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.