These passages were written by Strindberg fourteen years after the completion of the play to which they refer. We have other evidence, however, that, while he might have seen things more clearly in retrospect, he had not been lured by the lapse of time into placing his characters in a light different from that in which they were conceived. On the list of characters forming part of the original handwritten manuscript of the first version of Master Olof, now preserved in the Public Library of Gothenburg, Sweden, the author has jotted down certain very significant notes opposite the more important names. Thus he has written opposite the name of the King: "To accomplish something in this world, one has to risk morality and conscience;" opposite the name of Olof: "He who strives to realize an idea develops greatness of personality—he accomplishes good by his personal example, but he is doomed to perish;" opposite that of Bishop Brask: "There is movement in whatever exists—whatever stands still must be crushed;" and opposite that of Gert: "He who wills more than his reason can grasp must go mad."
Such was the play with which the young Strindberg returned to the Swedish capital in the fall of 1872; and let us remember in this connection, that up to the time in question no dramatic work of similar importance had ever been produced in Sweden. Its completion was more epoch-making for Sweden than that of Brand was for Norway in 1865—since the coming of Ibsen's first really great play was heralded by earlier works leading up to it, while Master Olof appeared where nobody had any reason to expect it. This very fact militated against its success, of course; it was too unexpected, and also too startlingly original, both in spirit and in form.
At the time there was only one stage in Sweden where such a work could be produced—the Royal Theatre at Stockholm. To the officials of this state—supported institution Strindberg submitted his work—hopefully, as we know from his own statement. It was scornfully and ignominiously rejected, the main criticism being that a serious historical drama in prose was unthinkable. I shall make no comment whatever on that judgment, having in mind how several years later Edmund Gosse bewailed the failure of Ibsen to give a metrical form to his Emperor and Galilean.
Strindberg's next effort concerned publication. In this respect he was equally unsuccessful, although as a rule it has never been very difficult in Sweden to find a publisher for any work of reasonable merit. But the play was not only too original, it was too dangerously radical for a country where a truly modern form of representative government had not been achieved until seven years earlier. Strindberg was at first stunned by this failure. He seriously contemplated giving up writing altogether. When he had recovered somewhat, he seems reluctantly to have faced the possibility that the fault might be found in the play and not in the public.
So he set about to re-write it—and he did so not only once but repeatedly, producing in all six versions that differ more or less from one another. At first he clung to the prose form. Gradually he began to introduce verse, until finally, in 1877 or 1878, he completed an almost new play, where the metrical form predominated without being used exclusively. This version was actually published in 1878. Originally, an epilogue was appended to it, but this was dropped from all but a small part of the first edition. It is supposed to take place a number of years later than the fifth act, and shows Olof with his two sons outside the city walls of Stockholm, where they witness a miracle-play introducing God as the principle of darkness and Lucifer as the overthrown but never conquered principle of light. The bitter generalizations of this afterthought explain Sufficiently why it was excluded. To the later Strindberg—the man who wrote Advent, for instance—it must have seemed one of his most unforgivable offences.
Although Strindberg's main object in working over his play undoubtedly was to obtain its production, the metrical version was not put on the stage until 1890, when, however, it was performed at the Royal Theatre, toward which its author had looked so longingly and so vainly eighteen years earlier. The prose version, on the other hand, was produced as early as 1881, at the New Theatre in Stockholm, but was not published until the same year, when it appeared in book form grouped with a number of other writings from Strindberg's earliest period.
Of the five unprinted versions connecting the original prose drama of 1872 with the final metrical form of 1878, more or less complete manuscripts have been preserved, and these are now being examined in detail by the Swedish literary historian, Professor Karl Warburg. A summary analysis by Dr. John Landquist is appended to the second volume of the definitive edition of Strindberg's complete works (Albert Bonnier, Stockholm), where the epilogue to the metrical version is also reprinted after so many years of oblivion.
"Of all the manuscripts preceding the final metrical version," says Dr. Landquist, "the original one, written when Strindberg was twenty-three, is the masterpiece. There everything is consistent; there the dialogue has a power and an incisiveness to which it does not attain in any of the unprinted manuscripts. On the contrary, these seem more youthful than the original, producing at times an impression of immaturity and uncertainty on the part of the author. Even when some isolated phrase strikes one as fortunate, it does not tend to strengthen the drama as a whole. The later versions lack that sense of inner unity and that audacious touch which lend fascination and power to the original manuscript.
"Not until we reach the first metrical version (of 1876) does the full power of the playwright begin to reassert itself in such fashion that out of his untiring labors at last springs a new work, the mood of which differs essentially from that of the first prose version. These two versions—the first and the final—are the results of diametrically opposed methods of work. The first was written with a certainty and swiftness of inspiration that raised the young poet far above the productive powers generally characteristic of his years. The subsequent modifications prove merely how futile are the efforts of reason to improve what intuition has inspired. But gradually it seems to have dawned on the poet that he was about to evolve a wholly new work—that what he had come to aim at was quite distinct from what he had been aiming at in the beginning, and from that moment his artistic reasoning carried him onward until at last a new inspiration brought the work to its completion."
Concerning the final metrical version, I can give only a few outstanding and rather superficial facts, hoping that I may some time have the opportunity of presenting it entire to the American public. Like the prose version, it has five acts, but these are not subdivided into scenes. It is briefer, more concentrated both in spirit and in form, and may be said to display a greater unity of purpose. It is more human, too, and less titanic. The change shows itself strikingly in a figure like that of Mårten, who in the metrical version has become softened into an unconscionable but rather lovable rapscallion. The last remark but one made by Mårten when driven from Dame Christine's deathbed by Olof is: "Talk to your mother, son—the two of you have so much to forgive each other."