“An Enemy of the People” deals with Ibsen’s attitude toward politics and social questions. The “enemy” is a young doctor in a Norwegian town, who discovers that the famous baths, the basis of the town’s prosperity, are infected with typhoid. The doctor insists upon making the facts public, and so of course he has an unhappy time. Curiously enough, you will find the same story in “The Goose-Step”; it happened at the University of Oregon--quite a distance from Norway. The “enemy of the people” in this latter case was a young professor, who was duly compelled to move on. The world is forty years older than when Ibsen wrote this play; we have had time to analyze the economic forces in our society, and we are no longer satisfied with a crude distrust of democracy. It is true that the people stone the prophets; but later on they build monuments to them; and the world must be saved by the people, if it is to be saved at all. Ibsen’s attitude is the natural one for an artist, who has to take care of his own mind, and does not want anyone to tell him what to think. He is distrustful of discipline, preaches individualism--and finds the reactionaries glad to quote his words. But you see, all the poet has to do is to portray the world; the masses have a more difficult job--they have to change it. So they cannot rest in the anarchist attitude; they have to have discipline and solidarity, they have to organize and find leaders, and learn to stand by those leaders, and at the same time to control them. All that is a new task, and calls for new types of thinkers, not merely critical, but constructive. CHAPTER XCI THE BIOLOGICAL SUPERIOR Sweden also had a great dramatist and poet in this nineteenth century. He came some twenty years later than Ibsen, a tormented and highly emotional man of genius, who just about boxed the compass of thought, and believed everything there was for a man to believe. He was too much of a propagandist, even for me; I like an artist to have ideas, but not so many that they contradict! August Strindberg’s father was a bankrupt shop-keeper; his mother was a bar-maid, and three illegitimate children had preceded him. He was raised in a family of eleven in a small house, and the first emotions he knew were fear and hunger. He was lonely and unhappy all his life, and poured out his troubles in a torrent over Sweden. He began writing at twenty-one; he had the artist’s passion for all kinds of knowledge, and in those early days he was a Socialist and a champion of labor, also of the economic emancipation of women. But at the age of twenty-six he chose a wife, and illustrated the formula we used to sing in childhood: Needles and pins, needles and pins, When a man marries his trouble begins!