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also delimited as the italic. There is a single instance of a one-letter
italic (_I_).
Footnotes have been collected at the end of each section or act in which
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THE COLLECTED WORKS OF
HENRIK IBSEN
VOLUME V
EMPEROR AND GALILEAN
(1873)
THE COLLECTED WORKS OF
HENRIK IBSEN
_Copyright Edition. Complete in 11 Volumes._
_Crown 8vo, price 4s. each._
=ENTIRELY REVISED AND EDITED BY=
=WILLIAM ARCHER=
Vol. I. Lady Inger, The Feast at Solhoug, Love’s
Comedy
Vol. II. The Vikings, The Pretenders
Vol. III. Brand
Vol. IV. Peer Gynt
Vol. V. Emperor and Galilean (2 parts)
Vol. VI. The League of Youth, Pillars of Society
Vol. VII. A Doll’s House, Ghosts
Vol. VIII. An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck
Vol. IX. Rosmersholm, The Lady from the Sea
Vol. X. Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder
Vol. XI. Little Eyolf, John Gabriel Borkman, When
We Dead Awaken
LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
21 BEDFORD STREET, W.C.
THE COLLECTED WORKS OF
HENRIK IBSEN
COPYRIGHT EDITION
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VOLUME V
EMPEROR AND
GALILEAN
A WORLD-HISTORIC DRAMA
WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY
WILLIAM ARCHER
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: title page]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
1911
_First printed September 1907_
_Second Impression April 1911_
_Copyright 1907 by William Heinemann_
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION vii
CAESAR’S APOSTASY 1
_Translated by_ WILLIAM ARCHER
THE EMPEROR JULIAN 225
_Translated by_ WILLIAM ARCHER
EMPEROR AND GALILEAN.
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,[1] 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 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 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[2] 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
Björnson (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.[3] 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,
_Fædrelandet_, 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,[4] 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: “I 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, _Caesar’s 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 irreconcileable 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 Björnson, 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.’ Let
me therefore drain my glass to the growing, the coming time.”
The latest (so far as I know) of Ibsen’s references to this play is
perhaps the most significant of all. It occurs in a letter to the
Danish-German scholar Julius Hoffory, written from Munich, February 26,
1888: “_Emperor and Galilean_ is not the first work I wrote in Germany,
but doubtless the first that I wrote under the influence of German
spiritual life. When, in the autumn of 1868, I came from Italy to
Dresden, I brought with me the plan of _The League of Youth_, and wrote
that play in the following winter. During my four years’ stay in Rome, I
had merely made various historical studies, and taken sundry notes, for
_Emperor and Galilean_; I had not sketched out any definite plan, much
less written any of it. My view of life was still, at that time,
National-Scandinavian, wherefore I could not master the foreign
material. Then, in Germany, I lived through the great time, the year of
the war, and the development which followed it. This brought with it for
me, at many points, an impulse of transformation. My conception of
world-history and of human life had hitherto been a national one. It now
widened into a racial conception; and then I could write _Emperor and
Galilean_.”
I have now brought together those utterances of Ibsen’s which relate the
external history of the great double-drama, and give us some insight
into the spiritual influences which inspired and shaped it. We have seen
that, at the time of its completion, he confidently regarded it as his
masterpiece. It is the habit of many artists always to think their last
work their best; but there is nothing to show that this was one of
Ibsen’s foibles. Moreover, even towards the end of his life, when the
poet was asked by Professor Schofield, of Harvard, what work he
considered his greatest, he replied, _Emperor and Galilean_. If this was
his deliberate and lasting opinion, we have here another curious
instance of the tendency, so frequent among authors, to capricious
over-valuation of one or another of their less successful efforts.
Certainly we should be very sorry to miss this splendid fresco of the
decadent Empire from the list of Ibsen’s works; but neither technically
nor intellectually—unless I am very much mistaken—can it rank among his
masterpieces.
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.[5]
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 [not Maximus]—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 (paradoxically enough) 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.
When Julian has ascended the throne, a wholly different method of
treatment sets in. We could almost guess from internal evidence, what
Ibsen’s letters prove to be the fact—that he underwent a decisive change
of mental attitude during the process of composition. The original first
part, we see (that is to say the three-act play which was to have been
called _Julian and the Philosophers_), was finished some time before
January 18, 1871, on which date he tells Hegel that he is already at
work on the second part. But January 18, 1871, was the very day on
which, at Versailles, the King of Prussia was proclaimed German Emperor;
so that the first part must have been written before the Imperialisation
of Germany was even to be foreseen. While the poet was engaged upon the
second part of the “trilogy” he then designed, he was doubtless brooding
over the great event of January 18, and gradually realising its nature
and consequences. That change in his mental attitude was taking place,
which in his letter to Hoffory (p. xvi.) he described as the transition
from a national to a racial standpoint. While in January he “confidently
hopes” to have the whole play finished in June, July finds him, to all
appearance, no further advanced, and (very significantly) asking for
“facts,” documents of detail, whereof, in writing the first play, he had
felt no need. At the same time he tells Hegel that the critics will find
in the play that positive view of the world for which they have long
been clamouring—a _Weltanschauung_, we may fairly conjecture, at which
he has arrived during the six months’ interval since his last letter.
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. (Compare
the scene between Julian and Maximus at the end of Part II. Act III.)
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.
It may seem like a play on the word “empire” to connect this concept
with the establishment in January 1871 of a political confederation of
petty States, compared with which even Julian’s “orbis terrarum” was a
world-empire indeed. But there is ample proof that in Ibsen’s mind
political unification, the formation of large aggregates inspired by a
common idea, figured as a preliminary to the coming of the “third
empire.” In no other sense can we read the letters to Hoffory and
Brandes cited above (p. xv.); and I give in a footnote[6] a reference to
other passages of similar tenor. “But Julian,” it may be said,
“represented precisely the ideal of political cohesion which was revived
in the unification of Germany; why, then, should Ibsen, in writing the
second play, have (so to speak) turned against his hero?” The reason, I
think, was that Ibsen had come to feel that a loose political unity
could be of little avail without the spiritual fusion implied in a
world-religion; and this fusion it was Julian’s tragic error to oppose.
He was a political imperialist by inheritance and as a matter of course;
but what he really cared for, the point on which he bent his will, was
the restoration of polytheism with all its local cults. And here Ibsen
parted company with him. He sympathised to the full with Julian’s
rebellion against certain phases of Christianity—against book-worship,
death-worship, other-worldliness, hypocrisy, intolerance. He had himself
gone through this phase of feeling. During his first years in Rome, he
had seen the ruins of the ancient world of light and glory sicklied o’er
with the pale cast of mediaevalism; and he had ardently sympathised with
Julian’s passionate resentment against the creed which had defamed and
defaced the old beauty in the name of a truth that was so radically
corrupted as to be no longer true. In this mood he had conceived and in
great measure executed the First Part, as we now possess it. But further
study of detail, in the light of that new political conception which had
arisen out of the events of 1870-71, had shown him that the secret of
Julian’s failure lay in the hopeless inferiority of the religion he
championed to the religion he attacked. That religion, with all its
corruptions, came to seem a necessary stage in the evolution of
humanity; and the poet asked himself, perhaps, whether he, any more than
Julian, had even now a more practical substitute to offer in its place.
In this sense, I take it, we must read his repeated assertion that he
had put into the play much of his own “spiritual experience.” In the
concept of the “third empire” he found, I repeat, the keystone to his
arch of thought, to which everything else must be brought into due
relation. He re-wrote (it seems probable) the scene of the symposium
(Part I. Act III.) in order to emphasise this idea; and it entirely
dominated and conditioned the whole of the second play.
But what was the effect of the concept? It was to make Julian a
plaything in the hands of some power, some implicitly-postulated
World-Will, working slowly, deviously, but relentlessly, towards a
far-off, dimly-divined consummation. Christianity, no doubt, was also an
instrument of this power; but it was an instrument predestined (for the
moment) to honourable uses, while its opponent was fated to dishonour.
Thus the process of the second part is a gradual sapping of Julian’s
intelligence and power of moral discrimination; while the World-Will,
acting always on the side of Christianity, becomes indistinguishable
from the mechanical Providence of the vulgar melodramatist.
Whatever we may think of the historical or philosophical value of the
theory of the “third empire,” there can be little doubt that its effect
upon the play has been artistically disastrous. It has led Ibsen to cog
the dice against Julian in a way from which even a Father of the Church
might have shrunk. He has not only accepted uncritically all the
invectives of Gregory, and the other Christian assailants of
“Antichrist,” but he has given to many historic events a fictitious
twist, and always to Julian’s disadvantage.[7]
It would need a volume to apply to each incident of the Second Part the
test of critical examination. I must be content with a rough outline of
the distorting effect of the poet’s preoccupation with his
“world-historic” idea.
In the first place, he makes Julian much more of a persecutor than even
his enemies allege him to have been. Nothing is more certain than that
Julian was sincerely convinced of the inefficacy of violence as a means
of conversion, and keenly alive to the impolicy of conferring upon his
opponents the distinction of martyrdom. Tried by the standards of his
age, he was a marvellously humane man. Compared with his uncle,
Constantine, his cousin Constantius, his brother Gallus—to go no further
back among wearers of the purple—he seems like a being of another race.
It is quite true, as his enemies allege, that his clemency was politic
as well as humane; but, whatever its motives, it was real and
consistent. Gregory, while trying to make him out a monster, explicitly
and repeatedly complains that he denied to Christians the crown of
martyrdom. Saint Jerome speaks of his “blanda persecutio”—persecution by
methods of mildness. The worst that can be alleged against him is a lack
of diligence in punishing popular outrages upon the Christians
(generally of the nature of reprisals) which occurred here and there
under his rule. That he incited to such riots is nowhere alleged; and it
is difficult to judge whether his failure to repress them was due to
malicious inertia or to actual lack of power. The policing of the empire
cannot have been an easy matter, and Julian was occupied, during the
whole of his brief reign, in concentrating his forces for the Persian
expedition. It cannot be pretended that his tolerance rose to the pitch
of impartiality. He favoured Pagans, and he more or less oppressed
Christians; though a considerable part of his alleged oppression lay in
the withdrawal of extravagant privileges conferred on them by his
predecessors. In his attempt to undo some of the injustices that
Christians had committed during their forty years of predominance—such
as the seizure of temple glebes and so forth—he was doubtless guilty, on
his own account, of more than one injustice. Wrong breeds wrong, and, in
a time of religious dissolution and reconstruction, equity is always at
the mercy of passion, resentment and greed. There was even, in some of
Julian’s proceedings, a sort of perfidy and insolence that must have
been peculiarly galling to the Christians. It would not be altogether
unjust to accuse him of having instituted against the new religion a
campaign of chicanery; but that is something wholly different from a
campaign of blood. The alleged “martyrdoms” of his reign are few in
number,[8] are recounted by late and prejudiced authorities, are
accompanied by all the manifestly fabulous details characteristic of
such stories, and are none of them, with the smallest show of
credibility, laid to the account of Julian himself.
But what is the impression we receive from Ibsen? We are given to
understand that Julian drifted into a campaign of sanguinary atrocity,
full of horrors as great as those recorded or imagined of the
persecutions under Decius or Diocletian. It is made to seem, moreover,
that he was personally concerned in some of the worst of these horrors.
We are asked to conceive his life as being passed with the mingled
shrieks and psalms of his victims ringing in his ears. He is made to
gloat in imagination over their physical agonies. (“Where are the
Galileans now? Some under the executioner’s hands, others flying through
the narrow streets, ashy pale with terror, their eyes starting from
their heads,” &c. &c.; p. 314). He is haunted in his last hours by
ghastly visions of whole troops of martyrs. Moreover, his persecutions
are made particularly hateful by the fact that they either fall upon or
threaten his personal friends. The companion of his childhood, Agathon
(a fictitious personage), is goaded by remorseless cruelty to that
madness which eventually makes him the assassin of Antichrist. Gregory
of Nazianzus is first made (what he never was) Julian’s most cherished
comrade, and is then shown as doing what he never did—playing a noble
and heroic part in personally defying the tyrant. Mad and monstrous
designs are attributed to Julian, such as that of searching out (with
the aid of tortures) and destroying all the writings of the Christians.
This trait appears to be suggested by a letter from Julian to the
Prefect of Egypt enjoining him to collect and preserve all the books
which had belonged to George, Bishop of Alexandria: “He had many of them
concerning philosophy and rhetoric, and many of them that contained the
doctrines of the impious Galileans. I would willingly see the last named
all destroyed, if I did not fear that some good and useful books might,
at the same time, be destroyed by mistake. Make, therefore, the most
minute search concerning them. In this search the secretary of George
may be of great help to you.... But if he try to deceive you in this
affair, submit him immediately to the torture.” It is needless to remark
upon the difference between a rhetorical wish that all the Christian
books in a particular library might be destroyed, and an actual attempt
to annihilate all the Christian writings in the world. Thus not only are
the clearest evidences of Julian’s abstention from violence disregarded,
but all sorts of minor incidents are misrepresented to his disadvantage.
A particularly grave injustice to his character meets us almost on the
threshold of the Second Part. The execution of the Treasurer, Ursulus,
by the military tribunal which Julian appointed on coming to the throne,
is condemned by all historians and was regretted by Julian himself. No
doubt he was culpably remiss in not preventing it; but Ibsen, without
the slightest warrant, gives his conduct a peculiarly odious character
in making it appear that he deliberately sacrificed the old man to his
resentment of a blow administered to his vanity in the matter of the
Eastern Ambassadors. There is nothing whatever to connect Ursulus with
this incident.
The failure of Julian’s effort to rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem is a
matter of unquestioned history. It is impossible now to determine,
though it is easy to conjecture, what natural accidents were magnified
by fanaticism into supernatural intervention. But what does Ibsen do? He
is not even content with the comparatively rational account of the
matter given by Gregory within a few months of its occurrence. He adopts
Ammian’s later and much exaggerated account; he makes Jovian, who had
nothing to do with the affair, avouch it with the authority of an
eye-witness; and, to give the miracle a still more purposeful
significance, he represents it as the instrument of the conversion of
Jovian, who was to be Julian’s successor, and the undoer of his work.
Under ordinary circumstances, this would be a quite admissible
re-arrangement of history, designed to save the introduction of another
character. But the very fact that the poet is, throughout the play, so
obviously sacrificing dramatic economy and concentration to historic
accuracy, renders this heightening of the alleged miracle something very
like a falsification of evidence. It arises, of course, from no desire
to be unjust to Julian, for whom Ibsen’s sympathy remains unmistakable,
but from a determination to make him the tragic victim of a World-Will
pitilessly using him as an instrument to its far-off ends.
But this conception of a vague external power interfering at all sorts
of critical moments to baffle designs of which, for one reason or
another, it disapproves, belongs to the very essence of melodrama.
Therefore the incident of the Temple of Jerusalem brings with it painful
associations of _The Sign of the Cross_; and still more suggestive of
that masterpiece is the downfall of the Temple of Apollo at Daphne which
brings the second act of the Second Part to a close. Here the poet
deliberately departs from history for the sake of a theatrical effect.
The temple of Apollo was not destroyed by an earthquake, nor in any way
that even suggested a miracle. It was simply burnt to the ground; and
though there was no evidence to show how the conflagration arose, the
suspicion that it was the work of Christians cannot be regarded as
wholly unreasonable.
An incident of which Ibsen quite uncritically accepts the accounts of
Julian’s enemies is his edict imposing what we should now call a test on
the teachers in public (municipal) schools. This was probably an
impolitic act; but an act of frantic tyranny it certainly was not. Homer
and Hesiod were in Julian’s eyes sacred books. They were the Scriptures
of his religion; and he decreed that they should not be expounded to
children, at the public expense, by “atheists” who (unless they were
hypocrites as well) were bound to cast ridicule and contempt on them as
religious documents. It is not as though Christians of that age could
possibly have been expected to treat the Olympian divinities with the
decent reverence with which even an agnostic teacher of to-day will
speak of the Gospel story. Such tolerance was foreign to the whole
spirit of fourth-century Christianity. It was nothing if not intolerant;
and the teacher would have been no good Christian who did not make his
lessons the vehicle of proselytism. There is something a little
paradoxical in the idea that tolerance should go the length of endowing
the propagation of intolerance. It is quite false to represent Julian’s
measure as an attempt to deprive Christians of all instruction, and hurl
them back into illiterate barbarism. He explicitly states that Christian
children are as welcome as ever to attend the schools.
As the drama draws to a close, Ibsen shows his hero at every step more
pitifully hoodwinked and led astray by the remorseless World-Will. He
regains, towards the end, a certain tragic dignity, but it is at the
expense of his sanity. “Quos deus vult perdere prius dementat.” Now,
there is no real evidence for the frenzied megalomania, the
“Cäsarenwahn,” which the poet attributes to Julian. It is not even
certain that his conduct of the Persian expedition was so rash and
desperate as it is represented to be. Gibbon (no blind partisan of
Julian’s) has shown that there is a case to be made even for the burning
of the fleet. The mistake, perhaps, lay, not so much in burning it, as
in having it there at all. Even as events fell out, the result of the
expedition was by no means the greatest disaster that ever befell the
Roman arms. The commonplace, self-indulgent Jovian brought the army off,
ignominiously indeed, but in tolerable preservation. Had Julian lived,
who knows but that the burning of the ships might now have ranked as one
of the most brilliant audacities recorded in the annals of warfare?
It would be too much, perhaps, to expect any poet to resist the
introduction of the wholly unhistoric “I am hammering the Emperor’s
coffin,” and “Thou hast conquered, Galilean!” They certainly fell in too
aptly with Ibsen’s scheme for him to think of weighing their evidences.
But one significant instance may be noted of the way in which he twists
things to the detriment either of Julian’s character or of his sanity.
In the second scene of the fifth act, he makes Julian contemplate
suicide by drowning, in the hope that, if his body disappeared, the
belief would spread abroad that he had been miraculously snatched up
into the communion of the gods. Now Gregory, it is true, mentions the
design of suicide; but he mentions it as an incident of Julian’s
delirium _after_ his wound. Gregory’s virulence of hatred makes him at
best a suspected witness; but even he did not hold Julian capable of so
mad a fantasy before his intellect had been overthrown by physical
suffering and fever.
Thus from step to step, throughout the Second Part, does Ibsen disparage
and degrade his hero. It is not for me to discuss the value of the
conception of the “third empire” to which poor Julian was sacrificed.
But one thing we may say with confidence—namely, that the postulated
World-Will does not work by such extremely melodramatic methods as those
which Ibsen attributes to it. So far as its incidents are concerned, the
Second Part might have been designed by a superstitious hagiologist, or
a melodramatist desirous of currying favour with the clergy. Nay, it
might almost seem as though the spirit of Gregory of Nazianzus—himself a
dramatist after a fashion—had entered into Ibsen during the composition
of the play. Certainly, if the World-Will decreed that Julian should be
sacrificed in the cause of the larger Imperialism, it made of Ibsen,
too, its instrument for completing the immolation.
In translating _Kejser og Galilæer_ I was enabled (by arrangement) to
avail myself of occasional aid from Miss Catherine Ray’s version of the
play, published in 1876. To Miss Ray belongs the credit of having been
the first English translator of Ibsen, as Mr. Gosse was his first
expositor. The text of my earlier rendering has been very carefully
revised for the present edition.
One difficulty has encountered me at every turn. The Norwegians use only
one word—_Riget_ (German _das Reich_)—to cover the two ideas represented
in English by “empire” and “kingdom.” In most cases “empire” is clearly
the proper rendering, since it would be absurd to speak in English of
the Roman or the Byzantine Kingdom. But it would be no less impossible
to say, in the Lord’s Prayer, “Thine is the empire and the power and the
glory.” In the scene with Maximus in Ephesus, and in several other
passages, I have used the word “empire” where “kingdom,” in its Biblical
sense, would have been preferable, were it not necessary to keep the
analogy or contrast between the temporal and the spiritual “empire”
clearly before the reader’s mind. But at the end of the fifth act of
_Caesar’s Apostasy_, where the Lord’s Prayer is interwoven with the
dialogue, I have been forced to fall back on “kingdom.” The reader,
then, will please remember that these two words stand for one
word—_Riget_—in the original.
The verse from Homer quoted by Julian in the third act of the second
play occurs in the twentieth book of the _Odyssey_ (line 18). Ibsen
prints the sentence which follows it as a second hexameter line; but
either he or one of his authorities has apparently misread the passage
in the treatise, _Against the Cynic Heraclius_, on which this scene is
founded. No such line occurs in Homer; and in the attack on Heraclius,
the phrase about the mad dog appears as part of the author’s text, not
as a quotation. I have ventured, therefore, to “render unto Caesar the
things that are Caesar’s,” and print the phrase as Julian’s own.
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Footnote 1:
It was acted at the Leipzig Stadttheater, December 5, 1896, and at the
Belle-Alliance Theater, Berlin, on the occasion of the poet’s
seventieth birthday, in March 1898. It must, of course, have been
enormously cut down.
Footnote 2:
_Julian the Apostate._ 2 vols. London, 1905.
Footnote 3:
The poem was never finished at all. It is doubtless that of which a
fragment has been recovered and is about to be published (1907).
Footnote 4:
It was, in fact, a pamphlet aimed at Frederick William IV. of Prussia,
and entitled _A Romanticist on the Throne of the Caesars_.
Footnote 5:
I may, perhaps, be excused for quoting at this point an extract from a
review of Negri’s _Julian the Apostate_, in which I tried to summarise
the reasons of Julian’s hatred of Christianity: “Firstly, he was
unmoved by the merits of the Christian ethic, even where it coincided
with his own, because he saw it so flagrantly ignored by the corrupt
Christianity of his day. A puritan in the purple, he was morally too
Christian to be a Christian of the fourth-century Church. Secondly, he
hated the pessimism of Christianity—that very throwing-forward of its
hopes to the life beyond the grave which so eminently fitted it to a
period of social catastrophe and dissolution. He found its heaven and
hell vulgar and contemptible, and regarded the average Christian as a
sort of spiritual brandy-tippler, who rejected, for a crude stimulant
and anodyne, the delicate lemonade of Neo-Platonic polytheism.
Thirdly, he resented what he called the ‘atheism’ of Christianity, its
elimination of the divine from Nature, leaving it inanimate and
chilly. Fourthly, like the earlier Emperors, he deemed Christianity
anti-social, and the Christian potentially and probably, if not
actually, a bad citizen of the Empire. Fifthly, he hated the
aggressive intolerance of Christianity, its inability to live and let
live, its polemical paroxysms, and iconoclastic frenzies.... These
were the main elements in his anti-Christianity; and yet they are not,
taken together, quite sufficient to account for the measureless scorn
with which he invariably speaks of ‘Galileans.’ One cannot but feel
that Christianity must have done him some personal injury, not clearly
known to us. Was he simply humiliated by the hypocrisy he had had to
practise in his boyhood and youth? Or was Ibsen right in divining some
painful mystery behind his certainly unsatisfactory relations with his
Christian consort, Helena?”
Footnote 6:
For the letter to Hoffory, see _Correspondence_, Letter 198. The
letter to Brandes is numbered 115. See also letters to Hegel (177) and
to Brandes (206). I may also refer to an extract from Ibsen’s
commonplace book, published in the _Die neue Rundschau_, December
1906, in which he says, “We laugh at the four-and-thirty fatherlands
of Germany: but the four-and-thirty fatherlands of Europe are equally
ridiculous. North America is content with one, or—for the present—with
two.” For a somewhat fuller treatment of this subject, see the
_Nineteenth Century and After_, February 1907.
Footnote 7: