Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Volume 6).djvu/20

 PILLARS OF SOCIETY.

INTRODUCTION.

In the eight years that intervened between ''The League of Youth and Pillars of Society''—his second prose play of modern life—Ibsen published a small ollection of his poems (1871), and his "World-Historic Drama," Emperor and Galilean (1873). After he had thus dismissed from his mind the figure of Julian the Apostate, which had haunted it ever since his earliest days in Rome, he deliberately abandoned, once for all, what may be called masquerade romanticism—that external stimulus to the imagination which lies in remoteness of time and unfamiliarity of scene and costume. It may be that, for the moment, he also intended to abandon, not merely romanticism, but romance—to deal solely with the literal and commonplace facts of life, studied in the dry light of everyday experience. If that was his purpose, it was very soon to break down; but in Pillars of Society he more nearly achieved it than in any other work.

Many causes contributed to the usually long pause between Emperor and Galilean and Pillars of Society. The summer of 1874 was occupied with a visit to