Julie. That is all very fine. But, Jean, you must give me courage. Say that you love me. Come and take me in your arms.
Jean (hesitating). I would like to, but I dare not. Not here in this house. I love you without doubt. Can you doubt it?
Julie (shyly, with true womanly feeling). You! Say "thou" to me. Between us there are no longer any barriers. Say "thou."
Jean (troubled). I cannot. There are still barriers between us so long as we remain in this house. There is the past, there is the Count. I have never met anyone who compelled such respect from me. I have only to see his gloves lying on a chair to feel quite small. I have only to hear his bell, and I start like a shying horse. And when I now look at his boots, standing there so stiff and stately, it is as if something made my back bend. (He kicks the boots.) Superstition, prejudice which have been driven into us from childhood, but which may be as easily forgotten again. If you will only come into another country, into a republic, people will cringe before my porter's livery. People shall cringe, but I shall not cringe. I was not born to cringe, for there is stuff in me; there is character in me; and if once I grip the lowest branch, you shall watch me climb. To-day I am a lackey, but next year I am a proprietor; in ten years I shall be independent, and then I go to Roumania and get myself an order. I can—mark well I say I can—a count.
Julie. Fine, fine!
Jean. Ah, in Roumania a man can buy a count's title, and then you will be a countess—my countess.
Julie. What do I care for what I have cast aside! Say that you love me, or else—ah, what am I else?
Jean. I will say it a thousand times—later on. But not here. And, above all, no sentimentality, or all is lost. We must keep cool like sensible people. (He takes out a cigar, cuts the end, and lights it.) Sit down there, and I will sit here, and then we can chat as if nothing had happened.
Julie (in despair). Oh, my God! Have you no feelings?
Jean. I! Why, there is no one more sensitive than I, but I can command my feelings.
Julie. A short time ago you would have kissed my shoe, and now——
Jean (coldly). Yes, before. But now we have something else to think about.
They cannot flee without money. Jean suggests that she can steal the necessary sum in her father's room. He taunts her with her weakness until she robs her father. They prepare to leave the house. The girl wants to bring her greenfinch. Infuriated by her sentimentality, Jean snatches the bird from her and kills it. The man's brutality and meanness are suddenly revealed to her; her brain reels under the humiliation which she has brought upon herself. She hurls curses at the head of the impudent domestic. The morning has come, and Christine enters the kitchen on her way to church. The girl appeals to her, seeks her sympathy, but Christine's feelings of propriety are too shocked to allow of any pity for the fallen girl. She leaves them. The Count returns. They hear him in his room, know that he will discover the theft. His daughter is half demented with fear, remorse, shame; she is incapable of deciding what to do. Jean's servant conscience has been awakened by the arrival of his master. The Count is there to command, Jean to obey. And when Lady Julie wants him to tell her what to do he hands her a razor—with the complacency with which he might hand his mistress the riding-whip. She leaves the kitchen and kills herself.
Such are the outlines of this painful play, the most "successful" of Strindberg's naturalistic dramas. Again we have a struggle between man and woman, but this time the opposites of class and blood are added to those of sex. The healthy egotism, the common instincts of self-preservation in the valet endow him with a physical stability against which Lady Julie's emotions break like foam against a rock. She goes, he remains. Like The Admirable Crichton, Jean knows that there must be masters and servants in this world of inequality, and, though his passions for once mastered his conviction, he is soundly submissive to social law and order. In Lady Julie, Strindberg has sketched the useless, unnatural, pleasure-loving, hysterical woman of the leisured classes whom he detests.
In the preface to the play he analyses this type of woman. "Lady Julie is a modern character," he writes, "not as if the half-woman, the man-hater, had not existed in all times, but because she has now been discovered, has appeared on the scene, and created a disturbance." In such women he sees a danger to the race, for, as a rule, they attract degenerate men, and transmit their own misery to another generation. They sell themselves for "power, decorations, distinctions, diplomas," and produce beings of undecided sex to whom life is useless. For such psycho-pathological creatures Strindberg sees no hope beyond that of elimination through contact with reality (Jean was "reality" to Lady Julie), or a fatal outburst of long-suppressed sexual instincts. "The type is tragic," he concludes, "offering the spectacle of a desperate struggle against nature; tragic as a romantic inheritance which is now being destroyed by the naturalism which only seeks happiness; and only strong and good species are compatible with happiness."
Justin McCarthy translated Lady Julie into English, and expressed his admiration for the unalloyed realism of the piece in an article in The Fortnightly Review. The mental intensity with which Strindberg visualised the character of Lady Julie is strangely impressive. There is no extravagant or jejune theorising; it is drama vehemently conceived and true to its creator. But the horror which moved Justin McCarthy when reading the play, and which most readers experience, is a product of Strindberg's peculiar misogyny which, for the purposes of the play, he coupled with the ordinary standard of convention and morality. Lady Julie's disgrace is unpardonable from the point of view of society. She dies in deference to its verdict. We cannot imagine a drama by Strindberg, in which tragedy is woven out of the misconduct of a Lord Julius instead of a Lady Julie. A young "blood," neurotic, suffering from ennui, and seeking temporary distraction in the company of Jeanne, the valet's daughter, would not have inspired a naturalistic drama of sex and caste. There is a wealth of material which can be used to épater le bourgeois in the idea of a well-bred woman's precipitous "return to nature." The commonplace spectacle of a similar descent on the part of a well-bred man affords none.
In Comrades we meet the type of woman who surpasses Lady Julie in anti-social attributes. Laura is something of a female tigress, the mother whose claws are ready to tear all but the cub; Lady Julie, with her hysteria I and her caprices is still the womanly woman. But Bertha who is united to her "comrade" Axel in a marriage of equality is worse than they. She is plain, mannish, ambitious; a mental parasite who suppresses her womanhood and simulates her husband's talents. The rival of man, the unsexed, simian-brained shrew, Strindberg's bête noire.
Comrades is a four-act comedy of marriage. Axel Alberg and his wife are Swedish painters in Paris. They have each painted a picture which has been submitted to the Salon. In Act I we find Axel at work in the studio. He is a good fellow, honest, painstaking, generous. Friends call and discover his embarrassing position as a married comrade. There is the doctor, mature in experience and philosophical in outlook, who when Axel asks him if he does not believe in woman answers: "No, I don't. But I love her." There is the sensible, matter-of-fact Lieutenant Starck, who will stand no nonsense from women, and whose happy, normal wife knows that woman's real happiness is found in subjection unto her husband. They are shocked to hear of Bertha's tastes and habits. Bertha comes home. She has kept her nude male model waiting, and her poor husband has had to pay five francs in consequence of her unpunctuality. This is a small part of the sacrifices he has made for her artistic career. In the scenes that follow we see Bertha insisting on keeping the household accounts, though her head cannot grapple with the simplest problems of addition and subtraction. She has made false entries, and deliberately deceives Axel as to the manner in which the funds of the comradeship are expended. She coquettes with Willmer, a young writer, and receives presents from him. Intent upon securing the acceptance of her picture, she makes nefarious use of Axel's love for her.
Bertha. Will you be very kind to me? Very?
Axel. I always want to be kind to you, my dear.
Bertha. Do you? Look here, you know Roubey, don't you?
Axel. Yes, I met him in Vienna, and we became good friends.
Bertha. You know that he is a member of the jury?
Axel. Well, what about that?
Bertha. Yes, now you will be angry. I know it.
Axel. If you know it, don't make me angry.
Bertha (caresses him). You won't sacrifice anything for your wife—nothing.
Axel. Go and beg? No, that I won't do.
Bertha. Not for yourself, for your picture will probably be accepted all the same, but for your wife?
Axel. Don't ask me.
Bertha. I should really never ask anything of you.
Axel. Yes, things which I can do without sacrificing....
Bertha. Your manly pride.
Axel. Let us leave it at that.
Bertha. But I should sacrifice my womanly pride, if I could help you.
Axel. You have no pride.
Bertha. Axel!
Axel. There, there, forgive me.
Bertha. I am sure you are jealous of me. I am sure you would not like my picture to be accepted.
Axel. Nothing would delight me more, I assure you, Bertha.
Bertha. Would it also delight you if I were accepted and you were refused?
Axel. I must feel (laying his hand on his heart). I am sure it would be an unpleasant feeling—sure. Both because I paint better than you, and because....
Bertha. Say it straight out,—because I am a woman.
Axel. Yes, also for that reason. It is strange, but I have a feeling as if you women were intruders, forcing your way in and demanding the spoils of the battle which we men have fought whilst you sat by the fireside. Forgive me, Bertha, for saying this, but such thoughts come to me.
Bertha. You are just like all other men, exactly.
Axel. Like all other men. I hope so.
Bertha. And lately you have assumed such superiority; you used not to be like that.
Axel. I suppose that is because I am superior. Do something which we men have not already done.
Bertha. What! What are you saying? Are you not ashamed?
Bertha changes her tone, and plays the humble comrade who is sorely in need of a little encouragement. Axel rejects her arguments, but eventually goes to Monsieur Roubey. During Axel's absence a letter arrives containing the information that his picture has been refused. Bertha guesses its contents and revels in the luxury of pity and schadenfreude. Axel returns, after finding Madame Roubey at home, (a meeting cleverly foreseen by Bertha) with the news that Bertha's picture has already been accepted. He congratulates Bertha on her success. He is confident that his picture will also be accepted. She hands him the letter. The scène de rupture is inevitable.
Axel (lays his hand on his heart and sits down). What ... (controls himself). This is a blow which I did not expect. This is most unpleasant.
Bertha. Well, perhaps I can help you now.
Axel. You look as if you enjoyed my defeat, Bertha. Oh, I feel a great hatred of you stirring within me!
Bertha. I look happy, perhaps, because I have had a success, but when one is tied to a man who cannot rejoice in one's happiness it is difficult to feel sorry when he is unhappy.
Axel. I don't know what has happened, but it seems to me that we have become enemies now. The struggle for a position has come between us, and we can no longer be friends.
Bertha. Does not your sense of justice tell you that the one who was most competent won the battle?
Axel. You were not the most competent.
Bertha. But the jury thought so.
Axel. The jury? But you know very well that you cannot paint as well as I do.
Bertha. Are you sure of that?