ces of it in New York, and
Madame Alla Nazimova has announced it for production during the coming
season (1907-1908).

As the external history of _Little Eyolf_ is so short. I am tempted to
depart from my usual practice, and say a few words as to its matter and
meaning.

George Brandes, writing of this play, has rightly observed that "a kind
of dualism has always been perceptible in Ibsen; he pleads the cause of
Nature, and he castigates Nature with mystic morality; only sometimes
Nature is allowed the first voice, sometimes morality. In _The Master
Builder_ and in _Ghosts_ the lover of Nature in Ibsen was predominant;
here, as in _Brand_ and _The Wild Duck_, the castigator is in the
ascendant." So clearly is this the case in _Little Eyolf_ that Ibsen
seems almost to fall into line with Mr. Thomas Hardy. To say nothing of
analogies of detail between _Little Eyolf_ and _Jude the Obscure_, there
is this radical analogy, that they are both utterances of a profound
pessimism, both indictments of Nature.

But while Mr. Hardy's pessimism is plaintive and passive, Ibsen's is
stoical and almost bracing. It is true that in this play he is no
longer the mere "indignation pessimist" whom Dr. Brandes quite justly
recognised in his earlier works. His analysis has gone deeper into the
heart of things, and he has put off the satirist and the iconoclast. But
there is in his thought an incompressible energy of revolt. A pessimist
in contemplation, he remains a meliorist in action. He is not, like Mr.
Hardy, content to let the flag droop half-mast high; his protagonist
still runs it up to the mast-head, and looks forward steadily to the
"heavy day of work" before him. But although the note of the conclusion
is resolute, almost serene, the play remains none the less an indictment
of Nature, or at least of that egoism of passion which is one of her
most potent subtleties. In this view, Allmers becomes a type of what
we may roughly call the "free moral agent"; Eyolf, a type of humanity
conceived as passive and suffering, thrust will-less into existence,
with boundless aspirations and cruelly limited powers; Rita, a type of
the egoistic instinct which is "a consuming fire"; and Asta, a type of
the beneficent love which is possible only so long as it is exempt from
"the law of change." Allmers, then, is self-conscious egoism, egoism
which can now and then break its chains, look in its own visage, realise
and shrink from itself; while Rita,