Little Eyolf
Little Eyolf INTRODUCTION.CHARACTERSACT FIRSTACT SECONDACT THIRDCopyright
Little Eyolf
Henrik Ibsen
INTRODUCTION.
Little Eyolf was written in Christiania during 1894, and
published in Copenhagen on December 11 in that year. By this time
Ibsen's correspondence has become so scanty as to afford us no clue
to what may be called the biographical antecedents of the play.
Even of anecdotic history very little attaches to it. For only one
of the characters has a definite model been suggested. Ibsen
himself told his French translator, Count Prozor, that the original
of the Rat-Wife was "a little old woman who came to kill rats at
the school where he was educated. She carried a little dog in a
bag, and it was said that children had been drowned through
following her." This means that Ibsen did not himself adapt to his
uses the legend so familiar to us in Browning'sPied
Piper of Hamelin, but found it ready adapted by the
popular imagination of his native place, Skien. "This idea," Ibsen
continued to Count Prozor, "was just what I wanted for bringing
about the disappearance of Little Eyolf, in whom the infatuation
[Note: The French word used by Count Prozor is "infatuation." I can
think of no other rendering for it; but I do not quite know what it
means as applied to Allmers and Eyolf.] and the feebleness of his
father reproduced, but concentrated, exaggerated, as one often sees
them in the son of such a father." Dr. Elias tells us that a
well-known lady-artist, who in middle life suggested to him the
figure of Lona Hessel, was in later years the model for the
Rat-Wife. There is no inconsistency between these two accounts of
the matter. The idea was doubtless suggested by his recollection of
the rat-catcher of Skien, while traits of manner and physiognomy
might be borrowed from the lady in question.The verse quoted on pp. 52 and 53 [Transcriber's Note: "There
stood the champagne," etc., in ACT I] is the last line of a very
well-known poem by Johan Sebastian Welhaven,
entitledRepublikanerne, written in 1839.
An unknown guest in a Paris restaurant has been challenged by a
noisy party of young Frenchmen to join them in drinking a health to
Poland. He refuses; they denounce him as a craven and a slave; he
bares his breast and shows the scars of wounds received in fighting
for the country whose lost cause has become a subject for
conventional enthusiasm and windy rhetoric."De saae pas hverandre. Han vandred sin
vei. De havde champagne, men rörte den
ei.""They looked at each other. He went on his way. There stood
their champagne, but they did not touch it." The champagne incident
leads me to wonder whether the relation between Rita and Allmers
may not have been partly suggested to Ibsen by the relation between
Charlotte Stieglitz and her weakling of a husband. Their story must
have been known to him through George Brandes'sYoung
Germany, if not more directly. "From time to time,"
says Dr. Brandes, "there came over her what she calls her
champagne-mood; she grieves that this is no longer the case with
him." [Note:Main Currents of Nineteenth Century
Literature, vol. vi. p. 299] Did the germ of the
incident lie in these words?The first performance of the play in Norway took place at the
Christiania Theatre on January 15, 1895, Fru Wettergren playing
Rita And Fru Dybwad, Asta. In Copenhagen (March 13, 1895) Fru Oda
Nielsen and Fru Hennings played Rita and Asta respectively, while
Emil Poulsen played Allmers. The first German Rita (Deutsches
Theater, Berlin, January 12, 1895) was Frau Agnes Sorma, with
Reicher as Allmers. Six weeks later Frl. Sandrock played Rita at
the Burgtheater, Vienna. In May 1895 the play was acted by M.
Lugné-Poë's company in Paris. The first performance in English took
place at the Avenue Theatre, London, on the afternoon of November
23, 1896, with Miss Janet Achurch as Rita, Miss Elizabeth Robins as
Asta, and Mrs. Patrick Campbell as the Rat-Wife. Miss Achurch's
Rita made a profound impression. Mrs. Patrick Campbell afterwards
played the part in a short series of evening performances. In the
spring of 1895 the play was acted in Chicago by a company of
Scandinavian amateurs, presumably in Norwegian. Fru Oda Nielsen has
recently (I understand) given some performances of it in New York,
and Madame Alla Nazimova has announced it for production during the
coming season (1907-1908).As the external history ofLittle Eyolfis so short. I am tempted to depart from my usual practice,
and say a few words as to its matter and meaning.George Brandes, writing of this play, has rightly observed
that "a kind of dualism has always been perceptible in Ibsen; he
pleads the cause of Nature, and he castigates Nature with mystic
morality; only sometimes Nature is allowed the first voice,
sometimes morality. InThe Master
Builderand inGhoststhe
lover of Nature in Ibsen was predominant; here, as
inBrandandThe Wild
Duck, the castigator is in the ascendant." So clearly
is this the case inLittle Eyolfthat
Ibsen seems almost to fall into line with Mr. Thomas Hardy. To say
nothing of analogies of detail betweenLittle
EyolfandJude the Obscure,
there is this radical analogy, that they are both utterances of a
profound pessimism, both indictments of Nature.But while Mr. Hardy's pessimism is plaintive and passive,
Ibsen's is stoical and almost bracing. It is true that in this play
he is no longer the mere "indignation pessimist" whom Dr. Brandes
quite justly recognised in his earlier works. His analysis has gone
deeper into the heart of things, and he has put off the satirist
and the iconoclast. But there is in his thought an incompressible
energy of revolt. A pessimist in contemplation, he remains a
meliorist in action. He is not, like Mr. Hardy, content to let the
flag droop half-mast high; his protagonist still runs it up to the
mast-head, and looks forward steadily to the "heavy day of work"
before him. But although the note of the conclusion is resolute,
almost serene, the play remains none the less an indictment of
Nature, or at least of that egoism of passion which is one of her
most potent subtleties. In this view, Allmers becomes a type of
what we may roughly call the "free moral agent"; Eyolf, a type of
humanity conceived as passive and suffering, thrust will-less into
existence, with boundless aspirations and cruelly limited powers;
Rita, a type of the egoistic instinct which is "a consuming fire";
and Asta, a type of the beneficent love which is possible only so
long as it is exempt from "the law of change." Allmers, then, is
self-conscious egoism, egoism which can now and then break its
chains, look in its own visage, realise and shrink from itself;
while Rita, until she has passed through the awful crisis which
forms the matter of the play, is unconscious, reckless, and
ruthless egoism, exigent and jealous, "holding to its rights," and
incapable even of rising into the secondary stage of maternal love.
The offspring and the victim of these egoisms is Eyolf, "little
wounded warrior," who longs to scale the heights and dive into the
depths, but must remain for ever chained to the crutch of human
infirmity. For years Allmers has been a restless and half-reluctant
slave to Rita's imperious temperament. He has dreamed and theorised
about "responsibility," and has kept Eyolf poring over his books,
in the hope that, despite his misfortune, he may one day minister
to parental vanity. Finally he breaks away from Rita, for the first
time "in all these ten years," goes up "into the infinite
solitudes," looks Death in the face, and returns shrinking from
passion, yearning towards selfless love, and filled with a profound
and remorseful pity for the lot of poor maimed humanity. He will
"help Eyolf to bring his desires into harmony with what lies
attainable before him." He will "create a conscious happiness in
his mind." And here the drama opens.Before the Rat-Wife enters, let me pause for a moment to
point out that here again Ibsen adopts that characteristic method
which, in writing ofThe Lady from the
SeaandThe Master Builder, I
have compared to the method of Hawthorne. The story he tells is not
really, or rather not inevitably, supernatural. Everything is
explicable within this limits of nature; but supernatural agency is
also vaguely suggested, and the reader's imagination is stimulated,
without any absolute violence to his sense of reality. On the plane
of everyday life, then, the Rat-Wife is a crazy and uncanny old
woman, fabled by the peasants to be a were-wolf in her leisure
moments, who goes about the country killing vermin. Coming across
an impressionable child, she tells him a preposterous tale, adapted
from the old "Pied Piper" legends, of her method of fascinating her
victims. The child, whose imagination has long dwelt on this
personage, is in fact hypnotised by her, follows her down to the
sea, and, watching her row away, turns dizzy, falls in, and is
drowned. There is nothing impossible, nothing even improbable, in
this. At the same time, there cannot be the least doubt, I think,
that in the poet's mind the Rat-Wife is the symbol of Death, of the
"still, soft darkness" that is at once so fearful and so
fascinating to humanity. This is clear not only in the text of her
single scene, but in the fact that Allmers, in the last act, treats
her and his "fellow-traveller" of that night among the mountains,
not precisely as identical, but as interchangeable, ideas. To tell
the truth, I have even my own suspicions as to who is meant by "her
sweetheart," whom she "lured" long ago, and who is now "down where
all the rats are." This theory I shall keep to myself; it may be
purely fantastic, and is at best inessential. What is certain is
that death carries off Little Eyolf, and that, of all he was, only
the crutch is left, mute witness to his hapless lot.He is gone; there was so little to bind him to life that he
made not even a moment's struggle against the allurement of the
"long, sweet sleep." Then, for the first time, the depth of the
egoism which had created and conditioned his little life bursts
upon his parents' horror-stricken gaze. Like accomplices in crime,
they turn upon and accuse each other—"sorrow makes them wicked and
hateful." Allmers, as the one whose eyes were already half opened,
is the first to carry war into the enemy's country; but Rita is not
slow to retort, and presently they both have to admit that their
recriminations are only a vain attempt to drown the voice of
self-reproach. In a sort of fierce frenzy they tear away veil after
veil from their souls, until they realise that Eyolf never existed
at all, so to speak, for his own sake, but only for the sake of
their passions and vanities. "Isn't it curious," says Rita, summing
up the matter, "that we should grieve like this over a little
stranger boy?"In blind self-absorption they have played with life and
death, and now "the great open eyes" of the stranger boy will be
for ever upon them. Allmers would fain take refuge in a love
untainted by the egoism, and unexposed to the revulsions, of
passion. But not only is Asta's pity for Rita too strong to let her
countenance this desertion: she has discovered that her relation to
Allmers isnot"exempt from the law of
change," and she "takes flight from him—and from herself."
Meanwhile it appears that the agony which Allmers and Rita have
endured in probing their wounds has been, as Halvard Solness would
say, "salutary self-torture." The consuming fire of passion is now
quenched, but "it, has left an empty place within them," and they
feel it common need "to fill it up with something that is a little
like love." They come to remember that there are other children in
the world on whom reckless instinct has thrust the gift, of
life—neglected children, stunted and maimed in mind if not in body.
And now that her egoism is seared to the quick, the mother-instinct
asserts itself in Rita. She will take these children to her—these
children to whom her hand and her heart have hitherto been closed.
They shall be outwardly in Eyolf's place, and perhaps in time they
may fill the place in her heart that should have been Eyolf's. Thus
she will try to "make her peace with the great open eyes." For now,
at last, she has divined the secret of the unwritten book on "human
responsibility" and has realised that motherhood
means—atonement.So I read this terrible and beautiful work of art. This, I
think, isameaning inherent in it—not
perhapsthe