Chapter VIII: The Theatre of Life (1)

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.