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The list of characters will suffice to indicate what a weird thing "The Spook Sonata" is. Rarely has Strindberg's peculiar fancy carried him further without bringing him to outright disaster. Mingling extreme realism of portrayal with a symbolism that frequently borders on the extravagant and the impossible, he has nevertheless produced a work that bites into the consciousness of the reader and challenges his thought to an unusual degree. The best characterisation of the play as a whole might be to call it a symbolistic mosaic pieced together with fragments of real life.
Reminiscences of the author's own life in all its periods recur constantly, and yet the play cannot be called autobiographical in any narrow sense. Not even its general tendency--if it can be said to have one--is particularly tied up with Strindberg's view of his own fate. No, the play is in all its aspects a generalisation along the lines of "The Dream Play," but brought nearer to the level and superficial appearance of every-day life.
One of its purposes is to illustrate the mysterious relationship between seemingly disconnected things and events which Strindberg during his latest period was so prone to discover everywhere.--When in this super-Swedenborgian mood, he was inclined to regard the slightest incident of daily life as a mere symbol meant to shadow or foreshadow vaster incidents on higher levels. It would be dangerous to accept his readings of life in this mood as so many formulations of truth, but, on the other hand, it would be unwise to discard them as meaningless. What must be remembered first and last in the study of Strindberg's work is that he was primarily, if not wholly, a bearer of suggestions rather than of final truths. We cannot go to him for knowledge of what life actually is, but we may be sure of never reading one of his pages without finding some new angle of approach, the use of which will help our own thought to enlarge our knowledge of actual life. Those who demand predigested thought will always be lost in the mazes of his irresponsible fancy. Those who ask nothing more of literature than to be set thinking will always find him one of the most fruitful writers produced by modern times.
For this very reason it would be futile to attempt any explanatory analysis of "The Spook Sonata." There must, in fact, be a separate analysis of that kind for every thinking reader. One may say, of course, that its name as well as the strange function which forms its central scene, points to an interpretation of all human life as a ghostly reflection of wasted and buried possibilities. But there is charity as well as bitterness in the play, and it seems to preach the lesson that we owe tolerance to every man but him who thinks himself better than the rest. It warns, too, against that interference with other lives which seems to have been one of the haunting spectres of Strindberg's own existence. In other words, the play may be regarded as a final passionate expression of his will to live his own life in his own way and of his resentment against real or fancied efforts to balk I that will.
Dramatically this play is well worthy of study, It contains some points that, whether successful or no in this particular connection, should not be passed over by future playwrights. Such a point, for instance, is the continued presence on the stage of several dumb characters during almost the entire first scene. I do not know whether it will come home to readers of the play that, while the conversation is going on between the Student and Old Hummel, for example, the Janitress and the Dark Lady are all the time present in the background as living reminders of the secret threads of human life underlying the conflict between the two men that do the talking. And the idea of trying to render simultaneous portrayal of life within and without a human habitation has again been tried by Strindberg in this play with very remarkable and suggestive results.
There are several signs which indicate that Strindberg changed his plan of the play while he was writing it. There is one character present on the list of characters in the Swedish text that never appears--the Janitor. On the other hand, that list does not contain the name of the Cook, who plays such a strange part in the final scene--a sort of infernalised Greek chorus with a Japanese soy bottle for its Dionysian emblem. The arrangement of the stage directions in the Swedish original indicates, too, that he intended a single setting to serve for the whole play. He hoped probably to be able to let the action laid within the house be seen from the outside, but, warned by his strong sense of theatrical feasibility, he changed his plans unhesitatingly, and with them his scenery.
Several of the minor themes running through the play may to the reader seem not only minor but hopelessly trivial. I am thinking principally of the constantly recurring charge against servants that they take the nourishment out of food before serving it to their masters. This suspicion seems to have been one of Strindberg's fixed ideas, occurring in almost every work where the relationship between masters and servants is at all mentioned. I think he has harped too much on this theme, both in "The Spook Sonata" and elsewhere. I think, too, that he is wrong in placing the responsibility with the servants. On the other hand, I think one of his services is that he works with modern science to bring us a better realisation of the dose interrelation between the material basis of our existences and the more important spiritual overtones.
"The Spook Sonata" was written and published in 1907. It was played for the first time on January 27, 1908, at the Intimate Theatre, Stockholm, reaching a total of twelve performances.
The little scene named "The First Warning" is frankly autobiographical. It relates an actual incident from Strindberg's first marriage, to which, I think, he makes reference in "A Fool's Confession"--a work, by the bye, which should really be named "A Fool's Plea" in English.
In spite of sinister undertones, "The First Warning" is distinctly a comedy, and practically the only short thing in a lighter vein written by Strindberg. At first he named it "The First Tooth," but he had adopted the present title before the original publication--with three other one-act plays--occurred, in 1893. In Germany the play is known under the name "Signs of Autumn" (Herbstzeichen). Beginning on September 10, 1910, it was given eight times in all at the Intimate Theatre, Stockholm, but long before that time it had been played a number of times on various German stages.
King Gustavus I, founder of the Vasa dynasty, which reigned over Sweden until 1818, has rightly been called the "father" of his country and the builder of modern Sweden. He finished the war of liberation, by which the hampering and unsatisfactory union between Sweden and the other two Scandinavian kingdoms was finally severed. But he did much more. He reorganised the whole country, in all its departments, on such a basis of efficiency that it became able to play the part of a great European power for more than a century. Some have pictured him as a sort of superman. Others have called him a mere country squire, applying the methods of stable and barn to a whole country. Both those views of him are probably correct as well as incorrect. He was undoubtedly first of all an able and conscientious peasant on a large scale, but as such he was very much in place at a time when agriculture was the only source of income that could be called national. And his cares on behalf of commerce and mining show him to have had a very broad and foresighted view of husbandry.
The figure of the first Vasa took an early hold of Strindberg's imagination. He introduced it in the first version of his first great play, "Master Olov." But there the king was a subordinate character--so much so, in fact, that he did not appear at all in the final metrical version of the play, completed in 1877. At that time Strindberg was more interested in Master Olov, the dreaming idealist who placed religious reform above political and economical reorganisation. When, in 1899, he returned to "old King Gustav," his interest had shifted, and in this play, said to be his greatest historical drama--and one of the greatest of its kind in the annals of modern literature--the royal figure dominates absolute.
When I first contemplated a translation of this play I feared it would be necessary to preface it with a condensed history of Sweden during the early sixteenth century. Having finished my task, I find that an elaborate historical introduction would merely be a duplication of the work done by the playwright. Barring a few minor points that have been illuminated by notes, all the history needed for the understanding of the play will be found within the play itself. The truth of the matter is that Strindberg was not writing history but poetry, and that he was more anxious to portray human character than to set forth all too familiar historical events.
He portrayed his main character in more than one way and sense, however. The King, as we find him in the drama, is a wonderfully vivid and faithful reconstruction of a great man that has writ himself in large letters on the map of his country. But he is also a symbolisation of a type that will always remain one of the most fascinating of all that people the earth: that of the ruler who is conscious both his mission and of the price that must be paid for its fulfilment. The problem of Strindberg's play might be said to be this: granted such a mission, how much has a man the right to pay for its proper fulfilment? And as behoves a poet Strindberg has brought this problem to no triumphant "Q.E.D." His ambiguous, yet tremendously significant, answer seems to be: "Such a man has the right to do whatever his mission demands, even though it may go against his grain as an individual, but he must be humble about it and not confuse himself with Providence." Gustavus is humbled and made to suffer, not because of this or that act, but because of an inclination to consider his own mission the only one in sight.
A few words need to be said about the chronology of the play. In accordance with his theories in regard to historical playwriting Strindberg has dealt very freely with dates and facts. The play occupies a period of about two years, which length of time separates the first act from the four last. These take place within a few days. The historical events that enter as material into the play were spread over nearly twenty years, and Strindberg has not hesitated to introduce them in reversed order either. This license must be considered in the light of what I have already said about his intentions. His main concern was to show how the principal character would act under certain given circumstances, and to use those circumstances in the manner most apt to throw light on the character in question. And in this respect he has undoubtedly been successful.
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