* * * *
MAJA {drawing ULFHEIM away}. Let us make haste and get down.
As he cannot take more than one person at a time, Ulfheim promises to send aid for Rubek and Irene, and, seizing Maja in his arms, clambers rapidly but warily down the path. On the desolate mountain plateau, in the growing light, the man and the woman are left together — no longer the artist and his model. And the shadow of a great change is stalking close in the morning silence. Then Irene tells Arnold that she will not go back among the men and women she has left; she will not be rescued. She tells him also, for now she may tell all, how she had been tempted to kill him in frenzy when he spoke of their connection as an episode of his life.
RUBEK {darkly}. And why did you hold your hand?
IRENE. Because it flashed upon me with a sudden horror that you were dead already — long ago.
But, says Rubek, our love is not dead in us, it is active, fervent and strong.
IRENE. The love that belongs to the life of earth — the beautiful, miraculous life of earth — the inscrutable life of earth — that is dead in both of us.
There are, moreover, the difficulties of their former lives. Even here, at the sublimest part of his play, Ibsen is master of himself and his facts. His genius as an artist faces a]l, shirks nothing. At the close of The Master Builder, the greatest touch of all was the horrifying exclamation of one without, ‘O! the head is all crushed in.’ A lesser artist would have cast a spiritual glamour over the tragedy of Bygmester Solness. In like manner here Irene objects that she has exposed herself as a nude before the vulgar gaze, that Society has cast her out, that all is too late. But Rubek cares for such considerations no more. He flings them all to the wind and decides.
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