himself: ambitious and
weak-willed; unscrupulous when something was at stake, and yielding
at other times; possessed of great self-confidence, mixed with a deep
melancholy; balanced and irrational; hard and gentle."

Finally, he gives us this illuminating exposition of his own views on
the moral validity of the main characters, thus disposing once for all
of the one-sided interpretations made by persons anxious to use this
or that aspect of the play in support of their own political or social
idiosyncrasies: "All the chief characters are, relatively speaking, in
the right. The Constable, from the standpoint of his own day, is right
in asking Olof to keep calm and go on preaching; Olof is right in
admitting that he had gone too far; the scholar, Vilhelm, is right when,
in the name of youth, he demands the evolution of a new truth; and Gert
is right in calling Olof a renegade. The individual must always become
a renegade--forced by the necessity of natural laws; by fatigue; by
inability to develop indefinitely, as the brain ceases to grow about the
age of forty-five; and by the claims of actual life, which demand that
even a reformer must live as man, mate, head of a family, and
citizen. But those who crave that the individual continue his progress
indefinitely are the shortsighted--particularly those who think that the
cause must perish because the individual deserts it.... It is an open
question, for that matter, whether Olof did not have a better chance to
advance his cause from the pulpit of the reformed Greatchurch than he
would have had in low-class taverns."

These passages were written by Strindberg fourteen years after the
completion of the play to which they refer. We have other evidence,
however, that, while he might have seen things more clearly in
retrospect, he had not been lured by the lapse of time into placing his
characters in a light different from that in which they were conceived.
On the list of characters forming part of the original handwritten
manuscript of the first version of Master Olof, now preserved in the
Public Library of Gothenburg, Sweden, the author has jotted down certain
very significant notes opposite the more important names. Thus he has
written opposite the name of the King: "To accomplish something in this
world, one has to risk morality and conscience;" opposite the name
of Olof: "He who strives to realize an idea develops greatness of
personality--he accomplishes good by his pers