Angel of God, in the guise of an old beggar-woman, descends into their garden, and she drags away, by an invisible chain, “the little gnawing thing,” the pathetic lame child. The effect on the pair of Eyolf’s death by drowning is the subject of the subsequent acts. In Rita jealousy is incarnate, and she seems the most vigorous, and, it must be added, the most repulsive, of Ibsen’s feminine creations. The reckless violence of Rita’s energy, indeed, interpreted by a competent actress—played, for instance, as it was in London most admirably by Miss Achurch—is almost too painful for a public exhibition, and to the old criticism, “nec pueros coram populo Medea trucidet,” if a pedant chooses to press it, there seems no reply. The sex question, as treated in Little Eyolf, recalls The Kreutzer Sonata (1889) of Tolstoi. When, however, I ventured to ask Ibsen whether there was anything in this, he was displeased, and stoutly denied it. What an author denies, however, is not always evidence.
Nothing further of general interest happened to Ibsen until 1896, when he sat down to compose another drama, John Gabriel Borkman. This was a study of the mental adventures of a man of high commercial imagination, who is artificially parted from all that contact with real affairs which keeps such energy on the track, and
