Halvard lost his former home through a fire; it was the beginning of his luck in life and also the date of his unhappiness. His children died soon after the affair, and his wife's mind became morbid over the loss. "Is it not frightful," he tells Hilda, "that I must now go about and reckon it up, pay for it?--not with money, but with human happiness. And not merely my own; with that of others, too. Do you see _that_, Hilda? That is what my artistic success has cost me--and others. And every livelong day I must go about and see the price paid for me anew. Again, and again, and still again." Several fixed ideas haunt this man's brain. He has become moody, even surly, because he suspects the younger generation of treason to him. As he supplanted old Brovik, the broken-down architect in his employ, so he fears that the son, Knut Brovik, will supplant him. He has, being a man loved by women, won power over Knut's betrothed. He believes that he has the rare gift of willing a thing, a telepathic power. He is not mad but overwrought, and Hilda's visit is in the nature of a rescue. _She_ is the fairy princess who is to rescue him from the evil Ego, in which he is imprisoned as if in an ogre's cage. Georg Brandes writes of The Master Builder: "It gives at one and the same time a sense of enthralment and a sense of deliverance. This is a play that echoes and reëchoes in our minds long after we have read it.... Great is its art, profound and rich in its symbolic language.... Ibsen's intention has been to give us by means of real characters, but in half-allegorical form, the tragedy of a great artist who has passed the prime of life." And as the Danish critic aptly remarks, in his--Ibsen's--case, "Realism and symbolism have thriven very well together for more than a score of years. The contrasts in his nature incline him at once to fidelity, to fact, and to mysticism." This accounts in part for the puzzling _naïveté_ of the dialogue, externally so simple that it delights children. Symbolic figures are employed throughout, with repetitions of motives as in a symphonic composition. These buttress up a structure that might otherwise dissolve in fantastic smoke, so aerial is its thesis.