Climbing High

In The Master Builder, the best play of Ibsen’s final period, the religious, mystical, and poetic strains in the playwright’s nature burst forth. Bygmester Solness is the most compelling of Ibsen’s later, brooding self-portraits, a messianic hero pulled down from the heights to reside in the community of men, and now painfully laboring to drag himself up again. This is, of course, pure autobiography; and, as has often been observed, the play contains many such elements, culled from Ibsen’s emotional, and sometimes even his “actual,” experience. The character of Hilde Wangel, for example–that voracious, beautifully plumed bird of prey who urges Solness towards a fatal demonstration of his will, virility, and potency–is based on an eighteen-year-old girl, Emilie Bardach, whom the sixty-four-year-old playwright had just met (he called her “a May sun in a September life”). Solness’s fear that the younger generation will rise up and smite him suggests Ibsen’s fear of being eclipsed by rising young playwrights like Strindberg, Knut Hamsun, and Hauptmann. Solness’s sense that his unremitting dedication to his calling has destroyed his happiness is a reflection of Ibsen’s doubts and regrets, further expressed in John Gabriel Borkman, Little Eyolf, and When We Dead Awaken, about his own dedication as an artist. And Solness’s development as a builder, proceeding from towered churches to “homes for human beings” to towered houses, parallels Ibsen’s development from his epic poetic plays to his realistic prose works to the symbolic, poetic realism of his last period.

The most interesting biographical element in The Master Builder is its strong messianic theme, which deserves special emphasis because it is so often overlooked. In this aspect of the play (which dominates the last act), Solness emerges as a Promethean rebel who is defined by his ambiguous relation to God. Long before the action begins, Solness had been a pious and reverent man, and had tried to express his devotion to God by building churches to His great glory. In return, Solness believes, God had rewarded him with certain superhuman powers–“helpers and servers”–which account for his fabulous luck and his tremendous will. Though this interpretation seems rather farfetched, Solness is not demented. His will–now somewhat diseased through remorse and fear–is indeed an almost supernatural instrument, providing him with a hypnotic power over his employees. And all through his career, Solness has been unusually favored by circumstances; even his career was initiated by a lucky catastrophe, for after his wife’s ancestral home had burned down, he had constructed a successful project on the ruins.

Yet, ever since that conflagration, Solness has been in revolt against God. When his children died as an indirect result of the fire, Solness blamed God for trying to rob him of his worldly happiness for the sake of a more complete dedication to his divine calling. Refusing to be the instrument of a celestial purpose, Solness repudiated God when hanging the wreath on the church tower at Lysanger, a negation which Hilde Wangel–who was present–somehow heard as the vibrations of “harps in the air.” At that moment, Solness dedicated his career not to religious monuments to the greater glory of God but to secular dwelling places for the greater comfort of human beings. But even as a “free builder” he has felt no joy. Aline, his wife – consumed with self-reproach over the death of her children–has become a frigid Death-in-Life. And since the community has no real use for the homes he has built for it, Solness (like Ibsen) is himself consumed with remorse for having suppressed his aspiration towards the heights.

Now Solness fears Nemesis–the punishment of God–which he suspects will come in the shape of the younger generation battering down his door. And so it does, though not from the direction he expects. It is Hilde Wangel, his youthful admirer–and not his rival, the young apprentice Ragnar–who knocks ominously on his door, unwittingly becoming the Angel of the Lord. Hilde sees Solness through the idealizing distance of her childhood memories, and now she wants her ideal realized. Determined to whet his blunted spirit, she urges him “to do the impossible once again;” and Solness responds, basking in the warmth of her youth, hero worship, and Viking amorality. His will becomes more strong and certain, his conscience more robust, and his rebellion more defiant and dangerous. Convinced by Hilde that he is a superhuman being, beyond the good and evil of ordinary mortals, he determines to run away with her to build “castles in the air”–though he is still cautious enough to want a “firm foundation.”

But first he must earn her love, transcending his age and decline through a display of masculine potency. The opportunity arrives when he builds a tower on his new home (a religious pinnacle on a secular structure), and is persuaded by Hilde to hang a wreath on it, despite his attacks of vertigo. In terms of the religious aspect of the play, this is not only an act of hubris, but an act of blasphemy, since it is tantamount to a declaration of Godhead. And when he climbs up to the top, retribution speedily follows. Dizzied by the heights, and confused by Hilde’s enthusiastic waving of her shawl, Solness plummets to the earth; Hilde, applauding the achievement of the impossible ideal, continues to wave her shawl aloft, fixed on the hero but mindless of the broken human being at her feet. As the younger generation breaks into the garden she cries, “My–my Master Builder.”

It is a great cathedral of a play, with dark, mystical strains that boom like the chords of an organ. As a heroic rebel, Solness is in a class with Ibsen’s epic heroes. Warring with God, he is finally conquered through overweening pride; but his defeat is a partial victory–he has also conquered God by attempting the deeds he feared most to do. Ibsen’s treatment of Solness shows that his interest in objective rebellion is now over for good. The Master Builder is free from all considerations of biology, determinism, and Darwinism, and the play cannot even be comprehended in a purely realistic reading. Ibsen’s symbolism has begun to dominate the action, making it suggestive and metaphorical rather than specific and concrete. For after building homes for human beings and finding little satisfaction in the task, Ibsen has now returned to the great towering structures of his early years–building them now, to be sure, on a “firm foundation” of disciplined form.

This article is adapted from an essay in The Theatre of Revolt (1962).