as a preliminary to the coming of the "third empire." In no other sense can we read the letters to Hoffory and Brandes cited above (p. xv.); and I give in a footnote[1] a reference to other passages of similar tenor. "But Julian," it may be said, "represented precisely the ideal of political cohesion which was revived in the unification of Germany; why, then, should Ibsen, in writing the second play, have (so to speak) turned against his hero?" The reason, I think, was that Ibsen had come to feel that a loose political unity could be of little avail without the spiritual fusion implied in a world-religion; and this fusion it was Julian's tragic error to oppose. He was a political imperialist by inheritance and as a matter of course; but what he really cared for, the point on which he bent his will, was the restoration of polytheism with all its local cults. And here Ibsen parted company with him. He sympathised to the full with Julian's rebellion against certain phases of Christianity—against book-worship, death-worship, other-worldliness, hypocrisy, intolerance. He had himself gone through this phase of feeling. During his first years in Rome, he had seen the ruins of the ancient world of light and glory sicklied o'er with the pale cast of mediaevalism; and he had ardently sympathised with Julian's passionate resentment against the creed which had defamed and defaced the old
- ↑ For the letter to Hoffory, see Correspondence, Letter 198. The letter to Brandes is numbered 115. See also letters to Hegel (177) and to Brandes (206). I may also refer to an extract from Ibsen's commonplace book, published in the Die neue Rundschau, December 1906, in which he says, "We laugh at the four-and-thirty fatherlands of Germany: but the four-and-thirty fatherlands of Europe are equally ridiculous. North America is content with one, or—for the present—with two." For a somewhat fuller treatment of this subject, see the Nineteenth Century and After, February 1907.
