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.
He ceased entirely to write and plunged instead into scientific speculation and experimentation. Chemistry was the subject that had the greatest fascination for him, and his dream was to prove the transmutability of the elements. In the course of a prolonged stay at Paris, where he shunned everybody and risked both health and life in his improvised laboratory, his mental state became more and more abnormal, without ever reaching a point where he ceased to realise just what was going on within himself. He began to have psychic experiences of a character that to him appeared distinctly supernatural. At the same time he was led by the reading of Balzac to the discovery of Swedenborg. By quick degrees, though not without much mental suffering, he rejected all that until then had to him represented life's highest truths. From being a materialistic sceptic, he became a believing mystic, to whom this world seemed a mere transitory state of punishment, a "hell" created by his own thoughts.
The crisis took him in the end to a private sanitarium kept by an old friend in the southern part of Sweden, but it would be far from safe to assume that he ever reached a state of actual insanity. His return to health began in 1896 and was completed in a year. In 1897 he resumed his work of artistic creation once more, and with a new spirit that startled those who had held him lost for ever. First of all a flood of personal experiences and impressions needed expression. This he accomplished by his two autobiographical novels, "Inferno" and "Legends," the former of which must be counted one of the most remarkable studies in abnormal psychology in the world's literature. Next came "The Link" and another one-act play. In 1898 he produced the first two parts of "To Damascus," a play that—in strikingly original form, and with a depth of thought and feeling not before achieved—embodied his own soul's long pilgrimage in search of internal and external harmony. The last part of the trilogy was not added until 1904.
Then followed ten years of production so amazing that it surpassed his previous high-water mark during the middle eighties, both in quality and quantity. Once for all the mood and mode of his creation had been settled. He was still a realist in so far as faithfulness to life was concerned, but the reality for which he had now begun to strive was spiritual rather than material. He can, during this final period, only be classed as a symbolist, but of the kind typified by Ibsen in the series of masterpieces beginning with "Rosmersholm" and ending with "Little Eyolf."
More and more as he pushes on from one height to another, he manages to fuse the two offices of artist and moralist without injury to either of them. His view of life is still pessimistic, but back of man's earthly disappointments and humiliations and sufferings he glimpses a higher existence to which this one serves merely as a preparation. Everything that happens to himself and to others seems to reveal the persistent influence of secret powers, pulling and pushing, rewarding and punishing, but always urging and leading man to some goal not yet bared to his conscious vision. Resignation, humility, kindness become the main virtues of human existence. And the greatest tragedy of that existence he sees in man's—that is, his own—failure to make all his actions conform to those ideals. Thus, in the closing line of his last play, "The Great Highway," he pleads for mercy as one who has suffered more than most "from the inability to be that which we will to be."
Among the earliest results of his autumnal renascence was a five-act historical drama named "Gustavus Vasa." It proved the first of a dozen big plays dealing with the main events in his country's history from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. As a rule they were built about a monarch whose reign marked some national crisis. Five stand out above the rest in artistic value: "Gustavus Vasa," "Erie XIV," "Gustavus Adolphus," "Charles XII," and "The Last Knight." At once intensely national and broadly human in their spirit, these plays won for Strindberg a higher place in his countrymen's hearts than he had ever before held—though notes of discord were not missing on account of the freedom with which he exposed and demolished false idols and outlived national ideals. As they stand to-day, those dramas have in them so much of universal appeal that I feel sure they must sooner or later win the same attention in the English-speaking countries that they have already received in Germany.
While thus recalling the past to new life, he was also busy with another group of plays embodying what practically amounts to a new dramatic form. The literary tendency underlying them might be defined as realistic symbolism or impressionistic mysticism—you can take your choice! The characters in those plays are men and women very much belonging to our own day. They speak as you or I might do. And yet there is in them and about them a significance surpassing not only that of the ordinary individual, but also that of ordinary poetical portrayals of such individuals.
"There Are Crimes and Crimes," "Christmas," "Easter," and "Midsummer" are the principal plays belonging to this group. With them must be classed the trio of fairy or "dream" plays written under the acknowledged influence of Maeterlinck. In the first of these, the charming dramatic legend named "Swanwhite," the impetus received from the Belgian makes itself clearly felt. In the last of them, "The Dream Play," Strindberg has worked out a form that is wholly new and wholly his own. As the play in question forms part of this volume, I shall not need to speak of it here in the manner it would otherwise deserve.
Related to the group just described, and yet not confinable within it, stands the double drama, "The Dance of Death," which also appears in this volume. Numerous critics have declared it Strindberg's greatest play, and there is much in the work to warrant such a judgment. Its construction is masterly. Its characters are almost shockingly real. And yet the play as a whole is saturated with that sense of larger relationships which we are wont to dispose of by calling it "mysticism." Like all of Strindberg's work belonging to this period, it constitutes a huge piece of symbolism—but the subject of its symbolical interpretation seems to be nothing less than the sum of human interrelationships.
During the last three or four years of the decade we are now dealing with, Strindberg was very much interested in the project of establishing a theatre at Stockholm, where nothing but his own productions were to be staged. The plan was actually carried out and a building arranged that held only about two hundred people. It was called the Intimate Theatre. There Strindberg made some highly interesting experiments in the simplification and standardising of scenery, until at last some of his plays were given with no other accessories than draperies. The effects thus obtained proved unexpectedly successful. For this stage Strindberg wrote five dramas which he defined as "chamber plays." In form they harked back to "Miss Juliet," and they were meant to be played without interruptions. But in spirit they were marked by the same blend of mysticism and realism that forms such a striking feature of "The Dream Play," for instance. Add to these another fairy play, "The Slippers of Abu Casem," and a final autobiographical drama named "The Great Highway," and we get a total of twenty-nine dramatic works in ten years. For more critical treatment of Strindberg's art I would refer the reader to my articles in The Forum of February and March, 1912.