dinavia slumbered—so much so that when Bjornsen wrote an early play about Mary Stuart he was obliged, in deference to Protestant orthodoxy, to give John Knox the most honourable rôle. Ibsen disliked the society of a small Norwegian town, wrote satires on it, and so was accused of immorality. Consequently he fled to the South, and in the Neapolitan sun found strength to write about northern gloom. Brandes makes much of his misanthropy, and suggests that he took up the cause of Woman partly from hatred of Man.
"He did not originally possess a large amount of sympathy for woman. There are authors who have a peculiar affinity for women, who have, indeed, a decided feminine element in their own natures. Ibsen does not belong to this class. I am quite confident he takes far more pleasure in conversation with men than with women, and he has certainly passed much less time in the society of women than is the wont of poets."
A cynic might suggest that this accounts for his being still able, in middle age, to idealize Woman; but far be it from us to subscribe to such a notion. Much of his work—notably The Master Builder—was still unwritten at the time of Brandes' essay (1883); probably a good deal would have had to be modified if the essay had been brought up to date.
I have said nothing of the essays on Renan and Flaubert. They say the usual things pleasantly, but add little to our understanding of their subjects. It is a mark of the one-sideness of what passes as "culture" that such a book can be written without the inclusion of a single man of science. When one views the Nineteenth Century in perspective, it is clear that science is its only claim to distinction. Its literary men were mostly second-rate, its philosophers sentimental, its artists inferior to those of earlier times. Science ruthlessly forced novelties upon it, while men of "culture" tried to preserve the old picturesque follies by wrapping them in a mist of muddled romanticism. Until "culture" has made its peace with science, it will remain outside the main current of events, feeble and querulous, sighing for the past. The world that science has been making may be disgusting, but it is the world in which we have to live; and it condemns to futility all who are too fastidious to notice it.
