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- 
