ompetence 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 recalls the
exquisite genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne.(5)

The critics who insist on finding nothing but symbolism in the play have
fastened on Mrs. Solness's "nine lovely dolls," an