time he climbed a church tower and, as was the custom among Norwegian builders at that time (much like the christening of a ship), hung a garland at the topmost spire. Hilda had seen the triumph of her hero and remembered the precise date. “It was ten years ago,” she said, “on the nineteenth of September.” It was on September 20, 1889, that Ibsen wrote on the visitor’s ledger at Gossensass, “The great, painful joy of striving for the unattainable.” Also, like Solness, Ibsen was troubled by great heights. When he was a youth, he attempted to scale a mountain in Italy but discontinued his ascent in fear, lying flat to the ground clutching a boulder. Finally, like the Master Builder, he was deeply interested in the power of thought transference, and Ibsen was an avid follower of studies on hypnotism and spiritualism.

However interesting are the similarities between the author’s life and parallel themes of the play, The Master Builder is best enjoyed as theater rather than autobiography. The sharply defined conflicts of the play are resolved only at the conclusion. For this reason, the play performs especially well, although it has never been quite so popular as Hedda Gabler or A Doll’s House. The central conflict is that between high aspiration—romantic dreams to attain the impossible—and the limitations of reality. As Master Builder, Solness has achieved a measure of financial success and even fame, but, as he discloses to Doctor Herdal and later, more completely, to Hilda, he considers himself a mere shell, a failure. Having defied God at the church tower, he has since feared that he will be cursed for his presumptuousness. At first he believes that the younger generation will be the agent of his destruction. Later, as he allies himself with the idealism of Hilda, he fears that his downfall will come not so much from rivals like Ragnar Brovik but from the failure of his own will. All his life he has depended upon “Helpers and Servers” to advance his career. Although a genius in his own right, he has nevertheless had to fight the world. His powerful will, like the nearly hypnotic force that controls the affections of Kaia Fosli, has directed the helpers and servers to perform his wishes. Without assistance, however, he loses confidence in his art.

Finally, however, Solness understands that the enemy to his peace lies not outside himself but within. He really has no need to fear the young, and he does not require the blind obedience of servitors. His failings are those of conscience. He believes that he is going insane. So terrible is his sense of guilt—guilt because of his conduct toward his wife; guilt because he has abandoned the dreams of creating great edifices, churches; guilt because he has defied God—that he becomes increasingly isolated, almost paranoid. When Hilda encourages him to perform the impossible, to prove to the world that only he should be allowed to build, his inner conflict breaks. He determines to hazard everything, even his life, to satisfy his princess and provide her with her promised kingdom—to top a wreath on the tower of the new house.

At this point in the drama, the center of conflict shifts from Solness—now that he has made his idealistic decision—to Hilda. Will she allow the Master Builder to risk his life simply to satisfy her own iron will (or from another viewpoint, the passions of a spoiled child)? She knows that Solness experiences giddiness when he is climbing. Ragnar tells her that the Master Builder has always been afraid to place the wreath on the topmost place, that other workmen perform the task. Yet she steadfastly demands her castle-in-the-air. In a romantic bond with the artist, she has identified her passion with his. Like the Viking women of old, with whom she has declared her kinship, she disdains a bourgeois conscience. For in her sprightly way she, too, is a warrior, and with a robust conscience she demands of her hero a sacrifice to prove his manhood.

A modern audience may perhaps judge Hilda more harshly than would Ibsen. As a character of social realism, she is idealistic to the point of folly. Careless, selfish, and willful, she contrasts with the sober, self-sacrificing, dutiful Aline Solness, the Master Builder’s wife. Yet when the audience comes to understand Mrs. Solness better, it sees that she has lived too narrow a life, devoid of romantic risks and heroism. She has never dared to confide to her husband the secret of her own guilt—that after the fire that destroyed her ancestral house, she lamented the loss of her nine dolls more grievously than that of her twin sons, who died shortly afterward. While the audience sympathizes with her human frailty (for she is not to be condemned for grasping firmly to such symbols of the past), it also sees in a contrasted light the heroic striving of Hilda. The trolls (hobgoblins that are symbols both of destructive and creative forces) that guide her life are still strong, not diminished by civilization. At the end of the play—when she shrieks with wild intensity, “My—my Master Builder!”—she identifies his romantic achievement with her own. She has willed his triumph. To Ibsen, the death of a mere man, even a genius, is an insignificant price for such a triumph. In his visionary play, the Master Builder lives on in his work and in Hilda.