[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.
[2]. Julian the Apostate. 2 vols. London, 1905.
[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).
[4]. It was, in fact, a pamphlet aimed at Frederick William IV. of Prussia, and entitled A Romanticist on the Throne of the Caesars.
[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?”
[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.
[7]. He has also, I think, taken too seriously Julian’s ironic self caricature in the Misopogon.
[8]. Between fifteen and twenty are enumerated by Allard (Julien l’Apostat), a writer who gravely reproduces the most extravagant figments of the hagiographers.