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THE LATEST PLAY OF IBSEN

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

A Deep and Delicate Study in Human 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 Green Tree Library.

It is a psychological presentation of an unhappy marriage. The woman, Mrs. Allmers, loves her husband passionately. He loves her quietly, incidentally and complaisantly. She is beautiful and rich. He has married her because of these things, and because 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 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 arms, and carried him, broken and harmed past remedy to the young parents, where they sat oblivious of the world wrapped in each other's 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, neglected, wandered about her gardens, or down by the melancholy fiord, or about her magnificent rooms and brooded on love. She was thrilled with the consciousness of her own witchery. She knew that any man book 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 mountains. He determined to return, sacrifice his book, which he had expected to be his life work, and devote himself to his unfortunate little son -- who was dreaming of being a soldier, and who could never, at best, be anything more than a scholar.

He comes back, finds his little son cricked out in a tiny soldier's uniform, and is moved at the pathos of the contrast between the possibilities 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 triumphant moment when she hears him declare that he is about to relinquish the writing of his book is seized with a new torment of jealous when she learns that he intends to devote his life to her strange little child -- the child she has never been able to get close to her heart.

In the midst of this scene on fo those peculiar characters by which Ibsen and Maeterlinck imbue their tales with an awesome fatality -- a presage of inevitable disaster -- enters. This is the "rat-wife," 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 pier in all this, of course, and yet more suggestion of the old pagan tales of the obedience of animals to luring music. Perhaps that is more than a hint of a fact at the bottom of it. Anyway, the old rat-wife terrifies them all with her mystery and her threats. The rat-wife looks at her dog, and says, nodding at Allmers:

"Moseman and I -- we two do it together. And it goes so smoothly -- for all you can see, at any rate. I just slip 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 out 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 boat, he and I do -- and then they follow after us, both the little and the big ratkins. Then we push out from land, and I scull with one oar, and play on my Pan's pipes. And Moseman, he swims behind. (With glittering eyes) And [?], creepers and crawlers, they follow and follow us out into the deep, deep waters. Ay, for they have to!"

They try to get rid of the rat witch -- who says she once lured her own lover into the black water. She goes, half-chagrined, but inscrutable, pausing to say [?]. Allmers: "If your ladyship should find that there's anything that keeps nibbling, and gnawing, and creeping, and crawling, then just see and get hold of me and Moseman."

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

And a few minutes later the little boy, who has gone to play on the beach, having followed the old rat-wife, is drowned. His crutch is found floating on the water.

Then follows a study in remorse. It is refined in that terrible and haunting way in which Ibsed can refine an emotion till it seems like the distillment of some tortured human heart. It has an air of actuality which refuses to be discountenanced. The reproaches of the husband and wife are as foolish, as angry and as unjust as one can imagine their early vows of love were excessive, voluptuous and unholy. The child which has 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 relations been different. He accuses her of having lured him to her arms, and made them both forget the little one on the day it was injured. She is haunted with those large eyes staring at her from under the green water, where, the peasant boys say, he floated slowly after the boat of the rat-wife. "Are they evil eyes?" Allmers horis at her, in cruel reminder of her own angry remark, "are they a child's evil eyes?"

THE LATEST PLAY OF IBSEN

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

A Deep and Delicate Study in Human 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 Green Tree Library.

It is a psychological presentation of an unhappy marriage. The woman, Mrs. Allmers, loves her husband passionately. He loves her quietly, incidentally and complaisantly. She is beautiful and rich. He has married her because of these things, and because 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 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 arms, and carried him, broken and harmed past remedy to the young parents, where they sat oblivious of the world wrapped in each other's 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, neglected, wandered about her gardens, or down by the melancholy fiord, or about her magnificent rooms and brooded on love. She was thrilled with the consciousness of her own witchery. She knew that any man book 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 mountains. He determined to return, sacrifice his book, which he had expected to be his life work, and devote himself to his unfortunate little son -- who was dreaming of being a soldier, and who could never, at best, be anything more than a scholar.

He comes back, finds his little son cricked out in a tiny soldier's uniform, and is moved at the pathos of the contrast between the possibilities 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 triumphant moment when she hears him declare that he is about to relinquish the writing of his book is seized with a new torment of jealous when she learns that he intends to devote his life to her strange little child -- the child she has never been able to get close to her heart.

In the midst of this scene on fo those peculiar characters by which Ibsen and Maeterlinck imbue their tales with an awesome fatality -- a presage of inevitable disaster -- enters. This is the "rat-wife," 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 pier in all this, of course, and yet more suggestion of the old pagan tales of the obedience of animals to luring music. Perhaps that is more than a hint of a fact at the bottom of it. Anyway, the old rat-wife terrifies them all with her mystery and her threats. The rat-wife looks at her dog, and says, nodding at Allmers"