Complete Works of Henrik Ibsen (141 page)

Theater der Stadt, Leipzig, where this play was first performed

INTRODUCTION
.

In a speech delivered at Copenhagen in 1898, Ibsen said: “It is now thirty-four years since I journeyed southward by way of Germany and Austria, and passed through the Alps on May 9. Over the mountains the clouds hung like a great dark curtain. We plunged in under it, steamed through the tunnel, and suddenly found ourselves at Miramare, where the beauty of the South, a strange luminosity, shining like white marble, suddenly revealed itself to me, and left its mark on my whole subsequent production, even though it may not all have taken the form of beauty.” Whatever else may have had its origin in this memorable moment of revelation,
Emperor and Galilean
certainly sprang from it. The poet felt an irresistible impulse to let his imagination loose in the Mediterranean world of sunshine and marble that had suddenly burst upon him. Antiquity sprang to life before his mental vision, and he felt that he must capture and perpetuate the shining pageant in the medium of his art. We see throughout the play how constantly the element of external picturesqueness was present to his mind.

Though it has only once or twice found its way to the stage, it is nevertheless — for good and for ill — a great piece of scene-painting.

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 Home 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 mediævalism 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 (what, indeed, is plain enough in Gibbon) 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.

Ibsen had been in Rome only two or three months when he wrote to Bjôrnson (September 16, 1864):

“I am busied with a long poem, and have in preparation a tragedy,
Julianus Apostata,
a piece of work which I set about with intense gusto, and in which I believe I shall succeed. I hope to have both finished next spring, or, at any rate, in the course of the summer.” As regards
Julianus Apostata
, this hope was very far astray, for nine years elapsed before the play was finished.! Not till May 4, 1866, is the project again mentioned, when Ibsen writes to his friend, Michael Birkeland, that, though the Danish poet, Hauch, has in the meantime produced a play on the same theme, he does not intend to abandon it.

On May 21, 1866, he writes to his publisher, Hegel, that, now that
Brand
is out of hand, he is still undecided what subject to tackle next. “I feel more and more disposed,” he says, “to set to work in earnest at
Kejser Julian
, which I have had in mind for two years.” He feels sure that Hauch’s conception of the subject must be entirely different from his; and he does not intend to read Hauch’s play. On July 22, 1866, he writes from Frascati to Paul Botten-Hansen that he is “wrestling with a subject and knows that he will soon get the upper hand of the brute.”

His German editors take this to refer to
Emperor and Galilean,
and they are probably right; but it is not quite certain. The work he actually produced was
Peer Gynt;
and we know that he had a third subject in mind at the time. We hear no more of Julian until October 28, 1870, when, in his autobiographic letter to Peter Hansen, he writes from Dresden:

“... Here I live in a tediously well-ordered community. What will become of me when at last I actually reach home! I must seek salvation in remoteness of subject, and think of attacking
Kejser Julian.”

This was, in fact, to be his next work; but two years and a half were still to pass before he finally “got the upper hand of the brute.” On January 18, 1871, he writes to Hegel: “Your supposition that
Julian
is so far advanced that it may go to the printers next month arises from a misunderstanding.

The first part is finished; I am working at the second part; but the third part is not even begun. This third part will, however, go comparatively quickly and I confidently hope to place the whole in your hands by the month of June.” This is the first mention we have of the division into three parts, which he ultimately abandoned. If Hegel looked for the manuscript in June, he looked in vain. On July 12

Ibsen wrote to him: “Now for the reason of my long silence: I am hard at work on
Kejser Julian.
This book will be my chief work, and it is engrossing all my thoughts and all my time. That positive view of the world which the critics have so long been demanding of me, they will find here.” Then he asks Hegel to procure for him three articles on
Julian
by Pastor Listov, which had appeared in the Danish paper,
Fœdrelandet
, and inquires whether there is in Danish any other statement of the
facts
of Julian’s career. “I have Neander’s German works on the subject; also D. Strauss’s; but the latter’s book contains nothing but argumentative figments, and that sort of thing I can do myself. It is facts that I require.” His demand for more facts, even at this stage of the proceedings, shows that his work must still have been in a pretty fluid state.

Two months later (September 24, 1871) Ibsen wrote to Brandes, who had apparently been urging him to “hang out a banner” or nail his colours to the mast: “While I have been busied upon
Julian
, I have become, in a way, a fatalist; and yet this play will be a sort of a banner. Do not be afraid, however, of any tendency-nonsense: I look at the characters, at the conflicting designs, at
history,
and do not concern myself with the ‘moral’ of it all. Of course, you will not confound the moral of history with its philosophy; for that must inevitably shine forth as the final verdict on the conflicting and conquering forces.” On December 27 (still from Dresden) he writes to Hegel:

“My new work goes steadily forward. The first part,
Julian and the Philosophers
, in three acts, is already copied out.... I am busily at work upon the second part, which will go quicker and be considerably shorter; the third part, on the other hand, will be somewhat longer.” To the same correspondent, on April 24,1872, he reports the second part almost finished. “The third and last part,” he says, “will be mere child’s play. The spring has now come, and the warm season is my best time for working.” To Brandes, on May 31, he writes, “I go on wrestling with
Julian
”; and on July 23 (from Berchtesgaden) “That monster Julian has still such a grip of me that I cannot shake him off.” On August 8 he announces to Hegel that he has “completed the second part of the trilogy.

The first part,
Julian and the Philosophers,
a play in three acts, will make about a hundred printed pages.

The second part,
Julian’s Apostasy,
a play in three acts, of which I am now making a fair copy, will be of about equal length. The third play,
Julian on the Imperial Throne,
will run to five acts, and my preparations for it are so far advanced that I shall get it out of hand very much quicker than the others. What I have done forms a whole in itself, and could quite well be published separately; but for the sake of the complete impression I think it most advisable that all three plays should appear together.”

Two months later (October 14) the poet is back in Dresden, and writes as follows to a new and much-valued friend, Mr. Edmund Gosse: “1 am working daily at
Julianus Apostata
, and... hope that it may meet with your approval. I am putting into this book a part of my own spiritual life; what I depict, I have, under other forms, myself gone through, and the historic theme I have chosen has also a much closer relation to the movements of our own time than one might at first suppose. I believe such a relation to be indispensable to every modern treatment of so remote a subject, if it is, as a poem, to arouse interest.” In a somewhat later letter to Mr. Gosse he says: “I have kept strictly to history... And yet I have put much self-anatomy into this book.”

In February 1873 the play was finished. On the 4th of that month Ibsen writes to his old friend Ludvig Daae that he is on the point of beginning his fair copy of what he can confidently say will be his “Hauptwerk,” and wants some guidance as to the proper way of spelling Greek names. Oddly enough, he is still in search of facts, and asks for information as to the
Vita Maximi
of Eunapius, which has not been accessible to him. Two days later (February 6) he writes to Hegel: “I have the great pleasure of being able to inform you that my long work is finished — and more to my satisfaction than any of my earlier works. The book is entitled
Emperor and Galilean, a World-Drama in Two Parts.
It contains: Part First,
Caesars Apostasy
; play in five acts (170 pp.); Part Second,
The Emperor Julian,
play in five acts (252 pp.)

... Owing to the growth of the idea during the process of composition, I shall have to make another fair copy of the first play. But it will not become longer in the process; on the contrary, I hope to reduce it by about twenty pages.... This play has been to me a labour of Hercules — not the actual composition: that has been easy — but the effort it has cost me to live myself into a fresh and visual realisation of so remote and so unfamiliar an age.” On February 23, he writes to Ludvig Daae, discussing further the orthography of the Greek names, and adding: “My play deals with a struggle between two irreconcilable powers in the life of the world — a struggle which will always repeat itself. Because of this universality, I call the book ‘a world-historic drama.’ For the rest, there is in the character of Julian, as in most that I have written during my riper years, more of my own spiritual experience than I care to acknowledge to the public. But it is at the same time an entirely realistic piece of work. The figures stood solidly before my eyes in the light of their time — and I hope they will so stand before the readers’ eyes.”

The book was not published until the autumn (October 16, 1873). On September 8, Ibsen wrote to Brandes that he was daily expecting its appearance.

“I hear from Norway,” he went on, “that Bjôrnson, 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.”

A second edition of
Emperor and Galilean
appeared in December
1873. In
the following January Ibsen writes to Mr. Gosse, who had expressed some regret at his abandonment of verse: “The illusion I wished to produce was that of reality. I wished to leave on the reader’s mind the impression that what he had read had actually happened. By employing verse I should have counteracted my own intention.... The many everyday, insignificant characters, whom I have intentionally introduced, would have become indistinct and mixed up with each other had I made them all speak in rhythmic measure. We no longer live in the days of Shakespeare.... The style ought to conform to the degree of ideality imparted to the whole presentment. My play is no tragedy in the ancient acceptation. My desire was to depict human beings and therefore I would not make them speak the language of the gods.” A year later (January 30, 1875) he thus answers a criticism by George Brandes: “I cannot but find an inconsistency between your disapproval of the doctrine of necessity contained in my book, and your approval of something very similar in Paul Heyse’s
Kinder der Welt.
For in my opinion it comes to much the same thing whether, in writing of a person’s character, I say ‘It runs in his blood’ or ‘ He is free — under necessity.’”

An expression in the same letter throws light on the idea which may be called the keystone of the arch of thought erected in this play. “Only entire nations,”

Ibsen writes, “can join in great intellectual movements.

A change of front in our conception of life and of the world is no parochial matter; and we Scandinavians, as compared with other European nations, have not yet got beyond the parish-council standpoint. But nowhere do you find a parish-council anticipating and furthering ‘the third empire.’” To the like effect runs a passage in a speech delivered at Stockholm, September 24, 1887: “I have sometimes been called a pessimist: and indeed I am one, inasmuch as I do not believe in the eternity of human ideals. But I am also an optimist, inasmuch as I fully and confidently believe in the ideals’ power of propagation and of development. Especially and definitely do I believe that the ideals of our time, as they pass away, are tending towards that which, in my drama of
Emperor and Galilean
, I have designated as ‘ the third empire.’