“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. Bits of Criticism _By_ John Burroughs BITS OF CRITICISM THE difference between a precious stone and a common stone is not an essential difference—not a difference of substance, but of arrangement of the particles—the crystallization. In substance the charcoal and the diamond are one, but in form and effect how widely they differ. The pearl contains nothing that is not found in the coarsest oyster-shell. Two men have the same thoughts; they use about the same words in expressing them; yet with one the product is real literature, with the other it is a platitude.