Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger | Page 2

past.
One day when in the evolution of the drama Strindberg's technique
shall have served its purpose and like Ibsen's, be forced to give way
before the advance of younger artists, when his most radical views shall
have become the commonplaces of pseudo-culture, the scientific
psychologist will take the man in hand and, from the minute record of
his life, emotions, thoughts, fancies, speculations and nightmares,
which he has embodied in autobiographical novels and that most
remarkable perhaps of all his creations, abysmal in its pessimism, "The
Inferno," will be drawn a true conception of the man.

That the individual will prove quite as interesting a study as his literary
work, even the briefest outline of Strindberg's life will suggest.
The lack of harmony in his soul that has permeated his life and work
with theses and antitheses Strindberg tries to explain through heredity,
a by no means satisfying or complete solution for the motivation of his
frequently unusual conduct and exceptional temperamental qualities,
which the abnormal psychologist is in the habit of associating with that
not inconsiderable group of cases in which the emotional and
temperamental characteristics of the opposite sex are dominant in the
individual. His ancestry has been traced back to the sixteenth century,
when his father's family was of the titled aristocracy, later, generation
after generation, becoming churchmen, although Strindberg's father,
Carl Oscar, undertook a commercial career. His mother, Ulrica
Eleanora Norling, was the daughter of a poor tailor, whom Strindberg's
father first met as a waitress in a hotel, and, falling in love with her,
married, after she had borne him three children.
August, christened Johann August, the fourth child, was born at
Stockholm, January 22, 1849, soon after his father had become a
bankrupt. There was little light or cheer in the boy's home; the
misfortune that overtook the family at the time of August's birth always
hung over them like a dark cloud; the mother became nervous and worn
from the twelve child-births she survived, the father serious and
reserved. The children were brought up strictly and as August was no
favorite, loneliness and hostility filled even his earliest years.
His first school days were spent among boys of the better class, who
turned up their noses at his leather breeches and heavy boots. He was
taken away from that school and sent where there was a lower class of
boys, whose leader he soon became, but in his studies he was far from
precocious, though not dull.
As he grew up the family fortunes bettered, and he attended a private
school patronized by cultivated and wealthy people. Mixing so with
both classes meant much in the development of the youth, and he began
to realize that he belonged to both and neither, felt homeless, torn in his
sympathies and antipathies, plebian and aristocratic at the same time. In

his thirteenth year, his mother died, a loss for which his father was
apparently soon consoled, as in less than a year he married his
housekeeper. This was another blow to the boy, for he disliked the
woman, and there was soon war between them.
At fifteen he fell in love with it woman of thirty of very religious
character, and its this was a period of fervent belief with the youth
himself, she became an influence in his life for Home time, but one day
a young comrade asked him to luncheon at a cafe, and for the first time
Strindberg partook of schnaps and ale with a hearty meal. This little
luncheon was the event which broke up the melancholy introspection of
his youth and stirred him to activity.
He went to Upsala University for one term and then left, partly on
account of the lack of funds for books, and partly because the slow,
pedantic methods of learning were distasteful to his restless, active
nature. He then became a school teacher; next interested in medical
science, which he studied energetically, until the realities of suffering
drove him from it. About this time, the same time, by the way, that
Ibsen's "The League of Youth" was being hissed down at Christiana,
the creative artist in Strindberg began to stir, and after six months more
of turmoil of soul, he turned to the stage as a possible solution, making
his debut at the Dramatiska Theatre in 1869 in Bjornson's "Mary
Stuart," in the part of a lord with one line to speak. After two months of
no advancement he found courage to ask to be heard in one of the
classical roles he had been studying.
The director, tired from a long rehearsal, reluctantly consented to listen
to him, likewise, the bored company of actors. Strindberg went on "to
do or die," and was soon shouting like a revivalist, and made such it
bad impression