Little Eyolf
LITTLE EYOLF. By Henrik Ibsen Translated, With an Introduction, by William Archer INTRODUCTION. Little Eyolf was written in Christiania during 1894, and published in Copenhagen on December 11 in that year. By this time Ibsen's correspondence has become so scanty as to afford us no clue to what may be called the biographical antecedents of the play. Even of anecdotic history very little attaches to it. For only one of the characters has a definite model been suggested. Ibsen himself told his French translator, Count Prozor, that the original of the Rat-Wife was "a little old woman who came to kill rats at the school where he was educated. She carried a little dog in a bag, and it was said that children had been drowned through following her." This means that Ibsen did not himself adapt to his uses the legend so familiar to us in Browning's _Pied Piper of Hamelin_, but found it ready adapted by the popular imagination of his native
except Straight Lines; and the necessity of this
I will speedily demonstrate.
Place a penny on the middle of one of your tables in Space; and
leaning over it, look down upon it. It will appear a circle.
But now, drawing back to the edge of the table, gradually lower
your eye (thus bringing yourself more and more into the condition
of the inhabitants of Flatland), and you will find the penny
becoming more and more oval to your view, and at last when you
have placed your eye exactly on the edge of the table
(so that you are, as it were, actually a Flatlander)
the penny will then have ceased to appear oval at all,
and will have become, so far as you can see, a straight line.
The same thing would happen if you were to treat
in the same way a Triangle, or a Square, or any other figure
cut out from pasteboard. As soon as you look at it with your eye
on the edge of the table, you will find that it ceases to appear
to you as a figure, and that it becomes in appearance a straight line.
Take for example an equilateral Triangle--who represents with us
a Tradesman of the respectable class. Figure 1 represents
the Tradesman as you would see him while you were bending over
him from above; figures 2 and 3 represent the Tradesman,
as you would see him if your eye were close to the level,
LITTLE EYOLF. By Henrik Ibsen Translated, With an Introduction, by William Archer INTRODUCTION. Little Eyolf was written in Christiania during 1894, and published in Copenhagen on December 11 in that year. By this time Ibsen's correspondence has become so scanty as to afford us no clue to what may be called the biographical antecedents of the play. Even of anecdotic history very little attaches to it. For only one of the characters has a definite model been suggested. Ibsen himself told his French translator, Count Prozor, that the original of the Rat-Wife was "a little old woman who came to kill rats at the school where he was educated. She carried a little dog in a bag, and it was said that children had been drowned through following her." This means that Ibsen did not himself adapt to his uses the legend so familiar to us in Browning's _Pied Piper of Hamelin_, but found it ready adapted by the popular imagination of his native