The Master Builder | Page 7

of drama seems for ever on the point
of floating away to blend with the art of music. Substantially, the play
is one long dialogue between Solness and Hilda; and it would be quite
possible to analyse this dialogue in terms of music, noting (for example)
the announcement first of this theme and then of that, the resumption
and reinforcement of a theme which seemed to have been dropped, the
contrapuntal interweaving of two or more motives, a scherzo here, a
fugal passage there. Leaving this exercise to some one more skilled in
music (or less unskilled) than myself, I may note that in The Master
Builder Ibsen resumes his favourite retrospective method, from which
in Hedda Gabler he had in great measure departed. But the retrospect
with which we are here concerned is purely psychological. The external
events involved in it are few and simple in comparison with the
external events which are successively unveiled in retrospective

passages of The Wild Duck or Rosmersholm. The matter of the play is
the soul-history of Halvard Solness, recounted to an impassioned
listener--so impassioned, indeed, that the soul-changes it begets in her
form an absorbing and thrilling drama. The graduations, retardations,
accelerations of Solness's self-revealment are managed with the subtlest
art, so as to keep the interest of the spectator ever on the stretch. The
technical method was not new; it was simply that which Ibsen had been
perfecting from Pillars of Society onward; but it was applied to a
subject of a nature not only new to him, but new to literature.
That the play is full of symbolism it would be futile to deny; and the
symbolism is mainly autobiographic. The churches which Solness sets
out building doubtless represent Ibsen's early romantic plays, the
"homes for human beings" his social drama; while the houses with high
towers, merging into "castles in the air," stand for those spiritual
dramas, with a wide outlook over the metaphysical environment of
humanity, on which he was henceforth to be engaged. Perhaps it is not
altogether fanciful to read a personal reference into Solness's refusal to
call himself an architect, on the ground that his training has not been
systematic--that he is a self-taught man. Ibsen too was in all essentials
self-taught; his philosophy was entirely unsystematic; and, like Solness,
he was no student of books. There may be an introspective note also in
that dread of the younger generation to which Solness confesses. It is
certain that the old Master-Builder was not lavish of his certificates of
competence to young aspirants, though there is nothing to show that his
reticence ever depressed or quenched any rising genius.
On the whole, then, it cannot be doubted that several symbolic motives
are inwoven into the iridescent fabric of the play. But it is a great
mistake to regard it as essentially and inseparably a piece of symbolism.
Essentially it is a history of a sickly conscience, worked out in terms of
pure psychology. Or rather, it is a study of a sickly and a robust
conscience side by side. "The conscience is very conservative," Ibsen
has somewhere said; and here Solness's conservatism is contrasted with
Hilda's radicalism--or rather would-be radicalism, for we are led to
suspect, towards the close, that the radical too is a conservative in spite
or herself. The fact that Solness cannot climb as high as he builds
implies, I take it, that he cannot act as freely as he thinks, or as Hilda
would goad him into thinking. At such an altitude his conscience would

turn dizzy, and life would become impossible to him. But here I am
straying back to the interpretation of symbols. My present purpose is to
insist that there is nothing in the play which has no meaning on the
natural-psychological plane, and absolutely requires a symbolic
interpretation to make it comprehensible. The symbols are harmonic
undertones; the psychological melody is clear and consistent without
any reference to them.(4) It is true that, in order to accept the action on
what we may call the realistic level, we must suppose Solness to
possess and to exercise, sometimes unconsciously, a considerable
measure of hypnotic power. But time is surely past when we could
reckon hypnotism among "supernatural" phenomena. Whether the
particular forms of hypnotic influence attributed to Solness do actually
exist is a question we need not determine. The poet does not demand
our absolute credence, as though he were giving evidence in the
witness-box. What he requires is our imaginative acceptance of certain
incidents which he purposely leaves hovering on the border between
the natural and the preternatural, the explained and the unexplained. In
this play, as in The Lady from the Sea and Little Eyolf, he shows a
delicacy of art in his dalliance with the occult which irresistibly