and one of his associates of those days has recorded that Ibsen "walked about Grimstad like a mystery sealed with seven seals." He had continued, by assiduous reading, his self-education, and in 1850 he contrived to come up as a student to Christiania. In the same year he published his first work, the blank-verse tragedy of _Catilina_, under the pseudonym Brynjolf Bjarme. A second drama, _The Viking's Barrow_, was acted (but not printed) a few months later; Ibsen was at this time entirely under the influence of the Danish poet Oehlenschläger. During the next year or two he made a very precarious livelihood in Christiania as a journalist, but in November 1851 he had the good fortune to be appointed "stage-poet" at the little theatre of Bergen, with a small but regular salary. He was practically manager at this house, and he also received a travelling stipend. In 1852, therefore, he went for five months to study the stage, to Copenhagen and to Dresden. Among many dramatic experiments which Ibsen made in Bergen, the most considerable and most satisfactory is the saga-drama of _Mistress Inger at Östraat_, which was produced in 1855; and printed at Christiania in 1857; here are already perceptible some qualities of his mature character. Much less significant, although at the time more successful, is _The Feast at Solhaug_, a tragedy produced in Bergen in 1856; here for a moment Ibsen abandoned his own nascent manner for an imitation of the popular romantic dramatist of Denmark, Henrik Hertz. It is noticeable that Ibsen, by far the most original of modern writers for the stage, was remarkably slow in discovering the true bent of his genius. His next dramatic work was the romantic tragedy of _Olaf Liljekrans_, performed in 1857, but unprinted until 1898. This was the last play Ibsen wrote in Bergen. In the summer of the former year his five years' appointment came to an end, and he returned to Christiania. Almost immediately he began the composition of a work which showed an extraordinary advance on all that he had written before, the beautiful saga-drama of _The Warriors in Helgeland_, in which he threw off completely the influence of the Danish romantic tragedians, and took his material directly from the ancient Icelandic sources. This play marks an epoch in the development of Norwegian literature. It was received by the managers, both in Christiania and Copenhagen, with contemptuous disapproval, and in the autumn of 1857 Ibsen could not contrive to produce it even at the new theatre of which he was now the manager. _The Warriors_ was printed at Christiania in 1858, but was not acted anywhere until 1861. During these years Ibsen suffered many reverses and humiliations, but he persisted in his own line in art. Some of his finest short poems, among others the admirable seafaring romance, _Terje Vigen_, belong to the year 1860. The annoyances which Ibsen suffered, and the retrograde and ignorant conditions which he felt around him in Norway, developed the ironic qualities in his genius, and he became an acid satirist. The brilliant rhymed drama, _Love's Comedy_, a masterpiece of lyric wit and incisive vivacity, was published in 1862. This was a protest against the conventionality which deadens the beauty of all the formal relations between men and women, and against the pettiness, the publicity, and the prosiness of betrothed and married life among the middle classes in Norway; it showed how society murders the poetry of love. For some time past Ibsen had been meditating another saga-drama in prose, and in 1864 this appeared, _Kongsemnerne_ (The Pretenders). These works, however, now so universally admired, contained an element of strangeness which was not welcome when they were new. Ibsen's position in Christiania grew more and more disagreeable, and he had positive misfortunes which added to his embarrassment. In 1862 his theatre became bankrupt, and he was glad to accept the poorly-paid post of "aesthetic adviser" at the other house. An attempt to obtain a poet's pension (_digtergage_) was unsuccessful; the Storthing, which had just voted one to Björnson, refused to do the same for Ibsen. His cup was full of disillusion and bitterness, and in April 1864 he started, by Berlin and Trieste, ultimately to settle in Rome. His anger and scorn gave point to the satirical arrows which he shot back to his thankless fatherland from Italy in the splendid poem of _Brand_, published in Copenhagen in 1866, a fierce attack on the Laodicean state of religious and moral sentiment in the Norway of that day; the central figure, the stern priest Brand, who attempts to live like Christ and is snubbed and hounded away by his latitudinarian companions, is one of the finest conceptions of a modern poet. Ibsen had scarcely closed _Brand_ before he started a third lyrico-dramatic satire. _Peer Gynt_ (1867), which remains, in a technical sense, the most highly finished of all his metrical works. In _Brand_ the hero had denounced certain weaknesses which Ibsen saw in the Norwegian character, but these and other faults are personified in the hero of _Peer Gynt_; or rather, in this figure the poet pictured, in a type, the Norwegian nation in all the egotism, vacillation, and lukewarmness which he believed to be characteristic of it. Ibsen, however, acted better than he preached, and he soon forgot his abstraction in the portrait of Peer Gynt as a human individual. In this magnificent work modern Norwegian literature first rises to a level with the finest European poetry of the century. In 1869 Ibsen wrote the earliest of his prose dramas, the political comedy, _The Young Men's League_, in which for the first time he exercised his extraordinary gift for perfectly natural and yet pregnant dialogue. Ibsen was in Egypt, in October 1869, when his comedy was put on the stage in Christiania, amid violent expressions of hostility; on hearing the news, he wrote his brilliant little poem of defiance, called _At Port Saïd_. By this time, however, he had become a successful author; _Brand_ sold largely, and has continued to be the most popular of Ibsen's writings. In 1866, moreover, the Storthing had been persuaded to vote him a "poet's pension," and there was now an end of Ibsen's long struggle with poverty. In 1868 he left Rome, and settled in Dresden until 1874, when he returned to Norway. But after a short visit he went back to Germany, and lived first at Dresden, afterwards at Munich, and did not finally settle in Christiania until 1891. His shorter lyrical poems were collected in 1871, and in that year his name and certain of his writings were for the first time mentioned to the English public. At this time he was revising his old works, which were out of print, and which he would not resign again to the reading world until he had subjected them to what in some instances (for example, _Mistress Inger at Östraat_) amounted to practical recomposition. In 1873 he published a double drama, each part of which was of unusual bulk, the whole forming the tragedy of _Emperor and Galilean_; this, Ibsen's latest historical play, has for subject the unsuccessful struggle of Julian the Apostate to hold the world against the rising tide of Christianity. The work is of an experimental kind, and takes its place between the early poetry and the later prose of the author. Compared with the series of plays which Ibsen had already inaugurated with _The Young Men's League_, _Emperor and Galilean_ preserves a colour of idealism and even of mysticism which was for many years to be absent from Ibsen's writings, but to reappear in his old age with _The Master-builder_. There is some foundation for the charge that Ibsen has made his romantic Greek emperor needlessly squalid, and that he has robbed him, at last, too roughly of all that made him a sympathetic exponent of Hellenism. Ibsen was now greatly occupied by the political spectacle of Germany at war first in Denmark, then in France, and he believed that all things were conspiring to start a new epoch of individualism. He was therefore deeply disgusted by the Paris commune, and disappointed by the conservative reaction which succeeded it. This disillusion in political matters had a very direct influence upon Ibsen's literary work. It persuaded him that nothing could be expected in the way of reform from democracies, from large blind masses of men moved capriciously in any direction, but that the sole hope for the future must lie in the study of personality, in the development of individual character. He set himself to diagnose the conditions of society, which he had convinced himself lay sick unto death. Hitherto Ibsen had usually employed rhymed verse for his dramatic compositions, or, in the case of his saga-plays, a studied and artificial prose. Now, in spite of the surprising achievements of his poetry, he determined to abandon versification, and to write only in the language of everyday conversation. In the first drama of this his new period, _The Pillars of Society_ (1877), he dealt with the problem of hypocrisy in a small commercial centre of industry, and he drew in the Bernick family a marvellous picture of social egotism in a prosperous seaport town. There was a certain similarity between this piece and _A Doll's House_ (1879), although the latter was much the more successful in awakening curiosity. Indeed, no production of Ibsen's has been so widely discussed as this, which is nevertheless not the most coherently conceived of his plays. Here also, social hypocrisy, was the object of the playwright's satire, but this time mainly in relation to marriage. In _A Doll's House_ Ibsen first developed his views with regard to the individualism of woman. In his previous writings he had depicted woman as a devoted and willing sacrifice to man; here he begins to explain that she has no less a duty to herself, and must keep alive her own conception of honour and of responsibility. The conclusion of _A Doll's House_ was violently and continuously discussed through the length and breadth of Europe, and to the situation of Nora Helmer is probably due more than to anything else the long tradition that Ibsen is "immoral." He braved convention still more audaciously in _Ghosts_ (1881), perhaps the most powerful of the series of plays in which Ibsen diagnoses the diseases of modern society. It was received in Norway with a tumult of ill-will, and the author was attacked no less venomously than he had been twenty years before. Ibsen was astonished and indignant at the reception given to _Ghosts_, and at the insolent indifferentism of the majority to all ideas of social reform. He wrote, more as a pamphlet than as a play, what is yet one of the most effective of his comedies, _An Enemy of the People_ (1882). Dr Stockmann, the hero of that piece, discovers that the drainage system of the bathing-station on which the little town depends is faulty, and the water impure and dangerous. He supposes that the corporation will be grateful to have these deficiencies pointed out; on the contrary, they hound him out of their midst as an "enemy of the people." In this play occurs Ibsen's famous and typical saying, "a minority may be right--a majority is always wrong." This polemical comedy seemed at first to be somewhat weakened by the personal indignation which runs through it, but it has held the stage. Ibsen's next drama, _The Wild Duck_ (1884), was written in singular contrast with the zest and fire which had inspired _An Enemy of the People_. Here he is squalid and pessimistic to a degree elsewhere unparalleled in his writings; it is not quite certain that he is not here guilty of a touch of parody of himself. The main figure of the play is an unhealthy, unlucky enthusiast, who goes about making hopeless mischief by exposing weak places in the sordid subterfuges of others. This drama contains a figure, Hjálmar Ekdal, who claims the bad pre-eminence of being the meanest scoundrel in all drama. _The Wild Duck_ is the darkest, the least relieved, of Ibsen's studies of social life, and his object in composing it is not obvious. With _Rosmersholm_ (1886) he rose to the height of his genius again; this is a mournful, but neither a pessimistic nor a cynical play. The fates which hang round the contrasted lives of Rosmer and Rebecca, the weak-willed scrupulous man and the strong-willed unshrinking woman, the old culture and the new, the sickly conscience and the robust one, create a splendid dramatic antithesis. Ibsen then began to compose a series of dramas, of a more and more symbolical and poetic character; the earliest of these was the mystical _The Lady from the Sea_ (1888). At Christmas 1890 he brought out _Hedda Gabler_; two years later _The Master-builder_ (_Bygmester Solnaes_), in which many critics see the highest attainment of his genius; at the close of 1894 _Little Eyolf_; in 1896 _John Gabriel Borkman_; and in 1900 _When We Dead Awaken_. On the occasion of his seventieth birthday (1898) Ibsen was the recipient of the highest honours from his own country and of congratulations and gifts from all parts of the world. A colossal bronze statue of him was erected outside the new National Theatre, Christiania, in September 1899. In 1901 his health began to decline, and he was ordered by the physician to abandon every species of mental effort. The evil advanced, and he became unconscious of the passage of events. After lingering in this sad condition he died, without suffering, on the 23rd of May 1906, and was accorded a public funeral, with the highest national honours. Entry: IBSEN