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
