crape together, separated from his second wife, who
had opened proceedings for divorce, far from his native land and without
any prospects for the future, he was brought to a profound religious
crisis. With almost incredible fortitude he succeeded in fighting his
way through this difficult period, with the remarkable result that the
former Bohemian, atheist, and scoffer was gradually able to emerge with
the firm assurance of a prophet, and even enter a new creative period,
perhaps mightier than before. One cannot help reflecting that a man
capable of overcoming a crisis of such a formidable character and of
several years' duration, as this one of Strindberg's had been, with
reason intact and even with increased creative power, in reality, in
spite of his hypersensitive nervous system, must have been an unusually
strong man both physically and mentally.

Upon trying to define more closely what actual relation the play has
to those events of Strindberg's restless life, of which we have given a
rough outline, we find that for the most part the author has undoubtedly
made use of his own experiences, but has adapted, combined and added to
them still more, so that the result is a mixture of real experience and
imagination, all moulded into a carefully worked out artistic form.

If to begin with, we dwell for a while on Part I it is evident that
the hurried wanderings of THE STRANGER and THE LADY between the street
corner, the room in the hotel, the sea and the Rose Room with the
mother-in-law, have their foundation--often in detail--in Strindberg's
rovings with Frida Uhl. I will give a few examples. In a book by Frida
Uhl about her marriage to the Swedish genius (splendid in parts but not
very reliable) she recalls that the month before her marriage she took
rooms at Neustaedtische Kirchstrasse 1, in Berlin, facing a Gothic church
in Dorotheenstrasse, situated at the cross-roads between the post
office in Dorotheenstrasse and the cafe 'Zum Schwarzen Ferkel' in
Wilhelmstrasse. This Berlin environment appears to be almost exactly
reproduced in the introductory scene of Part I, where THE STRANGER and
THE LADY meet outside a little Gothic church with a post office and
cafe adjoining. The happy scenes by the sea are, of course, pleasant
recollections from Heligoland, and the many discussions about money
matters in the midst of the honeymoon are quite explicable when we know
how the dramatist was continually haunted by money troubl