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INTRODUCTION vii

EMPEROR AND GALILEAN.

INTRODUCTION.

It did not take him long to decide upon the central figure for his picture. What moved him, as it must move every one who brings to Rome the smallest scintilla of imagination, was the spectacle of a superb civilisation, a polity of giant strength and radiant beauty, obliterated, save for a few pathetic fragments, and overlaid by forms of life in many ways so retrograde and inferior. The Rome of the sixties, even more than the Rome of to-day, was a standing monument to the triumph of mediaevalism over antiquity. The poet who would give dramatic utterance to the emotions engendered by this spectacle must almost inevitably pitch upon the decisive moment in the transition--and Ibsen found that moment in the reaction of Julian. He attributed to it more "world-historic" import than the sober historian is disposed to allow it. Gaetano Negri shows very clearly that Julian's action had not the critical importance which Ibsen assigns to it. His brief reign produced, as nearly as possible, no effect at all upon the evolution of Christianity. None the less is it true that Julian made a spiritual struggle of what had been, to his predecessors, a mere question of politics, one might almost say of police. Never until his day did the opposing forces confront each other in full consciousness of what was at stake; and never after his day had they even the semblance of equality requisite to give the struggle dramatic interest. As a dramatist, then--whatever the historian may say--Ibsen chose his protagonist with unerring instinct. Julian was the last, and not the least, of the heroes of antiquity.

The book was not published until the autumn . On September 8, Ibsen wrote to Brandes that he was daily expecting its appearance. "I hear from Norway," he went on, "that Bj?rnson, though he cannot know anything about the book, has declared it to be 'Atheism,' adding that it was inevitable it should come to that with me. What the book is or is not I won't attempt to decide; I only know that I have energetically seen a fragment of the history of humanity, and what I saw I have tried to reproduce." On the very day of the book's appearance, he again writes to Brandes from Dresden: "The direction public affairs have taken in these parts gives this poem an actuality I myself had not foreseen."

Of all historical plays it is perhaps the most strictly historical. Apart from some unimportant chronological rearrangements, the main lines of Julian's career are reproduced with extraordinary fidelity. The individual occurrences of the first play are for the most part invented, and the dialogue freely composed; but the second play is a mere mosaic of historical or legendary incidents, while a large part of the dialogue is taken, almost word for word, either from Julian's own writings, or from other historical or quasi-historical documents. I will try to distinguish briefly between the elements of history and fiction in the first play: in the second there is practically no fiction save the fictions of Gregory and the ecclesiastical historians.

The details of the first act have no historical foundation. Gallus was not appointed Caesar on any such occasion as Ibsen describes; and there seems to be no hint of any intrigue between him and Helena. The character of Agathon is fictitious, though all that is related of Julian's life in Cappadocia is historical. The meeting with Libanius is an invention; and it was to Nicomedia, not to Pergamus, that Julian was sent shortly after the elevation of his brother to the second place in the Empire.

The chronological order of the events on which the second and third acts are founded is reversed by Ibsen. Julian fell under the influence of Maximus before ever he went to Athens. Eunapius relates his saying, "I go where torches light themselves, and where statues smile," or words to that effect; but they were spoken at Pergamus to Chrysantius, a Neo-Platonist, who, while deprecating the thaumaturgic methods of Maximus, averred that he himself had witnessed this marvel. For the details of the symposium at Ephesus there is no foundation, though Gregory and others relate weird legends of supernatural experiences which Julian underwent at the instance of Maximus. Not till after the disgrace and death of Gallus did Julian proceed to Athens, where he did not study under Libanius. Indeed, I cannot discover that he ever personally encountered Libanius before his accession to the throne. It is true that Gregory and Basil were his fellow students at Athens; but the tender friendship which Ibsen represents as existing between them is certainly imaginary.

All the military events at Paris, and the story of Julian's victory over Knodomar, are strictly historical. Helena, however, did not die at Paris, but at Vienne, after her husband had assumed the purple. Her death was said to have been indirectly due to a jealous machination of the Empress Eusebia; but the incident of the poisoned fruit is quite fictitious, and equally so are the vague enormities revealed in the dying woman's delirium. From the fact that Julian is strangely silent about his wife, we may conjecture that their marriage was not a happy one; but this is all the foundation Ibsen had to build upon.

For the scene in the Catacombs at Vienne there is nothing that can fairly be called a historic basis. It is true that, after assuming the purple, Julian did at one time endanger his position by shutting himself away from his soldiery; it is true, or at least it is related, that Julian "brought from Greece into Gaul the high priest of the mysteries--the Hierophant, as he was called --and did not decide to rebel until he had, with the greatest secrecy, accomplished the prescribed sacred rites." There is also a vague, and probably mythical, report of his having gone through some barbarous ceremony of purification, in order to wipe out the stain of his baptism. On such slight suggestions did Ibsen build up the elaborate fabric of his fifth act. The character of Sallust, like that of Oribases, is historical: but of any approach to double-dealing on the part of the excellent Sallust there is no hint. As there is no foundation for the infidelity of the living Helena, so there is no foundation for the part played by Helena dead in determining Julian's apostasy.

While Ibsen invents, however, he does not falsify; it is when he ceases to invent that falsification sets in. In all essentials, this first play is a representation of the youth of Julian as just as it is vivid. His character is very truly portrayed--his intellectual and moral earnestness, his superstition, his vanity, his bravery, his military genius. The individual scenes are full of poetic and dramatic inspiration. There may be some question, indeed, as to the artistic legitimacy of the employment of the supernatural in the third act; but of its imaginative power there can be no doubt. The drama progresses in an ever-ascending scale of interest, from the idyllic-spectacular opening, through the philosophic second act, the mystic third act, the stirring and terrible fourth act, up to the magnificent poetic melodrama of the fifth. In a slightly old-fashioned, romantic style, the play is as impressive to the imagination as it is, in all essentials, faithful to historic fact.

What, then, was that "positive view"? It can have been nothing else than the theory of the "third empire," which is to absorb both Paganism and Christianity, and is to mark, as it were, the maturity of the race, in contrast to its Pagan childhood and its Christian adolescence. The analogy between this theory and the Nietzschean conception of the "Overman" need not here be emphasised. It is sufficient to note that Ibsen had come to conceive world-history as moving, under the guidance of a Will which works through blinded, erring, and sacrificed human instruments, towards a "third empire," in which the jarring elements of flesh and spirit shall be reconciled.

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