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.