the "homes for human beings" his social drama; while the houses
with high towers, merging into "castles in the air," stand for those
spiritual dramas, with a wide outlook over the metaphysical
environment of humanity, on which he was henceforth to be engaged.
Perhaps it is not altogether fanciful to read a personal reference
into Solness's refusal to call himself an architect, on the ground
that his training has not been systematic--that he is a self-taught
man. Ibsen too was in all essentials self-taught; his philosophy
was entirely unsystematic; and, like Solness, he was no student of
books. There may be an introspective note also in that dread of
the younger generation to which Solness confesses. It is certain
that the old Master-Builder was not lavish of his certificates of
competence to young aspirants, though there is nothing to show that
his reticence ever depressed or quenched any rising genius.

On the whole, then, it cannot be doubted that several symbolic
motives are inwoven into the iridescent fabric of the play. But it
is a great mistake to regard it as essentially and inseparably a
piece of symbolism. Essentially it is a history of a sickly
conscience, worked out in terms of pure psychology. Or rather, it
is a study of a sickly and a robust conscience side by side. "The
conscience is very conservative," Ibsen has somewhere said; and here
Solness's conservatism is contrasted with Hilda's radicalism--or
rather would-be radicalism, for we are led to suspect, towards the
close, that the radical too is a conservative in spite or herself.
The fact that Solness cannot climb as high as he builds implies, I
take it, that he cannot act as freely as he thinks, or as Hilda would
goad him into thinking. At such an altitude his conscience would
turn dizzy, and life would become impossible to him. But here I am
straying back to the interpretation of symbols. My present purpose