n
it fell into confusion. When the master grew reasonable, the
castle turned utterly crazy; the great wing became too little,
the little wing fell to ruin.

Thus we see that, thirty-five years before the date of _The Master
Builder_, Ibsen's imagination was preoccupied with a symbol of a master
building a castle in the air, and a young girl in one of its towers.

There has been some competition among the poet's young lady friends for
the honour of having served as his model for Hilda. Several, no doubt,
are entitled to some share in it. One is not surprised to learn that
among the papers he left behind were sheaves upon sheaves of letters
from women. "All these ladies," says Dr. Julius Elias, "demanded
something of him--some cure for their agonies of soul, or for the
incomprehension from which they suffered; some solution of the riddle of
their nature. Almost every one of them regarded herself as a problem
to which Ibsen could not but have the time and the interest to apply
himself. They all thought they had a claim on the creator of Nora....
Of this chapter of his experience, Fru Ibsen spoke with ironic
humour. 'Ibsen (I have often said to him), Ibsen, keep these swarms of
over-strained womenfolk at arm's length.' 'Oh no (he would reply), let
them alone. I want to observe them more closely.' His observations would
take a longer or shorter time as the case might be, and would always
contribute to some work of art."

The principal model for Hilda was doubtless Fraulein Emilie Bardach,
of Vienna, whom he met at Gossensass in the autumn of 1889. He was then
sixty-one years of age; she is said to have been seventeen. As the lady
herself handed his letters to Dr. Brandes for publication, there can be
no indiscretion in speaking of them freely. Some passages from them I
have quoted in the introduction to _Hedda Gabler_--passages which show
that at first the poet deliberately put aside his Gossensass impressions
for use when he should stand at a greater distance from them, and
meanwhile devoted himself to work in a totally different key. On October
15, 1889, he writes, in his second letter to Fraulein Bardach: "I
cannot repress my summer memories, nor do I want to. I live through my
experiences again and again. To transmute it all into a poem I find, in
the meantime, impossible. In the meantime? Shall I succeed in doing
so some time in the future? And do I really wish to succeed? In the
meantime, at any rate, I do