The paradoxical versatility of a man who holds all the keys of successful drama in his hands, and yet sacrifices the theatre to the transcendentalism of his ideas, is not easily explained. Strindberg told Dr. John Landquist, now editor of the posthumous edition of his collected works, that he really found it difficult to write modern plays, and that he loved pomp and circumstance in drama.[3] That love is displayed in the sumptuous repast introduced into the second part of _To Damascus_, at once coarsely barbaric and uncomfortably ethereal, a strange combination of the Banquet of Life and the Swedish _hors-d'œuvre_ table. And yet, this is the man who wrote the Chamber Plays: _Storm, The Burned Lot, The Pelican, The Black Glove_ and _The Spook Sonata_ (1907), in which the figures move, physical, yet free from the three dimensions, impersonated ideas, brain-spectres who walk the boards with unsteady feet. This is the man who wrote the preface to _Lady Julie_, who sought the realisation of his theatrical ideal in the one-act play with two or three characters, and who later came to write _Gustavus Adolphus_ with fifty-four characters, _Midsummer_ with thirty-two characters; who created twenty-four characters for _Gustavus Vasa_, and twenty for _Eric XIV_ and _The Saga of the Folkungs_ respectively, and whose dramatic lavishness necessitated a succession of five-act dramas. It seems strange that the author of saga plays, like _The Journey of Lucky Peter_, and _The Keys of Heaven_, with its parodied Sancho Panzaisms, should have composed _The Dance of Death_; that the conscience-stricken visions of To Damascus should be followed by _The Slippers of Abu Casem_. This ingenious "toy for children" Strindberg dedicated to his youngest daughter, the little Anne-Marie, on her sixth birthday. The two great Norwegian dramatists presented an orderly development in the choice of dramatic form, which makes the study of their art an exercise in the logic of temperament. The natural romanticism of Ibsen's early plays passed into the classical art of _Ghosts_. The intellectual modernism of the later Ibsen was the ripeness anticipated by every shrewd observer of the course of his mind. The art of Ibsen is complex, yet simple. Born out of the depths of his love of truth and his love of beauty, it arose, well-formed, palpable, a thing for all the world to see and hear, an indictment of the gigantic social fraud to which all must ultimately listen. It is essentially exoteric. So is the art of the rival and minor playwright, Björnson, who has given the world its most perfect dramatised sermons. Strindberg's art is incalculable, subtle, the caprice of a spirit that cannot exhaust itself: esoteric because it is ever rooted in the unconscious. His plays may be read and seen by the many, but at present they will be understood only by the few.