There are within all of us many personalities, some of which
remain for ever potentialities. But it is conceivable that any one
of them, under circumstances different from those in which we have
been living, might have developed into its severely logical
consequence--or, if you please, into a human being that would be
held abnormal if actually encountered.

This is exactly what Strindberg seems to have done time and again,
both in his middle and final periods, in his novels as well as in
his plays. In all of us a _Tekla_, an _Adolph_, a _Gustav_--or a
_Jean_ and a _Miss Julia_--lie more or less dormant. And if we search
our souls unsparingly, I fear the result can only be an admission
that--had the needed set of circumstances been provided--we might
have come unpleasantly close to one of those Strindbergian
creatures which we are now inclined to reject as unhuman.

Here we have the secret of what I believe to be the great Swedish
dramatist's strongest hold on our interest. How could it otherwise
happen that so many critics, of such widely differing temperaments,
have recorded identical feelings as springing from a study of his
work: on one side an active resentment, a keen unwillingness to
be interested; on the other, an attraction that would not be denied
in spite of resolute resistance to it! For Strindberg _does_ hold
us, even when we regret his power of doing so. And no one familiar
with the conclusions of modern psychology could imagine such a
paradox possible did not the object of our sorely divided feelings
provide us with something that our minds instinctively recognise as
true to life in some way, and for that reason valuable to the art of
living.

There are so many ways of presenting truth. Strindberg's is only
one of them--and not the one commonly employed nowadays. Its main
fault lies perhaps in being too intellectual, too abstract. For
while Strindberg was intensely emotional, and while this fact
colours all his writings, he could only express himself through
his reason. An emotion that would move another man to murder would
precipitate Strindberg into merciless analysis of his own or
somebody else's mental and moral make-up. At any rate, I do not
proclaim his way of presenting truth as the best one of all
available. But I suspect that this decidedly strange way of
Strindberg's--resulting in such repulsively superior beings as
_Gustav_, or in such grievously inferior ones as _Adolph_--may come
nearer t