tion. The speeches put into the
mouths of antique characters are appropriate, but they are seldom vivid;
as Bentley said of the epistles of Julian's own teacher Libanius, "You
feel by the emptiness and deadness of them, that you converse with some
dreaming pedant, his elbow on his desk." The scheme of Ibsen's drama was
too vast for the very minute and meticulous method he chose to adopt.
What he gives us is an immense canvas, on which he has painted here
and there in miniature. It is a pity that he chose for dramatic
representation so enormous a field. It would have suited his genius far
better to have abandoned any attempt to write a conclusive history,
and have selected some critical moment in the life of Julian. He should
rather have concentrated his energies, independent of the chroniclers,
on the resuscitation of that episode, and in the course of it have
trembled less humbly under the uplifted finger of Ammianus.

Of _Emperor and Galilean_ Ibsen afterwards said: "It was the first" (but
he might have added "the only") "poem which I have written under the
influence of German ideas." He was aware of the danger of living too
long away from his own order of thought and language. But it was always
difficult for him, once planted in a place, to pull up his roots. A
weariness took possession of him after the publication of his double
drama, and he did practically nothing for four years. This marks a
central joint in the structure of his career, what the architects call
a "channel" in it, adding to the general retrospect of Ibsen's work an
aspect of solidity and resource. During these years he revised some of
his early writings, made a closer study of the arts of sculpture and
painting, and essayed, without satisfaction, a very brief sojourn in
Norway. In the spring of 1875 he definitely moved with his family from
Dresden to Munich.

The brief visit to Christiania in 1874 proved very unfortunate. Ibsen
was suspicious, the Norwegians of that generation were constitutionally
stiff and reserved; long years among Southern races had accustomed him
to a plenitude in gesture and emphasis. He suffered, all the brief time
he was in Norway, from an intolerable _malaise_. Ten years afterwards,
in writing to Bjoernson, the discomfort of that experience was still
unallayed. "I have not yet saved nearly enough," he said, "to support
myself and my family in the case of my discontinuing my literary work.
And I should be obliged to discon