Act II shows us Bertha usurping Axel's place as teacher. She finds

fault with his technique, and snatches the brush out of his hand to show him how to paint. Her puny mind reels with the desire to humiliate him. Malicious tongues have whispered that he has painted her picture, that he has good-humouredly let her reap the honour of his toil. Bertha is casting about for a means of crushing Axel for ever. To-morrow they will give an evening-party. Her friend Abel--another of the emancipated, heartless, false, perverse, masculine women of artistic Bohemia--makes a welcome suggestion. Why not arrange to have Axel's rejected picture sent home at the very hour when their friends are assembled in the studio? The idea fascinates Bertha, but she dare not be responsible. "I should like it to be done, but I don't want to be concerned in it," she says. "I want to stand guiltless and to be able to swear that I am innocent." And Abel undertakes to manage the matter.

The sex-war reaches its climax in Act III. Axel has tom himself free from the meshes of his decaying love. Now he knows Bertha as she really is. He has discovered her dishonest book-keeping, her money transactions with Willmer, her insidious efforts to emasculate his soul--he realises the full horror of her short hair, and of their union. He has broken his marriage-vows, and throws down the wedding-ring. He is free. But Bertha's malignity clings to him:

_Bertha_. And this, all this noble revenge, simply because you were inferior to me.

_Axel_. I was your superior when I painted your picture.

_Bertha_. When you painted my picture! Say that again and I will strike you.

_Axel_. You who despise brute force are always the first to appeal to it. Strike me if you like.

_Bertha_ (_advancing towards him_). You think I have not the strength.

_Axel_ (_seizing both her wrists and holding them_). No, not that. Are you convinced now that I am also physically the stronger? Bow down, or I will break you!

_Bertha_. Dare you strike me?

_Axel_. Why not? I only know of one reason why I should not.

_Bertha_. And that is----?

_Axel_. That you are irresponsible.

_Bertha_ (_struggling to free herself_). Ah, let me go!

_Axel_. Not until you have begged my pardon. Down on your knees. (_He forces her down with one hand_.) Now look up to me from below. That is your place, the place you yourself have chosen.

_Bertha_ (_gives in_). Axel, Axel, I don't know you e any longer. Can this be you who swore to love me, you who begged to be allowed to support me?

_Axel_. Yes, I was strong then and believed I had strength to do it. But you clipped the hair of my strength while my tired head lay in your lap. During sleep you stole my best blood, and yet enough remains to subdue you. Stand up, and let us have done with speeches. There is business to be talked over. (_Bertha gets up, then sits down on the sofa, weeping_.)

_Axel_. Why are you crying?

_Bertha_. I don't know. Perhaps because I am weak.

_Axel_. You see! I was your strength. When I took back what was my own you had nothing left. You were like a rubber ball which I blew out; when I threw you down you collapsed.

_Bertha_ (_without looking up_). I don't know if it is as you say, but since we quarrelled my strength has left me. Axel, believe me, I have never felt for you what I now feel.

_Axel_. Really! What do you feel?

_Bertha_. I can't say. I don't know if it is love, but....

_Axel_. What do you mean by love? Is it not a secret longing to eat me alive once more? You begin to love me. Why not formerly, when I was good to you? Goodness is stupidity. Let us be wicked. What do you think?

_Bertha_. Yes, I would rather have you a little wicked than weak. (_Gets up_.) Axel, forgive me, but don't desert me. Love me, oh, love me!

But Axel is not caught again. He consents to allow the party to take place, as if they were still good comrades, but he is determined to obtain a divorce. In Act IV we again meet the happy pair, Starck, Willmer, Abel, Dr. Östermark, the _raisonneur_ of the play, and his divorced wife, Mrs. Hall, a dubious middle-aged woman whom Bertha imagines to be a victim of man's brutality and a living argument in favour of the woman's movement. She and Abel have arranged, not only to punish Axel by confronting him with his unsuccessful picture, but to disconcert Dr. Östermark by confronting him with the wife and daughters whom he has not seen for eighteen years. But Bertha's calculations are faulty, as usual. The picture is carried into the studio by order of the _concierge_ who has protested against its unexpected appearance at the door. Axel is annoyed. She wants everybody to see the picture, to look at it closely. They do, and it turns out to be Bertha's picture.

The last scenes of the play show us a shame-faced Bertha recovering from the fainting-fit which followed upon the sight of the picture. She knows that Axel has nobly changed the numbers in order to give her a better chance. She knows that circumstances have combined to unmask her completely. He is the stronger, and she offers him her love. Relentless in his masculine strength, Axel shakes her off, turns her out into the street. "You once asked me to forget that you are a woman," he cries, "well, I have forgotten it." She reminds him of a man's duty to his wife. Axel hands her some bank-notes. Bertha departs consoled and Axel goes to meet his mistress. "I want comrades at the _café_, but at home I want my wife," he cries, before the final exit of Bertha.

_Comrades_ has been confounded with the typical _comédie rosse_. But here, as in _Lady Julie_, the collision of character is presented with the intensity which is possible only when a dramatist treats of a question which to him is vital. One inadequately described as a "tragedy," the other as a "comedy," there is in both plays the pessimistic despair of the absolutely sincere anti-feminist. It raises them high above the facile farce of passion, satiety and change. Bertha is to Strindberg the New Woman--a creature to be shunned and exterminated. Nietzsche thought that the "beautiful and dangerous cat," which is woman, should never be visited without a whip. Strindberg would not only bring the whip, but poison to the defeminised monster who wishes to be the rival of man.

In _Comrades_ the dramatist presents his characters with that ironical smile which is the condiment of life's bitter draughts. There is a general consciousness of _blague_ pervading the studio. The doctor who finds the wife, on whom he once lavished a romantic love, a drunken slattern, her daughters in a second union in the service of vice, helps the reeling woman out of the house and expresses his feelings thus: "Oh, Dolce Napoli! Joy of life, where art thou? Went away as she did. Such was the bride of my youth!... Oh, Dolce Napoli! I wonder if the cholera-sick fishing harbour is so sweet, after all! Blague probably. Blague, blague! Brides, love, Naples, _joie de vivre_, ancient, modern, liberal, conservative, ideal, real, natural--blague. Blague all the way."

_Creditors_ is a one-act play in which we meet the erotic woman, the alluring, treacherous, unmoral creature of instinct and passion, who battens on men's souls--in short, the vampire. After the _blague_ of _Comrades_ the anguish of _Creditors_. There are two men and one woman in the piece. Tekla has been married to Adolf, a painter, for seven years. Adolf adores her--their love has been a ceaseless giving on his part. He has merged his personality in hers, he has laid his art as a sacrifice on the altar of his devotion. He has thought of her, painted her, modelled her, given her the treasures of his mind, filled her soul until his own is empty, and now he is weak whilst she is strong. They are staying at the seaside place, to which they come every summer. Tekla has been away for a week when the curtain rises on Adolf engaged in modelling the figure of his wife. He is a nervous wreck, semi-epileptic, with crutches by his side. He is talking confidentially to Gustaf, whose acquaintance he has made during Tekla's absence. He does not know that Gustaf is the husband from whom Tekla was separated before he married her, does not know that Gustaf is the _creditor_ to whom they are both in debt. Gustaf induces Adolf to tell the story of his married life, of his sacrifices, his self-effacement, his reckless giving. He subtly leads Adolf to realise Tekla's voracious egotism, her falseness, her voluptuousness, plays upon his jealousy, rouses his suspicions, wrecks his peace of mind. Adolf is fascinated against his will by the force and coolly analysing mind of Gustaf. He cannot understand why there is something in Gustaf's manner of speaking, and in his eye which reminds him of Tekla. Gustaf replies that Tekla and he may be distant relatives, as are all human beings.

They discuss Tekla's first husband. Adolf has never seen him, but knows that he is an idiot, for Tekla has written a book in which the ridiculous man is described. Gustaf shows Adolf that he is treated as the second idiot by Tekla. He asks why Tekla sent away her child. Adolf hesitates to tell his friend, then confesses that at the age of three the child showed a likeness to the first husband which Tekla found unendurable. Gustaf asks Adolf if he has never felt jealous of the first husband. "Would it not nauseate you to meet him when out for a walk, when his eyes on your Tekla would say to you: We instead of I--We?" Adolf admits that the thought has haunted him. Gustaf draws a picture of the torment caused by the indelible memory of the third. "But they know that _one_ sees them in the darkness--and then they are frightened and in their fright the figure of the absent one begins to haunt them, to assume dimensions, to change until he becomes a nightmare disturbing their sleep of love, a creditor who knocks at the door, and they see his black hand between theirs, they hear his grating voice in the silence of the night which should only be disturbed by their beating pulses. He does not prevent their union, but he disturbs their happiness. And when they feel his invisible power of disturbing their happiness, when at last they flee--but flee in vain from the memory which persecutes them--from the debt they have left behind, and the judgment which frightens them, they lack the strength to bear their transgression and find a scapegoat which must be slaughtered...."

Tortured by the suggestion that Tekla has now been unfaithful to him, which every sentence spoken by Gustaf drives more deeply into the inflamed brain, Adolf consents to test Tekla's fidelity by means devised by Gustaf. When she comes home Adolf is to study her manner, and lead her to reveal her real self, whilst Gustaf listens in another room. When the husband has reached the limit of his power of deduction he is to go out, and leave to Gustaf the rôle of inquisitor. Adolf is to be a secret witness of the second examination. He can hear all in the adjoining room.

Tekla comes home. She is playful, loving, treats him as her naughty child--just as Gustaf said she would, if guilty. She has enjoyed herself, and Adolf's solemn tones of reproach and impending disaster cause a revulsion of feeling, in which she shows herself as the heartless coquette, the _mangeuse d'hommes_, to whom conjugal monotony is insupportably dull. Adolf goads her vanity by saying that she has reached the age, when admirers are no longer troublesome. She wishes to assure him of the contrary, warns him, threatens that in future he will have to play the ridiculous part of the jealous and deceived husband who, lacking evidence, can only injure himself.

Adolf tells her that her plumes are borrowed, that he has endowed her with sense, electrified her once empty brain, made her famous by his pictures and his deification. She concludes that he means to tell her that he has written her books. The rhythm of the quarrel rises until Adolf in the throes of an approaching fit, cries: "Be quiet. Leave me. You destroy my brain with your clumsy pincers--you thrust your claws in my thoughts and tear them to pieces."

At the sight of Adolf's condition Tekla grows tender. He recovers, and she makes him beg her forgiveness. After summoning his remaining strength he leaves her. Gustaf enters the room. There is a touching scene of recognition, embarrassment and assurances of mutual respect. The virile mind of Gustaf soothes Tekla's overwrought nerves. She allows him to understand that her present husband is feeble, backboneless, and unreasonably jealous.

They revive memories. Gustaf observes that she still wears the ear-rings which he gave her. The magnetism of old associations, old regrets, draws them together. Gustaf puts his arm round her waist; she resists and confesses herself afraid of his presence. She does not wish to do any real wrong to Adolf, for she knows that he loves her. But Gustaf knows more than she does. He shows her the tom pieces of her photograph, thrown on the floor by Adolf some time before. He makes her see clearly that Adolf treats her with contempt. He begs her to liberate herself from Adolf's sick fancies, and to come back to the man of will. Some scruples, a short struggle, and she promises to meet him in the evening when Adolf will be away.

The sound of something falling comes from the adjoining room. Gustaf assures her that it is nothing--probably a dog that has been locked up. But Tekla is smitten with sudden understanding. She sees through Gustaf's plot, knows that her husband has heard everything. The horrible revenge of the man she betrayed revolts her, yet impresses her by its diabolical consistency. Gustaf is about to leave her, declaring that the debt has been paid, when the door is opened, and Adolf appears, deadly pale, a cut across the cheek, his eyes vacant, and foaming at the mouth. He falls. Tekla throws herself over the body, from which life is fast ebbing. "Adolf, my beloved child, say that you are alive, forgive, forgive; Oh, God! he does not hear, he is dead. Oh, God in Heaven!" And the curtain falls as Gustaf exclaims: "Really, she loves him too! Poor thing!"

_Creditors_ has added an important psychological factor to Strindberg's usual duel of sex. Here we have, not only the sinful nature of woman, the instinctive selfishness, the absence of moral sense, but the operation of a mysterious law of unity, which assists in the downfall of the woman and the victory of the stronger man. Tekla, once mother of Gustaf's child, is held to him by cords of a sympathy which may be called physiological, and which constitutes nature's irrefrangible banns of marriage.

The thesis has since been fully developed in Paul Hervieu's _Le Dédale_. Here the dissonance of divorce and re-marriage resounds through a highly artistic presentment of the conflict between religion, morality, affection and "nature." Marianne de Pogis has left Max, her husband, because of his infidelities. She re-marries and finds in Le Breuil, her second husband, the virtues which her former husband lacked. Her child by the first marriage falls ill, and she meets her first husband by its bedside. She remains in his house to nurse the child, and succumbs to the old love which has never died. The end is tragic. She cannot go back to Le Breuil. Hervieu cuts short the agony of three souls by the death of the two men. Le Breuil kills Max and himself; together they go over the rock into the foaming waters where human passion is extinguished. Strindberg also summons death as the only solution of Adolf's martyrdom, but, with characteristic sense of the hideous interminableness of life's complexities, leaves Tekla and Gustaf to loathe the tie which they cannot break. Gustaf is the strong man who, knowing woman, despises her and masters her. Adolf is the woman-worshipper, the slave who has sold his masculine birthright for worthless favours. He is killed by disillusionment.

The production of _The Father, Lady Julie,_ and _Creditors_ at the Théâtre Libre was followed by their performance at the Théâtre de l'Œuvre in Paris, another experimental theatre which was founded in 1893 by M. Lugné-Poë. _Lady Julie_ was part of the early repertory of the Freie Bühne, an advanced playhouse which had been established in Berlin in 1889 to meet the demand for realism on the stage. _The Father_ and _Creditors_ were performed in Copenhagen in 1889, and the latter play was soon presented at the Residenz Theater in Berlin. The Independent Theatre in London, founded by Mr. J.T. Grein in 1891, introduced Ibsenism to England, and suffered the penalty of the pioneer. Strindbergism might have wrecked the undertaking before the work was accomplished. Mr. Grein's services to the British playgoer have not yet been fully appreciated. He broke one or two windows in the suffocating theatre of banalities and bon-bon amours. Thanks to his courage we can now enjoy an increased amount of oxygen. But the West-End stage still thrives on airlessness. The popular long-run play, in which the charming actress appears as mannequin for the best costumier, whilst social inanities are paraded as absorbing problems--with a happy ending--contracts the lungs of all who in the drama seek a mirror and a criticism of life. To find modern dramatic art they must perforce go to the sporadic centres of unconventional and non-commercial performances, or to the semi-private stages of societies which fight the prevalent stagnation by bold experimental presentation of new dramatic ideas. Strindberg's plays are practically unknown in England. The Adelphi Players produced _The Father_ in July, 1911, and _Lady Julie_ in April, 1912. The Stage Society, which is the descendant of Mr. Grein's Independent Theatre, has played _Creditors_. The Stronger, an atmospheric sketch with two characters, of whom the one maintains silence, whilst the other uses her tongue, was acted by Madame Lydia Yavorskaia and Lady Tree in 1909. Of the remainder of the fifty-one plays by which he has encompassed many "schools" of playwriting, evolved new dramatic forms, and tested different methods of expression the British public knows little or nothing.

* * * * *

Naturalism has passed away. The shallow materialism, the false simplicity of presentation, with which it sought to kill romantic methods of dramaturgy, proved fatal. They were found to be as unreal as the old-fashioned conventions of the stage. But there were other qualities in the movement which have not died, but profoundly influenced the character-drawing and scenic development of the modern drama. Hauptmann, Hervieu, Wedekind, Schnitzler, Gorky, Tchekhov have transmuted and individualised the permanent elements of the early realism. As an exponent of naturalism Strindberg's personality towered high above the first noisy purveyors of what M. Jullien named "slices of life"--some distressingly indigestible. It is true that the fabric of his drama was woven out of the ever-recurring theme of sexual antagonism. He described it with the undertone of personal suffering--the suffering of experience and of pity--with which Tolstoy made his peasants articulate in _Powers of Darkness_, or Henry Becque the ill-used women in _Les Corbeaux_.

But Strindberg's plays are highly "unpleasant," says some defender of the morality of the stage. True, but they are honestly unpleasant. They differ from the popular play of amorous escapades and half-uttered indecencies, as the mountain torrent differs from the garden fountain. They are written by the impelling force of an idea, whilst the conventional immorality play exists in the interests of frivolous entertainment. However much we may disagree with the _leitmotif_ in Strindberg's naturalistic plays, and realise the limitations of his theses, we cannot ignore them. And do they not, after all, treat of "love," the obsessing object of dramatic interest from the plaintive demi-monde of Dumas _fils_ to the man-hunting Ann of Bernard Shaw? From Sudermann and Pinero to Schnitzler and Capus, through sentimentalism, conventionalism, and cynicism, the theme persists in absorbing dramatic imagination. Compared with Schnitzler, the prince of amorists, Strindberg's _milieu_ is sombre with fateful retribution. Like Strindberg, Schnitzler dramatises the illusion and disillusionment of love; his lovers and mistresses are also on the road to knowledge. The ten couples who pass over the stage in _Reigen_ might be sparks from Strindberg's anvil. But on closer inspection we find that there has been no fire. Schnitzler's world is the play-room of the passions, Strindberg's their inferno.

In _Lady Julie_ and _Creditors_, both one-act plays and each with only three speaking parts, he created a new dramatic form. He now assailed the old theatre with the same vigour with which he had attacked old social institutions. In the preface to _Lady Julie_ he contemptuously writes:

"The theatre has long appeared to me, as art in general, to be a _Biblia Pauperum_, a bible in pictures for those who cannot read writing or print, and the playwright as a lay preacher who disseminates the thoughts of the period in popular form, so popular that the middle classes, which chiefly fill the theatres, can understand what it is all about without much mental exertion. The theatre has therefore always been a board-school for young people, the half-educated, and women who still possess the primitive capacity for deceiving themselves, and allowing themselves to be deceived, i.e. to accept illusion, receive suggestion from the author."

The influence of Edmond de Goncourt, who called the theatre an exhibition of spouting marionettes and a place for the exercise of educated dogs, can be traced in this passage. Rudimentary, incomplete processes of thought, dependent on imagination, are, concluded Strindberg, necessary to theatrical enjoyment. With the development of reflection, investigation, and the higher mental attributes, decay of pleasure in theatrical performances would follow as the shell drops from the ripe fruit. In the theatrical crisis which raged in Europe at this time (1888), and in the moribund state of drama in England and Germany he saw evidence of an approaching extinction of the theatre.

It would, however, be a mistake to invest these views with a greater seriousness than they contained. As Henry Becque pointed out in his "Souvenirs," _la fin du théâtre_ has repeatedly been proclaimed by dissatisfied critics, without causing the slightest impediment in the ceaseless flow of dramatic production. In the preface to _Le Fils Naturel_, Dumas had compared the moralising functions of the stage to those of the Church. Strindberg replied, twenty years later, by predicting the downfall of both as vehicles of human progress. Hot-headed attacks on the theatre precede the evolution of new dramatic forms; they are the outcome of the modernity which is ever at war with methods which have become classic. "To save the theatre, the theatre must be destroyed, the actors and actresses must all die of the plague," is the sweeping verdict of Eleonora Duse,[2] but there is no disparagement in the reflection that the melancholy prophecies are often uttered by dramatists who are misunderstood and rejected. In Anton Tchekhov's _The Seagull_, published in 1900, the familiar protest is heard: "To me the theatre of to-day," says the poet Constantine, through whom the author speaks, "is no more than an antiquated prejudice, a dull routine." He protests against the trivialities, the commonplace morality, the repeated dishing up of the same story in a thousand varieties. He wants to flee, as Maupassant fled from the Eiffel Tower. Each malcontent finds solution in his own new method of drama. Rousseau's letter to d'Alembert contains the genuine criticism of the theatre, with which no born dramatist can sympathise. From the effect of fostering artificial emotions, of indulging in sham joys and sorrows, there is no escape through improvement of dramatic form. Whether for good or ill it remains with us. But there is happily little danger of the rationality, in which Strindberg saw the doom of the theatre.

The choice of naturalistic subjects was to be a contributing factor in the process of rationalism. Of the painful impression created by _Lady Julie_ Strindberg writes:

"When I chose this subject from life, just as it was told to me some years ago when it stirred me deeply, I found it suitable for a tragedy, for it still makes a painful impression to see a happily placed individual go to the wall, and still more to see a family die out. But the time may come when we shall be sufficiently evolved and enlightened to contemplate with indifference the coarse, cynical, and heartless drama which life offers, when we have laid aside the inferior and unreliable registration-machines which we call feelings, and which will be superfluous and injurious when our organs of judgment are fully developed....

"The fact that my tragedy makes a sad impression on many is the fault of the many. When we become strong, as were the first French revolutionaries, it will make an exclusively pleasant and cheerful impression to see the royal parks cleared of rotting, superannuated trees which have too long stood in the way of others with equal right to vegetate their full life-time; it will make a good impression in the same sense as does the sight of the death of an incurable.

"The reproach was levelled against my tragedy, _The Father_, that it was so sad, as though one wanted merry tragedies. People clamour for the joy of life, and theatrical managers order farces, as though the joy of life consisted in being foolish, and in describing people as if they were each and all afflicted with St. Vitus's Dance or idiocy. I find the joy of life in the powerful, cruel struggle of life, and my enjoyment in discovering something, in learning something. Therefore I have chosen an unusual, though instructive, case, in other words, an exception, but a great exception which confirms the rule, and which is sure to offend the lovers of the banal. The simple brain will further be shocked by the fact that my motives behind the action are not simple, and that there is not one view alone to be taken of it. An event in life--and this is a comparatively new discovery--is generally produced by a whole series of more or less deep-seated motives, but the spectator chooses for the most part the one which is easiest for him to grasp, or the one most advantageous to the reputation of his judgment. Take a case of suicide as an example. 'Bad business,' says the bourgeois. 'Unhappy love!' say the women. 'Sickness!' says the disease-ridden man. 'Shattered hopes!' the bankrupt. But it is possible that the motives lay in all of these causes, or in none, and that the dead man hid the real one by putting forward another which has thrown a more favourable light on his memory."

In an essay entitled _On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre_, written in March, 1889, and published in the first volume of a collection of plays and essays under the title _Things Printed and Unprinted_, Strindberg proclaims the regenerating powers of the Naturalistic Theatre in the following words:

"Let us have a theatre, where we can be horrified by the horrible, where we can laugh at what is laughable, play with playthings; where we can see everything without being shocked, if that which has hitherto been concealed behind theological and æsthetical hangings is revealed. Though old, conventional laws may have to be broken, let us have a free theatre, where everything is admitted except the talentless, the hypocritical and the stupid."

He distinguishes between true and false naturalism, and deprecates the commonplace dulness of the subject chosen by Henry Becque in _Les Corbeaux_. To Strindberg the choice of such subjects depends on a soullessness or a lack of temperament, which must bore the spectator instead of stimulate him. He calls such a dramatic method simple photography which "includes everything, even the speck of dust upon the lens of the camera. This is realism," he writes; "a method, latterly exalted to an art, a little art which cannot see the wood for the trees. This is the false Naturalism which believed that art consisted merely in sketching a piece of nature in a natural manner, but it is not the true naturalism which seeks out those points in life, where the great conflicts occur, which loves to see that which cannot be seen every day, rejoices in the battle of elemental powers, whether they be called love or hatred, revolt or sociability; which cares not, whether a subject be beautiful or ugly, if only it is great."

"I do not know the modes," cried Socrates, "but leave me one which will imitate the tones and accents of a brave man, enduring danger or distress, fighting with constancy against fortune." The Naturalism of which Strindberg was a prophet might have chosen these words as a motto. Socrates continued: "And also one fitted for the work of peace, for prayer heard by the gods, for the successful persuasion or exhortation of men, and generally for the sober enjoyment of ease and prosperity." With this side of man's natural life young Naturalism had no sympathy. That came with years of discretion.

The transformation of the diffuse drama in many acts into the concise and dynamic one-act play with few characters, and the simplification of stage technique, were the salient points in Strindberg's proclamation of Theatre Reform. He held that there is generally but one scene, towards which the playwright mounts on devious paths, and that author and audience alike are made to endure painful side-shows for the sake of one thing worth seeing. A man's dramatic talent may outlast his one-act play, but it is taxed to depletion in the construction of five acts, just as the imaginative patience of the audience is exhausted by the long intervals.

The Greek art of the one-act play had been revived in the eighteenth century in the _Proverbes Dramatiques_ of Carmontelle, developed by Musset and Feuillet, and had finally found a modern interpretation in the style of the _Quart d'Heure_ of which _Entre Frères_ by Guiche and Lavedan is a typical example. When writing _Lady Julie_, Strindberg had in mind the monographic novels of the brothers de Goncourt. The dialogue in Lady Julie is interrupted twice. There is singing and a folk-dance. Such diversions do not leave the spectator time to escape from the suggestion of the playwright, or to lose the precious illusion. The performance of Lady Julie lasts an hour and a half, and Strindberg saw no reason why the public should not be educated to endure one act which lasts the whole evening. There may be mental diversions, such as are provided by monologue, pantomime and ballet; but people can listen for hours to sermons and speeches, and may consequently learn true dramatic concentration.

The scenery should be simple. "With the aid of a table and two chairs the strongest conflicts which life offers could be presented," he writes of the genre of the proverbe, "and by that form of art it became possible to popularise the discoveries of modern psychology." The decorations should only be suggestive of place and time. An impressionistic representation of a corner of a room and its furniture--not the whole room--is all that is needed. Grotesque scene-painting should be abolished together with the stagey villain who can create no illusion of wickedness. Footlights were an abomination to Strindberg. M. Ludovic Céller[3] tells us of their humble and smoky origin in the tallow candles which, for economical reasons, were placed on the floor to illuminate the darkness of stage and auditorium. Whatever their origin, they have a power of distorting facial expression against which Strindberg vehemently protested. His protest has been echoed by numerous reformers of the theatre. But the footlights remain to disfigure noses and blacken eyes in accordance with time-honoured custom. With proper side-lighting and less paint on the faces of the actors Strindberg saw possibilities for the mimic art, which are hidden under shadows and heavy layers of powder and rouge. The visible orchestra was another obstacle to scenic progress; in the shrinking of stage and auditorium to a size compatible with artistic presentation, he saw another means of improvement. In the small, simplified theatre, with well-regulated light effects and actors with natural intonation and gestures, Strindberg found a chance for the continuance of the theatre. Many of his ideas have been realised in the Künstler Theater of Munich.

In the preface to _Lady Julie_ he deals with the all-important subject of characterisation. "As modern characters," he writes, "living in a period of transition more hurried and hysterical than its immediate predecessor, I have drawn my characters vacillating, broken, mixtures of old and new.... My souls (characters) are conglomerations of past and present stages of culture, scraps of books and newspapers, fragments of men and women, tom shreds of Sunday attire that are now rags, such as go to make up a soul. And I have thrown in some history of origins in letting the weaker steal and repeat the words of the stronger, in letting the souls borrow ideas, or so-called suggestions from one another."

He ridicules the ordinary idea of a strong character. The person "who has acquired a fixed temperament or accommodated himself to a certain rôle in life, who in a word has ceased to grow, was supposed to have character; whilst one who developed, the skilful navigator on the stream of life who does not sail with close-tied sheets, but who knows when to fall off before the wind and when to luff again, was deemed deficient in character.... This bourgeois conception of the fixity of the soul was transferred to the stage, where all that is bourgeois has ever reigned supreme. Such a character became synonymous with a gentleman, fixed and ready-made, one who invariably appeared drunk, jocular, melancholy.... I do not, therefore, believe in simple theatrical characters. And the summary judgments which authors pass on human beings, such as: this one is stupid; that one is brutal; he is jealous; he is mean, etc., should be refuted by naturalists who know the rich complexity of the soul, and who realise that 'vice has an obverse which shows a considerable likeness to virtue.'"

The secret of Strindberg's great influence on the theatre of twenty years ago lay in this very conception of character. His men and women are _alive_, moving, changing, growing, shrinking in ceaseless response to the pressure of existence. He is the dramatist of the _perpetuum mobile_ in the modern heart, the interpreter of inexhaustible discontent in himself and others. His personality vibrates in the dialogue, and lifts the idea of the play to the surface in every consecutive scene, but the artist in him is stronger than the idealogue. The curtain and the settled problem do not drop together. Strindberg has answered a question or two, tentatively, in his own manner, but others crowd in upon him and his audience. The absence of finality is felt through the tragic endings, through the strong blend of moods, emotions and desires of his exceptional characters, through the unreasonableness of his prejudices. In spite of pessimism and cynicism a hope of change is communicated to the spectator, which penetrates depression and stimulates the curiosity to live.

Amongst the one-act plays which were written between 1887 and 1897, _Samum_, _Pariah, The Stronger, Playing with Fire_ and _The Link_ present the typical characters of psychic intensity and neuropathic activity. _Samum_ is the story of the revenge of an Arabian girl and her lover upon a hapless Frenchman, lieutenant in a Zouave regiment. She kills him, not with a dagger, for that might involve the punishment of her tribe, but with words. With the help of "Samum," the hot, suffocating wind of the desert which blows phantoms into the white man's brain, she thrusts suggestion after suggestion into his mind. She makes the sick man believe that he has been bitten by a mad dog; she offers him sand instead of water in the drinking bowl, and rejoices when he dreads the drink; she invokes hideous pictures of the defeat of his regiment, the faithlessness of his wife, the death of his child, before his fevered imagination. She finally makes him stare in a mirror at the ghastly image of a skull, and tells him that this is his face, that he is dead. And when the Frenchman, murdered by horror, sinks back dead, Youssef, her lover, proud of race and proud of the woman's black magic, hails her as the worthy mother of his child.

_Pariah_ is a dialogue which bears the mark of the master-craftsman in the dramatic presentation of psychological events. It is a contest of minds founded on a tale by Ola Hansson. Two middle-aged men, one an archæologist, the other a somewhat mysterious man of unknown occupation, who has returned to Sweden from America, have met in the country. The archæologist is engaged in recovering antique ornaments from the bowels of the earth. In the room where the two men face each other there stands a box, containing bracelets and trinkets of gold which he has found. Herr X., the archæologist, talks of his poverty, of how easily he might appropriate to his own use some of the gold he has found. Debts could be paid, and his wife's anxiety allayed by one single bracelet. So simple and yet impossible to do. Herr Y. listens to the reasons which prevent Herr X. from becoming a thief though there can be no fear of detection. Incapable of stealing himself, Herr X. expresses his pity for others who fall under similar temptation. He suspects that the man by his side is in need of such pity--his conduct has already betrayed the convict. By a series of psychologically timed questions Herr X. unmasks Herr Y., who, taken by surprise, confesses that he has served a term of imprisonment for fraud. The wild anger which for a moment surged through the brain of the criminal has given way to servile admiration of the superior mind. He kisses the archæologist's hand. All is known, and yet there is no condescension on the part of the stronger man. Herr Y. tells the story of how he came to write a false signature; he wishes to persuade Herr X. of his spiritual innocence, show him that he was the victim of an uncontrollable impulse which never defiled his real self. Herr X. has fallen into an introspective mood. Hesitating, half afraid of what he is doing, he confides to Herr Y. that he has killed a man--a worthless, drunken old servant, and without intention to inflict deadly injury, it is true, but such is the fact: he is a murderer. In reply to Herr Y.'s eager questions why he escaped without punishment, Herr X. gives the reasons, why he believed it to be a greater wrong to give himself up to justice than to conceal the deed--there were his parents, his career, his fitness for life. Herr Y. has the scoundrel's alert sense of opportunity. He begins by pointing out his moral superiority over Herr X., and ends by trying to extort money. Let Herr X. only put his hand in the box, and transfer some of its contents to Herr Y., and nothing more will be said of the crime. Let him refuse to do this, and the whole story will be told at the nearest police-station. The end of this incisive piece of psychology shows us Herr Y., driven to flight by the cold-blooded logic of Herr X., who demonstrates that the would-be accuser is a forger who is "wanted," and whose dread of the police authorities is a guarantee of his discretion in the matter.

* * * * *

_The Stronger_ is a contest of temperaments carried out by one voice only. Two women--the wife and the mistress of one man--have met in a café. Mademoiselle Y. sits silent, whilst Madame X. talks. But her silence conveys more than speech. It drives Madame X. to reveal the humiliation she has suffered, it drives her through jealous and angry recriminations to a triumphant and vindictive assertion of her superior position as the legal wife and mother. As an ironical and adroit study of two types of the soul feminine, and by the skilful handling of the monologue the piece is one of the best of its genre.

_Playing with Fire_ is a triangular comedy of marriage, in which conjugal fidelity is saved at the eleventh hour through sudden and truly Strindbergian disillusionment which makes the friend of husband and wife depart like a rocket from the house of temptation, whilst the peace of an orderly lunch descends upon the family. _The First Warning_ is a conjugal squabble, and one of the weakest dramatic episodes conceived by Strindberg. The character of the jealous and enslaved husband, who has made six vain attempts to flee from the devastating charm of his wife, is a diluted réchauffé of an incident related in _The Confession of a Fool_, including the significant moment when the wife is subjugated by the shock of losing her first front tooth, and the attendant discovery of the vanity of all things of beauty. The dialogue is unreal, and Strindberg's sketch of the young girl so unnatural that we may be grateful that the type has not been more frequently chosen for "naturalistic" treatment.

_The Link_, a tragedy published in 1897, is a masterly divorce-court scene. Here Strindberg draws the shame and agony of the broken marriage-tie with bitter realism, and yet with a delicate touch of that all-human compassion before which the flowers of satire wither. The Baron and the Baroness have decided to separate, and proceedings for a deed of separation have been entered by the husband. There is a link between them which cannot be broken--the child whom they both love; and for his sake they are determined not to expose their differences before the hungry eyes of scandal-mongers. The husband is willing to let the mother have the custody of the child. But the questions of the judge pierce the veneer of amiability. Who is the cause of dissension? What has brought them before the Court? The answers bring accusations and recriminations, a parade of quarrels and dissensions, angry revelations of infidelity, disgust, espionage, lies, hatred, and, when the Court exercises its legal power of depriving both parents of the custody of the child, the torture of vain regret and empty lives. There is consummate art in the picture of the emotional revolution, through which husband and wife are forced into self-damning revelations. The minor characters of the jurymen and court officials are drawn with a calm observation and quiet humour which form an effective background to its central tragic figures. Incidentally, the inadequacy of the law to secure justice for the wronged is shown, and the lawyer in the play has some affinity with the legal luminaries in M. Brieux's _La Robe Rouge_. But Strindberg's judge is a righteous man who chafes under the limitations and responsibilities of his profession.

Those, whose knowledge of Strindberg's writings is limited to his naturalistic plays, have judged his powers as a literary artist from an entirely inadequate point of view. When Justin McCarthy spoke of the real Strindberg, as revealed in _The Father, Lady Julie_ and _Comrades_, he ignored, not only the volumes of essays, stories and novels which preceded the plays mentioned, but those which were published at the same time. Strindberg has been described as a man who had no interest to spare for social problems, or politics, or the great movements of his time--as a dramatist whose knife was forever delving in the pathological tissue of passions, and whose eyes saw nothing but the broad and sombre outlines of inevitable tragedy. Those who know _The People of Hemsö_ (1887), a novel of the fishermen's life in the Stockholm Archipelago, fresh as the salt breeze of the sea, bright with sunshine, and the jollity of a man with steady nerves, who is thoroughly at home in a boat and in a hut, are familiar with another side of Strindberg. Or the volume of short stories entitled _Fisher Folk_ (1888), with its sketches of life on the island, broadly humorous, impressive in its unaffected narrative of the struggles and ambitions of the hardy toilers among the rocks. The stories bring us in the midst of the island folk: we know their practical, wind-dried minds where superstition lurks in a corner; we see their sparse bodies--sometimes fed on herring-heads and potatoes. We attend the dance which the poor, hunch-backed tailor gives to the young people as an offering on the altar of joy, and lament with him the devastation wrought by terpsichorean orgies in his garden. We accompany Westman, the ungodly pilot who has harpooned a seal from his little boat, and is dragged out to sea by the cruel monster in spite of pitiful recitals of the Lord's Prayer, and offers of a pure silver chandelier to the local church. We are made to participate in the people's life. In both books there is a wealth of descriptive power, and there is something fundamentally healthy in the figures of the common people whom he draws, a natural pathos in their vulgarity, and even in their criminality.

There are some who see exclusively _das Dämonische_ in Strindberg, and who picture him as perpetually skirting precipices of moral and intellectual negation, or as a Lucifer who never emerges from consuming tongues of fire. They have nothing to say of such books as his _Sketches of Flowers and Animals_ (1888). Here we meet him, a mild and patient gardener, sowing his salad and spinach, revelling in the reward which his cool cucumbers offer after having been carefully tended by loving hands. Here he initiates us into his cult of the flower, his adoration of colour and form in the plant world; he anticipates Maeterlinck in his sensitive studies of the intelligence of flowers and the mysteries of seeds. His _Fables_ are stories of birds, insects and bushes, betraying an intimate knowledge of nature, and sparkling with a good-humoured satire. In these books there are strokes of brilliant imagination, there is a womanly tenderness for the lives of plant-children. In one of his stories[4] he tells us of a tall fir that can feel and suffer, and his description of the spirit within the tree which sobs under the wood-cutter's axe, and which some day we shall recognise, reminds us of Fiona Macleod's _Cathal of the Woods_. Strindberg's love of Nature had many qualities in common with Thoreau--there is the same pleasure in cultivating the cabbage-patch, the same ecstatic contemplation of green life. Thoreau could find his way in the wood during the night by the touch of his feet. Strindberg, treading his way through the forest in the dark hours, knows whether he walks on soil, clubmoss or maidenhair, "through the nerves, of his large toe."[5]

There is also a practical, homely side of Strindberg, which is generally ignored, qualities appertaining to the small farmer with a keen eye to profitable cultivation of the land. Without these qualities he could not have written _Among French Peasants_ (1889), which is a series of articles on the life and conditions in agricultural France. They are the product of the mind of a true son of the soil, equipped with a journalist's power of rapid generalisation. Strindberg travelled through France, notebook in hand, stayed amongst the peasants, measured hay and corn, attended weddings and fairs, annotating the prices of meat and butter, studied the ravages of the phylloxera and geological formations. The book is crammed with facts and comparative statistics of town and country, wheat and wine, village education, libraries, labourers' wages, cheese-making, the best fertilisers, and other matters of import to rural economy.

He shirked no trouble, avoided no obstacles to equip himself as a writer on gigantic subjects. His encyclopædic grasp of a many-sided subject is shown in this book, and in his numerous essays on sociological questions. It carries with it a certain superficiality, and readiness to theorise from insufficient data which may necessitate a graceful retraction of opinions, once loudly proclaimed. But there is ample compensation in the freshness and vigour of a mind which bears crop after crop without exhausting itself. Such a quickly grown crop, verdant and luxurious in ideas, is the essay, written in 1884, _On the General Discontent, its Causes and Remedies_, in which he inveighs against the evils of a false Culture, and within the space of a hundred pages lets Society pass in review before his critical pen in the types of the king, the bureaucrat, the physician, the teacher, the merchant, the sailor, the artisan, the manufacturer, the labourer, the servant, the scientist, the author, the journalist, and the artist, and finally prescribes the pills of self-help, self-government and limitation of useless luxuries, artfully mixed. There is much of Rousseau, Tolstoy, Spencer, Mill and de Quesnay in the social philosophy, with which he wished to build on the ruins, wrought by _The Red Room_ and _The New Kingdom_. The ideal peasant--in Tolstoyan garb--was then Strindberg's hope for humanity.

When he wrote _At the Edge of the Sea_, in 1890, the horrors of unchecked democracy had been revealed to him. It is the story of a highly intelligent, refined and super-sensitive man who is forced to live amongst coarse and ignorant people, and who is gradually driven to insanity and suicide. This book is the apex of Strindberg's novelistic art. The scene is again laid on one of the islands outside Stockholm, the life of the fisherfolk is once more described. But the tone and the colour are changed. There is the same brilliancy in the description of scenery, and the psychological imagination is more lavish than ever, but the mists of Nietzscheanism lie heavily over the book. The distinction between "slave-morality" and "master-morality" is emphasised with truly Dionysian pessimism.

The same influence coloured the preface to _Lady Julie_, and the novel _Tschandala_, published in 1889, and led Mr. Edmund Gosse into the error of describing Strindberg as "the most remarkable creative talent started by the philosophy of Nietzsche." Strindberg was certainly not "started" by Nietzsche who was entirely unknown to him until the autumn of 1888, when George Brandes brought the two writers together. A correspondence between Nietzsche and Strindberg began in 1889, and continued until Nietzsche's illness. Nietzsche read Strindberg's novels with interest, and Strindberg duly acknowledged the influence which Nietzsche exercised upon him, but protested against the mistaken view expressed by Mr. Gosse and others, in the following words: "Those who have followed my career as a writer at its different stages of development know sufficiently well how early I adopted the so-called Nietzschean standpoint with regard to conventional morals, and the emancipation of women to give me my due, and Nietzsche his with clear consciences."

The statement that Strindberg was a Nietzschean _pur et simple_ is as absurd as the statement that he was a Darwinist or a Methodist. He passed through the fatalism of Hartmann, the pessimism of Schopenhauer, the naturalism of Zola, the realism of Turgenev and Dostoevsky. On one occasion he speaks of Balzac as his master, on another he calls himself a Voltairean. These influences are but lights on the way. He passes on, and speaks to us with a new tongue. When charged with inconsistency he might well have answered with Walt Whitman: "I am large--I contain multitudes."

[1] _Fröken Julie_, the Swedish name of this play, has been translated into English as "Miss Juliet" and "Miss Julia." The meaning of the Swedish title and the idea of the play are more faithfully rendered by the title _Lady Julie_. In the choice of a title for his feminine type of aristocratic degeneracy, Strindberg was probably influenced by Anna Maria Lenngren's _Fröken Juliana_, a well-known satirical poem on a similar subject which belongs to classical Swedish literature. Up to the middle of the nineteenth century the title "Fröken" was exclusively used-when addressing the unmarried daughters of the hereditary nobility of Sweden. An unmarried daughter of a Swedish count is a countess, though she is addressed as "Fröken." Upon marriage with a commoner she may use or drop her title.

[2] _Studies in Seven Arts_, by Arthur Symons.

[3] _"Les décors, les costumes et la mise-en-scène au XVII siècle."_

[4] Confused Sensations.

[5] The Confession of a Fool.