CONTENTS

PAGE
Introduction to “Hedda Gabler” [vii]
Introduction to “The Master Builder” [xix]
“Hedda Gabler” [1]
Translated by Edmund Gosse and William Archer
“The Master Builder” [187]
Translated by Edmund Gosse and William Archer

HEDDA GABLER.
INTRODUCTION.

From Munich, on June 29, 1890, Ibsen wrote to the Swedish poet, Count Carl Snoilsky: “Our intention has all along been to spend the summer in the Tyrol again. But circumstances are against our doing so. I am at present engaged upon a new dramatic work, which for several reasons has made very slow progress, and I do not leave Munich until I can take with me the completed first draft. There is little or no prospect of my being able to complete it in July.” Ibsen did not leave Munich at all that season. On October 30 he wrote: “At present I am utterly engrossed in a new play. Not one leisure hour have I had for several months.” Three weeks later (November 20) he wrote to his French translator, Count Prozor: “My new play is finished; the manuscript went off to Copenhagen the day before yesterday.... It produces a curious feeling of emptiness to be thus suddenly separated from a work which has occupied one’s time and thoughts for several months, to the exclusion of all else. But it is a good thing, too, to have done with it. The constant intercourse with the fictitious personages was beginning to make me quite nervous.” To the same correspondent he wrote on December 4: ”The title of the play is Hedda Gabler. My intention in giving it this name was to indicate that Hedda, as a personality, is to be regarded rather as her father’s daughter than as her husband’s wife. It was not my desire to deal in this play with so-called problems. What I principally wanted to do was to depict human beings, human emotions, and human destinies, upon a groundwork of certain of the social conditions and principles of the present day.“

So far we read the history of the play in the official “Correspondence.”[[1]] Some interesting glimpses into the poet’s moods during the period between the completion of The Lady from the Sea and the publication of Hedda Gabler are to be found in the series of letters to Fräulein Emilie Bardach, of Vienna, published by Dr. George Brandes.[[2]] This young lady Ibsen met at Gossensass in the Tyrol in the autumn of 1889. The record of their brief friendship belongs to the history of The Master Builder rather than to that of Hedda Gabler, but the allusions to his work in his letters to her during the winter of 1889 demand some examination.

So early as October 7, 1889, he writes to her: ”A new poem begins to dawn in me. I will execute it this winter, and try to transfer to it the bright atmosphere of the summer. But I feel that it will end in sadness—such is my nature.“ Was this “dawning” poem Hedda Gabler? Or was it rather The Master Builder that was germinating in his mind? Who shall say? The latter hypothesis seems the more probable, for it is hard to believe that, at any stage in the incubation of Hedda Gabler, he can have conceived it as even beginning in a key of gaiety. A week later, however, he appears to have made up his mind that the time had not come for the poetic utilisation of his recent experiences. He writes on October 15: ”Here I sit as usual at my writing-table. Now I would fain work, but am unable to. My fancy, indeed, is very active. But it always wanders away. It wanders where it has no business to wander during working hours. I cannot repress my summer memories—nor do I wish to. I live through my experiences again and again and yet again. To transmute it all into a poem, I find, in the meantime, impossible.“ Clearly, then, he felt that his imagination ought to have been engaged on some theme having no relation to his summer experiences—the theme, no doubt, of Hedda Gabler. In his next letter, dated October 29, he writes: “Do not be troubled because I cannot, in the meantime, create (dichten). In reality I am for ever creating, or, at any rate, dreaming of something which, when in the fulness of time it ripens, will reveal itself as a creation (Dichtung).” On November 19 he says: “I am very busily occupied with preparations for my new poem. I sit almost the whole day at my writing-table. Go out only in the evening for a little while.” The five following letters contain no allusion to the play; but on September 18, 1890, he wrote: “My wife and son are at present at Riva, on the Lake of Garda, and will probably remain there until the middle of October, or even longer. Thus I am quite alone here, and cannot get away. The new play on which I am at present engaged will probably not be ready until November, though I sit at my writing-table daily, and almost the whole day long.”

Here ends the history of Hedda Gabler, so far as the poet’s letters carry us. Its hard clear outlines, and perhaps somewhat bleak atmosphere, seem to have resulted from a sort of reaction against the sentimental “dreamery” begotten of his Gossensass experiences. He sought refuge in the chill materialism of Hedda from the ardent transcendentalism of Hilda, whom he already heard knocking at the door. He was not yet in the mood to deal with her on the plane of poetry.[[3]]

Hedda Gabler was published in Copenhagen on December 16, 1890. This was the first of Ibsen’s plays to be translated from proof-sheets and published in England and America almost simultaneously with its first appearance in Scandinavia. The earliest theatrical performance took place at the Residenz Theater, Munich, on the last day of January 1891, in the presence of the poet, Frau Conrad-Ramlo playing the title-part. The Lessing Theater, Berlin, followed suit on February 10. Not till February 25 was the play seen in Copenhagen, with Fru Hennings as Hedda. On the following night it was given for the first time in Christiania, the Norwegian Hedda being Fröken Constance Bruun. It was this production which the poet saw when he visited the Christiania Theater for the first time after his return to Norway, August 28, 1891. It would take pages to give even the baldest list of the productions and revivals of Hedda Gabler in Scandinavia and Germany, where it has always ranked among Ibsen’s most popular works. The admirable production of the play by Miss Elizabeth Robins and Miss Marion Lea, at the Vaudeville Theatre, London, April 20, 1891, may be counted the second great step towards the popularisation of Ibsen in England, the first being the Charrington-Achurch production of A Doll’s House in 1889. Miss Robins afterwards repeated her fine performance of Hedda many times, in London, in the English provinces, and in New York. The character has also been acted in London by Eleonora Duse, and as I write (March 5, 1907) by Mrs. Patrick Campbell, at the Court Theatre. In America, Hedda has frequently been acted by Mrs. Fiske, Miss Nance O’Neill and other actresses—quite recently by a Russian actress, Madame Alla Nazimova, who (playing in English) has made a great success both in this part and in Nora. The first French Hedda Gabler was Mlle. Marthe Brandès, who played the part at the Vaudeville Theatre, Paris, on December 17, 1891, the performance being introduced by a lecture by M. Jules Lemaître. In Holland, in Italy, in Russia, the play has been acted times without number. In short (as might easily have been foretold) it has rivalled A Doll’s House in world-wide popularity.

It has been suggested,[[4]] I think without sufficient ground, that Ibsen deliberately conceived Hedda Gabler as an “international” play, and that the scene is really the “west end” of any great European city. To me it seems quite clear that Ibsen had Christiania in mind, and the Christiania of a somewhat earlier period than the ’nineties. The electric cars, telephones, and other conspicuous factors in the life of a modern capital are notably absent from the play. There is no electric light in Secretary Falk’s villa. It is still the habit for ladies to return on foot from evening parties, with gallant swains escorting them. This “suburbanism,” which so distressed the London critics of 1891, was characteristic of the Christiania Ibsen himself had known in the ’sixties—the Christiania of Love’s Comedy—rather than of the greatly extended and modernised city of the end of the century. Moreover, Lövborg’s allusions to the fiord, and the suggested picture of Sheriff Elvsted, his family and his avocations, are all distinctively Norwegian. The truth seems to be very simple—the environment and the subsidiary personages are all thoroughly national, but Hedda herself is an “international” type, a product of civilisation by no means peculiar to Norway.

We cannot point to any individual model or models who “sat to” Ibsen for the character of Hedda.[[5]] The late Grant Allen declared that Hedda was “nothing more nor less than the girl we take down to dinner in London nineteen times out of twenty”; in which case Ibsen must have suffered from a superfluity of models, rather than from any difficulty in finding one. But the fact is that in this, as in all other instances, the word “model” must be taken in a very different sense from that in which it is commonly used in painting. Ibsen undoubtedly used models for this trait and that, but never for a whole figure. If his characters can be called portraits at all, they are composite portraits. Even when it seems pretty clear that the initial impulse towards the creation of a particular character came from some individual, the original figure is entirely transmuted in the process of harmonisation with the dramatic scheme. We need not, therefore, look for a definite prototype of Hedda; but Dr. Brandes shows that two of that lady’s exploits were probably suggested by the anecdotic history of the day.

Ibsen had no doubt heard how the wife of a well-known Norwegian composer, in a fit of raging jealousy excited by her husband’s prolonged absence from home, burnt the manuscript of a symphony which he had just finished. The circumstances under which Hedda burns Lövborg’s manuscript are, of course, entirely different and infinitely more dramatic; but here we have merely another instance of the dramatisation or “poetisation” of the raw material of life. Again, a still more painful incident probably came to his knowledge about the same time. A beautiful and very intellectual woman was married to a well-known man who had been addicted to drink, but had entirely conquered the vice. One day a mad whim seized her to put his self-mastery and her power over him to the test. As it happened to be his birthday, she rolled into his study a small keg of brandy, and then withdrew. She returned some time afterwards to find that he had broached the keg, and lay insensible on the floor. In this anecdote we cannot but recognise the germ, not only of Hedda’s temptation of Lövborg, but of a large part of her character.

“Thus,” says Dr. Brandes, “out of small and scattered traits of reality Ibsen fashioned his close-knit and profoundly thought-out works of art.”

For the character of Eilert Lövborg, again, Ibsen seems unquestionably to have borrowed several traits from a definite original. A young Danish man of letters, whom Dr. Brandes calls Holm, was an enthusiastic admirer of Ibsen, and came to be on very friendly terms with him. One day Ibsen was astonished to receive, in Munich, a parcel addressed from Berlin by this young man, containing, without a word of explanation, a packet of his (Ibsen’s) letters, and a photograph which he had presented to Holm. Ibsen brooded and brooded over the incident, and at last came to the conclusion that the young man had intended to return her letters and photograph to a young lady to whom he was known to be attached, and had in a fit of aberration mixed up the two objects of his worship. Some time after, Holm appeared at Ibsen’s rooms. He talked quite rationally, but professed to have no knowledge whatever of the letter-incident, though he admitted the truth of Ibsen’s conjecture that the “belle dame sans merci” had demanded the return of her letters and portrait. Ibsen was determined to get at the root of the mystery; and a little inquiry into his young friend’s habits revealed the fact that he broke his fast on a bottle of port wine, consumed a bottle of Rhine wine at lunch, of Burgundy at dinner, and finished off the evening with one or two more bottles of port. Then he heard, too, how, in the course of a night’s carouse, Holm had lost the manuscript of a book; and in these traits he saw the outline of the figure of Eilert Lövborg.

Some time elapsed, and again Ibsen received a postal packet from Holm. This one contained his will, in which Ibsen figured as his residuary legatee. But many other legatees were mentioned in the instrument—all of them ladies, such as Fräulein Alma Rothbart, of Bremen, and Fräulein Elise Kraushaar, of Berlin. The bequests to these meritorious spinsters were so generous that their sum considerably exceeded the amount of the testator’s property. Ibsen gently but firmly declined the proffered inheritance; but Holm’s will no doubt suggested to him the figure of that red-haired “Mademoiselle Diana” who is heard of but not seen in Hedda Gabler, and enabled him to add some further traits to the portraiture of Lövborg. When the play appeared, Holm recognised himself with glee in the character of the bibulous man of letters, and thereafter adopted “Eilert Lövborg” as his pseudonym. I do not, therefore, see why Dr. Brandes should suppress his real name; but I willingly imitate him in erring on the side of discretion. The poor fellow died several years ago.

Some critics have been greatly troubled as to the precise meaning of Hedda’s fantastic vision of Lövborg “with vine-leaves in his hair.” Surely this is a very obvious image or symbol of the beautiful, tho ideal, aspect of bacchic elation and revelry. Antique art, or I am much mistaken, shows us many figures of Dionysus himself and his followers with vine-leaves entwined in their hair. To Ibsen’s mind, at any rate, the image had long been familiar. In Peer Gynt (Act iv. sc. 8), when Peer, having carried off Anitra, finds himself in a particularly festive mood, he cries: “Were there vine-leaves around, I would garland my brow.” Again, in Emperor and Galilean (Pt. II. Act i.) where Julian, in the procession of Dionysus, impersonates the god himself, it is directed that he shall wear a wreath of vine-leaves. Professor Dietrichson relates that among the young artists whose society Ibsen frequented during his first years in Rome, it was customary, at their little festivals, for the revellers to deck themselves in this fashion. But the image is so obvious that there is no need to trace it to any personal experience. The attempt to place Hedda’s vine-leaves among Ibsen’s obscurities is an example of the firm resolution not to understand which animated the criticism of the ’nineties.

Dr. Brandes has dealt very severely with the character of Eilert Lövborg, alleging that we cannot believe in the genius attributed to him. But where is he described as a genius? The poet represents him as a very able student of sociology; but that is a quite different thing from attributing to him such genius as must necessarily shine forth in every word he utters. Dr. Brandes, indeed, declines to believe even in his ability as a sociologist, on the ground that it is idle to write about the social development of the future. “To our prosaic minds,” he says, “it may seem as if the most sensible utterance on the subject is that of the fool of the play: ‘The future! Good heavens, we know nothing of the future.’” The best retort to this criticism is that which Eilert himself makes: ”There’s a thing or two to be said about it all the same.“ The intelligent forecasting of the future (as Mr. H. G. Wells has shown) is not only clearly distinguishable from fantastic Utopianism, but is indispensable to any large statesmanship or enlightened social activity. With very real and very great respect for Dr. Brandes, I cannot think that he has been fortunate in his treatment of Lövborg’s character. It has been represented as an absurdity that he should think of reading extracts from his new book to a man like Tesman, whom he despises. But though Tesman is a ninny, he is, as Hedda says, a ”specialist“—he is a competent, plodding student of his subject. Lövborg may quite naturally wish to see how his new method, or his excursion into a new field, strikes the average scholar of the Tesman type. He is, in fact, ”trying it on the dog“—neither an unreasonable nor an unusual proceeding. There is, no doubt, a certain improbability in the way in which Lövborg is represented as carrying his manuscript around, and especially in Mrs. Elvsted’s production of his rough draft from her pocket; but these are mechanical trifles, on which only a niggling criticism would dream of laying stress.

Of all Ibsen’s works, Hedda Gabler is the most detached, the most objective—a character-study pure and simple. It is impossible—or so it seems to me—to extract any sort of general idea from it. One cannot even call it a satire, unless one is prepared to apply that term to the record of a “case” in a work on criminology. Reverting to Dumas’s dictum that a play should contain “a painting, a judgment, an ideal,” we may say that Hedda Gabler fulfils only the first of these requirements. The poet does not even pass judgment on his heroine: he simply paints her full-length portrait with scientific impassivity. But what a portrait! How searching in insight, how brilliant in colouring, how rich in detail! Grant Allen’s remark, above quoted, was, of course, a whimsical exaggeration: the Hedda type is not so common as all that, else the world would quickly come to an end. But particular traits and tendencies of the Hedda type are very common in modern life, and not only among women. Hyperæsthesia lies at the root of her tragedy. With a keenly critical, relentlessly solvent intelligence, she combines a morbid shrinking from all the gross and prosaic detail of the sensual life. She has nothing to take her out of herself—not a single intellectual interest or moral enthusiasm. She cherishes, in a languid way, a petty social ambition; and even that she finds obstructed and baffled. At the same time she learns that another woman has had the courage to love and venture all, where she, in her cowardice, only hankered and refrained. Her malign egoism rises up uncontrolled, and calls to its aid her quick and subtle intellect. She ruins the other woman’s happiness, but in doing so incurs a danger from which her sense of personal dignity revolts. Life has no such charm for her that she cares to purchase it at the cost of squalid humiliation and self-contempt. The good and the bad in her alike impel her to have done with it all; and a pistol-shot ends what is surely one of the most poignant character-tragedies in literature. Ibsen’s brain never worked at higher pressure than in the conception and adjustment of those “crowded hours” in which Hedda, tangled in the web of Will and Circumstance, struggles on till she is too weary to struggle any more.

It may not be superfluous to note that the “a” in “Gabler” should be sounded long and full, like the “a” in “garden”—not like the “a” in “gable” or in “gabble.”

THE MASTER BUILDER.
INTRODUCTION.

With The Master Builder—or Master Builder Solness, as the title runs in the original—we enter upon the final stage in Ibsen’s career. “You are essentially right,” the poet wrote to Count Prozor in March 1900, “when you say that the series which closes with the Epilogue (When We Dead Awaken) began with Master Builder Solness.”

“Ibsen,” says Dr. Brahm, ”wrote in Christiania all the four works which he thus seems to bracket together—Solness, Eyolf, Borkman, and When We Dead Awaken. He returned to Norway in July 1891, for a stay of indefinite length; but the restless wanderer over Europe was destined to leave his home no more.... He had not returned, however, to throw himself, as of old, into the battle of the passing day. Polemics are entirely absent from the poetry of his old age. He leaves the State and Society at peace. He who had departed as the creator of Falk [in Love’s Comedy] now, on his return, gazes, not satirically, but rather in a lyric mood, into the secret places of human nature and the wonders of his own soul.“

Dr. Brahm, however, seems to be mistaken in thinking that Ibsen returned to Norway with no definite intention of settling down. Dr. Julius Elias (an excellent authority) reports that shortly before Ibsen left Munich in 1891, he remarked one day, “I must get back to the North!” “Is that a sudden impulse?” asked Elias. “Oh no,” was the reply; ”I want to be a good head of a household and have my affairs in order. To that end I must consolidate my property, lay it down in good securities, and get it under control—and that one can best do where one has rights of citizenship.“ Some critics will no doubt be shocked to find the poet whom they have written down an “anarchist” confessing such bourgeois motives.

After his return to Norway, Ibsen’s correspondence became very scant, and we have no letters dating from the period when he was at work on The Master Builder. On the other hand, we possess a curious lyrical prelude to the play, which he put on paper on March 16, 1892. It is said to have been his habit, before setting to work on a play, to “crystallise in a poem the mood which then possessed him”; but the following is the only one of these keynote-poems which has been published. I give it in the original language, with a literal translation:

DE SAD DER, DE TO—

De sad der, de to, i saa lunt et hus

ved höst og i vinterdage,

Saa brændte huset. Alt ligger i grus.

De to faar i asken rage.

For nede i den er et smykke gemt,—

et smykke, som aldrig kan brænde,

Og leder de trofast, hænder det nemt

at det findes af ham eller hende.

Men finder de end, de brandlidte to,

det dyre, ildfaste smykke,—

aldrig hun finder sin brændte tro,

han aldrig sin brændte lykke.

THEY SAT THERE, THE TWO—

They sat there, the two, in so cosy a house, through autumn and winter days. Then the house burned down. Everything lies in ruins. The two must grope among the ashes.

For among them is hidden a jewel—a jewel that never can burn. And if they search faithfully, it may easily happen that he or she may find it.

But even should they find it, the burnt-out two—find this precious unburnable jewel—never will she find her burnt faith, he never his burnt happiness.

This is the latest piece of Ibsen’s verse that has been given to the world; but one of his earliest poems—first printed in 1858—was also, in some sort, a prelude to The Master Builder. Of this a literal translation may suffice. It is called

BUILDING-PLANS

I remember as clearly as if it had been to-day the evening when, in the paper, I saw my first poem in print. There I sat in my den, and, with long-drawn puffs, I smoked and I dreamed in blissful self-complacency.

”I will build a cloud-castle. It shall shine all over the North. It shall have two wings: one little and one great. The great wing shall shelter a deathless poet; the little wing shall serve as a young girl’s bower.“

The plan seemed to me nobly harmonious; but as time went on 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 Fräulein 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 Fräulein Bardach: “I cannot repress my summer memories, nor do I want to. I live through my experiences again and again, and yet again. To transmute it all into a poem I find, in the meantime, impossible. In the meantime? Shall I succeed in doing so sometime in the future? And do I really wish to succeed? In the meantime, at any rate, I do not.... And yet it must come in time.” The letters number twelve in all, and are couched in a tone of sentimental regret for the brief, bright summer days of their acquaintanceship. The keynote is struck in the inscription on the back of a photograph which he gave her before they parted: An die Maisonne eines Septemberlebens—in Tirol, 27/9/89.[[6]] In her album he had written the words:

Hohes, schmerzliches Glück—

um das Unerreichbare zu ringen![[7]]

in which we may, if we like, see a foreshadowing of the Solness frame of mind. In the fifth letter of the series he refers to her as “an enigmatic Princess”; in the sixth he twice calls her “my dear Princess”; but this is the only point at which the letters quite definitely and unmistakably point forward to The Master Builder. In the ninth letter (February 6, 1890) he says: “I feel it a matter of conscience to end, or, at any rate, to restrict, our correspondence.” The tenth letter, six months later, is one of kindly condolence on the death of the young lady’s father. In the eleventh (very short) note, dated December 30, 1890, he acknowledges some small gift, but says: “Please, for the present, do not write to me again.... I will soon send you my new play [Hedda Gabler]. Receive it in friendship, but in silence!” This injunction she apparently obeyed. When The Master Builder appeared, it would seem that Ibsen did not even send her a copy of the play; and we gather that he was rather annoyed when she sent him a photograph signed “Princess of Orangia.” On his seventieth birthday, however, she telegraphed her congratulations, to which he returned a very cordial reply. And here their relations ended.

That she was right, however, in regarding herself as his principal model for Hilda, appears from an anecdote related by Dr. Elias.[[8]] It is not an altogether pleasing anecdote, but Dr. Elias is an unexceptionable witness, and it can by no means be omitted from an examination into the origins of The Master Builder. Ibsen had come to Berlin in February 1891 for the first performance of Hedda Gabler. Such experiences were always a trial to him, and he felt greatly relieved when they were over. Packing, too, he detested; and Elias having helped him through this terrible ordeal, the two sat down to lunch together, while awaiting the train. An expansive mood descended upon Ibsen, and chuckling over his champagne-glass, he said: ”Do you know, my next play is already hovering before me—of course in vague outline. But of one thing I have got firm hold. An experience: a woman’s figure. Very interesting, very interesting indeed. Again spice of devilry in it.“ Then he related how he had met in the Tyrol a Viennese girl of very remarkable character. She had at once made him her confidant. The gist of her confessions was that she did not care a bit about one day marrying a well brought-up young man—most likely she would never marry. What tempted and charmed and delighted her was to lure other women’s husbands away from them. She was a little dæmonic wrecker; she often appeared to him like a little bird of prey, that would fain have made him, too, her booty. He had studied her very, very closely. For the rest, she had had no great success with him. ”She did not get hold of me, but I got hold of her—for my play. Then I fancy“ (here he chuckled again) “she consoled herself with some one else.” Love seemed to mean for her only a sort of morbid imagination. This, however, was only one side of her nature. His little model had had a great deal of heart and of womanly understanding; and thanks to the spontaneous power she could gain over him, every woman might, if she wished it, guide some man towards the good. “Thus Ibsen spoke,” says Elias, ”calmly and coolly, gazing as it were into the far distance, like an artist taking an objective view of some experience—like Rubek speaking of his soul-thefts. He had stolen a soul, and put it to a double employment. Thea Elvsted and Hilda Wangel are intimately related—are, indeed, only different expressions of the same nature.“ If Ibsen actually declared Thea and Hilda to be drawn from one model, we must of course take his word for it; but the relationship is hard to discern.

There can be no reasonable doubt, then, that the Gossensass episode gave the primary impulse to The Master Builder. But it seems pretty well established, too, that another lady, whom he met in Christiania after his return in 1891, also contributed largely to the character of Hilda. This may have been the reason why he resented Fraülein Bardach’s appropriating to herself the title of “Princess of Orangia.”

The play was published in the middle of December 1892. It was acted both in Germany and England before it was seen in the Scandinavian capitals. Its first performance took place at the Lessing Theatre, Berlin, January 19, 1893, with Emanuel Reicher as Solness and Frl. Reisenhofer as Hilda. In London it was first performed at the Trafalgar Square Theatre (now the Duke of York’s) on February 20, 1893, under the direction of Mr. Herbert Waring and Miss Elizabeth Robins, who played Solness and Hilda. This was one of the most brilliant and successful of English Ibsen productions. Miss Robins was almost an ideal Hilda, and Mr. Waring’s Solness was exceedingly able. Some thirty performances were given in all, and the play was reproduced at the Opera Comique later in the season, with Mr. Lewis Waller as Solness. In the following year Miss Robins acted Hilda in Manchester. In Christiania and Copenhagen the play was produced on the same evening, March 8, 1893; the Copenhagen Solness and Hilda were Emil Poulsen and Fru Hennings. A Swedish production, by Lindberg, soon followed, both in Stockholm and Gothenburg. In Paris Solness le constructeur was not seen until April 3, 1894, when it was produced by “L’Œuvre” with M. Lugné-Poë as Solness. This company, sometimes with Mme. Suzanne Desprès and sometimes with Mme. Berthe Bady as Hilda, in 1894 and 1895 presented the play in London, Brussels, Amsterdam, Milan, and other cities. In October 1894 they visited Christiania, where Ibsen was present at one of their performances, and is reported by Herman Bang to have been so enraptured with it that he exclaimed, “This is the resurrection of my play!” On this occasion Mme. Bady was the Hilda. The first performance of the play in America took place at the Carnegie Lyceum, New York, on January 16, 1900, with Mr. William H. Pascoe as Solness and Miss Florence Kahn as Hilda. The performance was repeated in the course of the same month, both at Washington and Boston.

In England, and probably elsewhere as well, The Master Builder produced a curious double effect. It alienated many of the poet’s staunchest admirers, and it powerfully attracted many people who had hitherto been hostile to him. Looking back, it is easy to see why this should have been so; for here was certainly a new thing in drama, which could not but set up many novel reactions. A greater contrast could scarcely be imagined than that between the hard, cold, precise outlines of Hedda Gabler and the vague mysterious atmosphere of The Master Builder, in which, though the dialogue is sternly restrained within the limits of prose, the art 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 someone 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 the 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 by building doubtless represent Ibsen’s early romantic plays, the “homes for human beings,” his social dramas; 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 the 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 of 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.[[9]] 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 in spite of himself, and sometimes unconsciously, a considerable measure of hypnotic power. But the 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.[[10]]

The critics who insist on finding nothing but symbolism in the play have fastened on Mrs. Solness’s “nine lovely dolls,” and provided the most amazing interpretations for them. A letter contributed in 1893 to the Westminster Gazette records an incident which throws a curious light on the subject, and may be worth preserving. “At a recent first-night,” I wrote, ”I happened to be seated just behind a well-known critic. He turned round to me and said, ‘I want you to tell me what is your theory of those “nine lovely dolls.” Of course one can see that they are entirely symbolical.’ ‘I am not so sure of that,’ I replied, remembering a Norwegian cousin of my own who treasured a favourite doll until she was nearer thirty than twenty. ‘They of course symbolise the unsatisfied passion of motherhood in Mrs. Solness’s heart, but I have very little doubt that Ibsen makes use of this “symbol” because he has observed a similar case, or cases, in real life.’ ‘What!’ cried the critic. ‘He has seen a grown-up, a middle-aged, woman continuing to “live with” her dolls!’ I was about to say that it did not seem to me so very improbable, when a lady who was seated next me, a total stranger to both of us, leant forward and said, ‘Excuse my interrupting you, but it may perhaps interest you to know that I have three dolls to which I am deeply attached!’ I will not be so rude as to conjecture this lady’s age, but we may be sure that a very young woman would not have had the courage to make such an avowal. Does it not seem that Ibsen knows a thing or two about human nature—English as well as Norwegian—which we dramatic critics, though bound by our calling to be subtle psychologists, have not yet fathomed?“ In the course of the correspondence which followed, one very apposite anecdote was quoted from an American paper, the Argonaut: “An old Virginia lady said to a friend, on finding a treasured old cup cracked by a careless maid, ‘I know of nothing to compare with the affliction of losing a handsome piece of old china.’ ‘Surely,’ said the friend, ‘it is not so bad as losing one’s children.’ ‘Yes, it is,’ replied the old lady, ’for when your children die, you do have the consolations of religion, you know.’”

It would be a paradox to call The Master Builder Ibsen’s greatest work, but one of his three or four greatest it assuredly is. Of all his writings, it is probably the most original, the most individual, the most unlike any other drama by any other writer. The form of Brand and Peer Gynt was doubtless suggested by other dramatic poems—notably by Faust. In The Wild Duck, in Rosmersholm, in Hedda Gabler, even in Little Eyolf and John Gabriel Borkman, there remain faint traces of the French leaven which was so strong in the earlier plays. But The Master Builder had no model and has no parallel. It shows no slightest vestige of outside influence. It is Ibsen, and nothing but Ibsen.