person's character, I say 'It runs in his blood' or 'He is free—under necessity.'"
An expression in the same letter throws light on the idea which may be called the keystone of the arch of thought erected in this play. "Only entire nations," Ibsen writes, "can join in great intellectual movements. A change of front in our conception of life and of the world is no parochial matter; and we Scandinavians, as compared with other European nations, have not yet got beyond the parish-council standpoint. But nowhere do you find a parish-council anticipating and furthering 'the third empire.'" To the like effect runs a passage in a speech delivered at Stockholm, September 24, 1887: "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 towards 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 latest (so far as I know) of Ibsen's references to this play is perhaps the most significant of all. It occurs in a letter to the Danish-German scholar Julius Hoffory, written from Munich, February 26, 1888: "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. When, in the autumn of 1868, I came from Italy to Dresden, I brought with me the plan of The League of Youth, and wrote that play in the following winter. During my four years' stay in Rome, I had merely made various
