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 moments, who goes about the country killing vermin. Coming
across an impressionable child, she tells him a preposterous tale,
adapted from the old "Pied Piper" legends, of her method of fascinating
her victims. The child, whose imagination has long dwelt on this
personage, is in fact hypnotised by her, follows her down to the sea,
and, watching her row away, turns dizzy, falls in, and is drowned. There
is nothing impossible, nothing even improbable, in this. At the same
time, there cannot be the least doubt, I think, that in the poet's mind
the Rat-Wife is the symbol of Death, of the "still, soft darkn