we shall employ in ploughing our not lonely furrow. I have shown how our work is in some way, in however humble a degree, in harmony with the cry of' Back to the land,' and the Garden City; how it may brighten the life of the labourer and make his labour more intelligent and more effective; how it may aid in the renaissance of the arts which seems to be about to dawn upon us, by laying the foundation of a truly National Art, in the re-establishment of folk-drama. No art can be truly national unless it has such a foundation. A great artist whom we invited to join us wrote back, 'Certainly, art, drama, and conscription, more than anything else, will civilise our Empire.' It is in this spirit that our task is undertaken, not for the purpose of making a good labourer into a bad actor, but in the hope of refining some of his amusements, and suggesting to him new forms of recreation and intellectual pleasure. England possesses a great storehouse of this kind in the shape of dances, songs, and plays, and they are so often left on the shelf undusted and forgotten. By telling the story that our fathers have told us of England's greatness and gladness, we shall do something to make life more joyous, wiser and richer, for town and village. In so doing we shall assist many problems, not directly our own, such as that of self-defence and the revival of agriculture. In a word, we too are seeking to take part in the movement that is all around us for the re-awakening of England. Whether the name be well chosen or not, the objects of the Society can surely do something to make the tradition of 'Merrie England' a reality, by song and by dance, by tableau, by drama, by recitation, by pageant, by mystery or fairy play. We can do something to help the people to realise the joy and the sorrow of their own lives and of others. In showing them a ready form for the expression of these emotions, we shall increase the one and lessen or console the other. We shall as a nation again realise what every nation at its greatest holds ever before it-that human progress is realised, according to God's providence, in terms of immortal happiness or immortal pain. FRANK R. BENSON. IBSEN'S IMPERIALISM It is said that Henrik Ibsen, even towards the end of his life, regarded Emperor and Galilean, a World-historic Drama, as his masterpiece; and, whether this be so or no, there is ample evidence in his letters that at the date of its completion (1873) he held that opinion. I doubt whether any critic of repute has ever been found to agree with him. It has been recognised from the outset that, while the First Part of the great double drama is full of vigour, colour, and movement, the Second Part is languid, fragmentary, and more like a rather long-drawn historical romance than a drama properly so called. Even in the Second Part there are magnificent patches of imaginative work; but the general effect is one of effort, and effort of a rather cheap kind. We feel that, while the play is not very dramatic, it is distinctly and insistently melodramatic. An examination of its development in the poet's mind, and of its relation to its historic sources, reveals a curious reason for this difference in style and effect between the two parts. In the following pages I shall attempt to show that, just as he was about midway in its composition, Ibsen was seized and mastered by a 'world-historic' idea which impelled him, in the Second Part, if not to alter his view of the character of his hero, at any rate to belittle him by treating him as the pitifully purblind instrument of an overruling destiny. This idea, as I understand it, was a sort of imperialism—a belief in the efficacy of large political or racial aggregates in promoting that ' revolution of the spirit of man' to which he looked for the salvation of the world. That this idea was very clearly thought out, or that it was successfully brought into harmony with his other ideas, I do not contend. But we have the plainest evidence for the fact that it took hold on him, and dominated his thought, during the years when he was giving its final form to Emperor and Galilean. The play was conceived during the first months of Ibsen's first residence in Italy, in 1864; but it was put aside for six years, while he wrote Brand, Peer Gynt, and The League of Youth. In the autumn of 1870, while living in Dresden, he seriously attacked the theme, and on the 18th of January, 1871, he wrote to his publisher, Hegel, that the First Part was finished. But this 'First Part' was not the five-act play we now possess, under the title of Caesar's Apostasy. At that time he thought of making a trilogy of the work; and the First Part referred to in this letter to Hegel was a three-act play entitled Julian and the Philosophers. No doubt it substantially corresponded with the first three acts of Cæsar's Apostasy, and ended with Julian's elevation to the rank of Cæsar. At that time (January 1871) the poet hoped to have the whole play ready for the printers by June. As a matter of fact, he took more than two years over what he expected to complete in six months. In July 1871 he wrote to Hegel, asking for more historical documents as to the career of Julian'It is facts that I require.' At the same time he said: "This book will be my chief work. . . . That positive view of the world which the critics have so long been demanding of me they will find here.' Up to August of the following year (1872) he still wrote of the play as being divided into three parts: Julian and the Philosophers, three acts; Julian's Apostasy, three acts; and Julian on the Imperial Throne, five acts. It is not clear at what date he determined to fuse the six acts of the first two plays into the five acts of the play we actually possess. The announcement of this alteration first occurs in a letter to Hegel, of February 1873, informing him of the completion of the whole work. ... It was in 1872 that Ibsen made, by correspondence, the acquaintance of Mr. Edmund Gosse; and to him he wrote in October of that year: I am working daily at Julianus Apostata, and . . . am putting into this book a great 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. 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 the same key he wrote to his friend Ludvig Daae immediately after the completion of the play: There is in the character of Julian ... more of my own spiritual experience than I care to acknowledge to the public.' 6 Now let us note the exact day on which Ibsen told Hegel that Julian and the Philosophers was completed, that he was hard at work on the Second Part, and that he hoped to have all three parts finished in six months. The day was the 18th of January, 1871-the very day on which, at Versailles, King William of Prussia was proclaimed German Emperor. That this event, and all that it stood for, made a deep impression on Ibsen, we know on his own authority. In 1888 he wrote to the Danish-German scholar Julius Hoffory: 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. 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, and 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. This puts it beyond doubt that a marked change of mental attitude must have occurred during the actual composition of the play. We know that before the day on which the imperialisation of Germany became an accomplished fact—and therefore long before it was possible for the poet to realise and take home to himself the historic lessons of that event-the three acts of Julian and the Philosophers were already written, and good progress made with Julian's Apostasy. But when we next hear of the play, six months later, we find that, far from being finished, it has apparently made little or no advance. What has he been doing in the interval? He has been, I suggest, readjusting his mental attitude in the light of the world-historic' events of which he is an absorbed spectator. · In a letter to Hegel he speaks explicitly of the growth of the idea during the process of composition.' At the end of the six months of apparent inactivity we find him calling out (rather late in the day, one would think) for facts. The inference is that hitherto he has been poetising more or less freely on a comparatively slight historic basis, but that his new idea involves a closer sifting of the documents. And this inference is fully borne out by a study of the play in its relation to history. To put it broadly, but not, I think, unfairly: the First Part (as it now stands) is true to the spirit of history, but not to the letter, while the Second Part is true to the letter, but not to the spirit. For the actual events, the individual scenes, of the First Part, there is no historic foundation, except in the case of the military insurrection which forced Julian to assume the purple. Apart from some unimportant rearrangements of chronology, the other events are such as may quite well have occurred, but there is no evidence that they did actually occur. When we pass to the Second Part, on the other hand, we find it a mere mosaic of incidents and expressions taken bodily from the documents. Here there is practically nothing fictitious save the fictions of the ecclesiastical historians. Yet the general impression conveyed by the Second Part is as false to history and unjust to Julian as the general impression conveyed by the First Part is just and true. In saying this, however, I am somewhat anticipating my argument. All I have hitherto proved is that between January and June 1871-that is to say, between the practical completion of our present First Part and the commencement of the Second Part a momentous change of spirit and of method did as a matter of fact take place. The First Part, no doubt, would afterwards be in some degree modified in the light of later conceptions; but the changes were certainly not sufficient to obscure the spirit in which it was originally conceived, or to render it homogeneous with the Second. It is to be noted that not until after the six months' gap between January and July 1871 does Ibsen announce to Hegel that the play will contain 'that positive view of the world which the critics have so long been demanding.' 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. The theory is most clearly formulated in the scene between Julian and Maximus at the end of the third act of the Second Part, of which this is the essential portion: JULIAN. Who shall conquer? The Emperor or the Galilean ? MAXIMUS. Hear me, brother and friend of truth! I say you shall both succumb-but not that you shall perish. Does not the child succumb in the youth, and the youth in the man? Yet neither child nor youth perishes. Oh, my best-loved pupil-have you forgotten our colloquies in Ephesus about the three empires? JULIAN. Ah, Maximus, years have passed since then. Speak! MAXIMUS. You know I have never approved your policy as Emperor. You have tried to make the youth a child again. The empire of the flesh is swallowed up in the empire of the spirit. But the empire of the spirit is not final, any more than the youth is. You have tried to hinder the growth of the youth, to hinder him from becoming a man. Oh, fool, who have drawn your sword against that which is to be—against the third empire, in which the twin. natured shall reign! That this conception was no passing one, but was fundamental with Ibsen, is proved in many ways, but chiefly, perhaps, in a speech he delivered in Stockholm in 1887, fourteen years after the comple tion of Emperor and Galilean, in which he said: 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 toward 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 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 |