Page:Strindberg the Man (1920).djvu/21

beauty of revelation and recalled to us the sagas which we had read in our youth. Master Olof’s play with the two disciples whose parts in a religious drama he is rehearsing, was to us the harbinger of that new spring of which the author gave us the presentiment. We had been seized with a hatred of the religion in which we had been deceived, but we still retained that strong religious sentiment which quest and search had produced, and Strindberg’s words fell into a soil that was predisposed to receive them.

Not until many years afterwards when I saw Master Olof on the stage did I notice that my love of the play had been so great as to prevent me from fully grasping the significance of the closing scenes of the drama. My belief in the Swedish reformer^[1] had been so unlimited as to force me to overlook those traits of weakness which the poet had permitted to remain in him in order that he might be completely human.

The next work of Strindberg that came to us down there in the country was The Red Room. It was preceded by a rumor of excessive “redness,” the consequence of which was that we, the young, shrank for a time from reading it, in spite of the fact that we considered ourselves as red as it was possible to be.

And so when we read The Red Room, we felt as if a new warmth streamed into our veins. Our pulses throbbed more vigorously, and the whole description became enshrouded in a sort of red mist. And that was