ture has produced walked in a fuliginous and sulphurous darkness which was manifestly just as abnormal, How far should the madness of Strindberg affect our appreciation of his writings? this is the question which has to be faced.

August Strindberg was born in 1849, a few weeks after the marriage of his father, an unsuccessful grocer, to his mother, a barmaid. His childhood, by his own account, was singularly wretched. His parents beat him; he slept where he could, on a chair or an ironing board; 'warfare raged incessantly between his brothers' and himself, and they were fourteen in family. When he wrote the very copious history of his first thirty years, published in 1886, his mind seethed with resentment. The reader of this curious autobiography seems to hear a hiss in every page, with occasionally a snarl and an explosion, like the voice of an enraged tom-cat down a passage. Probably, the picture was darkened by memory, and his childhood not really so diabolical, but the main thing is that Strindberg thought it had been atrocious.

All through his youth he was undoubtedly very poor, very ambitious, and very indignant. At the age of thirty he suddenly became famous as the author of The Red Room, a work which, strangely enough, Mr. Björkman scarcely names in his biographical preface, although its publication was the turning point in Strindberg's career, and of far-reaching importance. From this time forward, although Strindberg was always in hot water, and showing an amazing ingenuity in alienating everybody who presumed to take an interest in him, the reputation of his volcanic force was ever on the rise, and when he died on May 14, 1912- his funeral was celebrated by the whole Swedish nation. In fact, neither Thomas Hardy, nor Anatole

France, nor even Ibsen has been the object of so much racial infatuation as August Strindberg.

It is natural that so strange and so fluent a writer-Strindberg is the author of more than one hundred works should attract curiosity, but it is legitimate to wish, in the interests of Sweden, that her greatest poet had been a man of saner, or at least of more amiable and human, instincts. His 'message'— as it is the cant of the day to call it - is mainly a message of hatred. He hated everybody, but he had a peculiar animosity against women, a sentiment which he was supposed to base upon three unlucky marriages. Of the first of these (he threw that wife out of an upper window) he has given an account so vivid and so vindictive that the printing of it in Sweden was prohibited; I possess the German editio princeps of this rare and refreshing fruit of anti-feminism, and can vouch for its astounding bitterness. It gushes like a fountain of vitriol. Strindberg was, he says himself, driven forward by 'an irresistible craving and turmoil of the brain' to tell one story of his life after another with inexorable cynicism.

One of his most infatuated admirers points to his 'coarse language and unsavory references to physical life' as one of the proofs of his 'perfect frankness.' He was attracted to sexual confession, we are told on the same authority, by 'the narcosis of alcohol.' I do not quite know what this means, yet, like Queen Victoria, I am not amused. The gifts of the spirit and the intellect

and Strindberg was prodigiously endowed with both- are surely not showered upon a man, that he may poison the wells of life with them; and yet it is essentially to destroy the illusions of hope and love, to suggest treason through affection, and to storm in anger against everything in heaven and

earth, that the greater part of Strindberg's poems and novels are directed. He began a tragedy with the title Jesus of Nazareth, which he tells us was 'intended to crush Christianity completely and for all time'; we may find a grim satisfaction in learning that, for once, he 'succumbed to the magnitude of the subject,' but is not this like Luntic Kolniyatch? If nations receive the authors they deserve, Sweden ought to feel morally uncomfortable in the possession of the author of Inferno.

The last thing, however, that I wish to do is to deny the force of Strindberg's writing or the legitimate claim which he makes on our attention. The merits and demerits of this strangest of writers cannot, however, be decided in ten minutes. The volume before us contains three specimens of his least disputable writing, the dramatic. The Link was written in 1877, during the brief period of Strindberg's first marriage, when for a short time he was relieved from his intense mental irritability. His wife had obtained a divorce from an earlier husband in order to marry the poet, and, although two or three years later language was insufficient to express Strindberg's loathing of the lady, for the moment he was peaceful. This respite is reflected, though in a very Strindbergian manner, in The Link, which offers us a daring, but not outrageous, satire on some of the anomalies of Swedish law.

The play suggests the form later on to be made familiar by M. Brieux, and the action takes place entirely in a provincial court-house. The case of a peasant girl whom a farmer has caught stealing first comes on; as he presents no witnesses, the farmer, a most excellent man, is heavily fined for having 'libelled' the girl by accusing her of the theft. The girl is let off scot-free, although everyone knows that she is a

rogue. Strindberg, with much sprightliness, shows that in the state of the law, this ridiculous result is inevitable. Then we pass to the divorce, or separation, of a baron and baroness, who begin to plead very politely, but, losing their tempers, drag one another down into an abyss of mutual ignominy. The moral of the piece seems to be the old one that 'the law is an ass,' a condition for which, however, the dramatist seems to propose no remedy.

The rest of the selection dates from Strindberg's complete maturity, when he had reached the summit of his technical command over language. Mr. Björkman, whom I suppose to be a Swede long resident in the United States, has translated the plays carefully into very fair American. He hardly does justice, however, to the Prologue of The Dream Play, which might almost be a scene out of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. The play itselfwhich should be read in connection with To Damascus, a trilogy not, I think, as yet translated - is very difficult to follow; it has been described as 'pre-cosmic' and time and space do not exist in it. I find myself powerless to analyze a work so stupendous, so incoherent, and yet so beautifully written.

To the same year, 1901, when Strindberg was passing through a phase of wild ascetic mysticism, belongs the double play of The Dance of Death, with which Mr. Björkman closes his selection. This is a much more interesting specimen of Strindberg's work than either of the preceding. It is very difficult to give an idea of a work so unusual, even so monstrous in form; The Dance of Death is a squalid story of today, the realism of which is redeemed by half-inspired or wholly insane flights into the highest heavens of Buddhistical ideality. This is certainly one of Strindberg's ablest and most characteristic productions.

BELLONA

BY DOROTHEA STILL

OUT of the dozing embers of my throne I stretch a hand toward my smould'ring torch;

Slowly, my sleep-dimmed eyes make furtive search

Into the shrouded souls of little men. Once more

Follow the victims worthy of my fire, And shriek my victory in Heaven's face;

Chant, as I fly,

My mutilation of the Gods' dear gifts. See, I have fouled their beauty in the muck

And smoking devastation of my trail: The shining pride of youth is turned to shame,

earth

blood

As of yore

honest age. Of age, I tear

My restless wings to find a stronger foe. Shivering fear

And hollow famine are my serving men

prey,

My hungry fingers groping for a sword.
Is my name

Indeed forgotten, and my ancient fame
Entombed in shame?
Men shall know

Me goddess; and their days shall glow Within the furnace of my reign below. - Behold, I wake,

My quenchless torch to take!

I stride in glory half across the world: Nay, all awide the earth, and thrust my torch,

Afire and murky with the steam of blood,

Into the depth of Heaven's serenity.

My brazen cry

Shatters the little people as they run Abroad with cringing haste to spread my flames,

Awhile my frenzy rocks the whirling globe.

hood