[5] A third and unaltered edition of this book, which is now regarded as one of the classical works on the subject, was issued during 1912 (H. Gebers Förlag, Stockholm).
[6] En Bok om Strindberg (Karlstad, 1894).
[CHAPTER VI]
THE ARTIST
Whilst fighting the battle of realism in fiction Strindberg had prepared the dramatic form which was to be his contribution to the "new" theatre, on which the curtain was about to rise. The demand for a new dramatic art had become imperative. Tired of the admonitions and stale declamations of the old rhetorical play, the public had asked for a representation of life. Dumas père had responded by writing the drama of personality, Dumas fils by establishing the play of moral problems. Ibsen had built the psychological play on the foundation of Dumas and had endowed the Norwegian language with a new sonority. Scribe had supplied fine technique and neat carpentry for the new French stage, but Paris, the petulant playgoer, sighed for other things.
Zola raised the cry of naturalism. The artificial plots of Dumas, Augier and Sardou were to be superseded by dramatic flashes of reality. "I yearn for life, with its shiver, its breath and its strength; I long for life as it is," cried the author of Thérèse Raquin, and Strindberg responded. In September, 1887, The Father was published, the first of the series of naturalistic plays through which Strindberg's European reputation as a modern dramatist and a woman-hater was established. The institution in the same year of the Théâtre Libre, by M. André Antoine, provided a stage which was wholly adapted to the revolt against old-fashioned theatricality.
M. Antoine was an employee at the gas-works who had a passionate faith in realistic drama. With a group of sympathetic dilettanti he began evening performances in a large room in Place Pigalle without the stage mechanism of the commercial theatre. Success attended the enthusiastic players, and the performances at the Théâtre Libre became the rendezvous of the intellectual and artistic world which gravitates to Paris. The soul of the enterprise, M. Antoine, was manager, actor, scene-painter, and mechanic. The theatre was semi-private. Special invitation cards to elect audiences protected the actors from the attention of gallery-opinion. The actors and authors of the new plays were the hosts in this home of dramatic revolution, where every original playwright was welcome. Strindberg's The Father, Lady Julie and Creditors were amongst the first plays produced, and he, therefore, had the satisfaction of being played in Paris before any appearance on the French stage of the "famous Norwegian blue-stocking." Tolstoy's Powers of Darkness, Zola's Thérèse Raquin, Emile Fabre's L'Argent, an adaptation of the brothers de Goncourt's Sœur Philomène and Villiers' "L'Evasion," belonged to the early repertoire. Ghosts was the first of Ibsen's plays to appear; it was followed by Rosmersholm. The Théâtre Libre lasted eight years. It had time to create a "modernity" in taste and dramatic expression which produced similar free theatres in Berlin and London, and a vogue of naturalism which included every variety of "life," and which, occasionally, gave undue preference to lubricity and morbidity.