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THE LATEST PLAY OF IBSEN

"Little Eyolf," in Which He Lays Bare the Human Heart.

A Deep Delicate Study In Himan Emotions-The Main Incidents in the Play.

The Great Norwegian May Have Taken a Lesson from Maeterlinck, the Belgian Dramatist.

Henrik Ibsen's last play is " Little Eyolf," and it is prettily published by Stone and Kimball, Chicago, in the Green Tree library.

It is a psychological presentation of an unhappy marriage. The woman, Mrs Allmers, lowes her husband passinately. He loves he quietly, incidentally and complaisanlty. She is beautiful and rich. Hr has married her because of these things, and becaise her beloved sister had suffered with him the inconveniences and chagrins of poverty. That sister had a home with him, and spent most of her time caring for little Eyolf, the maimed son of Allmers. This little Eyolf was injured by falling from the table when he was a little babe. Allmer's sister Asta had gathered him up in her amrs, and carried him, broken and harmed past remedy to the young parents, wehre they say oblivious or thie world, wrapped in each others smiles.

"The law of change" had been doing its fatal work. Allmers was absorbed on a book he was writing on "Human Responsibility" Mrs. Allmers, idle, beautiful, beglected, wandered about her gardens, or down by the melancholy flord, or about her magnificent rooms and brooded on love. She was thrilled with the consciousness of her own witchery. She knew that any man save her husband would have found her irresistible. She knew that nay many books he was writing She would, perhaps, have destroyed it if that would have availed to bring him closer to her.

Allmers, meantime brooded upon the words he was writing in this commentary of human responsibility. He left home and went up among the montains He determined to return , sacrifice his book, whihc he had expected to be his life work, and devote himself to his unfortunate little son-who was dreaming of being a solider, and who could never, at best, be anything more than a scholar.

He comes back, finds his little son tricked out in a tiny soldier's uniform, and is moved at the pathos of the contrast between the possibilites and the poor lad's aspirations He is tender with his sister, and kindly with his wife, and in this mood confides to them his change of plan. His wife, who has had one trimphant moment when she hears him declate that he is about to relinquish the writing of his book is seized with a new torment of jealousy when she learns that he intends to devote his life to her starnge little child-the child she has nver been able to get close to her heart.

In the midst of this scene one of those peculiar characters by which Ibsen and Materlinck imbue their tales with awesome fatality-a persage of inevitable disaster-enters. This is the "ratwife," who has the power to lure the rats from any house, or island, or town by playing upon her pipe With her she carried an ugly flat-nosed dog which possesses like herself a hypnotic power over vermin of any sort There is a suggestion of the pied piper in all this, of course, and yet more a suggestion of the old pagan tales of the obedience animals to luring music Perhaps that is more than a hint of fact at the bottom of it Anyway, the old rat-wife terrifies them all with her mystery and her threats The rat-wife looks hat her dog, and says, nodding at Allmen

"Moseman and I-we two do it together. And it goes so smoothly-for all you can see, at any rate I just slop a string through his collar, and then I lead him three times, around the house, and play on my Pan's pipes. When they hear that, they've got to come up from the cellars, and down from the garrets, and our of their holes, all the blessed little creatures"

Little Eyolf asks: "And does he bite them to death?"

'Oh, not at all," she responds "No, we go down to the boar, he and I do-and then they follow after us, both the little and the big ratkins Then we push out form land, and I scull with one oar, and play on my Pan's pipe. And Moseman, he swims behind (With glittering eyes) And all the creepres and crawlers, they follow and follow us out int othe deep, adep waters. Ay, for they have to!"

They try to get rid of the rat witch-who says she once lured her own Jover into the black water. She goes, haf-chagrined, but inscrubtable, pausing ot say to Mrs Allmers: "If your ladyship should fund that there's anything that keep nibbing, and gnawing, and creeping, and crawling, then just see and get hold of me and Moseman"

The husband and wofe are left alone. She chafes and fumes under his inattention. At length she breaks into a jealous woman ralling against her own child, who has evil eyes, and she says

And a few minutes later the little boy, who has gone to play on the beach, having followed haunting way in which Ibsen can refine an emotion till it seems like the distillment of some tortured human hear. It has an air of actuality which refuses to be discountenaced. The repraoches of the husband and wife are as foolish, as angry and as unjust as one can imagine their early vows of love were excessive , volupiuous and unholy. The child which as been given them as the accident of nature does not seem to them to be the palpable form of their love-as it would had their natures or their realtions been different He accuses her of hacing lured him to her arms, and made them both froget the little one on the day it was unjured She is haunted with those large eyes staring at her from under the gree water, where, the peasant boys say, he floted slowly after the boat of the rat-wife

"Are they evil eys?" Allmers hurls at her, in cruel reminder of her own angry remark, "are they a chil's evil eyes?"

His love for her seems deas She is maddened with remorse. They cannot bear to be together. Meantime, the sister Asta, has discovered that she is not the sister of Allmers, as both of them had always supposed This causes her to reject the importunities of a very frank and charming young civil engineer, who seems the one perfectly healthy and happy moral in the play. For asta feels that her happiness during the years she and Allmens struggles together in poverty arose from other reasons than that of their supposed relationship Meanwhile, the hatred between husband and wife seems to hourly increase. Her tumult wears itself away-as even the most violent storms must do- and she grows calmer, and sets about laying out a plan of life for herself She has lost her child, and in losing him has lost her husband. She could not live with such a vacuity as that in her heart She decides to look after the wretched little children who have swarmed over her state-the children of her tenans Her husbad, who has confessed his life to be empty, and who has spent his time since the event of the tragedy looking in melanoholy mad infatuation at the waters of the flord, comes at length to attain a sort of resepct for her resolve. Though he has declared that they could never live together again, he concludes to make the effort She accepts this decision with humility-too woen with suffering to rejoice when joy comes. And, indeed, it is bbut the faint shadow of joy. In short after several years of wedded life, these two people enter for the frist time upon something which may develop into a marriage in the sacred ses of the word

Asta, who realizes it all, fairly flees from the house At the last moment she consents to give as much of her devotion as she can to the very attractive and infatuated civil engineer. And the Allmens are left, living together and endeacoring by their acts of explation and self-sacrifce to escape from those child eyes that stare up at them for the flord

The whole play seems to be alive with unseen forces It is not the personages in the play any more than their Destiny that holds one.

It has often been said that Maeternick felt Isben's influence, but vertianly in "Little Eyol" the influence of the great Flamand is felt by Ibsen.

The trick to turning the sensitive human heart as bare as the scapel lays bare the brain is Ibsen's own, however. He probes deeper than any man, living or dead into the mysteries of marriage, which, by common consent, men and women conceal by a conventional smile. He knows that nothing but love can bring serenity, and is too much of a student of human nature to suppose that serenity is frequently an incident of married life among highly cultivated and complext creatures. To depcit the various sorts of miseries is his sorry work. He builds no ideals-Ibsen. He presents only what seems to him to be the conditions Probably he would say that he is no responsible for them He is master and when his men and women suffer other men and women must needs suffer in sympathy. But his books are sorrowful, and remind one that the century is very old and weary.

He does not, however, remind one that the sky is a yong today as it was yesterday, or that the springs of a thousand years from now will bring out grasses as delicately fringed as those that grew on the mountain paths when Petrarch was a Lover. For Ibsen the sky is gray and the flord is sighing He stands among his fellows a giant swathed in dun drapperies-a master with a mysterious brow- a man with no message, but with an eloquently weary paint.

ELIA W. PEATTIE.