vior of souls for heaven, must needs be indifferent to earthly
necessities. He sent her back to shame and degradation,--to her
duties to husband and home. Indeed, happiness--to him--was but the
unholy manifestation of a rebellious spirit, and a wife's duty was
not to judge, but "to bear with humility the cross which a higher
power had for your own good laid upon you."

Mrs. Alving bore the cross for twenty-six long years. Not for the
sake of the higher power, but for her little son Oswald, whom she
longed to save from the poisonous atmosphere of her husband's home.

It was also for the sake of the beloved son that she supported the
lie of his father's goodness, in superstitious awe of "duty and
decency." She learned, alas! too late, that the sacrifice of her
entire life had been in vain, and that her son Oswald was visited by
the sins of his father, that he was irrevocably doomed. This, too,
she learned, that "we are all of us ghosts. It is not only what we
have inherited from our father and mother that walks in us. It is
all sorts of dead ideas and lifeless old beliefs. They have no
vitality, but they cling to us all the same and we can't get rid of
them.... And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of
light. When you forced me under the yoke you called Duty and
Obligation; when you praised as right and proper what my whole soul
rebelled against as something loathsome; it was then that I began to
look into the seams of your doctrine. I only wished to pick at a
single knot, but when I had got that undone, the whole thing ravelled
out. And then I understood that it was all machine-sewn."

How could a society machine-sewn, fathom the seething depths whence
issued the great masterpiece of Henrik Ibsen? It could not
understand, and therefore it poured the vials of abuse and venom upon
its greatest benefactor. That Ibsen was not daunted he has proved by
his reply in AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE.

In that great drama Ibsen performs the last funeral rites over a
decaying and dying social system. Out of its ashes rises the
regenerated individual, the bold and daring rebel. Dr. Stockman, an
idealist, full of social sympathy and solidarity, is called to his
native town as the physician of the baths. He soon discovers that
the latter are built on a swamp, and that instead of finding relief
the patients, who flock to the place, are being poisoned.

An honest man, of strong convictions, the doctor considers i