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Updated: May 28, 2025
Madame de Staël and Michelet expressed high regard for German character and institutions. There are degrees and qualities of attraction and absorption, varying from the amorous surrender with which Lafcadio Hearn took on Japanese form to the bootlicking flattery which Sven Hedin heaps on the Germans. He would lackey anywhere. Strindberg dealt faithfully with Hedin's pretensions.
Let them consider the great exception of Goethe. He, no richer than Shakespear, Ibsen, or Strindberg in specific talent as a playwright, is in the empyrean whilst they are gnashing their teeth in impotent fury in the mud, or at best finding an acid enjoyment in the irony of their predicament.
How many Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes have lately, without feeling conscious of a drop of foreign blood, shaken hands with German brothers in Stockholm, Christiania, Copenhagen, Munich, Vienna, and Berlin. How much homely good-fellowship has grown up around the noble names of Ibsen, Björnsen, and Strindberg. *Faust and Rifles.*
You might have seen them at the opera or symphony concerts, at Shakespeare, Strindberg, or the German classics we used to read in college, or standing in line at six o'clock, sandwiches in hand, so that they might sit through a performance of "Peer Gynt," with the Grieg music, beginning at seven and lasting till after eleven.
Much as one may sympathize with a victim of the servant difficulty, one cannot but regard the last sentence as, in the vulgar phrase, rather a tall order. But it becomes taller still before Strindberg has done with it. Then came the dress-rehearsal of The Dream Play. This drama I wrote seven years ago, after a period of forty days' suffering which were among the worst which I had ever undergone.
The Liberry Teacher knew that it was her duty to go over and hypnotize the child into reading something which would lead more directly to Browning and Strindberg. But she didn't. "Poor little wop!" she thought unacademically. "Let her be happy in her own way!" And the Liberry Teacher herself went on being unhappy in her own way. "I'm just a battered bisque doll!" she repeated to herself bitterly.
I have noticed this quality in men such as Ibsen and Strindberg, who cry aloud in the wilderness of Philistia for freedom, for the "free, unhampered life" and then devise a new system that is thrice as irksome as the old, that puts one's soul into a spiritual bondage. Wedekind is of this order; a moralist is concealed behind his shining ambuscade of verbal immoralism.
It must not be supposed, moreover, that Miss Lind-Af-Hageby overlooks this aspect of Strindberg, which would hardly be possible in any case; she emphasises it, though, it may be by a warning instinct rather than by deliberate intention, she carefully avoids calling Strindberg a "vivisector," using instead the less appropriate term "dissector."
Her artificialities one by one were falling away from her like discarded garments. And yet I was not sure that it wasn't artifice that was discarding them. She was very clever. I might have guessed it, had I noticed earlier the volumes by Freud and Strindberg on the little ebony side table." Ballard paused a moment to light a fresh cigarette. "Bah!" I muttered contemptuously.
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