Strindberg suggests the soul's corruption and the soul's ineffable sweetness with the same impassioned power of creation. In Swanwhite, the charming fairy play in which the influence of Maeterlinck is discernible, the budding love between a fairy-like princess and a chivalrous prince is described with a delicacy which brings the reader into a land of romance and roses, of stainless purity and spring-like innocence. In Advent we are brought into the house of wickedness, of cruel, designing, ancient wickedness. The old judge and his wife are steeped in every variety of human treachery and vileness. They die, and we follow them into the darkness of hell, where the seven deadly sins have grouped themselves around the throne of the monarch. Through the pain of being made to see themselves as they really are, they cry out for light. In both pieces the "supernatural" plays the most important part; the wicked stepmother in Swanwhite exhales a breath of evil before which the rose fades, and the dove falls dead; the ill-treated children in Advent are comforted by a mysterious playmate, clad in white, who brings light into the dark cellar in which they have been imprisoned. The story in The Crown Bride of a peasant girl, who kills her child, is told with an exalted simplicity, and given a setting of the old fairy-faith of Dalecarlia which peoples the rivers with nature-spirits and the forests with trolls. Here, as in the other fairy plays, things are endowed with souls, and the fierce hatred between the two old peasant families is reflected by every object that surrounds them. Unknown forces are all the time engaged in a mystic underplay which is the real action of the piece.
The law of karma—the chain of cause and effect—runs through all these plays, and binds together the psychological sequence where the dramatic construction fails. In Easter Strindberg has drawn the anguish of a little bourgeois family, labouring under the misfortunes following upon the father's defalcations. He is in prison, and Elis, his son, a schoolmaster, who is meticulously honest, is weighed down by shame, and tormented by the fear that the man to whom the father is heavily indebted, will exercise his right and seize the furniture. The family look upon this man, Lindkvist, as an ogre, and when they learn that he has come to live in the same town they are in constant fear that he will ruin them. Throughout the three acts of this very playable piece Strindberg gives a highly finished and concentrated picture of those multiple and long-lived sufferings of the innocent, which follow in the wake of transgressions committed by the guilty. But he makes Lindkvist an arbiter of fate, a messenger of hope who shows that good as well as evil is minutely recorded in the great Book of Events. For long ago when Elis' father was a young man, and before he placed himself within the meshes of the law, he did Lindkvist a kindness. That kindness has never been forgotten; it lay like a seed of life in Lindkvist's soul, and, as it grew, it made him a generous man. And thus Lindkvist forgives and forgets, and the spirit of Easter is resurrected in the hearts of the family. Eleonora, the pure and tender-spirited girl who went mad on the day when her father was sent to prison, is wrongfully suspected of having stolen a daffodil plant in the shop of the adjoining florist. The symbolism of the piece is made complete by the strange play of the shadow of paternal crime on the guiltless child. In her mad innocence of the world's ways Eleonora has taken the flowerpot and left a shilling and her name on the counter, but the coin and the name are not seen by the agitated shopkeeper who is anxious to brand the suspected culprit. The "theft" is at last satisfactorily explained. Eleonora speaks with the wisdom of many lives when she says: "I was born old ... I knew everything already when I was born, and when I learnt something I only recollected. When I was four years old I knew men's ... thoughtlessness and foolishness, and therefore people were unkind to me."
The force of suggestion, the primary importance of thought form the keynote of several of Strindberg's plays. In Eric XIV he lets Göran Persson say to Eric: "King and friend, you so often use the word hate that at last you imagine yourself to be the enemy of humanity. Don't use it! The word is the first realisation of the creative force, and you throw a spell over yourself by this incantation. Say 'love' a little oftener, and you will imagine yourself loved." There are Crimes and Crimes, a play in four acts which has been a great theatrical success, is built around the subtle force of evil thought. Maurice, a dramatist of the Bohemian world in Paris, who is about to receive the laurels of fame deserts his mistress and his child to follow a woman bent on pleasure only; in the elation of their passion they wish death to Maurice's child and destruction to all obstacles in their way. The child dies mysteriously in the morning, and through a combination of malign circumstances Maurice is accused of being the murderer. He is innocent, but he has sinned in thought, and when, at the end of the fourth act, he is mercifully extracted from the vortex, into which he has brought himself, the Abbé says to him: "You were not innocent, for we are also responsible for our thoughts, words, desires, and you murdered in thought when your evil will wished for the death of your child."
There are Crimes and Crimes does full justice to Strindberg as an accomplished stage craftsman; in The Dance of Death we have, perhaps, the most sharply chiselled dramatic form of all his later plays. It is a symphony of married hatred and misery in which the orchestration is perfect. The dialogue is at once natural and calculated; the silent play of the piece even more intensely suggestive than the spoken words. We get glimpses of the dramatic art of bygone days: that of Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; we are mercilessly ground in the mill of a ghastly nineteenth-century problem play. The figure of the Captain of the Fortress, the untruthful, scheming old rascal who has attained to a diabolical mastery in the art of making others unhappy and uncomfortable, is drawn with a supreme irony which makes it unique in vital drama. Amongst Strindberg's realistic plays it has another distinction: it represents his only stage-creation of a vampire-like husband. The wife is naturally not far behind him. Death stands behind the central figures of the play, the dancing death of Holbein and Saint-Saëns. The strains of his tune drown the jarring notes of conflict, and bring the voice of hope to the Captain's lips: "Wipe out, and pass on!"
The trilogy To Damascus, with its autobiographical wanderings on the crooked paths of experience, is perhaps the strangest literary play ever written. It contains the elements of the old miracle and morality plays, the soul's battle with itself and with the Devil, its final renouncement of the world and entry into the new Life. "The Stranger" meets "The Lady"; together they journey from station to station on the road of suffering and disillusionment. They part in hatred, and meet again in the vicissitudes of love. They separate finally as The Stranger attains to peace, religious peace, in the monastery of dead passions on the top of the hill. The stages that He between the beginning and the end of the journey are described in scenes which are both possible and impossible. The Beggar, The Doctor, The Sister, The Mother, The Old Man, The Confessor, The Abbess, The Fool, The Shadows, and The Children all take their assigned parts as separate individuals. And yet they seem to be one and the same, fragments of a multiple personality. All things and all thoughts come back in this play like the top spun by a skilful player of diabolo. The Stranger climbs a mountain, and arrogantly threatens the Lord of the skies with a cross which he has snatched from a Calvary. He falls, and is found in raving delirium by the kind Samaritans of the Convent who bring him to their hospital. He regains consciousness, and finds himself seated at a table in the Refectory in company with the shades of all whom he has injured, or with whose fate his own is bound up. The scene is one of the deepest religious realism. It has a touch of that crushing and unreasonable sense of guilt which often accompanies the return to physical life of one who has been to the very gates of death. The curse of Deuteronomy is read by The Confessor, and every word brands the memory of The Stranger with the seal of The Law. Of this consciousness of guilt The Stranger says: "There are moments when I feel as if I carried within me all the sin and sorrow and uncleanliness and shame of the world; there are moments when I believe that the wicked act, crime itself, is an imposed punishment."
The world gives a banquet in honour of The Stranger, who has succeeded in making gold. But the banquet is so arranged as to show the envy and hatred and treachery which lie behind the festive speeches, the fickleness of public approval. In the portrait gallery of the monastery The Stranger is shown the real selves of great men who have been honoured for their consistency, whilst they have been bundles of inconsistencies—Napoleon, Luther, Voltaire, Goethe, Bismarck. The yearning for the peace that passeth all understanding is well expressed when The Stranger, bruised and tired, weary of searching and self-disgust, sees the white monastery on the hill and cries:
"Anything so white I never before beheld on this dirty earth, except in my dreams; yes, this is my youth's dream of a house wherein dwell peace and purity. I greet thee, white house.... Now, I am at home."
It is as if the heat of imagination, which produced some of Strindberg's great books, were too great to permit him to leave a subject, when, artistically, it is finished. After Inferno he wrote Legends which was but a faint echo. The theme of To Damascus is weakly repeated in The Great Highway, a drama in verse and prose which also deals with the soul's fearful struggle and disillusionment. To Damascus contains some shallow thoughts and some banalities of expression, but it is a powerful creation, magnificently conceived. In The Great Highway the mysticism falls flat, the play does not grip by any poetic power; it is an olla podrida of its author's philosophy of life which sometimes is not even lukewarm. But it does contain some gems of lyrical beauty, and one or two passages in which Strindberg reaches his own heights.