374 LITERARY PAPERS 



receptive of all noblest traits, she, freed from systems and rules, 

 gives forth offspring of body and thought, noble as she is, 

 permeated as she is through and through with noblest aspira- 

 tions. She is alive to the requirements of others for sympathy 

 and comprehension. What she absorbs from the cosmos, she 

 gives out in generous plentifulness. Whitman enumerates 

 the women who are the theme of writers from the earliest 

 time to the present, then he says, "Yet woman portrayed or 

 outlined at her best or as perfect human mother does not 

 hitherto, it seems to me, fully appear in literature." 



But there is one aspect of motherhood which does not seem 

 to have been touched on by Whitman perceptibly, that is, the 

 mother who might be named the impersonal mother, she 

 who, whether for her own offspring or another's, holds out 

 to the tender being her care and love because she is actuated 

 by the highest motives of kindliness based upon universal 

 brotherhood. These motives are not akin to the motives due 

 to the mother's instinct. Their roots are centred in currents 

 deeper by far, if less turbulent, than the mother's instinct; 

 in steady flowing currents destined to speed towards seas of 

 promise. This impersonal motherhood obtains irrespective 

 of any special claims of ownership because the child is of one's 

 own flesh and blood. This child has, as have all other chil- 

 dren, the claims to its own being, its own rights; it stands 

 independent, and towards such the impersonal mother stands 

 independent. Ibsen has brought out this point in the closing 

 scenes of his drama, " Little Eyolf." The husband and wife 

 meet on a plane of sympathy and action, to bring joy and hap- 

 piness to the hearts of the innumerable homeless children 

 of the poor, who are now to occupy with them their home. 

 The wife, in contrast to the mother's exclusive love, of the 

 early scenes of the play, opens her heart to these other chil- 

 dren of the poor. They are to use the belongings of little Eyolf, 

 their own child, who was enticed so mysteriously into a watery 

 grave. It needed the shock of this child's death to develop the 

 characters of Alfred and Rita Allmers to this impersonal 

 parental feeling. 



Ibsen has also made an attack on the modern family, cen- 



