Her death, sought because of cowardly reasons, is yet the one real fact in Hedda's shallow, feverish existence. Death could alone solve the discords of her life's cruel music.
XIV
THE MASTER BUILDER
(1892)
The doctor of the madhouse at Cairo, in which Peer Gynt crowns himself Emperor of Himself, said of his "patients": "Each one shuts himself up in the cask of self, plunges down deep in the ferment of self. He's hermetically sealed with the bung of self, and he tightens the staves in the well of self. None has a tear for another's woes, none has a sense for another's ideas. Ourselves—that's what we are in thought and in speech; ourselves to the outmost plank of the springboard."
Such a sealed soul was that of Halvard Solness before Hilda Wangel knocked at his door to demand of him the fulfilment of his promise. Ten years earlier he had promised to make her a princess. She was then a child and had excitedly waved a flag when she saw Solness in the pride of his manhood, the greatest of the architects, climb to the top of the scaffolding that surrounded the newly completed church and hang a wreath on the weather-vane. Her enthusiasm had pleased the artist, and a kiss was given with the promise. Her knock is as revolutionary as the open door of Nora's house of dolls. As Hilda enters she brings with her brilliant young womanhood, the fresh breeze of the new century. It was needed in the unhappy Solness household.
Halvard lost his former home through a fire; it was the beginning of his luck in life and also the date of his unhappiness. His children died soon after the affair, and his wife's mind became morbid over the loss.
"Is it not frightful," he tells Hilda, "that I must now go about and reckon it up, pay for it?—not with money, but with human happiness. And not merely my own; with that of others, too. Do you see that, Hilda? That is what my artistic success has cost me—and others. And every livelong day I must go about and see the price paid for me anew. Again, and again, and still again."
Several fixed ideas haunt this man's brain. He has become moody, even surly, because he suspects the younger generation of treason to him. As he supplanted old Brovik, the broken-down architect in his employ, so he fears that the son, Knut Brovik, will supplant him. He has, being a man loved by women, won power over Knut's betrothed. He believes that he has the rare gift of willing a thing, a telepathic power. He is not mad but overwrought, and Hilda's visit is in the nature of a rescue. She is the fairy princess who is to rescue him from the evil Ego, in which he is imprisoned as if in an ogre's cage.