Little Eyolf | Page 2

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 of Little Eyolf is 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. In The Master
Builder and in Ghosts the lover of Nature in Ibsen was predominant;
here, as in Brand and The Wild Duck, the castigator is in the
ascendant." So clearly is this the case in Little Eyolf that Ibsen seems
almost to fall into line with Mr. Thomas Hardy. To say nothing of
analogies of detail between Little Eyolf and Jude 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 of
The Lady from the Sea and The Master Builder,