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 some
one 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 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 building doubtless represent Ibsen's early romantic plays,