Georg Brandes writes of The Master Builder: "It gives at one and the same time a sense of enthralment and a sense of deliverance. This is a play that echoes and reëchoes in our minds long after we have read it.... Great is its art, profound and rich in its symbolic language.... Ibsen's intention has been to give us by means of real characters, but in half-allegorical form, the tragedy of a great artist who has passed the prime of life."
And as the Danish critic aptly remarks, in his—Ibsen's—case, "Realism and symbolism have thriven very well together for more than a score of years. The contrasts in his nature incline him at once to fidelity, to fact, and to mysticism." This accounts in part for the puzzling naïveté of the dialogue, externally so simple that it delights children. Symbolic figures are employed throughout, with repetitions of motives as in a symphonic composition. These buttress up a structure that might otherwise dissolve in fantastic smoke, so aerial is its thesis.
The various acts are mainly composed of a duologue between Hilda and Halvard. Gradually she obtains by her terrible intensity and child-like belief in him complete control of his self-absorbed will. She drives him to sign a letter of praise for the youthful architect, Knut, his possible rival; she sends the other girl away; she is kind to Aline, the unhappy wife. Hilda is, as Ibsen said, a reversed Hedda Gabler. She has much of Rebekka West in her, with added youth and a nature buoyant enough to triumph over the Solness ideals, just as she would have compelled Rosmersholm to go down into the world and ennoble men. She discovers Solness's intention to build no more, to climb no more to the top of high turrets. It pains her to think that her part, her master builder, the incarnation of her maidenly dreams, dares no longer mount in company with his ideals. He will build no more churches, only houses for human beings. There may be a castle in the air where he will find his happiness—with Hilda.
"I'm afraid you would turn dizzy before we got halfway up," she says.
"Not if I can mount in hand with you, Hilda," he replies.
"Then let me see you stand free and high up." But alone, he must mount to the top of the new tower. She urges him after the manner of Peter Skule in The Pretenders, as did Rebekka in Rosmersholm. She will not stand between Aline and Halvard, for she now knows Aline. Otherwise her moral life is as free as Nietzsche's. So Solness marches up the scaffolding, up the ladder to the very pinnacle, forgetting that life has but one pinnacle to scale, and never a second. Her ecstasy as she watches him reach the top, be once more the old genius, his real self, Halvard Solness, that she cheers him and—he falls. Unconscious that he is dead, apparently not caring for the woe brought to this house, Hilda calls out until the curtain hides her from view:—?
"My—my master builder!" And he is really hers, for she has created his soul anew. That is the meaning of this difficult and lovely fable,—though he fell to his death, Solness once more stood alone on the heights.
Maurice Maeterlinck has written most clearly on the theme of this play.
"Some time ago," he says in The Treasure of the Humble (translated by Alfred Sutro), "when dealing with The Master Builder, which is the one of Ibsen's dramas wherein the dialogue of the second degree attains the deepest tragedy, I endeavoured, unskilfully enough, to fit its secrets.... 'What is it,' I asked, 'what is it that, in The Master Builder, the poet has added to life, thereby making it appear so strange, so profound, so disquieting, beneath its trivial surface? The discovery is not easy, and the old master hides from us more than one secret. It would even seem as though what he has wished to say were but little by the side of what he has been compelled to say. He has freed certain powers of the soul that have never yet been free, and it may be that these have held him in thrall.'
"'Look you, Hilda,' exclaims Solness, 'look you! There is sorcery in you, too, as there is in me. It is this sorcery that imposes action on the powers of the beyond. And we have to yield to it. Whether we want to or not, we must. There is sorcery in them as in us all.' Hilda and Solness are, I believe, the first characters in drama who feel, for an instant, that they are living in the atmosphere of the soul; and the discovery of this essential life that exists in them, beyond the life of every day, comes fraught with terror. Hilda and Solness are two souls to whom a flash has revealed their situation in the true life.... Their conversation resembles nothing that we have ever heard, inasmuch as the poet has endeavoured to blend in one expression both the inner and outer dialogue. A new, indescribable power dominates this somnambulistic drama. All that is said therein at once hides and reveals the sources of an unknown life."