But of all Strindberg's plays, indisputably the most powerful is Miss Julie, that gripping tragedy of the over-sexed young woman who on an oppressive mid-summer evening insists on being seduced by her father's butler. The girl is of noble birth, and the duel of sex is intensified by the duel of class. In the fifty pages of this play, with its three characters of the woman, the butler, and the cook, which observes rigorously the Aristotelian unities, every element of the highest and gravest tragedy is introduced with the most accurate and natural psychology—the exaggerated dancing of the daughter of the house, who competes with her own cook for the favours of her own butler-lover; the ribald grins and songs of the servants; the mingled insolence, common sense, and respectfulness of the domestic; the hysterical reaction of the déclassée and dishonoured girl. The following passages may perhaps give some faint idea of this work's sustained and infernal power:
[John opens the cupboard, takes a bottle of wine out, and fills two used glasses.
THE YOUNG LADY. Where do you get the wine from?
JOHN. From the cellar.
THE YOUNG LADY. My father's burgundy.
JOHN. Ain't it good enough for his son-in-law?
THE WOMAN. Thief!
JOHN. Are you going to blab?
THE LADY. Oh—oh—the accomplice of a thief....
JOHN. You hate men-folk, miss?
THE LADY. Yes, as a rule!... But at times, when I feel weak—ugh!
JOHN. You hate me, too?
THE LADY. Infinitely! I could have killed you like an animal....
And how clutching is the climax, when the girl, a simultaneous prey to nausea with life and to fear of death, persuades her domestic to hypnotise her into suicide at almost the precise minute when her father is ringing for his boots:
THE YOUNG LADY. Have you never been in a theatre and seen the mesmerist? He says to the subject: "Take the broom"; he takes it. He says "Sweep"; and he sweeps....
JOHN (takes his razor and puts it into her hand). Here is the broom—go now where there's plenty of light—into the barn—and—(whispers into her ear).
Miss Julie is remarkable as being the only one of Strindberg's works in which the man comes off victorious with the exception of the four-act Comrades, that sombre comedy of Parisian artist life, where the crowing wife bullies her self-sacrificing husband on the score of having ousted him from the Salon by her own successful picture, only to be told that he had simply changed the numbers, and to be finally ejected from her perverted home by that reasserted man whose efficiency she had despised and exploited, but whose virile despotism she now begins to love.
In The Creditor, Strindberg treats again his favourite theme of the vampire woman and the spoliated man. Thekla, the usual worthless, demoniac female, having dissolved her marriage with the schoolmaster Gustav, has married the artist Adolph. The scene is the sea-side. Thekla has gone off on some jaunt. Her new husband, who is apparently even more miserable without than with his wife, is a nervous wreck. He makes the acquaintance of the old husband, who presents himself incognito to readjust the balance of his matrimonial account. Gustav plays with masterly hypnotism on the suggestibility of his colleague, making him doubt himself, his vocation, his health, and at last his wife. And then when his wife returns, and the enfeebled husband has made an abortive attempt at asserting his theoretic virile superiority, he makes love to the wife, is detected by the visitors, and goes back to his own solitary misery, to leave his wife stranded and his new confrere dead. Note, too, that here again the human triangle is complete in itself, and that the agony is protracted to the last shred of its passion without ever flagging for one single moment.
Space prohibits any complete discussion of the remaining plays in the cycle of Strindberg's Eleven One-acters. Yet we would mention Motherly Love, a variation on the theme of Mrs. Warren. The souteneuse mother, with all her loathsome affectation of wounded parental feeling, plays judiciously on the morbidly filial conscience of a clean-minded but weak-willed actress-daughter, prevents her from obtaining respectable friends or advancement on the stage, in order to preserve for herself her sole professional stock-in-trade.
Equally impressive is The Bond, which expresses in one divorce-court scene the whole mordant tragedy of wrangling matrimony and authentic parental affection.
In a lighter vein is Playing with Fire, the one real comedy which Strindberg ever wrote. In this the delightful ménage of a young son, a young wife, a young friend of the family, a young charity cousin, and a philistine but by no means senile father, everybody is flirting with everybody else. Particularly admirable in its mixture of the comic and the ironic is the character and attitude of the conceited and ultra-modern artist-husband, genuinely jealous of that friend and of that wife whom he loves so sincerely, and yet throwing them into each other's arms in a compounded mood of priggish bravado and authentic affection. The friend, apprehensive lest he may have a bad conscience, is anxious to take a room in the village.
THE WIFE. Why don't you stay with us? Out with it.
THE FRIEND. I don't know. I think you ought to be left quiet. Besides it might happen that we should get fed up with each other.
THE WIFE. Are you fed up with us already? I tell you, it won't do. I tell you that if you stay out there in the village, people will begin to talk.
THE FRIEND. Talk? What will they talk about?
THE WIFE. Oh, you know perfectly well how stories get put together.
THE SON. You stay here—there's an end of it. Let them talk. If you stay here, it goes without saying that you're my wife's lover, and if you stay in the village, it goes without saying that you've broken with each other, or that I've kicked you out. Consequently, I think it more honourable for you to be regarded as her lover—eh, what?
THE FRIEND. You certainly express yourself with considerable lucidity; but in a case like this, I'd rather prefer to consider which is honourable for you two.