vels, and essays alike, he
is a specialist in the jars of existence. He magnified even the smallest
worries until they assumed mountainous proportions. He was the kind of
man who, if something went wrong with the kitchen boiler, felt that the
Devil and all his angels had been loosed upon him, as upon the righteous
Job, with at least the connivance of Heaven. He seems to have regarded
the unsatisfactoriness of a servant as a scarcely less tremendous evil
than the infidelity of a wife. If you wish to see into twhat follies of
exaggeration Strindberg's want of the sense of proportion led him, you
cannot do better than turn to those pages in _Zones of the Spirit_ (as
the English translation of his _Blue Book_ is called), in which he tells
us about his domestic troubles at the time of the rehearsals of _The
Dream Play._

My servant left me; my domestic arrangements were upset; within
forty days I had six changes of servants--one worse than the other.
At last I had to serve myself, lay the table, and light the stove.
I ate black broken victuals out of a basket. In short, I had to
taste the whole bitterness of life without knowing why.

Much as one may sympathize with a victim of the servant difficulty, one
cannot but regard the last sentence as, in the vulgar phrase, rather a
tall order. But it becomes taller still before Strindberg has done with
it.

Then came the dress-rehearsal of _The Dream Play._ This drama I
wrote seven years ago, after a period of forty days' suffering
which were among the worst which I had ever undergone. And now
again exactly forty days of fasting and pain had passed. There
seemed, therefore, to be a secret legislature which promulgates
clearly defined sentences. I thought of the forty days of the
Flood, the forty years of wandering in the desert, the forty days'
fast kept by Moses, Elijah, and Christ.

There you have Strindberg's secret. His work is, for the most part,
simply the dramatization of the conflict between man and the irritations
of life. The chief of these is, of course, woman. But the lesser
irritations never disappear from sight for long. His obsession by them
is very noticeable in _The Dream Play_ itself--in that scene, for
instance, in which the Lawyer and the daughter of Indra having married,
the Lawyer begins to complain of the untidiness of their home, and the
Daughter to complain of the dirt:

THE DAUGHTE