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;