NEVER has the great master written anything simpler and more human
than “Little Eyolf.” The two fundamental chords which sound with
varying force through all his earlier works are here struck anew with
increased distinctness and resonance. The ennobling power of suffering,
the educational value of pain,—that is the first lesson which the
play conveys; and the second, which is closely akin to it, is the
development of personality through the discipline of renunciation.
Alfred Allmers, a poor and obscure man of letters, has married Rita,
a rich and beautiful heiress. During the first seven or eight years
of their marriage they live frankly the life of the senses; and in
amorous intoxication forget the world with its claims, being completely
absorbed in each other. Their little son Eyolf they leave largely
to his aunt, Asta (Allmers’s supposed sister), and only interest
themselves in him spasmodically, and then to very little purpose. Rita
is, in fact, not very fond of the child, and feels vaguely annoyed
whenever she is reminded of her duties toward it. It is directly due to
her erotic intensity that the boy, who has been left in his high-chair
at table, tumbles down and is crippled for life. He then becomes a
reproach to his mother, and she rather shuns than seeks the sight of
him.
I find this development of Rita to be true and consistent. Women, as
a rule, after marriage, develop the wifely character at the expense
of the maternal, or the maternal at the expense of the wifely. Rita
Allmers belongs to the former class. She is young, beautiful, and
passionate; her wifehood is all to her; her motherhood only incidental.
But this condition cannot endure. The husband, at all events, feels
a subtle change steal over his relation to his wife; and in order to
make it clear to himself, he goes on a long pedestrian tour into the
mountains. On his return, at the end of two weeks, he is received by
Rita with a bacchanalian seductiveness which ill befits his serious
mood. He has resolved to introduce a radical change in the household.
He will henceforth devote himself to the education of his son, and make
that his chief concern. His book on “Human Responsibility,” at which
he has been writing in a desultory fashion, shall no longer divert
his attention from the actual responsibility, which it were a sin to
shirk. Rita, however, when he unfolds his plan to her, is anything but
pleased. She wants him all to herself, and is not content to share him
with anybody, even though it be her own child. She cannot be put off
with crumbs of affection. She coaxes, she threatens; she hints at dire
consequences. With the passionate vehemence of a spoiled and petted
beauty, who believes her love disdained, she upbraids him, and cries
out at last that she wishes the child had never been born. Presently a
wild scream is heard from the pier, and little Eyolf’s crutch is seen
floating upon the still waters of the fiord.
The second act opens with a scene in which Asta is endeavoring to
console Allmers in his affliction. He is trying to find the purpose,
the meaning of his bereavement. “For there must be a meaning in
it,” he exclaims. “Life, existence,—destiny _cannot_ be so utterly
meaningless.” Asta had loved the dead child, and he feels drawn to
her by the communion of sorrow. From Rita, on the other hand, he
feels repelled, because he cannot, in spite of her wild distraction,
believe in the genuineness of her grief. She demands black crape,
flag at half mast, and all the outward symbols of mourning; but the
sensation which now is torturing her is not pain at the loss of the
boy, but self-reproach. The keen tooth of remorse is piercing the very
marrow of her bones. For the first time in her life she forgets how she
looks,—what impression she is making. And that is, psychologically, a
wholesome change. The centre of her consciousness is wrenched violently
out of herself, and she sees existence with a different vision. A most
admirable symbol for this unsleeping remorse which is stinging and
scorching her conscience is “the great, open eyes” of little Eyolf, as
he was seen lying on the bottom of the fiord. These eyes pursue the
guilty mother. “They will haunt me all my life long,” she declares.
Keen, simple, and soul-searching is the conversation between husband
and wife, as the first quiverings of a spiritual life are awakened in
both of them under the lash of an accusing conscience. Even while they
upbraid each other, each trying to shift his share of responsibility
upon the other, a vague shame takes possession of them, and the guilty
heart knows and avows its guilt. They conceive of Eyolf’s death as a
judgment upon them, as a retribution for their shirking their parental
duty. For the first time in their lives they stand soul to soul in all
their naked paltriness. It is scarcely strange that they should shrink
from each other. But a new sincerity is born of the very futility of
embellishing pretences. The secret thoughts which each has had of
the other, but never has dared to utter, pop forth, like toads out
of their holes, and show their ugly faces. His book, which Allmers
had professed to regard as his great life-work, was, as Rita has long
since guessed, a mere makeshift to give a spurious air of importance to
his idleness, and he has abandoned it, not as a sacrifice to parental
duty, but because he distrusted his ability to finish it. But when
such things have been said—when each has stripped the other of all
dissembling draperies—how is life to continue? How is their marriage to
regain its former beauty and happiness? Alas, never! The old relation
is definitely terminated and can never be renewed. It is because she
feels this so deeply that Rita declares that henceforth she must have
much company about her; for, she adds, “It will never do for Alfred
and me to be alone.” And Allmers, under the same profound revulsion of
feeling, expresses his desire to separate from his wife. She wishes
forgetfulness, and hopes to drown her remorse in social dissipations;
while to him forgetfulness seems like disloyalty to the dead, and he
determines to consecrate the future to his grief, with a dim idea
that he may thus atone for his guilt. Being equally miserable alone
or together, they turn in their despair to Asta and implore her to
remain with them, and take the place of little Eyolf. But Asta, having
discovered that Alfred is not her brother, is afraid to assume the
dangerous rôle of consoler, and departs with the engineer Borgheim, who
has long been in love with her.
In that dreary lethargy which follows violent grief, Rita and Allmers
stand without the energy to readjust their lives to the changed
conditions. The world is disenchanted for them; the very daylight
beats upon their eyes with a brazen fierceness, and all things are
empty, futile, devoid of meaning. But in the midst of this oppressive
stillness new thoughts are born; new sentiments begin to stir. They
are bound together, if by nothing else, by their communion in guilt.
Their past memories and their common remorse constitute a bond which is
scarcely less powerful than love. Very simply and patiently is the new
birth of the spiritual life in both of them indicated in the following
dialogue:—
ALLMERS—Yes, but you—you yourself—have bound me to you by our life
together.
RITA—Oh, in your eyes I am not—I am not—entrancingly beautiful any more.
ALLMERS—The law of change may perhaps keep us together, none the less.
RITA (_Nodding slowly_)—There is a change in me now—I feel the anguish
of it.
ALLMERS—Anguish?
RITA—Yes, for change, too, is a sort of birth.
ALLMERS—It is—or a resurrection. Transition to a higher life.
RITA (_Gazing sadly before her_)—Yes, with the loss of all—all life’s
happiness.
ALLMERS—That loss is just the gain.
RITA—Oh, phrases! Good heavens! we are creatures of earth, after all.
ALLMERS—But something akin to the sea and the heavens, too, Rita.
RITA—You, perhaps; not I.
ALLMERS—Oh, yes—you, too; more than you suspect.
The force of the common memories asserts itself anew, and they resolve
to remain together and help each other bear the burden of life. Death
is no longer a horror, but a quiet fellow-traveller, neither welcomed
nor dreaded. Very beautifully and naturally is the transition to the
new altruistic endeavor indicated in their wonder why the little
companions of Eyolf, who all could swim, made no effort to save him.
Never had Eyolf’s father and mother interested themselves in these
boys; nor had they made the least effort to ameliorate the hard lot
of the poor fishing population, settled about them. Having never sown
love, they had never reaped it. Now, in order to fill the aching void
of her heart with “something that is a little like love,” Rita invites
all the little ragamuffins from the village up into her luxurious
house, clothes them in Eyolf’s clothes, gives them Eyolf’s toys to play
with, and feeds them and warms them and lavishes upon them the homeless
love which was her own child’s due, but of which he was defrauded.
In the opening up of this new well-spring of love in her heart, she
suddenly perceives the meaning of Eyolf’s death.
RITA—I suppose I must try if I cannot lighten—and ennoble their lot in
life.
ALLMERS—If you can do that—then Eyolf was not born in vain.
RITA—Nor taken away from us in vain, either. . . . (_Softly, with a
melancholy smile_) I want to make my peace with the great open eyes,
you see.
ALLMERS (_Struck, fixing his eyes upon her_)—Perhaps I could join you
in that? And help you, too, Rita?
And so they begin together a new existence, with new aims and a deeper
sense of human responsibility. The contrast between the old life in
the senses and the new life in the spirit, is emphasized in a few
striking and simple phrases. Their aspiration is now consciously
“upwards—towards the peaks,—towards the great silence.”
“Little Eyolf,” though its theme is closely akin to those of Ibsen’s
previous plays, is yet written in a new key, and it strikes in its
conclusion a note which is quite alien to the author’s earlier
work. The declaration of human responsibility—in the sense of
accountability, on the part of the refined and prosperous, for the
degradation of the poor or miserable—sounds very strange upon his
lips. If Carlyle at three score and ten had lifted up his voice
and sung “The Song of the Shirt,” or “The Cry of the Children,” we
could not have been more surprised. Ibsen’s scorn of the nameless
herd—of its meanness, its baseness, its purblind gropings and coarse
enjoyments—rings loudly enough through “Peer Gynt,” “The League of
Youth,” and “An Enemy of the People.” What means this wonderful
softening of his heart toward Nature’s step-children, if not that his
own vision has been enlarged, a new warm spring has been opened up in
his old age, watering the roots of his being. It is obvious that in
returning to his native land and becoming a world-renowned man, he has
celebrated his reconciliation with humanity. The world is no longer
so dark to him, nor destiny so cruel and meaningless as in the days
of his obscurity. Very noble sound these mellow notes in the final
scenes of “Little Eyolf,” even though we miss occasionally the cadence
of the harsh voice that spoke so many wholesome truths in “Brand” and
“Rusmersholm.” Interesting, too, it is to observe that the moral
lesson of “Little Eyolf” is the very same as that of a score of Robert
Browning’s poems and dramas. Though Browning never emphasizes altruism
to the extent that Ibsen does in the present play, the arousing of man,
through suffering, from the life of the senses to that of the spirit is
succinctly stated, the very soul of the Gospel according to Browning.