The two lay bare their very thoughts. Alfred has really never loved Rita. Her gold and green forests and her beauty led him to marry her. His craze for the boy further removed him from his wife, and his intellectual life was not conducive to perfect sympathy. He wished his lad to be a prodigy. He meant him to do in the world all the father had not. The scene is a poignant one. The mother, very human woman of considerable temperament, is almost broken-hearted at the double loss. The child's death was a blow, but her husband's dislike drives her frantic. The child, young as he was, had repelled her. She felt barred from the wealth of love that flourished between father and child. She resented it. She resented the child's love for Asta, for Asta proves to be a very formidable factor in the play. She is jealous of everybody.
Alfred Allmers is just a bit of a prig, self-conscious like most people with a self-imposed mission in life, and doubtless possessing in full measure the scholar's peevishness. The sister Asta is a woman with an awful secret. She can give her suitor Borgheim no hopes. She loves her brother's child to distraction, and she knows of her mother's dishonour. To Rita she is not altogether sympathetic. She takes from her Eyolf's love, the love he should have bestowed on his mother, and she is evidently held in high intellectual favour by her husband. Naturally Rita, who has lifted up both the Allmers by her wealth, feels all this. She confesses it, too, to her husband. He has become morbid, unmanned, hysterical, since the accident. All his hopes are dashed to earth and shattered. He conceives a horrible fear for his wife. The interview is a prolonged one and intensely painful. It is written with supreme art and conveys volumes in half-uttered sentences. There are no really long speeches, the dialogue being crisp, and while the action is not rapid, three lives' histories are told with consummate art and unabated vigour.
Asta has then a scene with her brother. She tells him that she is not his sister; her mother was not all she should have been to his father. Brother and sister face each other, and their parting at the end of the act is another of those strangely affecting climaxes Ibsen builds so well. There is never shown a hint of warmer feelings between the two than their supposed relationship warrants. Eyolf, Eyolf! it is always the spirit of the child that directs the doings of this strange yet ordinary group of human beings.
Allmers later suggests suicide to his wife, and the awful contingency is discussed. The tone of Little Eyolf is distinctly optimistic. Hope is preached on every page. Alfred and Rita clasp hands and take up their life work as it lies before them in the squalid village that belongs to them. Asta goes away with Borgheim, leaving a flavour of the mystic behind her. She is a true Ibsen girl. Little Eyolf is the lodestar of Allmers ever after. The play seems on its surface to be a powerful preachment against dilettanteism. Writing a book about Human Responsibility is all well enough, but out in the thick of the fight is a man's place. Assume the responsibilities of common humanity. Do not talk about them. The relations of parents to children are fully exploited, and the lesson read is that parents owe much to each other, quite as much as to their children.
Ibsen has girded at the conventionalities of the marriage relation in other plays. This is his Kreutzer Sonata. He shows the selfishness of a parent's love. Rita and Alfred confess that they never truly understood Eyolf, for they never knew each other. It is a profound character study. Ibsen was writing for another theatre—the theatre of the twentieth century. He has, like Maeterlinck, abjured the drama of poison, mystery, conflict, violence, aye, even the drama of heroism. He is a sorcerer who reveals to us the commonplace of life in other symbols. We are surrounded by mystery. Life at its lowest term is a profound mystery. Science may tabu late, but the poet draws aside the veil.
To dip below the surface of Ibsen's lines is never a grateful task, especially if the dramatic idea is first taken into consideration. Psychology must play the principal rôle in any estimate of Little Eyolf as a play pure and simple. Language is symbolic, though with Ibsen the single word is never as important as it is with Maeterlinck. So we find little of that dripping repetition, that haunting reiteration which the Belgian writer may have borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe. The ellipsis in Ibsen is cunningly contrived, he subtly foreshadows coming events, but never by the Word Beautiful. Little Eyolf depicts the tyranny of passion.
XVI
JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN
(1896)