CHAPTER VIII

THE THEATRE OF LIFE

Strindberg's fiftieth birthday was celebrated quietly in Lund in 1899. A general feeling of distrust and bewilderment was prevalent amongst his countrymen. At the age of fifty he had returned to Sweden, apparently healthy in mind and body, in the prime of life, charged with a literary vitality which confounded current theories of his insanity. He had calmly and unostentatiously resumed his task of writing drama. The haunted, feverish expression had left his countenance; he had made himself a new visage, upon which were stamped self-mastery and tranquillity of mind. And, yet, he had recently published _Inferno_ and _Legends_, and laid bare his soul's misery and delirium in throbbing pages, over which the reviewers had poured acrid contempt. He had written _To Damascus_ in a gust of mediæval repentance, and uncovered himself in the transports of asceticism. With a sigh of relief his enemies had laid aside their opposition to his indiscretions and revelations, his materialism and transcendentalism, his socialism and individualism. They felt that there was no need to take a lunatic seriously. His friends had waited patiently for the "dancing star" which they knew would arise out of the chaos.

_The Saga of the Folkungs, Gustavus Vasa_ and _Eric XIV_ appeared in 1899, and showed that the author of _Master Olof_ had returned to the art with which, twenty-seven years earlier, he had given his country its greatest historical play. With the precision of the somnambulist who takes up the thread of mental events, regardless of the time that has passed, Strindberg resumed the story of _Master Olof_ where he had left off. In _Gustavus Vasa_ we again meet Olof, the renegade, but he is now--as befits his character--a secondary person, duly subservient to the Power of the Time, King Gustavus Vasa. With _Gustavus Vasa_ and _Eric XIV_ Strindberg attained to mastery of a dramatic art, in which he stands unsurpassed. The art of writing _the psychological drama of history_ is his, and his alone. No other dramaturge of modern times has approached him in clarity of historical vision, or in imaginative reconstruction of living characters which are at once true to their time and to all times.

No period of Swedish history lends itself better to dramatic treatment than that dominated by the first of the Vasas, Gustavus Erikson, the chosen king of the people, the incarnation of will, of a wholly masculine personality. The king's struggle to quell the rebellious spirit of the freemen of Dalecarlia, the vast inland county north of Stockholm, to whom he owes his throne and his power, is the subject of the play. The wrath of the king pervades the first act with an atmospheric suggestion of fateful horror which is the antithesis of melodramatic art, and shows Strindberg's power of restraint and concentration in the unfoldment of tragedy. The king has marched to Dalecarlia in order to punish the stiff-necked peasants who think that they can make and unmake kings with impunity. When the curtain rises upon the assembled leaders of the peasants the king is not seen, but his presence is felt. Master Olof has arrived as the emissary of the sovereign; solemn messengers bid the veterans of the soil to remain seated until they are called to appear before the king. There is a sense of suppressed fear in the room; the quiet, slow-thinking men, dad in white sheep-skin coats, suspect something, but cannot grasp the unthinkable audacity of the king's plans. One by one they are called out, but no one returns. Then a messenger from the king brings in three blood-stained sheep-skin coats, and throws them on the table. This is the king's warning to those who remain, and who are permitted to live.

In the five acts of this play Strindberg lets us see the human qualities of Gustavus Vasa; the dramatist draws a living soul, not a marionette; a man, hot-tempered, hard, strong, with a vein of irresoluteness running through the granite of his will, a man whose strength is blended with the weakness of the child within that never grows up. We see in him the inconsistency of all flesh: the mighty reformer of the Roman Catholic Church who upholds evangelical Lutheranism and yet clings to catholic habits; the brutal tyrant who has a way of his own of enforcing obedience by bringing his little steel hammer in ominous contact with obstinate heads, and who yet remains the kind, fatherly friend of his people. The patriarch who has identified himself with his country before the Lord, who has stood forth as a prophet of patriotism, and who is forced by growing self-knowledge to separate the personal from the impersonal, is at last humiliated by the goodness of others. Threatened by rebels who march towards Stockholm from the south, outwitted by his treacherous allies in Lübeck, the old king trembles at the news that the sturdy men of Dalecarlia are on their way to Stockholm. The retribution for his harsh deeds of suppression is upon him, and he bows his head before the chastisement of God. But the men of Dalecarlia are made of stuff which outlasts a few fallen heads. They have come in their thousands to help their king and their country to put the common enemy to flight. Engelbrecht, their leader--jolly, true and a little tipsy--bursts into the king's palace, and proudly offers him the arms and the devotion of the men in sheep-skin coats, true representatives of the Swedish spirit.

Eric, the king's dissolute and epileptic son, heir to the throne, is in every way a contrast to his father: he is the chronic weakling who oscillates between unholy desire and self-disgust, the born pariah in the realm of the mind, whether he be clad in purple or in rags. Of such, we think, the Kingdom of Heaven is not made. Yet Strindberg shows us Eric's glimpse of heaven. In the fourth act Eric and his boon companion and evil counsellor, Göran Persson, bent on the pleasures of the tavern, meet Karin, the flowergirl. She asks Eric to buy her wreath of flowers:

_Prince Eric_ (_looks fixedly at the girl_). Who--is--that?

_Göran Persson_. A flowergirl.

_Prince Eric_. No--it--is--something else--do you see?

_Göran Persson_. What am I supposed to see?

_Prince Eric_. You ought to see what I see, but you can't.

The girl kneels before the prince. He takes the wreath from her hands, places it on her head, and asks her to rise. "Rise, my child," he says, "you must not kneel before me, but I shall kneel before you. I do not want to ask your name, for I know you, though I have never seen you, or heard anything about you." He begs her to ask a favour of him. She asks him to buy her flowers. Eric takes a ring off his finger, and gives it to the girl. She dare not wear it, and returns it. She leaves them, and Eric asks Göran if he has not seen the marvellous apparition, heard the wonderful voice. Göran has heard nothing but the voice of a common lass, a little cheeky.

_Prince Eric_. Hold your tongue, Göran, I love her.

_Göran Persson_. She is not the first one.

_Prince Eric_. Yes, the first one, the only one.

_Göran Persson_. Well, seduce her then.

_Prince Eric_ (_draws his sword_). Take care, or by God----

_Göran Persson_. Is he going to prick me now again?

_Prince Eric_. I do not know what has happened, but from this moment I detest you; I cannot live in the same town as you; you pollute me with your eyes, your whole being stinks. Therefore I leave you, and never want to see you before my face again. I leave you as if an angel had come to fetch me from the dwellings of the wicked; I detest the past, as I detest you and myself. (_Follows Karin_.)

Though Strindberg shows an understanding of love's miracles--with which he is not generally credited--he makes no attempt to endow the first meeting between Eric and the peasant girl who became the mother of his children, and finally his queen, with a greater transfiguring power than it possessed. Here, as in all his historical dramas, he writes with the sense of the importance of the infinitely small, with the knowledge that "characters" and events arise out of the mind's contact with things that seem insignificant to the superficial observer. The wooden rigidity which the ordinary historian gives to the figures of the past, is the result of the incapacity to visualise the daily, the commonplace, in lives lived long ago. Strindberg's psychological conception of characters of the past is based on an almost microscopical power of seeing details. His own hypersensitive emotional memory initiated him into the manner, in which history is made by mood and temper, aches and pains--as well as by deliberate purpose of will and political programmes. Whether it be true or not that the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was due to the toothache of Louis XIV, and that history was thus made by the ill-timed activity of molar nerves, psychological research into the origin of great events on the world's stage would reveal causes which the historian does not deign to consider.

_Eric XIV_, the drama of the reign of the mad son of the sane King Gustavus, is a masterpiece of life-like presentation. Searching comparisons between the arts of Strindberg and Shakespeare are otiose. But in the dramatic treatment of lunacy the author of _Eric XIV_ may well be compared with the author of _Hamlet_, _Lear_, and _Macbeth_. The dramatic verisimilitude of Strindberg's lunatics is made perfect through an experiential familiarity with the nethermost adventures of the mind, which Shakespeare lacked. In _Eric XIV_ the monomania of persecution, the fitful _délires de grandeur_, the half-conscious cruelty are drawn with a spontaneous realism which is heightened by a terrible psychological accuracy of analysis. Strindberg has drawn almost as many mad and half-mad folk as Shakespeare. He can describe every form of mental derangement, and has not forgotten the soul obsessed by God and, therefore, detached from the world. In _The Saga of the Folkungs_ the Voice of the Unseen speaks through an obsessed woman who sees the souls of people, and is able to reveal the hidden treachery of those who surround King Magnus. "One must be mad," says a barber in this play, "to have the courage to reveal all secrets at once." In _Easter_, the most mystical of Strindberg's plays, he draws an exquisite character of a young girl who is "mad," whose soul is pure and lovely, and who sees and hears things that happen far away. To her, also, all secrets are open; she can see the stars during the daytime, and, though her head is "soft," her spirit dwells in the realms of pure beauty. There is a fool in To Damascus; there is the frenzy of despair in _The Father_. The novels _Remorse, At the Edge of the Sea_ and _The Gothic Rooms_ present a gallery of psycho-pathological types.

Strindberg's novelistic treatment of lunacy has a natural profuseness of imagination, not unlike that of E.T.A. Hoffmann and Dostoevsky. It therefore bears little resemblance to the more artificial composition, typified by Paul Hervieu's _L'Inconnu_ or Guy de Maupassant's _Le Horla_.

The scenes in _Eric XIV_ are constructed with a finished workmanship, and an economy of events which make it one of Strindberg's most playable pieces. Consumed by jealous hatred of his brother, Johan, Eric keeps him a prisoner; a prey of malignant suspicion against everybody, Eric commits atrocious murders and endures frantic remorse. At last, Eric's excesses can no longer be endured by the people. He is imprisoned, and Johan becomes king. In _Eric XIV_ the psychological dissection of character does not hinder the dramatic movement of the play; the playwright combines brilliant impressionism with due subservience to the laws of the theatre. In _The Saga of the Folkungs_ he has allowed the psychological treatment to usurp the domain of drama. The play deals with a period in Swedish history when two brother kings occupied the throne. Here, too, we have sombre tragedy. There is no lack of dramatic elements, for the horrors of plague, hanging, flagellants and execution are shown upon the stage. But Strindberg has psychologised his characters so intensely that the flesh has, as it were, fallen away from their souls, and with that the obscurity of motives and objects which creates the deception upon which human action is built, and which is essential to drama. The effect of the play on the spectator is the intense, yet real, terror of a nightmare, from which we vainly struggle to awaken. The over-balance of psychological analysis mars some of the later historical dramas. It makes some of the transcendental plays and the chamber plays mere dramatic dialogues, pictures of minds in conflict; it gives us the Shadow Theatre of the Soul, and leads Strindberg to bold defiance of the rules of dramaturgy--including those laid down by himself.

The cycle of the Vasa plays--_Master Olof_, _Gustavus Vasa_ and _Eric XIV_--bears the mark of the consummate craftsman. Their strength is the strength of reality, their beauty a perfect proportion of dramatic construction. A row of historical plays followed: _Gustavus Adolphus_ (1900); _Engelbrecht_ (1901); _Charles XII_ (1901); _Gustavus III_ (1903); _Queen Christina_ (1903); _The Nightingale of Wittenberg_ (1903); _The Last Knight_ (1908); _The National Director_ (1909); _The Earl of Bjälbo_ (1909). Of these, _Gustavus Adolphus_ with its breadth of battlefield panorama; _Charles XII_ with its narrow searchlight on the declining figure of the lion-hearted, but beaten king; _Queen Christina_ with its flamboyant sketch of the clever and capricious daughter of Gustavus Adolphus, are eminently playable. _Gustavus III_ has pointed dialogue, cameo-like pictures of word-fencing; it faithfully paints the decadent time when Sweden was steeped in the sterile scepticism of France; it portrays the reaction which led to the assassination of the King of Masquerades, but the play is not woven with the dramaturgic skill of the former dramas. _The Last Knight_ is an historical jugglery with ideas in five acts which strains the dramatic form beyond its measure of elasticity.

* * * * *

It would require a separate volume to deal adequately with Strindberg's historical writings. It is not only his dramas which bear testimony to the originality of his historical conception, but a number of treatises, essays, and stories, such as _Studies in the History of Culture, The Swedish People, Swedish Destinies and Adventures, Historical Miniatures_, and _The Conscious Will in the History of the World_. His independent historical researches unearthed documents and accumulated evidence with a painstaking thoroughness which should have endowed him with a special "authority." But he has been derided and abused because of his lack of a truly professorial treatment of historical characters. His powers of visualisation and interpretation have given offence to historical specialists. He has been accused of distorting the calm faces of royal personages, of encumbering his pictures of the past with ugly and unnecessary details. He has been condemned because there is a twentieth-century atmosphere about his characters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But we may well ask: Has any historical chronicler or dramatist ever given a faithful representation of the past except through the medium of his own personality, his own time? There are anachronisms in _Hamlet_; so there are in _Eric XIV_. In a wider sense, all historical writings are anachronistic. In that sense Strindberg's history is less burdened with errors than that of most writers. The offence which Strindberg committed--if it be an offence--is that he saw and threw upon the canvas the lasting psychological features which persist through the vicissitudes of time, through the altered conditions of morality, custom, and nationality. He saw the eternally human beneath the masks of canonised and apotheosised individuals.

_Gustavus Adolphus_, Strindberg's drama of the fair hero-king of Sweden who played an illustrious part in the Thirty Years' War, and who landed with twenty thousand men in Pomerania in 1630 as friend and protector of oppressed Protestants in Germany, has all the elements of a powerful historical play. It has been severely criticised in Sweden and in Germany. Strindberg has himself explained that the Swedes objected to his portrait of Gustavus Adolphus because he had made him too small, and the Germans objected because he had made the conquering hero too great. Strindberg did not hesitate to show the blemishes on the historical idol of Sweden: the weakness, the impetuousness, the spells of fear, the carelessness, the moral elasticity which characterised Gustavus Adolphus. Nor did he hesitate to show the horrors and self-deception of war, the blackguardly deeds which are glorified by militarism, or the petty quarrels between Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists which prolonged the strife. The king is represented as being brought--by the force of events--to see the unworthiness of the cause which he espouses, and for which he finally dies. This was an unpardonable offence against the sacro-sanctity of tradition, and the fact that Strindberg's Gustavus Adolphus lost none of his heroic qualities by being stripped of pseudo-angelic ones did not temper the wind of the general condemnation. The famous generals of the Swedish army, Horn, Banér, Tott, Brahe, Torstensson, Stenbock, have been shorn of none of their glory.

In _Charles XII_ Strindberg repeats the offence committed in _Gustavus Adolphus_. With irreverent and destructive hands Charles XII broke the greatness of Sweden,[1] builded by Gustavus Adolphus, and Strindberg mercilessly analyses the foolhardy mind of Charles XII, through which his campaigns and his country were foredoomed to disaster.

The attacks made upon Strindberg by those who cling to stereotyped methods of historical judgment have but served to show the importance of the method which he inaugurated. It will undoubtedly guide the historian of the future. The average historian moulds his material to the conventional view; he has no place for the shapes of originality which, but for his cramped pages, would stand forth lifelike and real. Mr. William Archer tells us that the historical dramatist must not flagrantly defy or disappoint popular knowledge or prejudice. But popular knowledge can take no account of the deeper psychological traits which it is the business of the historical dramatist to discover. Mr. Archer holds that the dramatist must not run counter to "generally accepted tradition." "New truth, in history," he adds, "must be established either by new documents, or by a careful and detailed reinterpretation of old documents; but the stage is not the place either for the production of documents or for historical exegesis."[2] Those who thus separate the known past from the revivifying influence of imaginative art seek to impose the academic view of history upon the artistic conscience. That conscience is never free from impressions of the accumulated experience of the past. Every play which depicts yesterday's customs, manners, costumes, conflicts of thought and morality is "historical," and artistic exegesis alone can make real to us that which is absent from school treatises, statistics and blue-books.

The series of plays which have been designated as symbolical, transcendental, mystical and mad--according to the mental outlook of the reader--bring us nearest to the real Strindberg, to the essential in his imaginative art which, though illusive and often completely submerged, yet stands forth as the structure of his life. To this series belong _To Damascus_, I and II (1898), _Advent_ (1899), _The Dance of Death_, I and II (1901), _Easter_ (1901), _The Crown Bride_ (1902), _Swanwhite_ (1902), _The Dream Play_ (1902), _The Great Highway_ (1909). In these plays we have the eternal questions of the human mind, the joys of illusion, the sorrows of knowledge, the fruits of sin and hatred, the rise through pain and suffering, the soul's battle with relentless fate, the awful mystery of existence, and the ultimate hope of something better to come, cast into the weird and haunting shapes of the people of Strindberg's inner world; the souls that are at once real and unreal, mad and sane, acting in the solid world of matter, and held in shadowy bondage by the mists of dreamland. Here we meet them all, the souls that have gone by, that are here around us, that are yet to come. They meet us with tears and smiles, with lies and truth, with virtue and vice, pathetic and repulsive, lovable and loathsome--humanity.

Strindberg suggests the soul's corruption and the soul's ineffable sweetness with the same impassioned power of creation. In _Swanwhite_, the charming fairy play in which the influence of Maeterlinck is discernible, the budding love between a fairy-like princess and a chivalrous prince is described with a delicacy which brings the reader into a land of romance and roses, of stainless purity and spring-like innocence. In _Advent_ we are brought into the house of wickedness, of cruel, designing, ancient wickedness. The old judge and his wife are steeped in every variety of human treachery and vileness. They die, and we follow them into the darkness of hell, where the seven deadly sins have grouped themselves around the throne of the monarch. Through the pain of being made to see themselves as they really are, they cry out for light. In both pieces the "supernatural" plays the most important part; the wicked stepmother in _Swanwhite_ exhales a breath of evil before which the rose fades, and the dove falls dead; the ill-treated children in _Advent_ are comforted by a mysterious playmate, clad in white, who brings light into the dark cellar in which they have been imprisoned. The story in _The Crown Bride_ of a peasant girl, who kills her child, is told with an exalted simplicity, and given a setting of the old fairy-faith of Dalecarlia which peoples the rivers with nature-spirits and the forests with _trolls_. Here, as in the other fairy plays, things are endowed with souls, and the fierce hatred between the two old peasant families is reflected by every object that surrounds them. Unknown forces are all the time engaged in a mystic underplay which is the real action of the piece.

The law of _karma_--the chain of cause and effect--runs through all these plays, and binds together the psychological sequence where the dramatic construction fails. In _Easter_ Strindberg has drawn the anguish of a little bourgeois family, labouring under the misfortunes following upon the father's defalcations. He is in prison, and Elis, his son, a schoolmaster, who is meticulously honest, is weighed down by shame, and tormented by the fear that the man to whom the father is heavily indebted, will exercise his right and seize the furniture. The family look upon this man, Lindkvist, as an ogre, and when they learn that he has come to live in the same town they are in constant fear that he will ruin them. Throughout the three acts of this very playable piece Strindberg gives a highly finished and concentrated picture of those multiple and long-lived sufferings of the innocent, which follow in the wake of transgressions committed by the guilty. But he makes Lindkvist an arbiter of fate, a messenger of hope who shows that good as well as evil is minutely recorded in the great Book of Events. For long ago when Elis' father was a young man, and before he placed himself within the meshes of the law, he did Lindkvist a kindness. That kindness has never been forgotten; it lay like a seed of life in Lindkvist's soul, and, as it grew, it made him a generous man. And thus Lindkvist forgives and forgets, and the spirit of Easter is resurrected in the hearts of the family. Eleonora, the pure and tender-spirited girl who went mad on the day when her father was sent to prison, is wrongfully suspected of having stolen a daffodil plant in the shop of the adjoining florist. The symbolism of the piece is made complete by the strange play of the shadow of paternal crime on the guiltless child. In her mad innocence of the world's ways Eleonora has taken the flowerpot and left a shilling and her name on the counter, but the coin and the name are not seen by the agitated shopkeeper who is anxious to brand the suspected culprit. The "theft" is at last satisfactorily explained. Eleonora speaks with the wisdom of many lives when she says: "I was born old ... I knew everything already when I was born, and when I learnt something I only recollected. When I was four years old I knew men's ... thoughtlessness and foolishness, and therefore people were unkind to me."

The force of suggestion, the primary importance of thought form the keynote of several of Strindberg's plays. In _Eric XIV_ he lets Göran Persson say to Eric: "King and friend, you so often use the word hate that at last you imagine yourself to be the enemy of humanity. Don't use it! The word is the first realisation of the creative force, and you throw a spell over yourself by this incantation. Say 'love' a little oftener, and you will imagine yourself loved." _There are Crimes and Crimes_, a play in four acts which has been a great theatrical success, is built around the subtle force of evil thought. Maurice, a dramatist of the Bohemian world in Paris, who is about to receive the laurels of fame deserts his mistress and his child to follow a woman bent on pleasure only; in the elation of their passion they wish death to Maurice's child and destruction to all obstacles in their way. The child dies mysteriously in the morning, and through a combination of malign circumstances Maurice is accused of being the murderer. He is innocent, but he has sinned in thought, and when, at the end of the fourth act, he is mercifully extracted from the vortex, into which he has brought himself, the Abbé says to him: "You were not innocent, for we are also responsible for our thoughts, words, desires, and you murdered in thought when your evil will wished for the death of your child."

_There are Crimes and Crimes_ does full justice to Strindberg as an accomplished stage craftsman; in _The Dance of Death_ we have, perhaps, the most sharply chiselled dramatic form of all his later plays. It is a symphony of married hatred and misery in which the orchestration is perfect. The dialogue is at once natural and calculated; the silent play of the piece even more intensely suggestive than the spoken words. We get glimpses of the dramatic art of bygone days: that of Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; we are mercilessly ground in the mill of a ghastly nineteenth-century problem play. The figure of the Captain of the Fortress, the untruthful, scheming old rascal who has attained to a diabolical mastery in the art of making others unhappy and uncomfortable, is drawn with a supreme irony which makes it unique in vital drama. Amongst Strindberg's realistic plays it has another distinction: it represents his only stage-creation of a vampire-like _husband_. The wife is naturally not far behind him. Death stands behind the central figures of the play, the dancing death of Holbein and Saint-Saëns. The strains of his tune drown the jarring notes of conflict, and bring the voice of hope to the Captain's lips: "Wipe out, and pass on!"

The trilogy _To Damascus_, with its autobiographical wanderings on the crooked paths of experience, is perhaps the strangest literary play ever written. It contains the elements of the old miracle and morality plays, the soul's battle with itself and with the Devil, its final renouncement of the world and entry into the new Life. "The Stranger" meets "The Lady"; together they journey from station to station on the road of suffering and disillusionment. They part in hatred, and meet again in the vicissitudes of love. They separate finally as The Stranger attains to peace, religious peace, in the monastery of dead passions on the top of the hill. The stages that He between the beginning and the end of the journey are described in scenes which are both possible and impossible. The Beggar, The Doctor, The Sister, The Mother, The Old Man, The Confessor, The Abbess, The Fool, The Shadows, and The Children all take their assigned parts as separate individuals. And yet they seem to be one and the same, fragments of a multiple personality. All things and all thoughts come back in this play like the top spun by a skilful player of diabolo. The Stranger climbs a mountain, and arrogantly threatens the Lord of the skies with a cross which he has snatched from a Calvary. He falls, and is found in raving delirium by the kind Samaritans of the Convent who bring him to their hospital. He regains consciousness, and finds himself seated at a table in the Refectory in company with the shades of all whom he has injured, or with whose fate his own is bound up. The scene is one of the deepest religious realism. It has a touch of that crushing and unreasonable sense of guilt which often accompanies the return to physical life of one who has been to the very gates of death. The curse of Deuteronomy is read by The Confessor, and every word brands the memory of The Stranger with the seal of The Law. Of this consciousness of guilt The Stranger says: "There are moments when I feel as if I carried within me all the sin and sorrow and uncleanliness and shame of the world; there are moments when I believe that the wicked act, crime itself, is an imposed punishment."

The world gives a banquet in honour of The Stranger, who has succeeded in making gold. But the banquet is so arranged as to show the envy and hatred and treachery which lie behind the festive speeches, the fickleness of public approval. In the portrait gallery of the monastery The Stranger is shown the real selves of great men who have been honoured for their consistency, whilst they have been bundles of inconsistencies--Napoleon, Luther, Voltaire, Goethe, Bismarck. The yearning for the peace that passeth all understanding is well expressed when The Stranger, bruised and tired, weary of searching and self-disgust, sees the white monastery on the hill and cries:

"Anything so white I never before beheld on this dirty earth, except in my dreams; yes, this is my youth's dream of a house wherein dwell peace and purity. I greet thee, white house.... Now, I am at home."

It is as if the heat of imagination, which produced some of Strindberg's great books, were too great to permit him to leave a subject, when, artistically, it is finished. After _Inferno_ he wrote Legends which was but a faint echo. The theme of _To Damascus_ is weakly repeated in _The Great Highway_, a drama in verse and prose which also deals with the soul's fearful struggle and disillusionment. _To Damascus_ contains some shallow thoughts and some banalities of expression, but it is a powerful creation, magnificently conceived. In _The Great Highway_ the mysticism falls flat, the play does not grip by any poetic power; it is an _olla podrida_ of its author's philosophy of life which sometimes is not even lukewarm. But it does contain some gems of lyrical beauty, and one or two passages in which Strindberg reaches his own heights.

The _Dream Play_ is a new conception and a new art. In a memorandum to the play Strindberg writes: "In this Dream Play, as in the previous one _To Damascus_, the author has sought to imitate the disconnected, but apparently logical form of the dream. Anything may happen; everything is possible and probable. Time and space do not exist;, on an insignificant background of reality imagination spins threads and weaves new patterns: a mixture of memories, experiences, free fancies, absurdities and improvisations. The characters split, double, multiply, evaporate, solidify, diffuse, clarify. But one consciousness reigns above them all--that of the dreamer; it knows no secrets, no incongruities, no scruples, no law."

The texture of _To Damascus_ is solid compared with that of _The Dream Play_. The story of the descent of the Daughter of Indra into matter, of human life as typified by The Glazier, The Officer, The Lawyer, The Bill-poster and The Poet, is told without any dramatic sequence, such as is required by the theatre of to-day. It is a play written for a stage not yet built, to be performed by some diaphanous visitants from the astral world. Strindberg calls _The Dream Play_ a Buddhistic and proto-Christian drama. It is more than that: it is pre-cosmic.

The paradoxical versatility of a man who holds all the keys of successful drama in his hands, and yet sacrifices the theatre to the transcendentalism of his ideas, is not easily explained. Strindberg told Dr. John Landquist, now editor of the posthumous edition of his collected works, that he really found it difficult to write modern plays, and that he loved pomp and circumstance in drama.[3] That love is displayed in the sumptuous repast introduced into the second part of _To Damascus_, at once coarsely barbaric and uncomfortably ethereal, a strange combination of the Banquet of Life and the Swedish _hors-d'œuvre_ table. And yet, this is the man who wrote the Chamber Plays: _Storm, The Burned Lot, The Pelican, The Black Glove_ and _The Spook Sonata_ (1907), in which the figures move, physical, yet free from the three dimensions, impersonated ideas, brain-spectres who walk the boards with unsteady feet. This is the man who wrote the preface to _Lady Julie_, who sought the realisation of his theatrical ideal in the one-act play with two or three characters, and who later came to write _Gustavus Adolphus_ with fifty-four characters, _Midsummer_ with thirty-two characters; who created twenty-four characters for _Gustavus Vasa_, and twenty for _Eric XIV_ and _The Saga of the Folkungs_ respectively, and whose dramatic lavishness necessitated a succession of five-act dramas. It seems strange that the author of saga plays, like _The Journey of Lucky Peter_, and _The Keys of Heaven_, with its parodied Sancho Panzaisms, should have composed _The Dance of Death_; that the conscience-stricken visions of To Damascus should be followed by _The Slippers of Abu Casem_. This ingenious "toy for children" Strindberg dedicated to his youngest daughter, the little Anne-Marie, on her sixth birthday.

The two great Norwegian dramatists presented an orderly development in the choice of dramatic form, which makes the study of their art an exercise in the logic of temperament. The natural romanticism of Ibsen's early plays passed into the classical art of _Ghosts_. The intellectual modernism of the later Ibsen was the ripeness anticipated by every shrewd observer of the course of his mind. The art of Ibsen is complex, yet simple. Born out of the depths of his love of truth and his love of beauty, it arose, well-formed, palpable, a thing for all the world to see and hear, an indictment of the gigantic social fraud to which all must ultimately listen. It is essentially exoteric. So is the art of the rival and minor playwright, Björnson, who has given the world its most perfect dramatised sermons. Strindberg's art is incalculable, subtle, the caprice of a spirit that cannot exhaust itself: esoteric because it is ever rooted in the unconscious. His plays may be read and seen by the many, but at present they will be understood only by the few.

In versatility of dramatic form Hauptmann stands nearest Strindberg. He has almost as many strings to his harp as the Swede--he has written naturalistic plays and fairy drama, social plays and mystical drama, farce, comedy, romance and realism. Both dramatists are impelled by pity for human suffering, but the pity that guides Hauptmann, and which is typified by _The Weavers_, is an elemental, earthbound pity, concerned with food and poverty, lack of shelter and work. Strindberg's pity is transcendentalised; it hovers round the greater mysteries of existence itself, seeks to extract the human spirit from the curse of illusions. Hence the absence of finality in his writings. No book gives the impression of being quite finished; they all transmit the ache for a new point of view. Whilst Maeterlinck has evolved a philosophy of spiritualised tranquillity, and administers a soothing narcotic for the Soul Rampant in the twilight of his charmed castles, Strindberg walks on, acutely conscious of the thorns upon which he treads. Whilst Björnson, satisfied, proclaims his ideal of physical purity, and throws down _A Gauntlet_ at vice, Strindberg is haunted by the ideal of the human soul's unattainable purity from dross. Whilst Bernard Shaw cuts the world's perplexities with a joke, a flashing paradoxical joke, Strindberg raises his bands in threatening condemnation at the God-head Himself. In Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's _Elën_, Samuel says to Goetze: "Science will not suffice. Sooner or later you will end by coming to your knees." Goetze: "Before what?" Samuel: "Before the Darkness." Strindberg was brought to his knees by the Darkness, but he rose with the dawn that followed.

During the thirteen years that passed between the quiet celebration of Strindberg's fiftieth birthday, and the national festivities with which the Swedish people acclaimed him on January 22nd, 1912, his countrymen were gradually made aware of his greatness. Men of all parties fearlessly proclaimed his genius over the open grave, though some would never have ventured to do so if they had not felt quite sure that he could not prepare any further shocks of surprise.

It is impossible to present a study of the experiences which caused the corrosive bitterness in Strindberg's attacks on everything and everybody, without reference to the unjust and Pharisaical criticism to which he had to submit. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that it was difficult to live with Strindberg. The Swedes had to live with him, and the household of those who set themselves up to guard the propriety and integrity of literary art was day by day threatened by his revolutionary ideas, his personal attacks on spotless individuals, his coarse-grained descriptions of indescribable things. We must therefore extend sympathy to his detractors as well as to him. There is, besides, a reversionary power in the mere passage of time which calls for special tolerance. The reviewers of the _Athenæum_ and _Blackwood's Magazine_, who suggested that Ruskin's _Modern Painters_ had emanated from Bedlam, are more entitled to our sympathy than the object of their criticism.

The Swedes have a peculiar fear of praising that which is their own. They labour under a feeling that such praise is egotistical, blustering and discourteous to others. In Swedish peasant homes the housewife does honour to her guests by loud depreciation of the contents of her house and its offerings, no matter how well-appointed the home may be. The trait persists in the judgment of cultured people on national qualities, art and literature. It is certainly graceful, and makes the Swede an excellent companion, a polite and generous appreciator of the talents of others. But it is inimical to the toleration of a forceful and self-confident personality within one's own family or nation, and favourable to the mediocritisation of boisterous originality. If Strindberg had been an Italian or a Spaniard he would in all probability have been the recipient of the Nobel Prize during his life-time, in addition to posthumous honours.

In the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy (of Literature), the late Dr. C.D. af Wirsén, Strindberg had a persistent enemy. Wirsén acted as Secretary to the Academy from 1884 to his death in 1912, and exercised considerable influence over the selection of recipients of the Nobel Prize in literature which is awarded by the Swedish Academy. To Wirsén who wrote idyllic and elegiac poetry, and who held everything that is old in reverence, Strindberg was incomprehensible. By his attacks on Strindberg, and also by his derisive criticism of another free-thinking Swedish writer, Ellen Key,[4] Wirsén shows a close resemblance to the type of foolish biographer for which Mr. A.C. Benson has found an admirable name: the eagle-eating monkey. There is a pseudo-aristocracy of mind which receives not truth in its house, unless she be arrayed in garments of classical cut, and has not journeyed along the highways of humankind. Wirsén looked upon Strindberg as a parvenu of intelligence, just as certain academicians regarded Spencer as a parvenu of science. Wirsén's diligent criticisms of Strindberg range over twenty years,[5] and may in some measure explain Strindberg's delusions of persecution. In 1882 Wirsén gave qualified praise to _Master Olof_, and took the opportunity of reminding his readers that _The Red Room_ was pervaded by "evil but empty wit." His virtuous indignation over "the blasphemous effusions" and "ridiculous vanity" of Strindberg's autobiography was sustained by the discovery that it contained much boastfulness, but no solid thought, and he searched in vain for any proof that the unlucky author was--what he might have been--a noble, though eccentric personality. He received _The Father_ with feelings of pity for he could see nothing in it, but the impotence of a diseased imagination and a mixture of coarseness and paradoxicality. When Comrades was published Wirsén expressed his astonishment that such a play had found a publisher. He dismissed _The Stronger_, as giving "no evidence of strength in the composition. Anything weaker has seldom been put together." He could find no artistic merit in _At the Edge of the Sea_. In 1897 he condemned _The Link_ and _Playing with Fire_ by declaring that both were equally "unpleasant and painful." He naturally found Strindberg's verses bad, and shuddered over their invectives of hatred and revenge. When _Inferno_ was published he derived comfort from announcing that Strindberg's intellect "has now gone to pieces," but recorded mournfully that the pen that wrote _Legends_ was as evil as ever. Wirsén did not believe in Strindberg's delusions; he claimed to see through them: they were nothing but coquetry with the public, sensational advertisement. _To Damascus_ was to him "a horrid and depressing work--excessively loathsome." The most unjust of all Wirsén's accusations against Strindberg is, perhaps, that of dulness. The autopsychological quest for truth in Strindberg's writings bored Wirsén, and he thought others must be bored too. Between the chastisements Wirsén exhibited a truly Christian forbearance, and graced a corner of his literary column by beseeching Strindberg and his followers to return to the path of goodness. He assured the sinners that their return to sounder ideas and purer production would be met with a warm welcome and undisguised joy in spite of the past.

But the prodigal son of Swedish literature did not return to the house of the Academy. He had been well castigated for his brilliant satire on that somnolent institution in The _New Kingdom_, but he continued to mock "the Gods of Time" until the end of his days. In 1910 he took the Academy to task for its admiration of Baron Klinkowström, a poetaster, whose puerile and pompous verses were free from any menace to the existing order of things.

It is true that Wirsén did not represent the whole of literary criticism in Sweden. It is also true that Strindberg always had a small circle of faithful followers who admired him, believed in him--and copied him. But during the many years when Strindberg was absent from Sweden a new school of literature was formed which was equally out of touch with his early realism and his late mysticism. Oscar Levertin, Werner von Heidenstam, Gustaf af Geijerstam and Selma Lagerlöf are the most prominent names of modern Swedish literature. Geijerstam's Erik Grane is an offshoot of early Strindbergism, and Heidenstam's brilliant stories of the soldiers of Charles XII, _Karolinerna_, are not without traces of the influence of Strindberg's _Swedish Destinies and Adventures_. But Strindberg was always too sceptical to stake his fortune on any particular breed of Pegasus. In his last two "terrible" novels, _The Gothic Rooms_ (1904) and _Black Flags_ (1907), he again delivered himself of violent and personal attacks upon society in general and the priests of literature and art in particular, thereby widening the gulf that lay between him and them.

The many attacks made upon Strindberg in Sweden had one practical effect which caused him bitter disappointment. Theatrical managers fought shy of his plays. Fourteen years passed between the successful production of _The Father_ in Paris and its performance in Stockholm. _Lady Julie_ had to wait eighteen years before she was allowed to appear in Stockholm. In 1906 the play had a run of several weeks at "Folkteatern," in Stockholm, a playhouse for the working classes, where the aristocratic lady's downfall was appreciated in a crude, but wholehearted manner.

Whilst the theatrical managers of Sweden were hesitating as to the expediency of allowing Strindberg to overshadow the stage, Herr Lauthenburg gave popular performances at the "Residenz Theater" in Berlin of _Creditors_, _Playing with Fire_ and _Facing Death_. Together with Hauptmann and Ibsen, Strindberg now won theatrical triumphs all over Germany.

The indifference shown in Sweden towards the performance of Strindberg's plays led him to plan a Strindberg-Theatre to be run on lines similar to those of the Théâtre Maeterlinck. After many difficulties the plan was at last realised in the autumn of 1907, when _The Intimate Theatre_ began its stormy career with _The Pelican, The Burned Lot, Storm_, and the Hoffmanesque and elliptic _Spook Sonata_. These plays were promptly attacked by critics who made little attempt to understand them.

The efforts made in certain quarters to silence Strindberg could not suppress the rising wave of admiration. When once the public had been brought in touch with him, the anathema of the powerful literary coterie was useless. In 1901 Herr Albert Ranft had courageously staged _Gustavus Vasa_ and _Eric XIV_ at "Svenska Teatern" in Stockholm. They became theatrical successes. "Dramatiska Teatern" followed suit with _Charles XII_, _Easter_ and _There are Crimes and Crimes_. A young Norwegian actress, Harriet Bosse, played the part of Eleonora in _Easter_ with so much charm that she fascinated both audience and author. She became a favourite actress and--Strindberg's third wife. Several of Strindberg's great historical plays were performed before the opening of his own Intimate Theatre. Though the change in public opinion was making itself felt, Strindberg could not but resent the tardy recognition of his works.

He was out of touch with the literary men of his own country. To them he appeared as an outlander, and yet he was, withal, so intensely Swedish. He sought in vain to denationalise himself. He was not Swedish with the passionate, reverential love with which Dostoevsky was Russian. Strindberg was Swedish in spite of his efforts to the contrary; his country was in his blood and bones. When Herr A. Babillotte,[6] a German writer, says of Strindberg: "He is without roots ... though a Swede, he is certainly not Swedish," he shows scant understanding of one of the mainsprings in Strindberg's character and production. The statement is on a par with his contemptuous dismissal of Strindberg's historical dramas.[7] These plays drew nourishment from his love of his country, and derived actuality from his identity with Sweden. His heart hankered after Sweden, and drove him home when pride would have kept him away. In one of his first poems, entitled In Paris, he sang wittily of his incorrigible heart's longing for Sweden, despite the allurements of Montmartre. He felt lonely in Switzerland because he had not spoken to a countryman for three months.

The difficulty in tracing Strindberg's literary ancestry in Sweden is responsible for attempts to find his roots elsewhere. Thus Laura Marholm elaborates a fantastic theory, according to which the mixture of genius and nomadic barbarism in Strindberg is to be explained by his "Mongolian blood." The union of mystic melancholy and exuberant sensuousness in Strindberg caused close, but futile comparisons to be made between him and E.J. Stagnelius, a Swedish poet of the romantic school who died in 1823. But a greater number of points of contact could be established between Strindberg and the "wizard" of Swedish literature, K.J.L. Almqvist, who lived in open revolt against authority and convention of all kinds, and whose prolific writings showed a remarkable versatility of mind. Almqvist was a realist and symbolist who loved to throw out paradoxical _bons-mots_ on current morals with a generous hand. "Two things are white," he said, "... innocence and arsenic." The amoral note of his writings and the general bizarrerie of his metaphors may show a certain likeness to Strindberg, but it vanishes upon closer comparison. Almqvist was not a dramatist.

Though without direct literary parentage in Sweden, Strindberg is the most typical representative of his country's temperament and spiritual struggles. His genius is indigenous in spite of its universality. His is the race-consciousness which is enriched by contact with other races, but which never loses its distinct quality.

He writes an idiomatic Swedish which, in a sense, is not reproducible in another language. His sentences, whether in the dialogue of a drama, or in the story of a novel, are wrought with a nervous force which is untranslatable. His phrases seem to be innervated, warm-blooded entities, and support the theory that the sentence preceded the word in the evolution of speech. He is often ungrammatical; each sentence is a living whole which cannot be divided. Analyse him with syntax and dictionary, and you will find "mistakes" and startling neology. The meaning will sometimes be obscure. But read him as you would listen to a piece of music with your ear to the harmonics, and you will find a consummate artist in words. Laura Marholm says that the sound of Strindberg is like bell metal in Swedish, whilst it resembles tin in German. There is much truth in the statement. Even the vigorous and cogent translations into German by Herr Emil Schering cannot retain the soul and magic of Strindberg's style. Translated from German into English he is unrecognisable. The difficulty of fusing his meaning and style in a new form is also apparent in the direct translations into English which have been made. Some of his plays have been sympathetically done into English by Herr Edwin Björkman. Mr. Björkman quotes from an article in _The Drama_, in which the belief is expressed that Strindberg's prose will be rendered better in "American" than in English. Mr. Björkman's translations are certainly American rather than English. The question whether this is an advantage to the style and beauty of the translation is a matter of taste which it would be invidious to discuss.

Strindberg never strove to build up a style, like Stevenson who "played the sedulous ape" to Lamb, Wordsworth and Baudelaire. He knew nothing of the terrible torture of style which made Flaubert's literary labours a martyrdom. Ideas haunted Strindberg as they haunted Jules de Goncourt, but he never experienced the slavery to literary form in which the Goncourts lived. He did not live in order to write; he wrote in order to live.

In an article of reminiscences by Madame Hélène Welinder,[8] who spent the summer of 1884 with Strindberg and his family at Chexbres in Switzerland, there is a vivid account of Strindberg's manner of writing. He wrote with feverish restlessness, and tried to overcome sleeplessness with large doses of bromide. She asked him if rest would not be better than bromide. Strindberg put his hand to his forehead as if in pain, and replied with a tone of despair: "I cannot rest, however much I should like to. I must write for bread in order to maintain wife and children, and, even apart from this, I cannot stop. Whether I travel by train, or do anything else, my brain works incessantly, it grinds and grinds like a mill, and I cannot make it stop. I get no peace before I see my thoughts on paper, and then something new begins immediately, and there is the same misery. I write and write, and do not even read through what I have written."

This rapidity of composition was probably to some extent responsible for the frequent repetitions of the same word within a short paragraph, the careless tautology of ideas, situations and episodes in his books. Many instances of such episode-repetition could be given. Thus _Comrades_ and _Charles XII_ contain similar phrases about the woman clipping the man's hair of strength, whilst his head rests in her lap. _The Dream Play_ has several scenes which are "the doubles" of those related in _Fairhaven and Foulstrand_. A certain event connected with the tearing up of _The Swiss Family Robinson_ serves the author's psychological purposes both in _To Damascus_ and in _The Dream Play_. In _The Father_ Laura secretly abstracts the contents of her husband's letter-bag, and in _To Damascus_ "The Lady" is guilty of the same offence. Both in _Fairhaven and Foulstrand_ and in _To Damascus_ the woman promises not to read a certain book by the man which deals with his first marriage. She breaks the promise, and the disastrous effect is related with emphasis in both books. In _The Dance of Death_ the remorseless Captain calmly refers to his attempt to drown his wife by pushing her into the water; the incident is more fully worked out in _Fairhaven and Foulstrand_, and is the theme of a story in _Fisher Folk_. Such repetitions cannot be attributed to poverty of imagination; they are the outcome of a too retentive emotional memory and an insistent need of expression, immediate expression.

It is curious to note that in spite of the richness and purity of his Swedish, in which the living tongue of the people is heard as never heretofore, there is not infrequently an admixture of foreign words and expressions. That his early verse-play _In Rome_ should contain rhymes on "jouissance" and "connaissance," coupled with Swedish words, and that some of his early poems were adorned in the same manner is not surprising. But when Göran Persson in _Eric XIV_ lightly throws out a hybrid drawing-room phrase: "_Tant mieux_ for my enemies!" a jarring note is introduced which is difficult to explain in a dialogue, otherwise so carefully balanced. The habit of using root-words from many languages, to which he gave Swedish shape, grew upon Strindberg in later years. In the plays his characters suddenly begin to spout Latin and Greek, like the philosophic beggar in _To Damascus_ and the sergeant-major in _Gustavus Adolphus_. Such dramatic exercises in the classics may have had a good and sufficient reason. The use of words of foreign extraction was no doubt fostered by his familiarity with the literature of many countries, and by the limitations of each language. To this may be added his growing interest in philological research. A short time before his death he was keenly at work on the etymology of Finnish, Hebrew and Greek.

Uddgren's account of Strindberg's manner of working in 1907 shows that the fever had not left him. "When I have finished my work for the day," Strindberg said, "I always note on a piece of paper what I shall begin with the next day. The whole long afternoon and evening I collect material for next day's work. During my morning walk my thoughts are further condensed, and when I return from my wanderings I am charged like an electric machine. I put on a dry vest, for after my walk I am always very hot, and then I sit down at my writing-table. As soon as I have paper and pen ready it bursts out. The words literally tumble over me, and the pen works under high pressure in order to get everything down on paper. When I have written for a while I have a feeling that I am floating in space. Then it is as if a higher will than my own made the pen glide over the paper, guide it to write down words which seem to me entirely inspired."

The same ecstasy of writing is shown in _Alone_, where he says of his life at the writing-table: "I live, and I live the manifold lives of all the human beings I describe, happy with those who are happy, evil with the evil ones, good with the good; I creep out of my own personality, and speak out of the mouths of children, of women, of old men; I am king and beggar, I have worldly power, I am the tyrant and the most despised of all, the oppressed hater of the tyrant; I hold all opinions and profess all religions; I live in all times and have myself ceased to be. This is a state which brings indescribable happiness." These words remind us of Flaubert who felt "in the space of a minute a million thoughts, images and combinations of all kinds, throwing themselves into my brain at once as it were the lighted squibs of fire-works,"[9] and recall the plastic and yearning girl-soul of Marie Bashkirtseff who, when walking in Rome, exclaimed: "I want to be Cæsar, Augustus, Marcus Aurelius, Caracalla, the Devil, the Pope," and who adds: "I love to weep, I love to be in despair. I love to be grieved and sad ... and I love life in spite of everything."

Amiel, remembering a night when he lay stretched full length on the sandy shore of the North Sea, cries: "Will they ever return to me, those grandiose, immortal, cosmogonic dreams, in which one seems to carry the world in one's breast, to touch the stars, to possess the infinite?"[10] Amiel dreamt, Strindberg created; Amiel found literary exultation in dreamy contemplation of the universe, Strindberg in the spiral revolutions of humanity.

But sometimes the joy of literary creation gave way to profound self-disgust. "What an occupation," he writes in _The Quarantine Master's Tales_,[11] "to sit and flay one's fellow-humans, offer the skins for sale, and expect people to buy them. It is like the famished hunter who cuts off his dog's tail, eats the meat himself, and gives the bones to the dog, the dog's own bones. To go about spying out people's secrets, exposing the birthmark of one's best friend, using one's wife as a vivisection rabbit, storming like a Croat, cutting down, violating, burning and selling. The devil take it all."

Strindberg's style expands to fit his wild excursions into the world of ideas and his eccentricities of conception, such as the story of when he tried to catch dead "souls" with a bottle containing sugar of lead, on the Montparnasse cemetery,[12] or that of the madman's microscopical studies of the genesis of humanity in _At the Edge of the Sea_. His expressions and metaphors often bear the imprint of overwrought feeling, as when he speaks of the "blood-poisoning cares of the household," or when the impression produced by a visit to parents-in-law is that "of a serpent's hole into which Satan had enticed him." When he describes poor people asleep at night in a railway carriage, as presenting the appearance of corpses on a battlefield and scattered human limbs, we cannot but congratulate ourselves on the dulness of our imagination.

Strindberg's "wildness" has been falsely attributed to the influence of alcohol. His use of absinthe, and his habit of heaping all sins upon himself--including that of drunkenness--account for the fable that he was incapable of writing without the aid of alcoholic excesses. He cannot even be placed in the long list of literary and artistic "drunkards "--including the names of Bums, Byron, Charles Lamb, Addison, Musset, Hoffmann, Poe and Baudelaire--to whom alcohol was a means of attaining to inspiration. Strindberg did not seek cortical excitation. He sought oblivion. In _The Great Highway_, "The Hunter" says to "The Wanderer" (Strindberg): "Mr. Incognito, why do you drink so much?" _The Wanderer_: "Because I am always lying on the operating-table, and have to chloroform myself."

He was not a man who suffered from chronic congestion of the head in consequence of indifference to all hygienic laws. Ever since the early days when he used to throw himself headlong into the open sea from a rock, he was devoted to cold-water ablutions. His morning exercise, which sometimes was taken so vehemently as to tire him out completely, was part of the routine of daily life. In his home-life he was of methodical, orderly habits; he detested alike uncleanliness and untidiness--in fact, precisely the opposite of what some people have imagined him to be.

The roots of his "wildness" cannot be found in the fumes of alcohol. There was a strain of the publicist and the agitator in Strindberg which found but an insufficient outlet. His craving for social reform was not satisfied by corresponding activity. He suffered from too much happening within him, and too little without. His stored-up energy caused a series of eruptions. Strindberg was an orator afflicted with dumbness. His faults of style are those of the typical orator. The splendour and vigour of his phrasing often hide blunders of logic and hasty conclusions. If Strindberg had met audiences face to face, like Björnson, and been in actual touch with the people, his tongue would have lost its sting. Björnson's pulpit manner would have fitted Strindberg badly, but it would have protected him against himself.

But Strindberg could not be a public speaker. Though he was essentially a "Confessor" on paper of the race of St. Augustine and Chateaubriand, he dreaded the personal jostling and exhibition which are inseparable from political life. Loneliness was necessary to him. The emanations, opinions and habits of others were apt to oppress him, if brought too closely within his own circle. In Paris he fled from his friendship with Jonas Lie; in _Inferno_ he shows this dread of paying the taxes of friendship. He felt the identity of other people pressing on him in much the same way as Keats did. In company he did not like to be contradicted. Though a genial and generous host, he could turn friends out of his house if they proved themselves possessed of too great pugnacity of argument. "I have never hated human beings, rather the reverse," he says, "but ever since I was born I fear them."

This fear of an alien invasion of the soul, of losing himself in another, made him flee again and again from the prison-house of love. In all his books the attraction between man and woman is a duel between love and hatred. Sexual love is never spiritualised; it drags man into the illusions of Maya, it robs him of strength of purpose, of intellectual freedom. Hence Strindberg's men are ever struggling to get out of the clutches of woman. When the ties are too strong to be broken, when passion obscures reason, hatred is born. Anatole France calls himself "a philosophical monk." The monk is always by Strindberg's side, pointing out the degradation of carnal love, urging him to seek liberation at all costs. But he is not yet ready. He wants to go, and he wants to stay. And all his couples, autobiographical and purely imaginative, bum in the fires of love-hatred. "I love her," he writes in Inferno, "and she loves me, and we hate each other with a wild hatred, born of love, which is intensified by the great distance." In _Fairhaven and Foulstrand_ the lover says: "At bottom we hate each other, because we love each other. We are afraid of losing our personalities through the assimilating power of love, and therefore we must break away sometimes so as to feel that I am not you...."

After some time love always becomes irksome to Strindberg. He longs for male companionship. He experiences a sense of relief when he is free from the woman, from the consciousness of always being watched. His voice resumes its manly tones, his chest expands. This trait subsists in his stories; it makes marital happiness impossible.

He can describe the marriage of souls with exquisite delicacy, the first hours of newborn tenderness, the maiden's innocence, the youth's wonder at the miracle which is taking place within his heart, the chaste abandonment of reserve before the unifying power of love. But when once love has descended from Heaven to Earth, Strindberg does not leave the lovers in peace. From earth's paradise they are driven to hell; they must hate each other, torment each other, devour each other's substance with the cruelty of vampires. Even the first kiss is fraught with untold dangers. In _Midsummer_--a sunny play emphasising the worth of man and the dignity of work, remarkably free from distressing problems--this pathological trait is introduced. Julius, a healthy young gardener, kisses Louise, his sweetheart, on the mouth, and the demoniacal depths of human nature are immediately revealed to both. Julius begins to understand the meaning of hatred, and gives utterance to startling thoughts. Louise no longer recognises his voice. "Why did you kiss me?" says Julius, "we ought never to have done that." "What happened?" says Louise. "I have just read in a book," answers Julius, "that when two innocent bodies, carbon and nitrogen, unite a dreadful poison is formed. The poison has been born on our lips, and hatred has been born out of our innocent love."

Shakespeare married a shrew. She served as an excellent model for his portraits of angry women. Led by a malignant fate Strindberg married three women who had interests outside the home. He loved _the ideal_ of the womanly woman, the mother who lives for home and children. He came to detest the intellectual woman; she was to him the man-woman, a danger to the race, the enemy of man who steals his qualities because she is bent on his destruction.

In _The Confession of a Fool_ his love for his first wife suffers at an early stage through the necessary introduction of business into the divorce arrangements. "Where is the charm of a woman who is always worn out with contention, whose conversation bristles with legal terms?" he asks plaintively. In _Fairhaven and Foulstrand_ the second story of the Quarantine Master shows the same sad development: "... But this evening he found her ugly, carelessly dressed, with ink on her fingers, and her conversation was so business-like that she appeared to him in a detestable light." "A lady," he says in one of his essays on the art of the theatre, "must never be snappish or grumpy, even if her part is one of opposition. A lady should always be graceful, even in moments of anger."

Already as a youth he found it difficult to talk sense to girls. He denied that friendship could exist between the two sexes. The presence of emancipated and "free" women was sufficient completely to disorganise his work and temper. He told Uddgren that he did not feel happy in Switzerland, because he found women enjoying the same freedom as men in marriage. "I experienced a sense of peace when I came to Bavaria where the men are the rulers in marriage, and the women are obedient and faithful. The mere fact of returning to these old-fashioned, patriarchal conditions was sufficient to restore my literary powers which, during the last time in Switzerland, had been in abeyance."

In an essay entitled _Woman-Hatred and Woman-Worship_, published in 1897, Strindberg wrote: "As I have the reputation of being a woman-hater, and people amuse themselves by calling me one, I am forced to ask myself if I really am one. On looking back at my past life I discover that, ever since I became man, I have always lived in regular relations with women, and that their presence has aroused pleasant feelings in me, in so far as they have remained women towards me. But when they have behaved as the rivals of man, neglected their beauty and lost their charm, I have detested them by dint of a natural and sound instinct, for in them I sensed something of man, and an element of my own sex which I detest from the bottom of my heart.... Consequently, as I have been married twice and had five children, it is not very likely that I should be a woman-hater."

"The most beautiful thing I know," says The Stranger to The Lady in _To Damascus_, "is a woman bent over her needlework or her child." And The Lady crochets. The good women in his plays are all fitted for "the most beautiful thing": Gunlöd in _The Outlaw_, Margaretha in _The Secret of the Guild_, Karin in _Eric XIV_.

The following passage throws light, not only on Strindberg's attitude towards women, but on the attitude of women towards him: "To return to woman was to me to come back to nature, and in a corner of my soul I made myself unconscious, instinctive, a child, and thus renewed my power to think, act and fight.... I have always worshipped women, these enchanting, criminal minxes whose worst crimes are not registered in criminal statistics. But I have had sufficiently bad--or good--taste to tell them the troth, and they have revenged themselves by calling me woman-hater. Just think, if these priestesses of revenge knew how many successes with the fair sex their revenge has brought me! Inquisitiveness, the original sin of Eve, drew the little ingénues to the monster, and the monster put no obstacles in the way for even the most inquisitive to satisfy their curiosity ... many thanks, my charming enemies."

It is little wonder that a man so constituted should be appalled at the prospect of the New Woman with her independence, her clubs, her cigarettes, her politics, her sport. Monsieur Casimir Dudevant, the husband of George Sand, who was "just an ordinary man" was at first puzzled by his wife's extraordinary qualities, and then came to the conclusion that she was "idiotic." Poor Monsieur Dudevant! He was the forerunner of a long row of perplexed husbands, injured in their sense of the fitness of things. Strindberg merely made himself a spokesman for what the majority of masculine men feel in regard to intellectual women, even though they may not be capable of expressing it. Since he abandoned his early championship of woman's suffrage, he came to utter much bad and ill-tempered abuse of woman. Some of the things which he said of "lazy, stingy and cowardly woman," of her mental and physical inferiority to man, might well be included in Flaubert's _Dossier de la Sottise Humaine_. His arguments in favour of the theory that woman is an intermediary biological form, whose development has been arrested somewhere between man and youth, are interesting but unconvincing. The evidence he offers in support of his views on the general incapacity of woman--an incapacity which ranges from the handling of musical instruments to making coffee--bears the imprint of petulance rather than research. Sometimes there is a cross and quarrelsome tone in these utterances which reflects personal irritation, something of Alfred de Musset's words in _Nuit d'Octobre_:

Honte à toi, qui la première M'a appris la trahison...!

But, after all, there is not much difference between the reasons against woman's political emancipation put forward by Strindberg, and those to which Mrs. Humphry Ward clings. And there is a close affinity between the psychological and physiological arguments against woman's suffrage, advanced in leading articles in _The Times_, and those on which Strindberg based his objections to giving women greater freedom. The dread of the subjection of man, of a general feminisation of the world, and its effects on social life and politics, is the common ground of opposition.[13]

Some people have found an appropriate analogy in the fact that Strindberg "hated," not only women, but dogs. The hatred of dogs pervades his books, and has a note of the same bitter unreasonableness as his strictures on women. His first wife had a King Charles, "a blear-eyed little monster," which apparently received more loving attention than her husband. She even "prayed for dogs, fowls and rabbits," whilst, presumably, she did not pray for him. This was intolerable, and henceforth the dog became Strindberg's symbol of the worthless recipients of the good things of this world, of sneaking cupboard-love and uncleanliness. He has surpassed the Bible in contemptuous references to the dog.

From this hatred the rest of the animal world was exempt. He cautions the angler against inflicting unnecessary suffering on the worm. He feeds the birds on his window-sill and the bear in the Zoo. He tells a story of a certain island where all the people were abominable drunkards, and where the only eyes which could still reflect intelligence and the blue sky were those of animals. He is not in sympathy with the aimless destruction of life. "Why must one always have a gun when one sees an innocent creature in the forest?" he asks, and adds: "There are other occasions in life when a gun would be of better use." In _The Crown Bride_ the life of an ant is spared, and the mystic "White Child" proclaims the love that is greatest of all, "love for every living thing, great and small."

Strindberg's life in Stockholm during the last years of his great dramatic production flowed in a calm stream, the surface of which showed no signs of the storms within. He lived the life of a literary hermit, wrapped up in his studies and his art. He took his morning walks when the greater part of Stockholm was still asleep, and received only a few privileged friends in his home. Solitude had become his best friend. In the morning he made his own coffee, and partook of a light repast before going out. As a rule he lived frugally, and his little home was arranged with the greatest simplicity. "When I get out of bed the morning after a sober evening and a restful night, life itself is a distinct enjoyment. It is like rising from the dead," he says in _Alone_.

Poverty, the faithful companion of his youth, dung to him to the end. Even during the last years he was often in monetary difficulties; in his attacks upon the powers of the day he had no thought of what the morrow would bring to him. He had again and again to pay the penalty of speaking unpopular truths. And when money came his way he did not love it well enough to make it stay with him. He gave with a lavish, careless hand, with a heart ever warm and bleeding for those who had less than he. When, on his last birthday, a purse containing 50,000 kronor had been presented to him, as a token of the people's love and admiration, he gave away large sums to the cause of peace, to the poor. When, at last, a great publisher bought the rights of all his published works in Sweden for some £11,000, the affluence came too late--for him.

In 1901 he married Harriet Bosse who had been the sympathetic interpreter on the stage of the women in some of his plays. The marriage was amicably dissolved in 1904. During his third marriage he wrote _The Dance of Death_ and _Swanwhite_, and published a volume of poems, in which his lyrical powers were perfected through greater sensitiveness and restraint. Among these poems there is one, strange and beautiful, spiritual and earthly, in which he sings of the glory of the form of woman--the theme of artists and lovers since the beginning of time--but here treated in a new manner. In her he sees the motion of stars and planets, the lines of sphere, parabola and ellipse. He sees the infinite possibilities of the Cosmic procession, of the creative, ever-moving force, the highest and the lowest, in the symbol of the eternally feminine.

The "music of the spheres" has been captured in this little poem. It is strange how often one is constrained to use musical metaphors in describing Strindberg's style. There is always music in his language. He was conscious of this himself, for in his last plays he always chose music to fit the mood of his dramatic movement. Thus the spiritual peace of _Easter_, the change from fear of fate to certainty of God's presence, is accompanied by Haydn's _Sieben Worte des Erlösers_, the sinful thoughts of Maurice and Henriette in _There are Crimes and Crimes_ are followed by the finale of Beethoven's Sonata in D minor. _The Dream Play_ is interluded with Bach's Toccata con Fuga; the _Dance of Death_ is trodden to the tune of the "Entry of the Boyars."

Over his piano there hung a death-mask of Beethoven. The final movement of the "Moonlight Sonata" was to him the highest interpretation of humanity's yearning for deliverance. Music brought him peace. It gave him strength when words failed--even during the last days when he sat at his piano, improvising variations on the Death hymn of the Titanic. Strindberg's old friend Tor Aulin, the well-known Swedish composer, received a characteristic message from Strindberg's deathbed: "A last farewell from Saul to David."

The little Anne-Marie Bosse-Strindberg, his daughter in the last marriage, was very dear to his heart. He had found her gifted with something of the second sight which was his own, and his great tenderness for children found response in her. Amongst his three children by the first marriage his daughter Greta, married to Dr. Henry von Philp in Stockholm, understood him best. She was an actress, and took the part of Kerstin in _The Crown Bride_ during the national festivities in his honour in January, 1912. Happily he did not live to mourn over the tragic fate that overtook her. She was killed in a terrible railway accident which took place a few weeks after her father's death.

The illness which was to end his life had long been battling with his wonderful vitality. He caught cold during the Christmas of 1911, when he went to pay a visit to his daughter Greta. Pneumonia supervened and laid him low for some time. He regained strength and once again put on his warrior's armour. Of this illness he gave an account in Berliner Tageblatt of February 4th, 1912. After describing an etymological challenge which he had sent to three Finnish friends he writes:

"The challenge had hardly been accepted before I fell ill; I first noticed it on the morning of Christmas Day, when I was so tired, so tired, that I would neither get up, nor drink my coffee. I had no pains, but experienced a great calm and an indifference towards the outer world, and felt as if I had at last found peace. Usually I get up punctually at seven, take a walk, and hurry home, driven by an irresistible longing for work. Now this restlessness had left me; I felt my life-work was completed. I had said all I wished to say, and my unprinted manuscripts were put away in perfect order in boxes."

But the recovery was apparent only. The real trouble was cancer of the stomach. An operation was performed, but could not check the advance of the disease.

On January 22nd, 1912, the whole Swedish nation celebrated his sixty-third birthday. It was nearly too late. The breath of death was already upon him as he stood on his balcony, waving his hand to the torchlight procession which passed his house, bending his head before the deafening cheers which rose from the multitudes, from whose lips the cry for August Strindberg rose in tones of jubilant hero-worship. As he stood there, raised above the bands and banners of the festive acclamation, it may be that the memories of past mistakes, past humiliation, and past struggle for goodness, rose within that mighty brow, and kept pace with the steps of the marching crowd below. For he knew, as few have known, the comedy and the tragedy of life.

That night the theatres of Stockholm vied with each other in performing his plays. Laurel-wreathed busts and portraits of Strindberg were on view in the foyers and restaurants. The night came with public festivities in his honour, music and speeches of approbation.

But the dramatist remained at home in his Blue Tower with a few friends. The applause of the public touched his heart, but did not deceive him. He knew that the curtain was about to fall on his part in the perpetual performance in the Theatre of Life, and that new scenes were to follow, to be hissed and applauded until Time puts its last figure upon the stage.

[1] In 1658 the kingdom of Sweden included the whole of the present Sweden and Finland, and in addition Esthonia, Livonia, part of Ingermanland, Pomerania, Wismar, Bremen and Verden.

[2] _Play-Making. A Manual of Craftsmanship_, by William Archer.

[3] Idun, May, 1912.

[4] Ellen Key's _Lifsåskådning och Verksamhet som Författarinna_. En undersökning af C.D. af Wirsén.

[5] Kritiker, af C.D. af Wirsén.

[6] August Strindberg. _Das Hohe Lied seines Lebens_, von Arthur Babillotte.

7: "Ich halte Strindberg's historische Dramen für das Schwächste was er je geschrieben."

[8] _Ord och Bild_, No. IX, 1912.

[9] Correspondence.

[10] Amiel's Journal.

[11] _Fairhaven and Foulstrand_.

[12] _Fables and Other Stories_.

[13] The reader is referred to the following leading articles: _Insurgent Hysteria_ (March 16th, 1912), _The Subjection of Man_ (July 31st, 1912), and _Militant Suffragism_ (September 24th, 1912).

LIST OF STRINDBERG'S CHIEF WRITINGS

A uniform edition of Strindberg's collected works is in course of publication by Messrs. Albert Bonnier of Stockholm, who are the owners of the copyright of Strindberg's writings. The following list includes some unpublished works which will now be issued for the first time by Messrs. Bonnier.

In a preface to _The Author_, one of the autobiographical volumes, Strindberg gave a chronological list of his most important works, and added explanatory remarks. The appended notes embody some of Strindberg's views on his own writings:

The Freethinker 1869 Hermione 1869 In Rome 1870 The Outlaw 1871 Master Olof 1872 The Year 'Forty-Eight 1881

"In Rome," "The Outlaw," and "Hermione" are classified by Strindberg as "studies."

From Fjärdingen and Svartbäcken 1877 Stories The Red Room 1879 Novel From the Sea 1880} Here and There 1880} Stories Old Stockholm 1880}

He and She....

(To be published for the first time in the posthumous edition of Strindberg's Collected Works.)

The Secret of the Guild 1880} Sir Bengt's Wife 1882} Plays The Journey of Lucky Peter 1883} Studies in the History of Culture 1881 The Swedish People 1881-82 History. The New Kingdom 1882 Satirical sketches Swedish Destinies and Adventures (Two Volumes) 1883-92 Stories in Historical Setting.

Strindberg defines "The New Kingdom" as a criticism of "The Changeably Permanent."

Poems in Verse and Prose 1883 Somnambulistic Nights after Wakeful Days 1884 Miscellanea (Likt och Olikt) Essays: Society under Review. From Italy 1884 Married (Two Volumes) 1884-86 Stories.

Strindberg points out that the first volume of "Married" is a defence and glorification of marriage, of home, mother, and child, and that the second part is a criticism.

The Impoundage Journey

An account of the prosecution following upon the publication of "Married." It will now be issued in book-form.

Real Utopias 1885 Stories.

Described by Strindberg as positive suggestions in the spirit of Saint-Simonism. REMORSE--"The Peace Story"--is included in this collection.

The Bondswoman's Son} Fermentation Time. } In the Red Room } 1886-87 Autobiography The Author } The People of Hemsö 1887} Fisher folk 1888} Novels

These novels represent the author's emancipation from the bondage of "problems"; Strindberg points out that they are simply descriptions of country life and scenery.

Sketches of Flowers and Animals 1888 The Father 1887} Lady Julie 1888} Comrades 1888} Creditors 1890} Pariah 1890} Samum 1890} The Stronger 1890}Plays Facing Death 1893} The First Warning 1893} Debit and Credit 1893} Mother-Love 1893} Playing with Fire 1897} The Link 1897} Among French Peasants 1889 Tschandala 1889} The Island of Bliss 1890}Stories At the Edge of the Sea 1890 Novel

Strindberg remarks that "At the Edge of the Sea" was influenced by Nietzsche, but "the individual succumbs in the struggle for absolute individualism."

Things Printed and Unprinted (Two Volumes) 1890-97 Essays

The Associations of France and Sweden up to the Present Time 1891 (To be published for the first time in Swedish.)

Fables 1890-97 The Keys of Heaven 1892 Play

Strindberg's remark: "Darkness, sorrow, despair, absolute scepticism."

The Confession of a Fool 1893 Autobiographical Novel.

(A German edition was published in 1893; a French edition in 1894; it will now be published in Swedish.)

Jardin des plantes Antibarbarus 1892-98 Essays. Types and Prototypes Inferno 1897} Legends 1898} Autobiography. To Damascus. I and II 1898} III 1904} Plays. Advent. 1899}

"The great crisis at fifty," remarks Strindberg, "revolutions in my mental life, wanderings in the desert, devastation, Hells and Heavens of Swedenborg. Not influenced by Huysmans' "En Route," still less by Peladan, who was then unknown to the author ... but based on personal experiences."

There are Crimes and Crimes 1899} The Saga of the Folkungs 1899} Gustavus Vasa 1899} Plays. Eric XIV 1899} Gustavus Adolphus 1900}

"Light after darkness," writes Strindberg. "New production, with Faith, Hope, and Charity regained--and absolute certainty."

Midsummer 1901} Easter 1901} "The school of suffering." } The Dance of Death. I and II 1901} Plays. Engelbrecht 1901} Charles XII 1901} The Crown Bride 1902 Swanwhite 1902 The Dream Play 1902 Christina 1903 Gustavus III 1903 The Nightingale in Wittenberg 1903 Fairhaven and Foulstrand 1902 Stories. (Partly autobiographical.) Sagas 1903 Alone 1903 Mediative Autobiography. The Gothic Rooms 1904 Novel. Word-Play and Handicraft Poems. The Conscious Will in the History of the World Historical. A Free Norway[*] (* To be published for the first time.)

Historical Miniatures 1905} Stories in New Swedish Adventures. 1906} Historical Setting. Black Flags 1907 Novel.

A Blue Book. I, II, III 1907-8 The Synthetic Philosophy of Strindberg's Life.

Storm 1907} The Burned Lot 1907} The Spook Sonata 1907} Chamber Plays. The Pelican 1907} The Black Glove 1909} The Festival of the Finished Building. 1907} The Scapegoat 1907} Stories. The Last Knight 1908} The Slippers of Abu Casem 1908} The Earl of Bjälbo 1909} Plays. The National Director 1909} The Great Highway 1909}

"The Great Highway" is a "farewell to life and a self-declaration."

Hamlet } Julius Cæsar } Memorandum to the Members of } the Intimate Theatre. } Macbeth and Other Plays by } 1908-9 Dramaturgy. Shakespeare } An Open Letter to the Intimate } Theatre }

The Origins of our Mother Tongue 1910} Biblical Proper Names 1910} Philology. Roots of World-Languages 1910} Speeches to the Swedish Nation 1910 The State of the People 1910 Religious Renaissance 1910 China and Japan[1] 1911

Dr. John Landquist, the editor of the posthumous edition of Strindberg's collected works, has kindly placed the following note on Strindberg's manuscripts at our disposal:

"The MSS., most of which are still in existence, are written with the utmost care in Strindberg's clear and energetic hand, and are often beautifully ornamented. They reflect the neatness and order with which the author surrounded himself, and also the love with which he carried out his work. When writing mediæval drama, Strindberg illuminated his MSS. like a mediæval handwritten manuscript with artistically designed and coloured initial letters, and with miniatures painted by himself--the whole harmonising with the period and surroundings in which the action takes place. On other pages there is interspersed in the writing itself such ornamentation as would correspond to the time and atmosphere of the written work. As a rule he used hand-made Lessebo-paper, and generally made very few alterations. He hardly ever copied out his MSS. In later years he seldom corrected anything when once it had been written down. He did not like to read through his own works after having completed them."

[1] All correspondence relating to the authorisation of translations of Strindberg's works and the rights of performing his plays in England and America should be addressed to Herr Albert Bonnier, of Stockholm. He is now the sole representative of Strindberg's literary executors.

INDEX

A

Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 119 Addison, 338 Adelphi Players, The, 204 _Admirable Crichton, The_, 181 _Advent_, 304, 305, 306 Æschylus, 310 Ahasuerus, 16 Albericus, 89 Alembert, d', 209 Almqvist, K.J.L., 328, 329 _Alone_, 19, 284, 285, 335, 350 Amiel, _Journal_ of, 336 _Antibarbarus I, or the Psychology of Sulphur_, _or All is in All_, 241, 242 Antoine, Monsieur André, 171 Aphrodite Pandemos, 128 Archer, Mr. William, _Play-Making. A Manual of Craftsmanship_ by, 303 Aristotle, 251 _Athenæum_, 320 Augier, 170 Augustine, St. 340 Augustus, 336 Aulin, Tor, 352 _Author, The_, 19, 122, 133, 134, 152, 284 _Autobiography_, 56, 86, 98, 169

B

Babillotte, Herr Arthur,_ August Strindberg_. _Das Hohe Lied seines Lebens_ by, 327, 328 Bach, 352 Balfour, A.J. 256 Balzac, 159, 232; _Seraphita_ by, 260; 281 Bashkirtseff, Marie, 336 Baudelaire, 331, 338 Becque, Henry, _Les Corbeaux_ by, 205, 212; _Souvenirs_ by, 208 Beethoven, _Sonata in D minor_ by, 352; _Moonlight Sonata_ by, 352 Benson, Mr. A.C., 321 Berliner Tageblatt, 353, 354 Bismarck, 313 Björkman, Herr Edwin, 330 Björnson, Björnstjerne, _Mary Stuart_ by, 67, 75, 123, 152; _The King_ by, 153, 154, 317; _A Gauntlet_ by, 318, 339 _Black Flags_, 325 _Black Glove, The_, 316 _Blackwood's Magazine_, 320 Blake, 251, 255, 260 Blavatsky, Madame, _The Secret Doctrine_ by, 274, 275 _Blotsven_, 79 _Blue Bird, The_, 144 _Blue Book, A_, 282, 284, 286, 287 Boccaccio, 159 _Bok om Strindberg, En_, af Holger Drachmann, Knut Hamsun, Justin Huntly McCarthy, Björnstjerne Björnson, Jonas Lie, Georg Brandes, etc., 123, 152 _Bondswoman's Son, The_, 18, 19, 282, 283 Bonnier, Herr Albert, 123,161, 162 _Book of Job, The_, 260 Bosse, Harriet, 327, 351 Brandes, Georg, 123, 174, 175, 231 Brieux, Monsieur, _La Robe Rouge_ by, 225 Browning, Mrs., 281 Buckle, 97 _Burned Lot, The_, 316, 326 Burns, Robert, 121, 338 Byron, _Manfred_ by, 58, 338

C

Capus, 206 Caracalla, 336 Carlyle, 281 Carmontelle, _Proverbes Dramatiques_ by, 214 Céller, Monsieur Ludovic, _Les décors, les costumes_ _et la mise-en-scène au XVII siècle_ by, 215 Cellini, Benvenuto, 255 _Charles XII_, 299, 302, 303, 326, 332 Chateaubriand, 61, 340 Chemistry, 244, 245, 248, 251, 252, 253 Clairpsychism, 256, 276, 278, 285, 286, 287 Coleridge, 257 _Collected Works of August Strindberg, The_, 13, 123 Comédie rosse, 193 _Comrades_, 122, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 225, 322, 332 Comte, 283 _Confession of a Fool, The_, 22, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 223, 228, 237, 242, 343 _Confused Sensations_, 228 _Conscious Will in the History of the World, The_, 300 Corot, 96 _Creditors_, 172, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 206, 244, 326 _Crimes and Crimes, There are_, 309, 310, 326, 352

Criticism, Literary, 77, 78, 84, 139, 148, 150, 233, 234, 235, 236, 319, 320, 321, 322, 323, 324, 325 _Crown Bride, The_, 304, 306, 349, 353

D

_Dagens Nyheter_, 115 _Damascus, To_, 256, 288, 297, 304, 311, 312, 313, 314, 315, 316, 323, 332, 334, 345 _Dance of Death, The_, 304, 310, 311, 316, 333, 351, 352 Dante, 83; the _Commedia_ by, 89, 260 De Quincey, 151 Dickens, 47, 140 _Different Weapons_, 151 Dostoevsky, 232, 297, 327 Drachmann, Holger, 123, 240 _Drama, The_, 330 Drama, Naturalistic, 170, 171 "Dramatiska Teatern," 323 _Dream Play, The_, 256, 304, 314, 315, 332, 352 Dryden, 113 Dudevant, Monsieur Casimir, 346 Dumas fils, Alexandre, 170, 206; _Le Fils Naturel_ by, 208 Dumas père, Alexandre, 47, 170 Duse, Eleonora, 208

E

_Earl of Bjälbo, The_, 299 _Easter_, 256, 296, 304, 306, 307, 308, 326, 327, 352 _Edge of the Sea, At the_, 230, 231, 297, 323, 337 Eliasson, Dr., 269 Emerson, 281 _Encyclopædia Britannica_, 143 _Engelbrecht_, 299 _Eric XIV_, 289, 295, 296, 297, 298, 301, 308, 309, 316, 326, 333 Essen, Siri von, 122; divorce of, 130; becomes an actress, 130; marries August Strindberg, 132; divorce of, from Strindberg, 237 Euripides, 310

F

_Fables_, 227, 228, 337 Fabre, Emile, _L'Argent_ by, 172 _Facing Death_, 326 _Fairhaven and Foulstrand_, 332, 333, 336, 337, 341, 343 _Father, The_, 22, 122, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 202, 203, 204, 210, 225, 235, 244, 297, 322, 325, 332 _Fermentation Time_, 19, 53, 69, 86, 87 Feuillet, 214 _First Warning, The_, 223 _Fisher Folk_, 226, 227, 333 _Fjärdingen and Svartbäcken, From_, 135, 136 Flaubert, 331; _Correspondance_ of, 336; _Dossier de la Sottise Humaine_ by, 347 "Folkteatern," 325 France, Anatole, 341 _Freethinker, The_, 78, 79 "Freie Bühne," 202 _French Peasants, Among_, 228, 229

G

Geijerstam, Gustaf af, _Erik Grane_ by, 324 _General Discontent, its Causes and Remedies, On the_, 229, 230 Geographical Society, The Imperial Russian, 119 Gissing, George, _New Grub Street_ by, 141 Goethe, _Faust_ by, 61, 62, 83 _Goetz von Berlichingen_ by, 102, 281, 313 Goncourt, the brothers de, _Sœur Philomène_ by, 172, 214, 331 Goncourt, Edmond de, 207 Goncourt, Jules de, 331 Gorki, Maxim, 17, 204 Gosse, Mr. Edmund, 231 _Gothic Rooms, The_, 297, 325 _Great Highway, The_, 256, 304, 313, 314, 338 Grein, Mr. J.T., 203, 204 Guiche, _Entre Frères_ by, 214 _Gustavus Adolphus_, 280, 299, 301, 302, 316, 334 _Gustavus III_, 299 _Gustavus Vasa_, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294, 298, 316, 326

H

Hamsun, Knut, 123 Hansson, Ola, 220, 238 Hartmann, 232 Hauptmann, 204, 317; _The Weavers_ by, 318; 326 Haydn, _Sieben Worte des Erlösers_ by, 352 Heiberg, Gunnar, 240 Heidenstam, Werner von, 324; _Karolinerna_ by, 325 Heine, 239 Henry VII, 89 Hervieu, Paul, _Le Dédale_ by, 201, 204; _L'Inconnu_ by, 297 Hirsch, Dr. W., 256 _Historical Miniatures_, 300 Hoffmann, E.T.A., 239 _Kreisler_ by, 257, 297, 338 Holbein, 310 Homer, 90 Horace, 90, 113 Hospital of Saint Louis, 247 Hugo, Victor, 271 Huysmans, _Là-Bas_ by, 274; _En Route_ by, 274 Höffding, 93

I

Ibsen, 13; _Brand_ by, 75, 166, 170; _Ghosts_ by, 172, 317; _Rosmersholm_ by, 172, 203, 326

Independent Theatre, The, 203, 204 _Inferno_, 15, 19, 243, 248, 256, 257, 274, 277, 279, 280, 285, 288, 313, 323, 340, 341 Internationalism, 155 Intimate Theatre, The, 326, 327

J

_Journey of Lucky Peter, The_, 143, 144, 146, 316 _Joy of Life, The_, 278 Julius Cæsar, 336 Jullien, Monsieur, 205

K

Keats, 340 Key, Ellen, 321 _Keys of Heaven, The_, 316 Kierkegaard, Sören, _Enten-Eller_ by, 79 Knox, John, _The First Blast of the Trumpet against_ _the Monstrous Regiment of Women_ by, 237 "Künstler Theater," 216

L

La Bruyère, 98 _Lady Julie_, 172, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 193, 202, 204, 206, 209, 210, 211, 214, 216, 217, 218, 225, 231, 236, 244, 284, 316, 325 Lagerlöf, Selma, 324 Lamb, Charles, 257, 331, 338 Landquist, Dr. John, Article in _Idun_ by, 315 _Last Knight, The_, 299 Latini, Brunetto, 89 Lauthenburg, Herr, 326 Lavedan, Entire Frères by, 214 Lee, Nathaniel, 257 _Legends_, 256, 277, 288, 313, 323 Lenan, _Traumgewalten_ by, 257 Lenngren, Anna Maria, _Fröken Juliana_ by, 176 Lessing, 61 Levertin, Oscar, 278, 324 Library of Stockholm, The Royal, 118 Lie, Jonas, 123, 340 _Link, The_, 122, 219, 224, 225, 323 _Loke's Blasphemies_, 151 Louis XIV, 295 Lucanus, 90 Lugné-Poë, Monsieur, 202 Lundin, Claes, 146 Luther, 313

M

Macaulay, 70 McCarthy, Justin Huntly, 123; article in _The Fortnightly Review_ by, 183, 225 Macleod, Fiona, _Cathal of the Woods_ by, 228 Maeterlinck, 227, 305, 316 Marcus Aurelius, 336 Marholm, Laura, 238, 328, 330 _Married_, 123, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 235, 236, 237 _Master Olof_, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 136, 142, 289, 298, 322 Maupassant, Guy de, 159, 209; _Le Horla_ by, 297 Michel-Angelo, 251 _Midsummer_, 316, 342, 343 Mill, John Stuart, 230 _Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre, On_, 211, 212 Moses, 260 Multiple personalities, 283, 284 Munch, Edvard, 240, 259, 263 Murray, Grenville, _Les Hommes du Second Empire_ by, 149 Musset, Alfred de, 214, 338; _Nuit d'Octobre_ by, 347

N

Napoleon, 313 _National Director, The_, 299 Naturalism, 170, 204, 205, 212, 213 _New Kingdom, The_, 148, 149, 157, 230, 324 Newman, 51 Nietzsche, 13, 194, 231, 232, 284 _Nightingale of Wittenberg, The_, 299 Nobel Prize, The, 321 Nordau, Max, 149

O

Oehlenschläger, 79, 82 _Old Stockholm_, 146, 147 Orfila, 248, 260 _Outlaw, The_, 81, 84, 85, 86, 345 Ovid, 90

P

_Pariah_, 219, 220, 221, 222 _Paris, In_, 328 Patmore, Coventry, 281 Paul, Adolf, 240 Peace movement, The, 155, 156 Peladan, Sar, _Comment on devient Mage_ by, 280 _Pelican, The_, 316, 326 _People of Hemsö, The_, 226, 227, 235 Personne, John, _Strindberg-Literature and Immorality_ _amongst Schoolboys_ by, 165 _Peter Pan_, 144 Philp, Greta Strindberg von, 353 Pinero, Sir Arthur, 206 _Playing with Fire_, 219, 223, 323, 326 Poe, 255, 338 _Poems in Verse and Prose_, 150, 151 Przybyszewski, Stanislav, 240, 258, 259, 260, 262

Q

_Quarantine Master's Tales, The_, 336, 337, 343, 344 _Queen Christina_, 299 Quesnay, de, 230

R

Rahmer, Dr. S., Article in _Grenzfragen der Literatur_ _und Medizin_ by, 256 Ranft, Herr Albert, 326 Realism, 170, 183, 212 _Real Utopias_, 168 _Red Room, In the_, 19, 110, 111, 112, 113 _Red Room, The_, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 147, 148, 157, 230, 322 Reformation, the Protestant, 99, 291 Religion, 279 _Remorse_, 156, 297 Renan, _Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse_ by, 255 "Residenz Theater," 203, 326 _Reward of Virtue, The_, 157 Rodin, _Le Penseur_ by, 16 _Rome, In_, 74, 76, 77, 78, 333 Rosen, George von, _Erik XIV and Karin Månsdotter_ by, 95 Rousseau, 19, 154, 209, 230, 234; _Confessions_ by, 257; _Dialogues_ by, 257; _Rêveries_ by, 257, 260 "Rune," the formation of the, 73 Ruskin, 281; _Modern Painters_ by, 320

S

_Saga of the Folkungs, The_, 289, 296, 297, 298, 316 Saint-Saëns, 310 _Samum_, 219, 220 Sand, George, 61, 346 Sardou, 170 _Scenery of Sweden, The_, 236 Schering, Herr Emil, 330 Schiller, _Die Räuber_ by, 58, 63; _On the Theatre as an Institution for Moral Education_ by, 62 Schnitzler, 204; _Reigen_ by, 206 Schopenhauer, 232, 237, 238 Schumann, _Aufschwung_ by, 258, 259 "Schwarzen Ferkel, Zum," 239, 240 Scott, Sir Walter, 47 Scribe, 170 _Secret of the Guild, The_, 142, 345 Shakespeare, 47, 82, 83, 101; _Hamlet_ by, 106, 295, 301; _Lear_ by, 295; _Macbeth_ by, 295, 296, 343 Shaw, George Bernard, 206, 233, 234, 318 Sinology, 118 _Sir Bengt's Wife_, 144, 145, 146 _Sketches of Flowers and Animals_, 227 _Slippers of Abu Casem, The_, 316 Socialism, 167, 169, 229, 230 Socrates, 213 Sophocles, 82, 310 Sorbonne, La, 248 _Speeches to the Swedish Nation_, 279 Spencer, 106, 230, 283 _Spook Sonata, The_, 316, 326 Stage Society, The, 204 Stagnelius, E.J., 328 Stevenson, R.L., 331 Stockholm's Skärgård, 30, 83, 99, 226 _Storm_, 315, 326 Street riots in Stockholm, 66, 67, 126 Strindberg, Anne-Marie Bosse-, 316, 353 Strindberg, August, death of, 11; scientific studies of, 12, 37, 60, 83, 238, 239, 240, 241, 244,245; diary of, 14; faith in the Bible, 14; love of the early morning, 15; funeral of, 16; birth of, 20; parents of, 20; ancestry of, 20; poverty of, 21, 75, 83, 107, 117, 350; views of, on the family as an institution, 22, 23; misogyny of; 22, 124, 125, 171, 184, 194, 244, 344, 345; attacks upon women, 23, 75, 76, 175, 237, 347; early home of, 24, 29; early religious doubts of, 25, 32, 33; early school-days of, 27, 28; love of nature, 29, 30, 31, 32, 53, 227, 228, 265; independence of, at school 33, 34; death of the mother of, 35, 36, 37; interest of, in music, 38, 53, 352; constructs machines, 39, 40; as "gymnasist," 41; becomes a pietist, 42, 43, 44, 45; as private tutor, 46, 47, 48; influence of literature on, 47; becomes a freethinker, 47; preaches a sermon, 49; passes the "student--examen," 50; enters the University of Upsala, 51; criticism of academical routine, 51, 52, 53; becomes a schoolmaster, 54; studies social conditions, 54, 55, 103, 154, 155, 228, 229, 230; sympathy of, with the people, 56, 64, 65; contempt of current morals, 56, 120; takes up the study of medicine, 59; comes under the influence of art, 60; decides to become an actor, 62; makes his début at the Dramatic Theatre, 67; tries to commit suicide, 69, 80, 129; composes his first play, 69; first attempts to write verse, 71; first plays refused, 71, 72; returns to the University, 73; first performance of a play by, 76; burns the MSS. of Blotsven, 80; passes his Latin examination, 81; presents his æsthetic thesis. 81; performance of a Viking play by, 84; King Charles XV sends for, 85; as a painter, 90, 96, 103, 236, 240; becomes a journalist, 92; as an art critic, 95; lack of self-confidence of, 107; edits an insurance paper, 108; financial crash, 109; obtains a post as telegraph clerk, 114; resumes journalistic work, 115; becomes parliamentary reporter and dramatic critic, 116; is nominated assistant librarian, 118; class-consciousness of, 126, 127; first marriage of, 132; views of, on the sacredness of parenthood, 133, 134; increasing literary activity of, 135; first great dramatic success, 142, 143; on the tragedy of fatherhood, 146, 175; historical point of view of, 147, 148; criticises poetry as a form of literary expression, 151; leaves Sweden, 152; is prosecuted for blasphemy, 157; is cheered by the people in Stockholm, 162, 163, 164; attacks of Conservative press 163; is found "not guilty," 164; is denounced by feminists, 165; advocates rights of women and marriage reform, 167; views of, on spiritual functions of motherhood, 168; begins a series of naturalistic plays, 171; on the educational value of the theatre, 206, 207; views of, on theatre reform, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218; obtains divorce from his first wife, 237; second marriage of, 242; becomes an alchemist, 251; madness of, develops, 255; persecutional mania of, becomes acute, 265; prepares to die, 266; fears detention in an asylum, 269; love of, for his child, 271, 272; is influenced by Roman Catholicism, 272, 280; religious feeling of, 273, 279; attitude of, towards theosophy, 274, 275; recovery of, 275; psychic development of, 276; fiftieth birthday of, 288; resumes the writing of drama, 288; as an historical psychologist, 289, 301; criticism of, as an historian, 301, 302, 303; national celebration of, 319, 353, 354, 355; tautology in the writings of, 332, 333; philological studies of, 334; attitude towards animals of, 348, 349; third marriage of, 351; last illness of, 353, 354; _Stronger, The_, 204, 219, 222, 223, 322 _Studies in the History of Culture_, 300 Sudermann, 206 Sue, Eugène, _Le Juif Errant_ by, 47 "Svenska Teatern," 326 _Swanwhite_, 304, 305, 306, 351 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 260, 267, 272, 273, 277, 280, 281, 282, 283 Swedish Academy, The, 321, 324 _Swedish Destinies and Adventures_, 150, 300, 325 _Swedish People, The_, 148, 300 Swift, Dean, 234 _Sylva Sylvarum_, 241 Symons, Arthur, _Studies in Seven Arts_ by, 208

T

Tasso, 255, 273 Tchekhov, Anton, 204; _The Seagull_ by, 208