why he is sane. Ibsen does not profess to know how virtue
and happiness are brought about, in the sense that he professes
to know how our modern sexual tragedies are brought about.
Falsehood works ruin in THE PILLARS OF SOCIETY, but truth works equal
ruin in THE WILD DUCK. There are no cardinal virtues of Ibsenism.
There is no ideal man of Ibsen. All this is not only admitted,
but vaunted in the most valuable and thoughtful of all the eulogies
upon Ibsen, Mr. Bernard Shaw's QUINTESSENCE OF IBSENISM.
Mr. Shaw sums up Ibsen's teaching in the phrase, "The golden
rule is that there is no golden rule." In his eyes this
absence of an enduring and positive ideal, this absence
of a permanent key to virtue, is the one great Ibsen merit.
I am not discussing now with any fullness whether this is so or not.
All I venture to point out, with an increased firmness,
is that this omission, good or bad, does leave us face to face
with the problem of a human consciousness filled with very
definite images of evil, and with no definite image of good.
To us light must be henceforward the dark thing--the thing of which
we cannot speak. To us, as to Milton's devils in Pandemonium,
it is darkness that is visible. The human race, according to religion,
fell once, and in falling gained knowledge of good and of evil.
Now we have fallen a second time, and only the knowledge of evil
remains to us.

A great silent collapse, an enormous unspoken disappointment,
has in our time fallen on our Northern civilization. All previous
ages have sweated and been crucified in an attempt to realize
what is really the right life, what was really the good man.
A definite part of the modern world has come beyond question
to the conclusion that there is no answer to these questions,