prose, which gives it a strong realistic colouring. I have
paid particular attention to form, and, among other things, I have
accomplished the feat of doing without a single monologue, in fact
without a single "aside." 'The play is hardly more than a good farce;
the form is no more than the slightest of advances towards probability
on the strict lines of the Scribe tradition; the 'common order of
things' is there, in subject, language, and in everything but the
satirical intention which underlies the whole trivial, stupid, and no
doubt lifelike talk and action. Two elements are still in conflict, the
photographic and the satirical; and the satirical is the only relief
from the photographic. The stage mechanism is still obvious; but the
intention, one sees clearly, is towards realism; and the play helps to
get the mechanism in order.

After _The League of Youth_ Ibsen tells us that he tried to 'seek
salvation in remoteness of subject'; so he returned to his old scheme
for a play on Julian the Apostate, and wrote the two five-act plays
which make up _Emperor and Galilean_. He tells us that it is the first
work which he wrote under German intellectual influences, and that it
contains 'that positive theory of life which the critics have demanded
of me so long.' In one letter he affirms that it is 'an entirely
realistic work,' and in another, 'It is a part of my own spiritual life
which I am putting into this book ... and the historical subject chosen
has a much more intimate connexion with the movements of our own time
than one might at first imagine.' How great a relief it must have been,
after the beer and sausages of _The League of Youth_, to go back to an
old cool wine, no one can read _Emperor and Galilean_ and doubt. It is a
relief and an escape; and the sense of the stage has been put wholly on
one side in both of these plays, of which the second reads almost like
a parody of the first: the first so heated, so needlessly colloquial,
the second so full of argumentative rhetoric. Ibsen has turned against
his hero in the space between writing the one and the other; and the
Julian of the second is more harshly satirised from within than ever
_Peer Gynt_ was. In a letter to Dr. Brandes, Ibsen says: 'What the book
is or is not, I have no desire to enquire. I only know that I saw a
fragment of humanity plainly before my eyes, and that I tried to
reproduce what I saw.' But in the play itself this intention comes and
goes; an