nd for years abode in exile, an alien, if not a recluse.

Are not the memories of youth abiding? and can any one of us free
himself wholly from the bonds of early environment? The audience that
Ibsen has ever had in view when he was making his most searching
tragedies of modern life, the audience he has always wisht to move and
to rouse, morally and intellectually, was such a group of spectators as
might gather in the tiny and isolated village where he had spent his
boyhood. Ibsen himself may not have been conscious that this was the
audience he was seeking to stimulate; indeed, he may never have
suspected it; and he might even deny it in good faith. But the fact
remains, nevertheless, obvious and indisputable; and it helps to explain
not a little that might otherwise remain obscure. It enables us to
suggest a reason for a certain closeness of atmosphere sometimes felt in
this play or that, and for a certain lack of largeness of outlook, in
spite of the depth of insight. It makes us more tolerant toward a
certain narrowness, which is often provincial and sometimes almost
parochial.

It is not merely that Ibsen's social dramas are all of them intensely
Norwegian, peopled solely with natives and having the fiords ever
present in the background. It is not merely that he has shrunk from all
international contrasts, and from all cosmopolitanism;--and here, no
doubt, he has chosen the better part. It is not that he himself has not
shaken off the pettiness of the little village where he received his
first impression of his fellow-man. It is that altho he has seen the
world outside and altho he is thereby enabled to measure the smallness
of what he left behind, he cannot forget the inhabitants of Grimstad,
individually and collectively. They supply the constituent elements of
the audience which he is ever addressing, consciously or unconsciously.
It is their limited horizon he wants to enlarge; and it is their
lethargy he is longing to shatter.

IX

Perhaps there is no injustice in holding that much of Ibsen's arrogant
and aggressive individualism and self-assertion, is the result of his
own youthful solitude and struggle in the little village where the
druggist's ambitious apprentice who wrote poetry and who had opinions of
his own, soon managed to get on a war-footing with most of his
neighbors,--as the late Professor Boyesen recorded from his own
observations at the time, explaining that "a small town, where everybody