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:[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]]