INTRODUCTION

These stories originally appeared in two volumes, the first in 1884, the second in 1886. The latter part of the present edition is thus separated from the first part by a lapse of two years.

Strindberg’s views were continually undergoing changes. Constancy was never a trait of his. He himself tells us that opinions are but the reflection of a man’s experiences, changing as his experiences change. In the two years following the publication of the first volume, Strindberg’s experiences were such as to exercise a decisive influence on his views on the woman question and to transmute his early predisposition to woman-hating from a passive tendency to a positive, active force in his character and writing.

Strindberg’s art in Married is of the propagandist, of the fighter for a cause. He has a lesson to convey and he makes frankly for his goal without attempting to conceal his purpose under the gloss of “pure” art. He chooses the story form in preference to the treatise as a more powerful medium to drive home his ideas. That the result has proved successful is due to the happy admixture in Strindberg of thinker and artist. His artist’s sense never permitted him to distort or misrepresent the truth for the sake of proving his theories. In fact, he arrived at his theories not as a scholar through the study of books, but as an artist through the experience of life. When life had impressed upon him what seemed to him a truth, he then applied his intellect to it to bolster up that truth. Hence it is 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 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 from him never to visit a house of ill-fame, not even out of curiosity, because, as she pointed out, in such a case no man could ever trust himself. And she implored him to live a temperate life, and turn to God in prayer whenever temptation assaulted him.

His father was entirely devoted to science, which was a sealed book to his wife. When the mother was already on the point of death, he made a discovery which he hoped would make his name immortal in the scientific world. He discovered, on a rubbish heap, outside the gates of Stockholm, a new kind of goose-foot with curved hairs on the usually straight-haired calyx. He was in communication with the Berlin Academy of Sciences, and the latter was even now considering the advisability of including the new variety in the “Flora Germanica”; he was daily expecting to hear whether or not the Academy had decided to immortalise his name by calling the plant Chenopodium Wennerstroemianium. At his wife’s death-bed he was absentminded, almost unkind, for he had just received an answer in the affirmative, and he fretted because neither he nor his wife could enjoy the great news. She thought only of heaven and her children. He could not help realising that to talk to her now of a calyx with curved hairs would be the height of absurdity; but, he justified himself, it was not so much a question of a calyx with straight or curved hairs, as of a scientific discovery; and, more than that, it was a question of his future and the future of his children, for their father’s distinction meant bread for them.

When his wife died on the following evening, he cried bitterly; he had not shed a tear for many years. He was tortured by remorse, remembered even the tiniest wrong he had ever done her, for he had been, on the whole, an exemplary husband; his indifference, his absent-mindedness of the previous day, filled him with shame and regret, and in a moment of blankness he realised all the pettishness and selfishness of his science which, he had imagined, was benefiting mankind. But these emotions were short-lived; if you open a door with a spring behind it, it will close again immediately. On the following morning, after he had drawn up an announcement of her death for the papers, he wrote a letter of thanks to the Berlin Academy of Sciences. After that he resumed his work.

When he came home to dinner, he longed for his wife, so that he might tell her of his success, for she had always been his truest friend, the only human being who had never been jealous or envious. Now he missed this loyal companion on whose approval he could count as a matter of course; never once had she contradicted him, for since he never told her more than the practical result of his researches, there was no room for argument. For a moment the thought occurred to him that he might make friends with his son; but they knew each other too little; their relationship was that of officer and private soldier. His superior rank did not permit him to make advances; moreover, he regarded the boy with suspicion, because the latter possessed a keener intellect and had read a number of new books which were unknown to him; occasionally it even happened that the father, the professor, plainly revealed his ignorance to his son, the school-boy. In such cases the father was either compelled to dismiss the argument, with a few contemptuous remarks to “these new follies,” or peremptorily order the school-boy to attend to his lessons. Once or twice, in self-defence, the son had produced one or other of his school-books; the professor had lost his temper and wished the new school-books to hell.

And so it came about that the father devoted himself to his collections of dried plants and the son went his own way.

They lived in a quiet street to the left of the Observatory, in a small, one-storey house, built of bricks, and surrounded by a large garden; the garden was once the property of the Horticultural Society, and had come into the professor’s possession by inheritance. But since he studied descriptive botany, and took no interest in the much more interesting subjects of the physiology and morphology of plants, a science which was as good as unknown in his youth, he was practically a stranger to living nature. He allowed the garden with its many splendours to become a wilderness, and finally let it to a gardener on condition that he and his children should be allowed certain privileges. The son used the garden as a park and enjoyed its beauty as he found it, without taking the trouble to try and understand it scientifically.

One might compare the boy’s character to an ill-proportioned compensation pendulum; it contained too much of the soft metal of the mother, not enough of the hard metal of the father. Friction and irregular oscillations were the natural consequences. Now he was full of sentiment, now hard and sceptical. His mother’s death affected him beyond words. He mourned her deeply, and she always lived in his memory as the personification of all that was good and great and beautiful.

He wasted the summer following her death in brooding and novel-reading. Grief, and to no small extent idleness, had shaken his whole nervous system and quickened his imagination. His tears had been like warm April showers falling on fruit trees, wakening them to a precocious burgeoning: but alas! only too often the blossoms are doomed to wither and perish in a frosty May night, before the fruit has had time to set.

He was fifteen years old and had therefore arrived at the age when civilised man attains to manhood and is ripe to give life to a new generation, but is prevented from doing so by his inability to maintain a family. Consequently he was about to begin the ten years’ martyrdom which a young man is called upon to endure in the struggle against an overwhelming force of nature, before he is in a position to fulfil her laws.

It is a warm afternoon about Whitsuntide. The appletrees are gorgeous in their white splendour which nature has showered all over them with a profuse hand. The breeze shakes the crowns and fills the air with pollen; a part of it fulfils its destination and creates new life, a part sinks to the ground and dies. What is a handful of pollen more or less in the inexhaustible store-house of nature! The fertilised blossom casts off its delicate petals which flutter to the ground and wither; they decay in the rain and are ground to dust, to rise again through the sap and re-appear as blossoms, and this time, perhaps, to become fruit. But now the struggle begins: those which a kind fate has placed on the sunny side, thrive and prosper; the seed bud swells, and if no frost intervenes, the fruit, in due time, will set. But those which look towards the North, the poor things which grow in the shadow of the others and never see the sun, are predestined to fade and fall off; the gardener rakes them together and carts them to the pig-sty.

Behold the apple-tree now, its branches laden with half-ripe fruit, little, round, golden apples with rosy cheeks. A fresh struggle begins: if all remain alive, the branches will not be able to bear their weight, the tree will perish. A gale shakes the branches. It requires firm stems to hold on. Woe to the weaklings! they are condemned to destruction.

A fresh danger! The apple-weevil appears upon the scene. It, too, has to maintain life and to fulfil a duty towards its progeny. The grub eats its way through the fruit to the stem and the apple falls to the ground. But the dainty beetle chooses the strongest and soundest for its brood, otherwise too many of the strong ones would be allowed to live, and competition would become over-keen.

The hour of twilight, the gathering dusk, arouses the passionate instincts of the beast-world. The night-crow crouches on the newly-dug flower-bed to lure its mate. Which of the eager males shall carry the prize? Let them decide the question!

The cat, sleek and warm, fresh from her evening milk, steals away from her corner by the hearth and picks her way carefully among daffodils and lilies, afraid lest the dew make her coat damp and ragged before her lover joins her. She sniffs at the young lavender and calls. Her call is answered by the black tom-cat which appears, broad-backed like a marten, on the neighbour’s fence; but the gardener’s tortoise-shell approaches from the cow-shed and the fight begins. Handfuls of the rich, black soil are flying about in all directions, and the newly-planted radishes and spinach plants are roughly awakened from their quiet sleep and dreams of the future. The stronger of the two remains in possession of the field, and the female awaits complacently the frenetic embraces of the victor. The vanquished flies to engage in a new struggle in which, perhaps, victory will smile on him.

Nature smiles, content, for she knows of no other sin than the sin against her law; she is on the side of the strong for her desire is for strong children, even though she should have to kill the “eternal ego” of the insignificant individual. And there is no prudery, no hesitation, no fear of consequences, for nature has plenty of food for all her children—except mankind.

After supper he went for a walk in the garden while his father sat down at his bed-room window to smoke a pipe and read the evening paper. He strolled along the paths, revelling in the delicious odours which a plant only exhales when it is in full bloom, and which is the finest and strongest extract of etheric oils, containing in a condensed form the full strength of the individual, destined to become the representative of the species. He listened to the nuptial song of the insects above the lime trees, which rings in our ears like a funeral dirge: he heard the purring call of the night-crow; the ardent mewing of the cat, which sounds as if death, and not life, were wooing; the humming note of the dung-beetle, the fluttering of the large moths, the thin peeping of the bats.

He stopped before a bed of narcissus, gathered one of the while, starry flowers, and inhaled its perfume until he felt the blood hammering in his temples. He had never examined this flower minutely. But during the last term they had read Ovid’s story of Narcissus. He had not discovered a deeper meaning in the legend. What did it mean, this story of a youth who, from unrequited love, turned his ardour upon himself and was consumed by the flame when he fell in love with his own likeness seen in a well? As he stood, examining the white, cup-shaped petals, pale as the cheeks of an invalid with fine red lines such as one may see in the faces of consumptives when a pitiless cough forces the blood into the extremest and tiniest blood-vessels, he thought of a school-fellow, a young aristocrat, who was a midshipman now; he looked like that.

When he had inhaled the scent of the flower for some time, the strong odour of cloves disappeared and left but a disagreeable, soapy smell which made him feel sick.

He sauntered on to where the path turned to the right and finally lost itself in an avenue planted on both sides with elm-trees whose branches had grown together and formed an arch overhead. In the semi-darkness, far down the perspective, he could see a large green swing, suspended by ropes, slowly moving backwards and forwards. A girl stood on the back board, gently swinging herself by bending her knees and throwing her body forward, while she clung, with arms raised high above her head, to the ropes at her side. He recognised the gardener’s daughter, a girl who had been confirmed last Easter and had just begun to wear long skirts. To-night, however, she was dressed in one of her old dresses which barely reached to her ankles.

The sight of the young man embarrassed her, for she remembered the shortness of her skirt, but she nevertheless remained on the swing. He advanced and looked at her.

“Go away, Mr. Theodore,” said the girl, giving the swing a vigorous push.