In one of his early letters to Bjoernson, he had written: 'When I read the news from home, when I gaze upon all that respectable, estimable narrow-mindedness and worldliness, it is with the feeling of an insane man staring at one single, hopelessly dark spot.' All his life Ibsen gazed until he found the black spot somewhere; but it was with less and less of this angry, reforming feeling of the insane man. He saw the black spot at the core of the earth's fruit, of the whole apple of the earth; and as he became more hopeless, he became less angry; he learned something of the supreme indifference of art. He had learned much when he came to realise that, in the struggle for liberty, it was chiefly the energy of the struggle that mattered. 'He who possesses liberty,' he said, 'otherwise than as a thing to be striven for, possesses it dead and soulless.... So that a man who stops in the midst of the struggle and says, "Now I have it," thereby shows that he has lost it.' He had learned still more when he could add to his saying, 'The minority is always right,' this subtle corollary, that a fighter in the intellectual vanguard can never collect a majority around him. 'At the point where I stood when I wrote each of my books, there now stands a tolerably compact crowd; but I myself am no longer there; I am elsewhere; farther ahead, I hope.' 'That man is right,' he thought, 'who has allied himself most closely with the future.' The future, to Ibsen, was a palpable thing, not concerned merely with himself as an individual, but a constantly removing, continually occupied promised land, into which he was not content to go alone. Yet he would always have asked of a follower, with Zarathustra: 'This is my road; which is yours?' His future was to be peopled by great individuals.