Married | Page 2

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 to know of the mystery of life. He was still innocent, but he had heard many things discussed by the boys at school which had shocked and disgusted him. The mother explained to him all she could explain; warned him of the greatest danger to a young man, and exacted a promise