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The long-tailed electric light bulb held high in one hand, Josie would stand at the door like a priestess before her altar. There they swung, the ghosts and the skeletons, side by side. You remember that slinking black satin snakelike sheath that Gita Morini wore in "Little Eyolf"? There it dangles, limp, invertebrate, yet how eloquent!
There was a man called Biarni, who dwelt at Jorvi in Flysia-wharf, and he gathered men together from without Hitriver; and their purpose was that a band should be on either bank of the river. Now Grettir had two men with him; a man called Eyolf, the son of the bonder at Fairwood, and a stout man; and another he had besides.
Ibsen, then, may be said to have challenged imitation by composing a drama of passion with only three characters in it. But Ibsen was accustomed to a wider field, and his experiment seems not wholly successful. Little Eyolf, at least, is, from all points of view, an exercise on the tight-rope.
The sex question, as treated in Little Eyolf, recalls The Kreutzer Sonata 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.
Five they were, Helgi and his within the dairy Hardbien, his son, to wit, he was twelve years old his shepherd and two other men, who had come to him that summer, being outlaws one called Thorgils, and the other Eyolf. Thorstein the Black and Svein, son of Alf o' Dales, stood before the door. The rest of the company were tearing the roof off the dairy.
This is a totally different matter from Ibsen's treatment of the supernatural in such plays as The Lady from the Sea, The Master Builder and Little Eyolf. Ibsen, like Hawthorne, suggests without affirming the action of occult powers.
From many points of view this play may fairly be considered in the light of a tour de force. Ibsen one would conjecture is trying to see to what extremities of agile independence he can force his genius. The word "force" has escaped me; but it may be retained as reproducing that sense of a difficulty not quite easily or completely overcome which Little Eyolf produces.
Altho no other play of Ibsen's attains the extraordinary compactness and swiftness of 'Ghosts, several of them approach closely to this standard, the 'Master-Builder, for example, 'Little Eyolf' and more especially 'Rosmersholm, in which the author did not display on the stage itself more than a half of the strong series of situations he had devised to sustain the interest of the spectator and to elucidate his underlying thesis.
What this signifies may be realized if we say that it is as though a great English or French poet of the second half of the nineteenth century should seem to have never heard of Tennyson or Victor Hugo. On the other hand, at one crucial point of a late play, Little Eyolf, Ibsen actually pauses to quote Welhaven.
It was produced in 1894 at Monte Carlo, but, in spite of the deep impression which it created, has not yet been heard in Paris. The action passes in Norway in the times of the Vikings. Hulda is carried off by a band of marauders, whose chief she is compelled to wed. She loves Eyolf, another Viking, and persuades him to murder her husband.