Little Eyolf | Page 3

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 is not "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 1ife--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, is a
meaning inherent in it--not perhaps the meaning, and still less all the
meanings. Indeed, its peculiar fascination for me, among all Ibsen's
works, lies in the fact