Oddly enough, he thought that this, too,
was to be a "placable" play, written to amuse and stimulate, but
calculated to wound nobody's feelings. The fact was that Ibsen, like
some ocelot or panther of the rocks, had a paw much heavier than he
himself realized, and his "play," in both senses, was a very serious
affair, when he descended to sport with common humanity.
Another quotation, this time from a letter to Brandes, must be given to
show what Ibsen's attitude was at this moment to his fatherland and to
his art:
"When I think how slow and heavy and dull the general intelligence is at
home, when I notice the low standard by which everything is judged, a
deep despondency comes over me, and it often seems to me that I might
just as well end my literary activity at once. They really do not need
poetry at home; they get along so well with the party newspapers and the
_Lutheran Weekly_."
If Ibsen thought that he was offering them "poetry" in _The Enemy of the
People_, he spoke in a Scandinavian sense. Our criticism has never
opened its arms wide enough to embrace all imaginative literature as
poetry, and in the English sense nothing in the world's drama is denser
or more unqualified prose than _The Enemy of the People_, without a
tinge of romance or rhetoric, as "unideal" as a blue-book.
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