Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Volume 5).djvu/20

xvi historical studies, and taken sundry notes, for Emperor and Galilean; I had not sketched out any definite plan, much less written any of it. My view of life was still, at that time, National-Scandinavian, wherefore I could not master the foreign material. Then, in Germany, I lived through the great time, the year of the war, and the development which followed it. This brought with it for me, at many points, an impulse of transformation. My conception of world-history and of human life had hitherto been a national one. It now widened into a racial conception; and then I could write Emperor and Galilean."

I have now brought together those utterances of Ibsen's which relate the external history of the great double-drama, and give us some insight into the spiritual influences which inspired and shaped it. We have seen that, at the time of its completion, he confidently regarded it as his masterpiece. It is the habit of many artists always to think their last work their best; but there is nothing to show that this was one of Ibsen's foibles. Moreover, even towards the end of his life, when the poet was asked by Professor Schofield, of Harvard, what work he considered his greatest, he replied, Emperor and Galilean. If this was his deliberate and lasting opinion, we have here another curious instance of the tendency, so frequent among authors, to capricious over-valuation of one or another of their less successful efforts. Certainly we should be very sorry to miss this splendid fresco of the decadent Empire from the list of Ibsen's works; but neither technically nor intellectually—unless I am very much mistaken—can it rank among his masterpieces.