ircumstances by her Swedish sister.

Nobody familiar with the English language as it actually springs
from the lips of living men and women can doubt that it offers ways
of expressing varying shades of intimacy no less effective than any
found in the Swedish tongue. Let me give an illustration from the
play immediately under discussion. Returning to the stage after the
ballet scene, _Jean_ says to _Miss Julia_: "I love you--can you
doubt it?" And her reply, literally, is: "You?--Say thou!" I have
merely made him say: "Can you doubt it, Miss Julia?" and her
answer: "Miss?--Call me Julia!" As that is just what would happen
under similar circumstances among English-speaking people, I
contend that not a whit of the author's meaning or spirit has been
lost in this translation.

If ever a play was written for the stage, it is this one. And on
the stage there is nothing to take the place of the notes and
introductory explanations that so frequently encumber the printed
volume. On the stage all explanations must lie within the play
itself, and so they should in the book also, I believe. The
translator is either an artist or a man unfit for his work. As an
artist he must have a courage that cannot even be cowed by his
reverence for the work of a great creative genius. If, mistakenly,
he revere the letter of that work instead of its spirit, then he
will reduce his own task to mere literary carpentry, and from his
pen will spring not a living form, like the one he has been set to
transplant, but only a death mask!

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

Like almost all other art, that of the stage has long seemed to me
a sort of _Biblia Pauperum_, or a Bible in pictures for those who
cannot read what is written or printed. And in the same way the
playwright has seemed to me a lay preacher spreading the thoughts
of his time in a form so popular that the middle classes, from
which theatrical audiences are mainly drawn, can know what is being
talked about without troubling their brains too much. For this
reason the theatre has always served as a grammar-school to young
people, women, and those who have acquired a little knowledge, all
of whom retain the capacity for deceiving themselves and being
deceived--which means again that they are susceptible to illusions
produced by the suggestions of the author. And for the same reason
I have had a feeling that, in our time, when the rudimentary,
incomplete thought processes operating through our fancy s