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f, 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

en 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

s luck in life and also the date of his unhappiness. His children died

happiness. And not merely my own; with that of others, too. Do you see that, Hilda? That is what my artistic success has cos

ploy, 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

hat echoes and re?choes in our minds long after we have read it.... Great is its art, profound and rich in its symbolic language.... Ibsen's inten

him at once to fidelity, to fact, and to mysticism." This accounts in part for the puzzling na?veté of the dialogue, externally so simple that it delights children. Symbolic figures ar

nd 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 mo

urn dizzy before we got

in hand with you,

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 r

soul anew. That is the meaning of this difficult and lovely fable,-th

written most clearly o

o 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

t 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

full of the overtones, the harmonies, of mundane e