the earth's fruit, of the whole apple of the
earth; and as he became more hopeless, he became less angry; he learned
something of the supreme indifference of art. He had learned much when
he came to realise that, in the struggle for liberty, it was chiefly the
energy of the struggle that mattered. 'He who possesses liberty,' he
said, 'otherwise than as a thing to be striven for, possesses it dead
and soulless.... So that a man who stops in the midst of the struggle
and says, "Now I have it," thereby shows that he has lost it.' He had
learned still more when he could add to his saying, 'The minority is
always right,' this subtle corollary, that a fighter in the intellectual
vanguard can never collect a majority around him. 'At the point where I
stood when I wrote each of my books, there now stands a tolerably
compact crowd; but I myself am no longer there; I am elsewhere; farther
ahead, I hope.' 'That man is right,' he thought, 'who has allied
himself most closely with the future.' The future, to Ibsen, was a
palpable thing, not concerned merely with himself as an individual, but
a constantly removing, continually occupied promised land, into which he
was not content to go alone. Yet he would always have asked of a
follower, with Zarathustra: 'This is my road; which is yours?' His
future was to be peopled by great individuals.

It was in seeking to find himself that Ibsen sought to find truth; and
truth he knew was to be found only within him. The truth which he sought
for himself was not at all truth in the abstract, but a truth literally
'efficacious,' and able to work out the purpose of his existence. That
purpose he never doubted. The work he had to do was the work of an
artist, and to this everything must be subservient. 'The great thing is
to become honest and truthful in dealing with oneself--not to determine
to do this or determine to do that, but to do what one _must_ do because
one is oneself. All the rest simply leads to falsehood.' He conceives of
truth as being above all clear-sighted, and the approach to truth as a
matter largely of will. No preacher of God and of righteousness and the
kingdom to come was ever more centred, more convinced, more impregnably
minded every time that he has absorbed a new idea or is constructing a
new work of art. His conception of art often changes; but he never
deviates at any one time from any one conception. There is something
narrow as well as something intense in this certa