Strindberg's fiftieth birthday was celebrated quietly in Lund in 1899. A general feeling of distrust and bewilderment was prevalent amongst his countrymen. At the age of fifty he had returned to Sweden, apparently healthy in mind and body, in the prime of life, charged with a literary vitality which confounded current theories of his insanity. He had calmly and unostentatiously resumed his task of writing drama. The haunted, feverish expression had left his countenance; he had made himself a new visage, upon which were stamped self-mastery and tranquillity of mind. And, yet, he had recently published _Inferno_ and _Legends_, and laid bare his soul's misery and delirium in throbbing pages, over which the reviewers had poured acrid contempt. He had written _To Damascus_ in a gust of mediæval repentance, and uncovered himself in the transports of asceticism. With a sigh of relief his enemies had laid aside their opposition to his indiscretions and revelations, his materialism and transcendentalism, his socialism and individualism. They felt that there was no need to take a lunatic seriously. His friends had waited patiently for the "dancing star" which they knew would arise out of the chaos. [Illustration: August Strindberg--Bust by K.I. Eldh (Bought by the Swedish State. In the National Museum, Stockholm)] [Illustration: August Strindberg--Portrait by Carl Larsson, 1899. (In the National Museum, Stockholm)] _The Saga of the Folkungs, Gustavus Vasa_ and _Eric XIV_ appeared in 1899, and showed that the author of _Master Olof_ had returned to the art with which, twenty-seven years earlier, he had given his country its greatest historical play. With the precision of the somnambulist who takes up the thread of mental events, regardless of the time that has passed, Strindberg resumed the story of _Master Olof_ where he had left off. In _Gustavus Vasa_ we again meet Olof, the renegade, but he is now--as befits his character--a secondary person, duly subservient to the Power of the Time, King Gustavus Vasa. With _Gustavus Vasa_ and _Eric XIV_ Strindberg attained to mastery of a dramatic art, in which he stands unsurpassed. The art of writing _the psychological drama of history_ is his, and his alone. No other dramaturge of modern times has approached him in clarity of historical vision, or in imaginative reconstruction of living characters which are at once true to their time and to all times.