IBSEN'S PLAYS 727 



:c The Youthful League " checked Ibsen's rising popularity. It 

 was received with indignation in his native land. The philosophical 

 observer may find much food for reflection in the fact that the people 

 which not only admired, but positively exulted in " Brand " and 

 " Peer Gynt," indignantly resented the " Youthful League." But 

 this, too passed away. My copy bears the date of 1883, and shows 

 that in that year the work reached its fifth edition. 



After writing these three plays, Ibsen at last returned to " Julian 

 the Apostate," and in 1873 the two dramas, respectively entitled 

 " Caesar's Apostasy " and " The Emperor Julian," but also embraced 

 under the common title, " Emperor and Galilsean," made their ap- 

 pearance. 



In some respects this is the most ambitious, as well as the most 

 bulky, of Ibsen's works. It has great merits, so great, indeed, that it 

 would not be easy to exaggerate them; but yet it is almost the only 

 one of Ibsen's published works that can fairly be called an artistic 

 failure. Critics, I think, are substantially agreed on both these points. 

 The drama gives evidence of a historic sense, the more remarkable since 

 Ibsen was presumably not much of a Greek scholar, and must have de- 

 pended largely upon translations and secondary sources for his vivid 

 reconstruction of the epoch of Julian. The intolerable atmosphere of 

 suspicion, hypocrisy, and treachery in which Julian passed his youth; 

 his own timid, feverish, superstitious, yet attractive character; and 

 the heroic potentialities which never rise into heroism, the talent which 

 never becomes genius, the capacity which never ripens into greatness, 

 and the all-penetrating, all-corroding vanity that are the distinctive 

 characteristics of Julian, are thrown into vivid relief in the first of the 

 twin dramas. In the second we witness the moral and intellectual 

 collapse of a fanatic who lacks inspiration. Julian is a pedant, not a 

 prophet; and his pedantry swallows up his humanity, and dictates 

 actions as revolting and less excusable than the wildest excesses of the 

 Christian fanatics. But he never can adopt the role of a persecutor 

 with a whole heart. He is ashamed of himself, and is half conscious 

 all along of the hollowness of his own cause. He is engaged in a 

 hopeless struggle against fate, and its hopelessness does not bring out 

 the tragic grandeur of his nature, but saps his force and vitality, and 

 reduces him to insignificance, indecision, and at last to mere helpless 

 superstition and crazy arrogance. It is a relief to all, a relief chiefly 

 to himself, when he receives his death wound, can drop the weary 

 struggle, and can cry, " Galila?an ! Thou hast triumphed." 



The whole picture is drawn with deep insight both historical and 

 psychological. But it cannot be denied that the dialogue often drags 

 and sometimes overstays the climax; and that the second of the two 

 dramas has no sufficient development, and no sufficient interest to 

 sustain it at any rate through the first three of its five long acts. 



