while Rita, until she has passed through the awful crisis which
forms .the matter of the play, is unconscious, reckless, and
ruthless egoism, exigent and jealous, "holding to its rights," and
incapable even of rising into the secondary stage of maternal love.
The offspring and the victim of these egoisms is Eyolf, "little
wounded warrior," who longs to scale the heights and dive into the
depths, but must remain for ever chained to the crutch of human
infirmity. For years Allmers has been a restless and half-reluctant
slave to Rita's imperious temperament. He has dreamed and theorised
about "responsibility," and has kept Eyolf poring over his books,
in the hope that, despite his misfortune, he may one day minister
to parental vanity. Finally he breaks away from Rita, for the first
time "in all these ten years," goes up "into the infinite
solitudes," looks Death in the face, and returns shrinking from
passion, yearning towards selfless love, and filled with a profound
and remorseful pity for the lot of poor maimed humanity. He will
"help Eyolf to bring his desires into harmony with what lies
attainable before him." He will "create a conscious happiness in
his mind." And here the drama opens.

Before the Rat-Wife enters, let me pause for a moment to point out
that here again Ibsen adopts that characteristic method which, in
writing of _The Lady from the Sea_ and _The Master Builder_, I have
compared to the method of Hawthorne. The story he tells is not
really, or rather not inevitably, supernatural. Everything is
explicable within this limits of nature; but supernatural agency is
also vaguely suggested, and the reader's imagination is stimulated,
without any absolute violence to his sense of reality. On the plane
of everyday life, then, the Rat-Wife is a crazy and uncanny old
woman, fabled by the peasants to be a were-wolf in her leisure