He is not an aristocrat of the school of Carlyle, eager to put everything beneath the foot of a Cromwell or a Bismarck. The great task for democracy is, as Rosmer says in “Rosmersholm,” “to make every man in the land a nobleman.” “The State must go!” Ibsen wrote to G. Brandes in 1870. “That will be a revolution which will find me on its side. Undermine the idea of the State, set up in its place spontaneous action, and the idea that spiritual relationship is the only thing that makes for unity, and you will start the elements of a liberty which will be something worth possessing.” It is only by the creation of great men and women, by the enlargement to the utmost of the reasonable freedom of the individual, that the realization of Democracy is possible. And herein, as in other fundamental matters, Ibsen is at one with the American, with whom he would appear at first sight to have little in common. “Where the men and women think lightly of the laws; ... where the populace rise at once against the never-ending audacity of elected persons; ... where outside authority enters always after the precedence of inside authority; where the citizen is always the head and ideal; where children are taught to be laws to themselves; ... there the great city stands!” exclaims Walt Whitman.
In “The Pillars of Society”--which was separated from “The Young Men’s League” by the appearance of “Emperor and Galilean”--Ibsen pours delicious irony on those conventional lies which are regarded as the foundations of social and domestic life. Here also he presents us with one of the most eminent of the group of “governors, teachers, spiritual pastors and masters” that throughout these plays strive to act as the pillars of the social system. Straamand in “Love’s Comedy,” Manders in “Ghosts,” the schoolmaster, Rörlund, here, with many minor figures scattered through other plays, notwithstanding slight differences, are closely allied. The clergyman is for Ibsen the supreme representative and exponent of conventional morality. Yet the dramatist never falls into the mistake of some of his Scandinavian contemporaries who make their clerical figures mere caricatures. Here, as always, it is because it is so reasonable and truthful that Ibsen’s irony is so keen. Rörlund is honest and conscientious, but the thinnest veils of propriety are impenetrable to him; he can see nothing but the obvious and external aspects of morality; he is incapable of grasping a new idea, or of sympathizing with any natural instinct or generous emotion; it is his part to give utterance, impressive with the sanction of religion, to the traditional maxims of the society he morally supports. Pastor Manders, in “Ghosts,” is less fluent than Rörlund, and of stronger character. His training and experience have fitted him to deal in all dignity with the proprieties and conventions of social morality; but when he is in the presence of the realities of life, or when a generous human thought or emotion flashes out before him, he shrinks back, shocked and cowed. He is then, as Mrs. Alving says, nothing but a great child. That Ibsen is, in his clerical personages, as some have said, covertly attacking Protestantism, it is not necessary to assert. It is the traditional morality, of which the priesthood everywhere are the chief and authorized exponents, with which he is chiefly concerned. His attitude towards Christianity generally we may perhaps gather from the intensity of feeling with which Julian, in “Emperor and Galilean,” expresses his passionate repugnance to its doctrine of the evil of human nature and its policy of suppression. “You can never understand it, you,” he continues, “who have never been in the power of this God-Man. It is more than a doctrine which he has spread over the world; it is a charm which has fettered the senses. Whoever falls once into his hands--I think he never becomes free again. We are like vines planted in a foreign soil; plant us back again and we should perish; yet we languish in this new earth.”