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 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, by mistake be destroyed. 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 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 superstition 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 rearrangement 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 VOL, LXI-No. 300 S 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 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, or 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; and it is sheer absurdity 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 WorldWill. 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 have been. Gibbon (no 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 inspirations recorded in military history? It would be too much, perhaps, to expect any poet to resist the introduction of the wholly unhistorical '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. WILLIAM ARCHER. THE BACKGROUND OF DRAMA I. In his Shakespeare and the Modern Stage Mr. Sidney Lee has dealt in a trenchant style with the elaborate scenic production of Shakespeare's plays which is the fashion of the day. He gives many reasons why scenic display should not be too elaborate, among them the practical one that the cost of such productions is so excessive that two or three That is a matter pieces could be mounted for the same cost as one. which need hardly be discussed, for presumably managers know their own business and do not spend money on their productions unless they have good reason to expect it will be returned to them with profit. The chief practical objection, apart from artistic grounds, against the elaborate productions of to-day, is that the initial expense demands a long run before the manager can be recouped, and long runs do not make for the best achievement of the actor's art. Unfortunately, Shakespeare is not the only sufferer from this state of things, and long runs are not always the result of an expensive production. While the theatre is a commercial speculation, the manager will naturally attempt to squeeze every penny piece he can out of his commodities. The plays themselves suffer. Mr. J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan is an instance. It is now in its third year, and, we may assume, will gradually take its place as a dramatic perennial. It has not been improved in its subsequent growths. The acting has not improved, and all kinds of tasteless business' have been grafted on to the original stock. The problem of long runs is very difficult to solve. It is all very well to say that an artistic manager should withdraw a play after a reasonable number of performances, which would be determined both by public demand and the players' interest in their work; but London is so large that, if a play be really successful, it may run for a year without having exhausted its audience. Mr. Pinero's His House in Order is a case in point, for that play is not of the type which people desire to see many times, so that every audience is practically a fresh audience. Nor can it be said that Mr. Beerbohm Tree, who is the arch-priest of elaborate Shakespearian productions, keeps any Whether he one play on his stage for an exceptionally long run. changes them for financial reasons or other I do not know, but ä year's history of work at His Majesty's shows sufficient variety. Much Ado about Nothing, The Tempest, Business is Business, Colonel Newcome and Antony and Cleopatra, besides a Shakespeare week in the summer, is not a bad record for one theatre, and compares favourably with any stage but that of the Court Theatre. The practical side of theatre management is beset with so many difficulties that we had best not touch upon them. The complication of the problem by the magnificence of scenery, upholstery, and costumes supposed to be demanded by modern audiences does not apply to Shakespeare only. It will be more to the purpose to examine the modern decoration of Shakespeare, and scenic elaboration in general, entirely from the artistic standpoint. II. There are two opposed views which call for some consideration. Mr. H. Beerbohm Tree, in a lecture to the members of the Salon, thus expressed the faith that is in him : I take it that the entire business of the stage is-illusion. To gain this end, all means are fair. The same is sometimes said of love and war, though I incline to dismiss this declaration as an ethical fallacy. Illusion, then, is the first and last word of the stage: all that aids illusion is good, all that destroys illusion is bad. This simple law governs us-or should govern us. In that compound of all the arts which is the art of the modern theatre, the sweet grace of restraint is of course necessary, and the scenic embellishments should not overwhelm the dramatic interest, or the balance is upset-the illusion is gone! These be wise words, but it will be noted they contain a very drastic modification of the blessings of 'scenic embellishments.' Mr. Sidney Lee, whose opinions may be taken as representing those of the bulk of literary admirers of Shakespeare, bewails the fact that the imagination of modern audiences is so weak that they cannot create the environment of Shakespeare's dramas for themselves, as audiences did in the poet's day. But Mr. Lee is in favour of adequate scenery. He is not of Mr. Beerbohm Tree's 'certain pedants' who apparently imagine that Shakespeare should be presented on the stage of the twentieth century in the same manner and with the same limitations as were necessarily observed on the stage of the Globe Theatre in the sixteenth century.' The general question of the place of scenery in drama is complicated, however, by the loose con struction of Shakespeare's plays. Mr. Beerbohm Tree has quoted the chorus which precedes Henry the Fifth in support of his contention that Shakespeare did not consider the limited scenic conditions of his own day 'as perennial and eternal'; But pardon, gentles all, |