When the Norwegian painter and intellectual Erik Werenskiold asked Henrik Ibsen whether he was interested in architecture, he replied: “Yes! It is, as you know, my own trade”. Bygmester Solness (The Master Builder, 1892) would certainly substantiate such a claim: it shows intimate knowledge of a builder/architect’s firm, of the kind of commissions it receives, how these are fulfilled, and how it caters for shifts in taste. This was the first play Ibsen wrote after his return to Norway in the summer of 1891, this time for good (he had lived abroad for twenty-seven years), and it reflects the many changes taking place in Christiania (Oslo), including the new buildings Werenskiold had caught him scrutinizing. Ibsen could in fact have answered that, ever since his young manhood, he had seen the parallels between the architect and the creative writer.
In 1858, then thirty, he had written a half-humorous poem about receiving a copy of his first printed verses and the daydreams this event had sparked off. He called it: “Byggeplaner” (Building Plans). The poem’s strange image of a “cloud-castle”, in a wing of which a young woman might live, strikingly anticipates the most audacious imagery of The Master Builder thirty-four years later. This clusters round the “air-castles” that the eponymous Solness, ageing yet still strong-willed, wants to build for the young enchantress, Hilde Wangel, whose hero he is. There were readers and playgoers who associated the relationship of these two, with its tests of power and its sadomasochistic fantasies of escape, with Ibsen’s own apparent infatuation with a young pianist, Hildur Andersen. Hildur, his “princess” and “wild forest bird” (just as Hilde is Solness’s), was in her late twenties, and was often seen with him in public.
From May 29 to June 10, 1893, three of Ibsen’s plays were staged in London, at the Opera Comique: Rosmersholm, Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder. One man who saw all three in the same week was Thomas Hardy, already an admirer of Ibsen, but whose admiration was intensified by that experience. Hardy was a friend of both William Archer and Edmund Gosse, who had jointly translated The Master Builder, and this play in particular must have had an almost eerie personal significance for him. First, because architecture had been his own trade, from July 1856 when, as a boy of sixteen, he was articled to John Hicks, a Dorchester architect, until September 1872 when, with the serialization of A Pair of Blue Eyes – a novel with an architect-hero – he decided to devote himself to writing. Had any previous work for the theatre shown the interconnected two offices of a building firm? Or opened with the silence of concentration maintained by an old architect “extraordinarily clever at working out stresses and strains and cubic contents”, his draughtsman son and a young woman book-keeper? Or brought home to its audience the key distinction between a builder (Solness) who through native talent, acquired skill and shrewd business manoeuvres gets asked to design houses – Hardy’s own father had been a master-mason – and the properly qualified architect, who occupies a higher rung of society’s ladder (Ibsen’s Old Brovik, and Hardy’s first employer, with his renowned wide reading and encouragement of the arts)?
But there was another reason why this play spoke deeply to Hardy. His marriage, long troubled, was now all but intolerable to him; on May 19, he had met Florence Henniker, well-born, sophisticated, married, still in her twenties (indeed much the same age as Hildur Andersen), and herself an Ibsenite. Florence accompanied him to see The Master Builder, and so greatly did it excite her that she could not sleep all that night. Hardy had embarked on a kind of amitié amoureuse with her, and before long Ibsen was supplying the vocabulary of their relationship. He was her “master builder”, she his “Hilde Wangel”, a rather baleful designation, one thinks, but, as it turned out, not inapt. Though some letters (subsequently destroyed) that passed between them were “trollish” – a loaded term from the play, referring to the darker, wilder, libidinous sides of both individuals – Florence remained faithful to her husband; she was, for all her Ibsenism and aura of enlightenment, a committed Anglican for whom the idea of elopement, which Hardy seems to have wanted, was out of the question.
Six months later, Hardy had to acknowledge there was no emotional future in their friendship, and so turned with renewed intensity to his work. Back in 1887 he had made notes for a new novel, and three years later had worked these up into a “scheme”. Now this skeleton demanded flesh. Thus began work in earnest on the novel which was to be more of a succés d’estime et de scandale than Hardy could quite bear, causing him to abandon novel writing for poetry. First serialized (abridged) in Harper’s New Monthly with the rather terrible title of “Hearts Insurgent”, it was published in November 1895 as Jude the Obscure, and from the first was perceived as a new direction for its author. Ibsen’s influence on the book has long been recognized, especially the kinship Jude’s cousin Sue Bridehead enjoys with Rebekka West in Rosmersholm. But the relationship with The Master Builder is just as important, and in drawing attention to it we inevitably confront important imaginative and intellectual preoccupations shared by Ibsen (1828–1906) and Hardy (1840–1928). Before coming on to particular features, we can note more general ones that connect Jude to the cycle of plays Ibsen had begun with A Doll’s House in 1879, and would bring to a close with an intense epilogue, When We Dead Awaken (1899), a drama about another kind of builder, the sculptor.
Hardy’s attention in Jude to the physical aspects of the developing late-nineteenth-century world is as meticulous, as insightful in its focus on significant places and artefacts, as Ibsen’s groundbreaking stage settings: the railway, the railway timetable, the tram, the newly refurbished pub, the Post Office Directory, the shop of religious trumperies, the newly restored church, the lodging house, the modish ball for Oxford undergraduates’ Eights Week. Then the novel depends to a considerable degree on dialogue – dialogue which is at once colloquial and intellectually articulate: the characters express intimate feelings about themselves and each other, while striving to set these in a more universal context. Sue, begging her husband Phillotson to release her from their marriage, says: “Why can’t we agree to free each other? We made the compact, and surely we can cancel it – not legally, of course; but we can morally . . . . We shall both be dead in a few years, and then what will it matter to anybody that you relieved me from constraint for a little while?”. She has, she confesses, been “reading up” John Stuart Mill, and quotes to Phillotson Mill’s words: “She, or he, who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation”. Here we can hear the very accents of Rebekka West, and both Rebekka and Sue are surprised by their own capacity for passion, which they had not allowed for in their somewhat over-conscious and programmatic emancipation.
1890s British Ibsenites, drawn from Fabian, socialist and feminist circles, would have found Jude’s discussion of questions of burning topical interest Ibsenite in itself, since this was the aspect of the Norwegian dramatist’s work most often held up to them by his apologists. Three intimately connected issues dominate Jude: the inaccessibility of great British institutions, pre-eminently the two great old universities, to those outside a very small but immensely powerful section of the population; the immorality of both Church and State’s inflexibility on marriage, inevitably falling hardest on women (so that blessing is given to the unhappy unions of Jude and Arabella and of Phillotson and Sue, but not to that of Jude and Sue, where respect and unselfish love truly can be found); and the inability of modern, so-called progressive society to free itself from the baggage of ancient religions and world-systems, which reason can easily demonstrate to be riddled with inconsistencies and errors.
All of these themes are also present in The Master Builder, if in different proportions – Ibsen and Hardy’s viewpoints being not just similar but the same. We can see this if we look back at the speech that Ibsen made to the working-men of Trondheim on June 14, 1885, an occasion which must have played its part in his eventual decision to return permanently to Norway, since he tells them: “During these eight days at home I have experienced more of the joy of life than during all [the last] eleven years abroad”. He says:
“The nobility that I hope will be granted to our nation will come to us from two sources . . . . It will come to us from our women and from our working men. The reshaping of our social conditions now under way in Europe is concerned with the future position of the working man and of woman. That is what I hope for, and what I wait for. It is what I intend to work for and what I shall work for all my whole life so far as I am able.”
It is of inestimable importance to Ibsen’s play that Solness comes from a poor, pietistic background (not in fact the writer’s own, but one which he would later give Rubek in When We Dead Awaken). As much as Jude he is – if in worldly terms more successfully – the product of his own autodidacticism and youthful ambition; he never amends his title, Master Builder, to Architect, although, given what he has actually achieved, he is entitled to do so. His penurious start in life has made him practical, adventurous, sharp-witted, assertive, socially a little gauche, only too able and willing to profit from others’ weaknesses, and ruthlessly jealous of rivals, especially the talented young draughtsman, Ragnar Brovik. Solness’s marriage has been, ever since the death of his two baby sons (an occurrence which, duly translated, reappears in Jude) an unhappy one, though in his better moments he pays tribute to his wife, Aline, and to how she would have developed had life treated her more kindly. Nonetheless marriage remains for him a prison-house denying him that “joy of life” so essential to his well-being; while Aline, after the tragedy, like Sue after the deaths of her children, has retreated into a religion founded on morbid duty, and lacking either spiritual amplitude or intellectual foundation.
Their babies’ deaths have changed Solness’s own life even more radically than his wife’s, though his full reaction was delayed by about two years. Completing commissioned work on a church in a fjord-town, Lysanger, he was expected, as builder, to place a wreath on top of its tower. Though suffering his habitual vertigo, Solness discharged this ritual duty because he had at last found the confidence to make a solemn vow to the God of his pious childhood, who had taken away his beloved sons and undermined his wife, and yet apparently expected him to dedicate himself to buildings for His greater glory: “And as I stood there on high, at the very top, and as I hung the wreath on the weathercock, I spoke to Him: Listen to me, Almighty One. From this day forward, I too will be free. A master builder free in his own field, as you are in yours. Never again will I build churches for you. Only homes for people”. About the nature of his job at Lysanger, Solness is quite specific. He speaks to Hilde of “Den sommer da jeg var der og bygget tårn på den gamle kirken” – “The summer I was up there building a tower on the old church” (my italics).
From the evidence of Ibsen’s reading and correspondence at the time of the play’s composition, we can envisage the church at Lysanger as one of the old stave churches that are Norwegians’ most remarkable architectural inheritance. Built of timber and standing on the sites of Viking holy places, in high, open, prominent spots, these manifest Viking building methods and, in their decorations, Viking mythology. The earliest constructions of this kind have not survived: the two earliest intact examples, Urnes and Borgund, both in the Sogn og Fjordane district, date from 1150. Increasingly the churches showed illustrations, in carved wood, of actual conflicts between Viking and Christian religious symbols, with the latter winning. Stave churches, often pagoda-like, were beginning by the 1880s to be appreciated at last – if mostly too late – and not just for their antiquity, but for their artistry and beauty.
Whatever the metaphysics of his defiance, Solness’s choice of houses over churches displays excellent professional judgement. The economic and social climate was clearly propitious for the building of private dwellings, and he flourishes, dedicating his energies to “warm, cheerful, comfortable homes, where fathers and mothers and their children could live together, secure and happy, and feeling that it’s good to be alive”. Yet his past as a believing church-builder will not leave him alone. The Viking heritage that we can find in the stave churches haunts him still, and enters, on a serious level, his fantasy talk with Hilde. It is most definitely to be questioned whether his ideals as a maker of happy homes, pursued with quasi-religious resoluteness, are any easier to live up to than those of his earlier piety; his own private life is a constant mockery of them, and before the end of the play – that is, shortly before his death – he has come to the grim conclusion that they amount to nothing more than a chimera. Even aesthetically – and here the play demands very attentive reading – his past has retained him. Consonant with artistic movements all over Europe that would become known a little further into the 1890s as Art Nouveau and Jugendstil, he has always relished the decorative, the imaginative touch, the anti-utilitarian expression of humanity’s unquenchable need for stimulus and aspiration, all those turrets and crenellations and mock-ecclesiastical windows and motifs from ancient cultures which culminate in the gratuitous but splendid soaring tower to his new villa, the phallic appendage that will bring him to his death.
The collision in the stave church (and so within Solness) of the Viking and the Christian becomes in Jude the collision of the Classical (Jude’s first boyhood desire, after all, is for Greek and Latin grammars) with the teachings not only of the Gospels and Epistles but of their patristic commentators. To this can be added another double inheritance, that of the pagan and folkloric survivals in English churches, particularly in stone carvings, together with the severe Protestant words heard in the same places from the Prayer Book. The mental and moral balancing of the two occasions Jude a good deal of trouble, and is paralleled in his cousin Sue’s life when she takes a fancy to two statuettes of Venus and Apollo, rather than to objects of conventional Anglican devotion, and reads Swinburne for consolation: “Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; / The world has grown grey from thy breath”. (Vicisti Galilei were the reputed last words of Julian the Apostate, referred to in Hardy’s text, and the central character of Ibsen’s vast world-drama, Emperor and Galilean, published in 1873.) Jude’s builder’s “capabilities” (and they are considerable, and develop during the course of the novel) “were of an all-round sort, including monumental stone-cutting, gothic free-stone work for the restoration of churches, and carving of a general kind”. When he goes to the masons’ yard in Christminster he finds:
“new traceries, mullions, transoms, shafts, pinnacles, and battlements, standing on the bankers half-worked or waiting to be removed . . . marked by precision, mathematical straightness, smoothness, exactitude: there in the old walls were the broken lines of the original idea; jagged curves, disdain of precision, irregularity, disarray.”
It takes Jude only a few moments to perceive “that at best only copying, patching, and imitating went on here [in the yard]”. However,
“He did not at that time see that medievalism was as dead as a fern-leaf in a lump of coal; that other developments were shaping in the world around him in which Gothic architecture and its associations had no place. The deadly animosity of contemporary logic and vision towards so much of what he held in reverence was not yet revealed to him.”
To a far greater extent than in Ibsen’s play, the failure of religion to respond to that fuller appreciation of the human personality to which the late nineteenth century was aiming is bound up with the question of marriage and marriage laws. The views of life these express are also (largely unexposed) fern-leaves in coal. The penultimate sentence of the powerful passage just quoted turns out to be not altogether true. The aesthetic vocabulary of faith was transferred to the secular as if to give it some special authenticity, and shows the nervousness of the age in committing itself to the new, the forward-looking. “I must do something, if not church-gothic”, sighs Jude. To which Sue replies: “You must fall back upon railway stations, bridges, theatres, music-halls, hotels”. And truly, as any inspection of a late Victorian city testifies, he would have had to.
It is tempting to see Hardy’s use of Arabella in Jude the Obscure as reflecting Ibsen’s treatment of Hilde Wangel in The Master Builder. Both make a shattering reappearance in the life of the protagonist after a long absence, both are uncompromising and self-acknowledging figures of Eros but are ultimately associated with Thanatos. Certainly, from neither Solness’s nor Jude’s deaths can the presence of respectively Hilde or Arabella be subtracted. Jude’s re-consummation of his relationship with Arabella – in that “third-rate inn, near the station at Aldbrickham” – tells us, more clearly even than earlier incidents, what is so essential to the novel: Jude’s vulnerability as a male, to which not reason, wisdom, common sense or theology are the slightest bit pertinent. Solness is equally vulnerable. If his first vow from the top of a tower was against the churches’ God and in favour of humanity, his second is to be against the proscriptions of institutionalized marriage and in favour of self-realization through sex. Though Hilde has told him there can be no real relationship between them, he ascends the tower to make this vow all the same – and falls to his death.
As Hardy must have known from Archer and Gosse, The Master Builder contains more of Ibsen and his life than any other play in the prose-cycle, is indeed a correlative for his experiences and situation, including his romantic friendships with young women and a marriage grown seriously tired (though not wholly exhausted). About a year before he began work on it, when still living in Munich, Ibsen received a letter from the only one of his blood relations for whom he really cared, his sister Hedvig Stousland. She had told him of celebrations to be held in Skien, their native town, after the completion of its rebuilding programme (extensive destruction had been caused by fires in 1854 and 1886). Ibsen wrote back:
“It was in 1850 that I was last in Skien. Not long afterwards the town began to pass through a period of spiritual storms, which spread from there over a wider area. I have always loved stormy weather. And, although I was absent, I went through this tempestuous period with you. That I did take part in it – some of my writings bear witness to that. Then great calamities befell the town, devastating it again and again. The house where I was born and where I spent my earliest years, and the church – the old church with the angel of baptism under the raftered roof – were burned down. All the things to which my earliest recollections were attached have been burned – every one of them. So you can understand how impossible it would be for me not to feel myself deeply and personally affected, together with you all, by the blows that struck our common home. But I beg of you also to believe that it gave me a keen pleasure to read of the rebuilding of the town in a handsome and beautiful style, of the growth of the town, and of its progress in many directions. It seems to me that gladness and hope must fill your hearts when you think of the future of our town.”
Despite the somewhat formal diction this is a warm letter, and it adumbrates to a remarkable degree what we find in The Master Builder – fire, consecration ceremonies, pietism (the “spiritual storms” alluded to), communication with people across barriers of space and time, re-building, all worked with beautiful intricacy into a play that is matchlessly rich in texture.
Jude also revisits its author’s life as no previous work of his had quite done, and it is possible that Ibsen’s great work assisted him to confront its more difficult aspects: the early intellectual aspirations, the loss of orthodox faith, the wish to succeed in the British Establishment while not turning away from ordinary people, ordinary life, the continuing fascination with women – and the building trade. While working on the novel Hardy even took up some of his old architectural interests and thought about pursuing them still further. Each of these two artefacts has special merits of its own: the psychodynamics of Solness’s office, with the suppression of Kaja Fosli and the thwarted ambition of Ragnar, is a peculiar glory of The Master Builder, as is its presentation of hypnosis and telepathy, so fashionable in the 1880s and 90s as diverting alternatives to more exigent creeds. Likewise Hardy’s feeling for the animal world as sensate and intelligent bears fruit that would be unimaginable in Ibsen even at his most inclusive: the pig-killing in Jude still stands as one of the most passionately felt defences of animals ever written. But both works are the achievements of two artists at the very height of their powers. The Master Builder presents a truth as essential to us a hundred years after its author’s death as ever: that for our actions to be beneficent, our world-view must not only be strong but purged of all self-deception and superstition. Thomas Hardy already believed this but Ibsen’s play spurred him on to his own boldest fictional demonstration of it. We are in debt to them both.
