The Dream Play is a new conception and a new art. In a memorandum to the play Strindberg writes: "In this Dream Play, as in the previous one To Damascus, the author has sought to imitate the disconnected, but apparently logical form of the dream. Anything may happen; everything is possible and probable. Time and space do not exist;, on an insignificant background of reality imagination spins threads and weaves new patterns: a mixture of memories, experiences, free fancies, absurdities and improvisations. The characters split, double, multiply, evaporate, solidify, diffuse, clarify. But one consciousness reigns above them all—that of the dreamer; it knows no secrets, no incongruities, no scruples, no law."
The texture of To Damascus is solid compared with that of The Dream Play. The story of the descent of the Daughter of Indra into matter, of human life as typified by The Glazier, The Officer, The Lawyer, The Bill-poster and The Poet, is told without any dramatic sequence, such as is required by the theatre of to-day. It is a play written for a stage not yet built, to be performed by some diaphanous visitants from the astral world. Strindberg calls The Dream Play a Buddhistic and proto-Christian drama. It is more than that: it is pre-cosmic.
The paradoxical versatility of a man who holds all the keys of successful drama in his hands, and yet sacrifices the theatre to the transcendentalism of his ideas, is not easily explained. Strindberg told Dr. John Landquist, now editor of the posthumous edition of his collected works, that he really found it difficult to write modern plays, and that he loved pomp and circumstance in drama.[3] That love is displayed in the sumptuous repast introduced into the second part of To Damascus, at once coarsely barbaric and uncomfortably ethereal, a strange combination of the Banquet of Life and the Swedish hors-d'œuvre table. And yet, this is the man who wrote the Chamber Plays: Storm, The Burned Lot, The Pelican, The Black Glove and The Spook Sonata (1907), in which the figures move, physical, yet free from the three dimensions, impersonated ideas, brain-spectres who walk the boards with unsteady feet. This is the man who wrote the preface to Lady Julie, who sought the realisation of his theatrical ideal in the one-act play with two or three characters, and who later came to write Gustavus Adolphus with fifty-four characters, Midsummer with thirty-two characters; who created twenty-four characters for Gustavus Vasa, and twenty for Eric XIV and The Saga of the Folkungs respectively, and whose dramatic lavishness necessitated a succession of five-act dramas. It seems strange that the author of saga plays, like The Journey of Lucky Peter, and The Keys of Heaven, with its parodied Sancho Panzaisms, should have composed The Dance of Death; that the conscience-stricken visions of To Damascus should be followed by The Slippers of Abu Casem. This ingenious "toy for children" Strindberg dedicated to his youngest daughter, the little Anne-Marie, on her sixth birthday.
The two great Norwegian dramatists presented an orderly development in the choice of dramatic form, which makes the study of their art an exercise in the logic of temperament. The natural romanticism of Ibsen's early plays passed into the classical art of Ghosts. The intellectual modernism of the later Ibsen was the ripeness anticipated by every shrewd observer of the course of his mind. The art of Ibsen is complex, yet simple. Born out of the depths of his love of truth and his love of beauty, it arose, well-formed, palpable, a thing for all the world to see and hear, an indictment of the gigantic social fraud to which all must ultimately listen. It is essentially exoteric. So is the art of the rival and minor playwright, Björnson, who has given the world its most perfect dramatised sermons. Strindberg's art is incalculable, subtle, the caprice of a spirit that cannot exhaust itself: esoteric because it is ever rooted in the unconscious. His plays may be read and seen by the many, but at present they will be understood only by the few.
In versatility of dramatic form Hauptmann stands nearest Strindberg. He has almost as many strings to his harp as the Swede—he has written naturalistic plays and fairy drama, social plays and mystical drama, farce, comedy, romance and realism. Both dramatists are impelled by pity for human suffering, but the pity that guides Hauptmann, and which is typified by The Weavers, is an elemental, earthbound pity, concerned with food and poverty, lack of shelter and work. Strindberg's pity is transcendentalised; it hovers round the greater mysteries of existence itself, seeks to extract the human spirit from the curse of illusions. Hence the absence of finality in his writings. No book gives the impression of being quite finished; they all transmit the ache for a new point of view. Whilst Maeterlinck has evolved a philosophy of spiritualised tranquillity, and administers a soothing narcotic for the Soul Rampant in the twilight of his charmed castles, Strindberg walks on, acutely conscious of the thorns upon which he treads. Whilst Björnson, satisfied, proclaims his ideal of physical purity, and throws down A Gauntlet at vice, Strindberg is haunted by the ideal of the human soul's unattainable purity from dross. Whilst Bernard Shaw cuts the world's perplexities with a joke, a flashing paradoxical joke, Strindberg raises his bands in threatening condemnation at the God-head Himself. In Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's Elën, Samuel says to Goetze: "Science will not suffice. Sooner or later you will end by coming to your knees." Goetze: "Before what?" Samuel: "Before the Darkness." Strindberg was brought to his knees by the Darkness, but he rose with the dawn that followed.
During the thirteen years that passed between the quiet celebration of Strindberg's fiftieth birthday, and the national festivities with which the Swedish people acclaimed him on January 22nd, 1912, his countrymen were gradually made aware of his greatness. Men of all parties fearlessly proclaimed his genius over the open grave, though some would never have ventured to do so if they had not felt quite sure that he could not prepare any further shocks of surprise.
It is impossible to present a study of the experiences which caused the corrosive bitterness in Strindberg's attacks on everything and everybody, without reference to the unjust and Pharisaical criticism to which he had to submit. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that it was difficult to live with Strindberg. The Swedes had to live with him, and the household of those who set themselves up to guard the propriety and integrity of literary art was day by day threatened by his revolutionary ideas, his personal attacks on spotless individuals, his coarse-grained descriptions of indescribable things. We must therefore extend sympathy to his detractors as well as to him. There is, besides, a reversionary power in the mere passage of time which calls for special tolerance. The reviewers of the Athenæum and Blackwood's Magazine, who suggested that Ruskin's Modern Painters had emanated from Bedlam, are more entitled to our sympathy than the object of their criticism.
The Swedes have a peculiar fear of praising that which is their own. They labour under a feeling that such praise is egotistical, blustering and discourteous to others. In Swedish peasant homes the housewife does honour to her guests by loud depreciation of the contents of her house and its offerings, no matter how well-appointed the home may be. The trait persists in the judgment of cultured people on national qualities, art and literature. It is certainly graceful, and makes the Swede an excellent companion, a polite and generous appreciator of the talents of others. But it is inimical to the toleration of a forceful and self-confident personality within one's own family or nation, and favourable to the mediocritisation of boisterous originality. If Strindberg had been an Italian or a Spaniard he would in all probability have been the recipient of the Nobel Prize during his life-time, in addition to posthumous honours.