Master Olof. August Strindberg
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he set about to re-write it—and he did so not only once but repeatedly, producing in all six versions that differ more or less from one another. At first he clung to the prose form. Gradually he began to introduce verse, until finally, in 1877 or 1878, he completed an almost new play, where the metrical form predominated without being used exclusively. This version was actually published in 1878. Originally, an epilogue was appended to it, but this was dropped from all but a small part of the first edition. It is supposed to take place a number of years later than the fifth act, and shows Olof with his two sons outside the city walls of Stockholm, where they witness a miracle-play introducing God as the principle of darkness and Lucifer as the overthrown but never conquered principle of light. The bitter generalizations of this afterthought explain Sufficiently why it was excluded. To the later Strindberg—the man who wrote Advent, for instance—it must have seemed one of his most unforgivable offences.
Although Strindberg's main object in working over his play undoubtedly was to obtain its production, the metrical version was not put on the stage until 1890, when, however, it was performed at the Royal Theatre, toward which its author had looked so longingly and so vainly eighteen years earlier. The prose version, on the other hand, was produced as early as 1881, at the New Theatre in Stockholm, but was not published until the same year, when it appeared in book form grouped with a number of other writings from Strindberg's earliest period.
Of the five unprinted versions connecting the original prose drama of 1872 with the final metrical form of 1878, more or less complete manuscripts have been preserved, and these are now being examined in detail by the Swedish literary historian, Professor Karl Warburg. A summary analysis by Dr. John Landquist is appended to the second volume of the definitive edition of Strindberg's complete works (Albert Bonnier, Stockholm), where the epilogue to the metrical version is also reprinted after so many years of oblivion.
"Of all the manuscripts preceding the final metrical version," says Dr. Landquist, "the original one, written when Strindberg was twenty-three, is the masterpiece. There everything is consistent; there the dialogue has a power and an incisiveness to which it does not attain in any of the unprinted manuscripts. On the contrary, these seem more youthful than the original, producing at times an impression of immaturity and uncertainty on the part of the author. Even when some isolated phrase strikes one as fortunate, it does not tend to strengthen the drama as a whole. The later versions lack that sense of inner unity and that audacious touch which lend fascination and power to the original manuscript.
"Not until we reach the first metrical version (of 1876) does the full power of the playwright begin to reassert itself in such fashion that out of his untiring labors at last springs a new work, the mood of which differs essentially from that of the first prose version. These two versions—the first and the final—are the results of diametrically opposed methods of work. The first was written with a certainty and swiftness of inspiration that raised the young poet far above the productive powers generally characteristic of his years. The subsequent modifications prove merely how futile are the efforts of reason to improve what intuition has inspired. But gradually it seems to have dawned on the poet that he was about to evolve a wholly new work—that what he had come to aim at was quite distinct from what he had been aiming at in the beginning, and from that moment his artistic reasoning carried him onward until at last a new inspiration brought the work to its completion."
Concerning the final metrical version, I can give only a few outstanding and rather superficial facts, hoping that I may some time have the opportunity of presenting it entire to the American public. Like the prose version, it has five acts, but these are not subdivided into scenes. It is briefer, more concentrated both in spirit and in form, and may be said to display a greater unity of purpose. It is more human, too, and less titanic. The change shows itself strikingly in a figure like that of Mårten, who in the metrical version has become softened into an unconscionable but rather lovable rapscallion. The last remark but one made by Mårten when driven from Dame Christine's deathbed by Olof is: "Talk to your mother, son—the two of you have so much to forgive each other."
In strength and passion and daring, on the other hand, the final version falls far short of the original one, and the very fact that it is more logical, more carefully reasoned, tends at times to render it less psychologically true. Each version has its own merits and its own faults, and in their appeal they are so radically different that a choice between them must always remain meaningless except on temperamental grounds. At one point, however—and an important one at that—the metrical version seems to me the happier by far.
That cry of "renegade," which, echoing from the dim recesses of the church, makes the prose version end on a note of perplexing irony, may be theatrically effective, but it can hardly be called logical. Gert has been disposed of. His sudden return out of the clutches of the soldiers is inexplicable and unwarranted. Worse still, he has only a short while previous been urging Olof to live on for his work. If Olof be a renegade, he is so upon the advice of Gert himself, and to call the concession made by Olof for the saving of his own life far-reaching enough to explain Gert's sudden change of attitude approaches dangerously near to quibbling. In the metrical version, on the other hand, the same cry of "renegade" is quite logically and suitably wrung from the lips of Vilhelm, the scholar who is still dreaming of uncompromised ideals. But it is not the final word. This comes from Olof, and takes the form of a brief apostrophe to the fleeing Vilhelm, which I think ranks with the finest passages produced by Strindberg. Apologetically, I offer this English version of it as a fitting close to my Introduction:
Olof. Oh, what a word! But though it shook the air,
These columns did not stir, nor fell the dome,
And I stand calm upon this lonely shore,
Where I was dropped by the receding waves—
For, after all, I am ashore. And now
A last "good luck upon the road" I send
To speed the daring sailor who will give
No ear to one that just has come to grief.
With sails hauled close, steer for the open sea
And for the far-off goal your soul desires!
Ere long you must fall off like all the rest,
Although a star your guiding landmark be
For in due time the stars themselves must fall!
EDWIN BJORKMAN MAY 15, 1915
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