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.
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