Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Volume 5).djvu/16

xii has "completed the second part of the trilogy. The first part, Julian and the Philosophers, a play in three acts, will make about a hundred printed pages. The second part, Julian's Apostasy, a play in three acts, of which I am now making a fair copy, will be of about equal length. The third play, Julian on the Imperial Throne, will run to five acts, and my preparations for it are so far advanced that I shall get it out of hand very much quicker than the others. What I have done forms a whole in itself, and could quite well be published separately; but for the sake of the complete impression I think it most advisable that all three plays should appear together."

Two months later (October 14) the poet is back in Dresden, and writes as follows to a new and much-valued friend, Mr Edmund Gosse: "I am working daily at Julianus Apostata, and hope that it may meet with your approval. I am putting into this book a part of my own spiritual life; what I depict, I have, under other forms, myself gone through, and the historic theme I have chosen has also a much closer relation to the movements of our own time than one might at first suppose. I believe such a relation to be indispensable to every modern treatment of so remote a subject, if it is, as a poem, to arouse interest." In a somewhat later letter to Mr. Gosse he says: "I have kept strictly to history And yet I have put much self-anatomy into this book."

In February 1873 the play was finished. On the 4th of that month Ibsen writes to his old friend Ludvig Daae that he is on the point of beginning his fair copy of what he can confidently say will be his "Hauptwerk," and wants some guidance as to the proper way of spelling Greek names. Oddly enough, he is still in search of facts, and asks for information