" The impression is
perhaps not uncommon among ill-educated lads; what makes the case
unique, and defeats our educational formulas, is that it happened to be
true. But the impact of Ibsen with the social order of his age was
unlucky, we see, from the first; it was perhaps more unlucky than that
of any other great man of the same class with whose biography we have
been made acquainted. He was at daggers drawn with all that was
successful and respectable and "nice" from the outset of his career
until near the end of it.
Hence we need not be surprised if in the tone of his message to the
world there is something acrimonious, something that tastes in the mouth
like aloes. He prepared a dose for a sick world, and he made it as
nauseous and astringent as he could, for he was not inclined to be one
of those physicians who mix jam with their julep. There was no other
writer of genius in the nineteenth century who was so bitter in dealing
with human frailty as Ibsen was. By the side of his cruel clearness the
satire of Carlyle is bluster, the diatribes of Leopardi shrill and thin.
All other reformers seem angry and benevolent by turns, Ibsen is
uniformly and impartially stern.
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