Both "Creditors" and "Pariah" were written in the winter of 1888-89 at
Holte, near Copenhagen, where Strindberg, assisted by his first wife,
was then engaged in starting what he called a "Scandinavian Experimental
Theatre." In March, 1889, the two plays were given by students from the
University of Copenhagen, and with Mrs. von Essen Strindberg as Tekla. A
couple of weeks later the performance was repeated across the Sound,
in the Swedish city of Malmo, on which occasion the writer of this
introduction, then a young actor, assisted in the stage management. One
of the actors was Gustav Wied, a Danish playwright and novelist, whose
exquisite art since then has won him European fame. In the audience was
Ola Hansson, a Swedish novelist and poet who had just published a short
story from which Strindberg, according to his own acknowledgment on
playbill and title-page, had taken the name and the theme of "Pariah."
Mr. Hansson has printed a number of letters (Tilskueren, Copenhagen,
July, 1912) written to him by Strindberg about that time, as well as
some very informative comments of his own. Concerning the performance
of Malmo he writes: "It gave me a very unpleasant sensation. What did
it mean? Why had Strindberg turned my simple theme upsidedown so that
it became unrecognisable? Not a vestige of the 'theme from Ola Hansson'
remained. Yet he had even suggested that he and I act the play together,
I not knowing that it was to be a duel between two criminals. And he had
at first planned to call it 'Aryan and Pariah'--which meant, of course,
that the strong Aryan, Strindberg, was to crush the weak Pariah,
Hansson, coram populo."
In regard to his own story Mr. Hansson informs us that it dealt with "a
man who commits a forgery and then tells about it, doing both in a sort
of somnambulistic state whereby everything is left vague and undefined."
At that moment "Raskolnikov" was in the air, so to speak. And without
wanting in any way to suggest imitation, I feel sure that the groundnote
of the story was distinctly Dostoievskian. Strindberg himself had been
reading Nietzsche and was--largely under the pressure of a reaction
against the popular disapproval of his anti-feministic attitude--being
driven more and more into a superman philosophy which reached its
climax in the two novels "Chandalah" (1889) and "At the Edge of the Sea"
(1890). The Nietzschean note is unmistakable in the two plays contained
in the present volume.
But these plays are strongly colored by something else--by something
that is neither Hansson-Dostoievski nor Strindberg-Nietzsche. The
solution of the problem is found in the letters published by
Mr. Hansson. These show that while Strindberg was still planning
"Creditors," and before he had begun "Pariah," he had borrowed
from Hansson a volume of tales by Edgar Allan Poe. It was his
first acquaintance with the work of Poe, though not with American
literature--for among his first printed work was a series of
translations from American humourists; and not long ago a Swedish
critic (Gunnar Castren in Samtiden, Christiania, June, 1912) wrote of
Strindberg's literary beginnings that "he had learned much from Swedish
literature, but probably more from Mark Twain and Dickens."
The impression Poe made on Strindberg was overwhelming. He returns to
it in one letter after another. Everything that suits his mood of the
moment is "Poesque" or "E. P-esque." The story that seems to have made
the deepest impression of all was "The Gold Bug," though his thought
seems to have distilled more useful material out of certain other
stories illustrating Poe's theories about mental suggestion. Under the
direct influence of these theories, Strindberg, according to his own
statements to Hansson, wrote the powerful one-act play "Simoom," and
made Gustav in "Creditors" actually CALL FORTH the latent epileptic
tendencies in Adolph. And on the same authority we must trace the method
of: psychological detection practised by Mr. X. in "Pariah" directly to
"The Gold Bug."
Here we have the reason why Mr. Hansson could find so little of his
story in the play. And here we have the origin of a theme which, while
not quite new to him, was ever afterward to remain a favourite one with
Strindberg: that of a duel between intellect and cunning. It forms the
basis of such novels as "Chandalah" and "At the Edge of the Sea," but
it recurs in subtler form in works of much later date. To readers of the
present day, Mr. X.--that striking antithesis of everything a scientist
used to stand for in poetry--is much less interesting as a superman in
spe than as an illustration of what a morally and mentally normal man
can do with the tools furnished him by our new understanding of human
ways and human motives. And in giving us a play that holds our interest
as firmly as the best "love plot" ever devised, although the stage shows
us only two men engaged in an intellectual wrestling match, Strindberg
took another great step toward ridding the drama of its old, shackling
conventions.
The name of this play has sometimes been translated as "The Outcast,"
whereby it becomes confused with "The Outlaw," a much earlier play on
a theme from the old Sagas. I think it better, too, that the Hindu
allusion in the Swedish title be not lost, for the best of men may
become an outcast, but the baseness of the Pariah is not supposed to
spring only from lack of social position.