Married | Page 2

that, however opinionated Strindberg may at
times seem, his writings carry that conviction which we receive only
when the author reproduces' truths he has obtained first-hand from life.
One-sided he may occasionally be in Married, especially in the later
stories, but rarely unfaithful. His manner is often to throw such a
glaring searchlight upon one spot of life that all the rest of it stays in
darkness; but the places he does show up are never unimportant or
trivial. They are well worth seeing with Strindberg's brilliant
illumination thrown upon them.
August Strindberg has left a remarkably rich record of his life in
various works, especially in his autobiographical series of novels. He
was born in 1849 in Stockholm. His was a sad childhood passed in
extreme poverty. He succeeded in entering the University of Upsala in
1867, but was forced for a time on account of lack of means to interrupt
his studies. He tried his fortune as schoolmaster, actor, and journalist
and made an attempt to study medicine. All the while he was active in a
literary way, composing his first plays in 1869. In 1874 he obtained a
position in the Royal Library, where he devoted himself to scientific
studies, learned Chinese in order to catalogue the Chinese manuscripts,
and wrote an erudite monograph which was read at the Academy of
Inscriptions in Paris.
His first important literary productions were the drama Master Olof
(1878) and the novel The Red Room (1879). Disheartened by the failure
of Master Olof, he gave up literature for a long time. When he returned
to it, he displayed an amazing productivity. Work followed work in
quick succession--novels, short stories, dramas, histories, historical
studies, and essays. The Swedish People is said to be the most popular
book in Sweden next to the Bible. The mere enumeration of his
writings would occupy more than two pages. His versatility led him to
make researches in physics and chemistry and natural science and to
write on those subjects.

Through works like The Red Room, Married, and the dramas The
Father and Miss Julia, Strindberg attached himself to the naturalistic
school of literature. Another period of literary inactivity followed,
during which he passed through a mental crisis akin to insanity. When
he returned to the writing of novels and dramas he was no longer a
naturalist, but a symbolist and mystic. Among the plays he composed
in this style are To Damascus, The Dream Play, and The Great
Highway.
Strindberg married three times, divorced his first two wives, but
separated amicably from the third. He died in 1913. The vast
demonstration at his funeral, attended by the laboring classes as well as
by the "upper" classes, proved that, in spite of the antagonisms he had
aroused, Sweden unanimously awarded him the highest place in her
literature.
THOMAS SELTZER.

ASRA
He had just completed his thirteenth year when his mother died. He felt
that he had lost a real friend, for during the twelve months of her illness
he had come to know her personally, as it were, and established a
relationship between them which is rare between parents and children.
He was a clever boy and had developed early; he had read a great many
books besides his schoolbooks, for his father, a professor of botany at
the Academy of Science, possessed a very good library. His mother, on
the other hand, was not a well-educated woman; she had merely been
head housekeeper and children's nurse in her husband's house.
Numerous births and countless vigils (she had not slept through a
single night for the last sixteen years), had exhausted her strength, and
when she became bedridden, at the age of thirty-nine, and was no
longer able to look after her house, she made the acquaintance of her
second son; her eldest boy was at a military school and only at home
during the week ends. Now that her part as mother of the family was
played to the end and nothing remained of her but a poor invalid, the

old-fashioned relationship of strict discipline, that barrier between
parents and children, was superseded. The thirteen-year-old son was
almost constantly at her bedside, reading to her whenever he was not at
school or doing home lessons. She had many questions to ask and he
had a great deal to explain, and therefore all those distinguishing marks
erected by age and position vanished, one after the other: if there was a
superior at all, it was the son. But the mother, too, had much to teach,
for she had learnt her lessons in the school of life; and so they were
alternately teacher and pupil. They discussed all subjects. With the tact
of a mother and the modesty of the other sex she told her son all he
ought