'In every new poem or play,' he writes, 'I have aimed at my own personal spiritual emancipation and purification, for a man shares the responsibility and the guilt of the society to which he belongs.' This queer entanglement in social bonds on the part of one whose main endeavour had always been to free the individual from the conventions and restrictions of society is one of those signs of parochialism which peep out in Ibsen again and again. 'The strongest man,' he says in a letter, anticipating the epilogue of one of his plays, 'is he who stands alone.' But Ibsen did not find it easy to stand alone, though he found pleasure in standing aloof. The influence of his environment upon him is marked from the first. He breaks with his father and mother, never writes to them or goes back to see them; partly because he feels it necessary to avoid contact with 'certain tendencies prevailing there.' 'Friends are an expensive luxury,' he finds, because they keep him from doing what he wishes to do, out of consideration for them. Is not this intellectual sensitiveness the corollary of a practical cold-heartedness? He cannot live in Norway because, he says, 'I could never lead a consistent spiritual life there.' In Norway he finds that 'the accumulation of small details makes the soul small.' How curious an admission for an individualist, for an artist! He goes to Rome, and feels that he has discovered a new mental world. 'After I had been in Italy I could not understand how I had been able to exist before I had been there.' Yet before long he must go on to Munich, because 'here one is too entirely out of touch with the movements of the day.'