FOREWORD
August Strindberg died at Stockholm On May 14, 1912, just ten days after the first of his plays given in English in the United States had completed a month's engagement. This play was "The Father," which, on April 9, 1912, was produced at the Berkeley Theatre in New York, the same little theatre that witnessed in 1894 the first performance in this country of Ibsen's "Ghosts."
It happened that August Lindberg, the eminent Swedish actor and friend of Strindberg [who, by the way, was the first producer of "Ghosts" in any language], was visiting this country and came to see a performance of "The Father." His enthusiasm over the interpretation given Strindberg, in the English rendering of the play as well as in the acting, led him to cable a congratulatory message to Strindberg; and upon departing for Stockholm, he asked for some of the many letters of appreciation from significant sources which the production of "The Father" had called forth. These he wished to give to Strindberg as further assurance "that he has," to use Herr Lindberg's words, "the right representatives in this country." It is gratifying to those who esteem it a rare privilege to be the introducers of Strindberg's powerful dramatic art to the American stage to know that he finally found his genius recognized on this side of the ocean.
"Comrades," the first play in the present volume, belongs to the same momentous creative period as "The Father" and "Countess Julie," although there is little anecdotic history attaching to this vigorous comedy. It was written in Denmark, where Strindberg, after finishing "The Father" in Switzerland in 1887, went with his family to live for two years, and was published March 21, 1888.
Although the scene of the comedy is laid in Paris, all the characters are Swedish, which may be accounted for by the fact that the feminist movement, of which "Comrades" is a delicious, stinging satire, had been more agitated at that time in Scandinavia than elsewhere. That Paris was chosen as a background for this group of young artists and writers was probably reminiscent of the time, the early eighties, when Strindberg with his wife and children left Sweden and, after spending some time with a colony of artists not far from Fontainebleau, came to Paris, where there were many friends of other days, and established themselves in that "sad, silent Passy," as Strindberg's own chronicle of those times reads. There he took his walks in the deserted arcades of the empty Trocadero Palace, back of which he lived; went to the Théâtre Français, where he saw the great success of the day, and was startled that "an undramatic bagatelle with threadbare scenery, stale intrigues and superannuated theatrical tricks, could be playing on the foremost stage of the world;" saw at the Palais de l'Industrie the triennial exhibition of art works, "the crème de la crème of three salons, and found not one work of consequence." After some time he came to the conclusion that "the big city is not the heart that drives the pulses," but that it is "the boil that corrupts and poisons," and so betook himself and his family to Switzerland, where they lived in the vicinity of Lake Leman, which environment was made use of years later in the moving one-act play, "Facing Death," presented herewith.
"Pariah," the other one-act play appearing in this volume, is the generally recognized masterpiece of all the short one-act plays. The dialogue is so concentrated that it seems as if not one line could be cut without the whole structure falling to pieces, and in these terse speeches a genius is revealed that, with something of the divine touch, sounds the depths of the human heart and reveals its inmost thoughts. "Pariah" was published in 1890 and "Facing Death" in 1898.
The period of Strindberg's sojourn in Switzerland, 1884-87, was most important in the evolution of the character and work of the man who, throughout his career, was to engage himself so penetratingly and passionately in the psychology of woman, and love, and the problems of marriage, as to acquire the reputation, undeserved though it was, of woman-hater. That this observation and analysis of woman was not induced by natural antipathy to the sex, nor by unhappiness in his own married experience, is made clear by the facts of his life up to the time when such investigation was undertaken. What, then, did sway him to such a choice of theme? Examination of the data of this period from Strindberg's own annals reveals the following influences: Ibsen from his Norwegian throne had hailed woman and the laborer as the two rising ranks of nobility, and Strindberg asked himself if this was ironic, as usual, or prophetic. Feminine individualism was the cult of the hour. The younger generation had, through the doctrines of evolution, become atheistic. Strindberg tells of asking a young writer how he could get along without God. "We have woman instead," was the reply. This was the last stage of Madonna worship! And how had it happened that the new generation had replaced God with woman? "God was the remotest source; when he failed they grasped at the next, the mother. But then they should at least choose the real mother, the real woman, before whom, no matter how strong his spirit, man will always bow when she appears with her life-giving attributes. But the younger generation had pronounced contempt for the mother, and in her place had set up the loathsome, sterile, degenerate amazon—the blue-stocking!"
Earnestly pondering these matters, Strindberg at length decided to write a book about woman, a subject, he declares, which up to this time he had not wanted to think about, as he himself "lived in a happy erotic state, ennobled and beautified by the rejuvenating and expiatory arrival of children." But nevertheless he decided to write such a book, and so with sympathy and much old-fashioned veneration for motherhood the task was undertaken.
Regarding the mother as down-trodden, he wanted to think out a means for her deliverance. To obtain a clear vision he chose as a method the delineation of as large a number as possible of marriage cases that he had seen—and he had seen many, as most of his contemporary friends were married. Of these he chose twelve, the most characteristic, and then he went to work. When he had written about half that number, he stopped and reviewed the collection. The result was entirely different from what he had expected.