he 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 c