MANDERS. But what about the ideals?

MRS. ALVING. Oh--ideals, ideals! If only I were not such a coward!

Ibsen's social and political ideas follow necessarily from the nature
of his art. He knew too much about the depths of character to suppose
that people could be improved from without. He agreed with our
grandmothers that what men need are new hearts. It is good feeling that
makes good men, and the sole check on bad feeling is conscience. Laws,
customs, and social conventions he regarded as ineffectual means to
good. There is no virtue in one who is restrained from evil by fear. He
went further: he regarded external restraints as means to bad, since
they come between a man and his conscience and blunt the moral sense.
"So long as I keep to the rules," says the smug citizen, "I am of the
righteous." Ibsen loathed the State, with its negative virtues, its mean
standards, its mediocrity, and its spiritual squalor. He was a
passionate individualist.

Perhaps no one has seen more clearly that the State, at its best, stands
for nothing better than the lowest common factor of the human mind. What
else can it stand for? State ideals must be ideals that are not beyond
the intellect and imagination of "the average citizen"; also, since
average minds are not pervious to reason, the reasoning of statesmen
must be rhetoric. State morals--law and custom that is to say--are
nothing more than excuses for not bothering about conscience. But
Ibsen, being an artist, knew that he who would save his soul must do
what he feels to be right, not what is said to be so. Feeling is the
only guide, and the man who does what he feels to be wrong does wrong,
whatever the State may say.

The plain, though by no means frank, determination of society to
suppress the individual conscience lest it should clash with the
interests of the community seems positively to have shocked him. To be
fine, he believed, men must think and feel for themselves and live by
their own sense of truth and beauty, not by collective wisdom or
reach-me-down ideals.

"What sort of truths do the majority rally round? Truths so
stricken in years that they are sinking into decrepitude. When a
truth is so old as that, gentlemen, it's in a fair way to become a
lie (_Laughter and jeers_)."

How could Ibsen help being something of a politician? He seems really to
have wished his fellow-creatures to be fine, and to have been angry with
them becau