AUGUST STRINDBERG

THE DREAM PLAY THE LINK THE DANCE OF DEATH, Part I THE DANCE OF DEATH, Part II

TRANSLATED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

EDWIN BJÖRKMAN

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

1912

NOTE This translation is authorised by Mr. Strindberg, and he has also approved the selection of the plays included in this volume.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION A CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF AUGUST STRINDBERG'S MAIN WORKS THE DREAM PLAY THE LINK THE DANCE of DEATH, PART I THE DANCE of DEATH, PART II

INTRODUCTION

To the first volume of his remarkable series of autobiographical novels, August Strindberg gave the name of "The Bondwoman's Son." The allusion was twofold—to his birth and to the position which fate, in his own eyes, seemed to have assigned him both as man and artist.

If we pass on to the third part of his big trilogy, "To Damascus," also an autobiographical work, but written nearly twenty years later, we find The Stranger, who is none but the author, saying: "I was the Bondwoman's Son, concerning whom it was writ—Cast out this bondwoman and her son; for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the free woman's son.'"

And The Lady, back of whom we glimpse Strindberg's second wife, replies: "Do you know why Ishmael was cast out? It is to be read a little further back—because he was a scoffer! And then it is also said: 'He will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man's hand against him; and he shall dwell in opposition to all his brethren.'"

These quotations should be read in conjunction with still another, taken from Strindberg's latest play, "The Great Highway," which, while being a sort of symbolical summary of his life experience, yet pierces the magic circle of self-concern within which too often he has remained a captive. There The Hermit asks: "You do not love your fellow-men?" And Strindberg, masquerading as The Hunter, cries in answer: "Yes, far too much, and fear them for that reason, too."

August Strindberg was born at Stockholm, Sweden, on January 22, 1849. His father was a small tradesman, who had lost his business just before August was born, but who had the energy and ability to start all over again as a steam-ship agent, making a decided success of his second venture. The success, however, was slow in coming, and the boy's earliest years were spent in the worst kind of poverty—that poverty which has to keep up outward appearances.

The mother had been a barmaid in one of the numerous inns forming one of the Swedish capital's most characteristic features. There the elder Strindberg had met her and fallen deeply in love with her. August was their third child, born a couple of months after their relationship had become legalized in spite of bitter opposition from the husband's family. Other children followed, many of them dying early, so that August could write in later years that one of his first concrete recollections was of the black-jacketed candy which used to be passed around at every Swedish funeral.

Though the parents were always tired, and though the little home was hopelessly overcrowded—ten persons living in three rooms—yet the family life was not without its happiness. Only August seemed to stand apart from the rest, having nothing in common with his parents or with the other children. In fact, a sort of warfare seems to have been raging incessantly between him and his elder brothers. Thus a character naturally timid and reserved had those traits developed to a point where its whole existence seemed in danger of being warped.

At school he was not much happier, and as a rule he regarded the tasks set him there as so much useless drudgery. Always and everywhere he seemed in fear of having his personality violated, until at last that apprehension, years later, took on a form so morbid that it all but carried him across the limits of rationality. With this suspiciousness of his environment went, however, a keen desire to question and to understand. He has said of himself that the predominant traits of his character have been "doubt and sensitiveness to pressure." In these two traits much of his art will, indeed, find its explanation.

At the age of thirteen he lost his mother, and less than a year later his father remarried—choosing for his second wife the former housekeeper. That occurrence made the boy's isolation at home complete. During the years that followed he threw himself with his usual passionate surrender into religious broodings and practices. This mood lasted until he left for the university at Upsala. He was then eighteen. During his first term at the university he was so poor that he could buy no books. Worse even—he could not buy the wood needed to heat the bare garret where he lived.

Returning to Stockholm, he tried to teach in one of the public schools—the very school which he had attended during the unhappiest part of his childhood. From that time dates the theme of eternal repetition, of forced return to past experiences, which recurs constantly in his works. Another recurring theme is that of unjust punishment, and it has also come out of his own life—from an occasion when, as a boy of eight, he was suspected of having drunk some wine that was missing, and when, in spite of his indignant protests, he was held guilty and finally compelled to acknowledge himself so in order to escape further punishment.

But while still teaching school, he made certain acquaintances that set his mind groping for some sort of literary expression. He tried time and again to write verse, only to fail—until one day, in a sort of trance, he found himself shaping words into measured lines, and it suddenly dawned on him that he had accomplished the feat held beyond him. From the first the stage drew him, and his initial work was a little comedy, concerning which nothing is known now. Then he wrote another one-act play with the Danish sculptor Thorvaldsen for central figure, and this was accepted by the Royal Theatre and actually played with some success. Finally he produced a brief historical play in prose, "The Outlaw," which was spurned by the critics and the public, but which brought him the personal good-will and financial support of King Charles XV.

Thus favoured, he returned to the university with the thought of taking a degree. Instead he read everything not required in the courses, quarrelled with every professor to whom he had to submit himself for examination, and spent the major part of his time with a set of youngsters whose sole ambition was to make literature. Of that coterie, Strindberg was the only one to reach the goal which all dreamt of. On the sudden death of the king, when his little stipend ceased, he went up to the capital again, bent on staying away for ever from the university.

During the next couple of years, he studied medicine for a while, tried himself as an actor, conducted a trade journal, and failed rather than succeeded to make a living as a hack writer for various obscure newspapers. All this life he has pictured with biting humour in his first big novel, "The Red Room." At last, when he was twenty-three and had withdrawn in sheer desperation to one of the little islands between Stockholm and the open sea, he conceived and completed a five-act historical play, named "Master Olof," after Arch-bishop Olaus Petri, the Luther of Sweden.

The three main figures of that play, Master Olof, King Gustavus Vasa, and Gert the Printer, were designed by the author to represent three phases of his own character. The King was the opportunist, Olof the idealist, and Gert the "impossibilist." The title first chosen for the play was "The Renegade." It was suggested by the cry with which Gert greets the surrender of Olof in the final scene.

The indifference shown that first big work came near turning Strindberg away from a literary career for ever. It took him several years to recover from the shock of disappointment—a shock the more severe because he felt so uncertain of his own gifts. But those years of seeming inactivity were not lost. He had obtained a position in the Royal Library, which gave him a living and free access to all the books he wanted. At first he sought forgetfulness in the most exotic studies, such as the Chinese language. The honours of the savant tempted him, and he wrote a monograph which was accepted by the French Institute.

Gradually, however, he was drawn back to his own time. And there was hardly a field of human thought to which he did not give some attention. Already as a student at Upsala, his conception of life had been largely determined by the study of the Danish individualistic philosopher Kierkegaard, the English determinist Buckle, and the German pessimist Eduard von Hartmann. Among novelists, Hugo and Dickens were his favourites. They together with the brothers de Goncourt, and not Zola, helped principally to shape his artistic form until he was strong enough to stand wholly on his own feet.

At the age of twenty-six he met the woman who was to play the double part of muse and fate to him. She was already married. In the end she obtained a divorce and became Strindberg's wife. To begin with they were very happy, and under the stimulus of this unfamiliar feeling Strindberg began once more to write—but now in a manner such that recognition could no longer be denied him. The novel already mentioned was his first popular success. It drew bitter attacks from the conservative elements, but the flavour of real life pervading it conquered all opposition. To this day that first work of social criticism has not been forgiven Strindberg by the official guardians of Swedish literature.

After a while Strindberg threw himself with passion into the study of Swedish history. One of the results was a daring work named "The Swedish People," which is still, next to the Bible, the most read book among the Swedes in this country. He wrote also a series of short stories on historical themes which combined artistic value with a truly remarkable insight into the life of by-gone days. This series was named "Swedish Events and Adventures." About the same time he administered some scathing strictures on social and political conditions in a volume of satirical essays entitled "The New Kingdom."

His plays from this period include "The Secret of the Guild" and "Sir Bengt's Lady," both historical dramas of romantic nature. To these must be added his first fairy play, "The Wanderings of Lucky-Per," concerning which he declared recently that it was meant for children only and must not be counted among his more serious efforts. But this play has from the start been a great favourite with the public, combining in its rapidly moving scenes something of a modern "Everyman" and not a little of a Swedish "Peer Gynt."

After he had resigned from the Royal Library and retired to Switzerland for the purpose of devoting all his time to writing, he produced the volume of short stories, "Marriage," which led him up to the first turning point in his artistic career. It dealt with modern marital conditions in a manner meant to reveal the economic reefs on which so many unions are wrecked. His attitude toward women had already become critical in that work, but it was not yet hostile.

The book was confiscated. Criminal proceedings were brought against its publisher. The charge was that it spoke offensively of rites held sacred by the established religion of Sweden. Everybody knew that this was a mere pretext, and that the true grievance against the book lay in its outspoken utterances on questions of sex morality. Urged by friends, Strindberg hastened home and succeeded in assuming the part of defendant in place of the publisher. The jury freed him, and the youth of the country proclaimed him their leader and spokesman.

But the impression left on Strindberg's mind by that episode was very serious and distinctly unfavourable. As in his childhood, when he found himself disbelieved though telling the truth, so he felt now more keenly than anything else the questioning of his motives, which he knew to be pure. And the leaders of the feminist movement, then particularly strong in Sweden, turned against him with a bitterness not surpassed by that which Ibsen had to face from directly opposite quarters after the publication of "A Doll's House." Add finally that his marriage, which had begun so auspiciously, was rapidly changing into torture for both parties concerned in it.

Yet his growing embitterment did not make itself felt at once. In 1885 he published four short stories meant to em-body the onward trend of the modern spirit and the actual materialisation of some of its fondest dreams. Collectively he named those stories "Real Utopias," and they went far toward winning him a reputation in Germany, where he was then living.

But with the appearance of the second part of "Marriage" in 1886, it was plain that a change had come over him. Its eighteen stories constituted an unmistakable protest against everything for which the feminist movement stood. The efforts of Ibsen and Björnson to abolish the so-called "double code of morality"—one for men and another one for women were openly challenged on the ground that different results made male and female "immorality" two widely different things. Right here it should be pointed out, however, that Strindberg always, and especially in his later years, has demanded as high a measure of moral purity from men as from women—the real distinction between him and the two great Norwegians lying in the motives on which he based that demand.

The second part of "Marriage" shows a change not only in spirit but in form, and this change becomes more accentuated in every work published during the next few years. Until then Strindberg had shown strong evidence of the Romantic origin of his art. From now on, and until the ending of the great mental crisis in the later nineties, he must be classed as an ultra-naturalist, with strong materialistic and sceptical leanings. At the same time he becomes more and more individualistic in his social outlook, spurning the mass which, as he then felt, had spurned him. And after a while the works of Nietzsche came to complete what his personal experience had begun. His attitude toward woman, as finally developed during this period, may be summed up in an allegation not only of moral and mental but of biological inferiority. And though during his later life he has retracted much and softened more of what he said in those years of rampant masculine rebellion, he continues to this day to regard women as an intermediary biological form, standing between the man and the child.

With the publication, in 1887, of "The Father," a modern three-act tragedy, Strindberg reached a double climax. That work has been hailed as one of his greatest, if not the greatest, as far as technical perfection is concerned. At the same time it presents that duel of the sexes—which to him had taken the place of love—in its most startling and hideous aspects. The gloom of the play is almost unsurpassed. The ingeniousness of its plot may well be called infernal. By throwing doubt on her husband's rights as father of the child held to be theirs in common, the woman in the play manages to undermine the reason of a strong and well-balanced man until he becomes transformed into a raving maniac.

"The Comrades," a modern four-act comedy, portrays the marriage of two artists and shows the woman as a mental parasite, drawing both her inspiration and her skill from the husband, whom she tries to shake off when she thinks him no longer needed for her success. Then came the play of his which is perhaps the most widely known—I mean the realistic drama which, for want of a better English equivalent, must be named here "Miss Juliet." It embodied some startling experiments in form and has undoubtedly exercised a distinct influence on the subsequent development of dramatic technique. On the surface it appears to offer little more than another version of the sex duel, but back of the conflict between man and woman we discover another one, less deep-going perhaps, but rendered more acute by existing conditions. It is the conflict between the upper and partly outlived elements of society and its still unrefined, but vitally unimpaired, strata. And it is the stronger vitality, here represented by the man, which carries the day.

The rest of Strindberg's dramatic productions during this middle, naturalistic period, lasting from 1885 to 1894, included eight more one-act plays, several of which rank very high, and another fairy play, "The Keys to Heaven," which probably marks his nearest approach to a purely negative conception of life.

Paralleling the plays, we find a series of novels and short stories dealing with the people on those islands where Strindberg fifteen years earlier had written his "Master Olof." Two things make these works remarkable: first, the rare understanding shown in them of the life led by the tough race that exists, so to speak, between land and sea; and secondly, their genuine humour, which at times, as in the little story named "The Tailor Has a Dance," rises into almost epic expression. The last of these novels, "At the Edge of the Sea," embodies Strindberg's farthest advance into Nietzschean dreams of supermanhood. But led by his incorruptible logic, he is forced to reduce those dreams to the absurdity which they are sure to involve whenever the superman feels himself standing apart from ordinary humanity.

Finally he wrote, during the earlier part of this marvellously prolific period, five autobiographical novels. One of these was not published until years later. Three others were collectively known as "The Bondwoman's Son," and carried his revelations up to the time of his marriage. The first volume in the series is especially noteworthy because of its searching and sympathetic study of child psychology. But all the novels in this series are of high value because of the sharp light they throw on social conditions. Strindberg's power as an acute and accurate observer has never been questioned, and it has rarely been more strikingly evidenced than in his autobiographical writings. A place by itself, though belonging to the same series, is held by "A Fool's Confession," wherein Strindberg laid bare the tragedy of his first marriage. It is the book that has exposed him to more serious criticism than any other. He wrote it in French and consented to its publication only as a last means of escaping unendurable financial straits. Against his vain protests,

unauthorised translations were brought out in German and Swedish.

The dissolution of his marriage occurred in 1891. The circumstances surrounding that break were extremely painful to Strindberg. Both the facts of the legal procedure and the feelings it evoked within himself have been almost photographically portrayed in the one-act play, "The Link," which forms part of this volume. The "link" which binds man and woman together even when their love is gone and the law has severed all external ties is the child—and it is always for the offspring that Strindberg reserves his tenderest feelings and greatest concern.

After the divorce Strindberg left for Germany, where his works in the meantime had been making steady headway. A couple of years later he was taken up in France, and there was a time during the first half of the nineties, when he had plays running simultaneously at half a dozen Parisian theatres. While at Berlin, he met a young woman writer of Austrian birth who soon after became his second wife. Their marriage lasted only a few years, and while it was not as unhappy as the first one, it helped to bring on the mental crisis for which Strindberg had been heading ever since the prosecution of "Marriage," in 1884.