Ibsen has girded at the conventionalities of the marriage relation in other plays. This is his Kreutzer Sonata. He shows the selfishness of a parent's love. Rita and Alfred confess that they never truly understood Eyolf, for they never knew each other. It is a profound character study. Ibsen was writing for another theatre--the theatre of the twentieth century. He has, like Maeterlinck, abjured the drama of poison, mystery, conflict, violence, aye, even the drama of heroism. He is a sorcerer who reveals to us the commonplace of life in other symbols. We are surrounded by mystery. Life at its lowest term is a profound mystery. Science may tabu late, but the poet draws aside the veil. To dip below the surface of Ibsen's lines is never a grateful task, especially if the dramatic idea is first taken into consideration. Psychology must play the principal rôle in any estimate of Little Eyolf as a play pure and simple. Language is symbolic, though with Ibsen the single word is never as important as it is with Maeterlinck. So we find little of that dripping repetition, that haunting reiteration which the Belgian writer may have borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe. The ellipsis in Ibsen is cunningly contrived, he subtly foreshadows coming events, but never by the Word Beautiful. Little Eyolf depicts the tyranny of passion. * * * * * XVI JOHN GABRIEL BORKMAN (1896) There is in John Gabriel Borkman logical, well-knit construction. There is an unflinching criticism of life--the attitude of a man who began life as a poet and ends it as a realist; there is a strange power, unpleasant power, a meagre intensity, yet unquestionable intensity, and a genius for character-drawing and development of character that is just short of the marvellous. That Ibsen has chosen his characters from the world about him--a provincial, narrow, hard, cold world,--is a commentary on his truthfulness, on his adherence to realistic principles. The curious part of this is the resemblance his bourgeois people bear to the bourgeois of nearly every civilized country. John Gabriel Borkman is a play of great power, of a frugal, constructive beauty, and in it from first to last there sounds faintly but distinctly an antique note. There is also something of a Hamlet situation in the position of the young man who might have won back his father's kingdom, but quite like a modern Hamlet solved the knotty problem by going away to Paris; any place, far away from the bleak northern world where lived in a gloomy house his father, an ex-convict, his mother, a soured fanatic, and his aunt, an old maid and an idealist.