up with something that is a little like love." They come to
remember that there are other children in the world on whom reckless
instinct has thrust the gift, of life--neglected children, stunted and
maimed in mind if not in body. And now that her egoism is seared to the
quick, the mother-instinct asserts itself in Rita. She will take these
children to her--these children to whom her hand and her heart have
hitherto been closed. They shall be outwardly in Eyolf's place, and
perhaps in time they may fill the place in her heart that should have
been Eyolf's. Thus she will try to "make her peace with the great open
eyes." For now, at last, she has divined the secret of the unwritten
book on "human responsibility" and has realised that motherhood
means--atonement.

So I read this terrible and beautiful work of art. This, I think, is _a_
meaning inherent in it--not perhaps _the_ meaning, and still less all
the meanings. Indeed, its peculiar fascination for me, among all Ibsen's
works, lies in the fact that it seems to touch life at so many different
points. But I must not be understood as implying that Ibsen constructed
the play with any such definitely allegoric design as is here set forth.
I do not believe that this creator of men and women ever started from an
abstract conception. He did not first compose his philosophic tune and
then set his puppets dancing to it. The germ in his mind was dramatic,
not ethical; it was only as the drama developed that its meanings dawned
upon him; and he left them implicit and fragmentary, like the symbolism
of life itself, seldom formulated, never worked out with schematic
precision. He simply took a cutting from the tree of life, and, planting
it in the rich soil of his imagination, let it ramify and burgeon as it
would.

Even if one did not know the date of _Little Eyolf_, one could
confidently assign it to the latest period of Ibsen's career, on
noting a certain difference of scale between its foundations and its
superstructure. In his earlier plays, down to and including _Hedda
Gabler_, we feel his invention at work to the very last moment, often
with more intensity in the last act than in the first; in his later
plays he seems to be in haste to pass as early as possible from
invention to pure analysis. In this play, after the death of Eyolf
(surely one of the most inspired "situations" in all drama) there is
practically no external action whatsoever. Nothing happens save in the
s