cultural resources in henrik ibsen's early environment - Ibsen.net

However, when nations have come to consciousness and stand at the helm themselves,
they want to regulate their connections by their own natural sympathies; commonality in
language and customs, together with common memories of the past draw them together,
and little-by-little, under literature's influence, they approach the consciousness that they
have a common historical vocation, a common principle to manifest in humanity's general
process of civilization, and that in order to develop and defend this they must unite both
their intellectual and material powers. The perception that every individual state is
directly determined to promote the general human civilization, and accordingly can join
with anybody else, would correspond to cosmopolitanism in individuals, which indeed
also leads them to feel that they are at home in any state and religion, that wherever they
are they could act the same way. 9
II.
The Scandinavian Idea is accordingly in no way an isolated phenomenon, a
phantom of an individual's fantasy or mood; it is much more, as we have seen its
analogies in all quarters and it is deeply grounded in the general historical development
and the whole direction of the times. That our Scandinavia could not be unaffected by
the ideas fermenting everywhere in Europe, was so much more natural, because the spirit
of history, or to use a more commonly understood expression: Providence, seems recently
to have turned its attention more and more towards us. Even the most careless glance
9 It must be regarded as such a state-cosmopolitanism when some Danish patriots dream of an alliance with
France against England. To be sure, it is the Affair of 1807 which still creates enmity; they do not consider
that it was only the work of the nemesis of history with respect to the Danish forefathers' bloody actions in
England. All kindred nations--like brothers--have quarrelled and fought in their childhood; but they must
grow up sometime, and then such accounts must be regarded as settled.
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