my ability, I practise the Christian
teachings. For only through religion, or the hope of something
better, and the recognition of the innermost meaning of life as
that of an ordeal, a school, or perhaps a penitentiary, will it be
possible to bear the burden of life with sufficient resignation."

Here, as elsewhere, it is made patent that Strindberg's
religiosity always, on closer analysis, reduces itself to
morality. At bottom he is first and last, and has always been, a
moralist--a man passionately craving to know what is RIGHT and to
do it. During the middle, naturalistic period of his creative
career, this fundamental tendency was in part obscured, and he
engaged in the game of intellectual curiosity known as "truth for
truth's own sake." One of the chief marks of his final and
mystical period is his greater courage to "be himself" in this
respect--and this means necessarily a return, or an advance, to a
position which the late William James undoubtedly would have
acknowledged as "pragmatic." To combat the assertion of
over-developed individualism that we are ends in ourselves,
that we have certain inalienable personal "rights" to pleasure
and happiness merely because we happen to appear here in human
shape, this is one of Strindberg's most ardent aims in all his
later works.

As to the higher and more inclusive object to which our lives must
be held subservient, he is not dogmatic. It may be another life.
He calls it God. And the code of service he finds in the tenets of
all the Christian churches, but principally in the Commandments.
The plain and primitive virtues, the faith that implies little
more than square dealing between man and man--these figure
foremost in Strindberg's ideals. In an age of supreme self-seeking
like ours, such an outlook would seem to have small chance of
popularity, but that it embodies just what the time most needs is,
perhaps, made evident by the reception which the public almost
invariably grants "There Are Crimes and Crimes" when it is staged.

With all its apparent disregard of what is commonly called
realism, and with its occasional, but quite unblushing, use of
methods generally held superseded--such as the casual introduction
of characters at whatever moment they happen to be needed on the
stage--it has, from the start, been among the most frequently
played and most enthusiastically received of Strindberg's later
dramas. At Stockholm it was first taken up by the Royal Dramat