Whilst fighting the battle of realism in fiction Strindberg had prepared the dramatic form which was to be his contribution to the "new" theatre, on which the curtain was about to rise. The demand for a new dramatic art had become imperative. Tired of the admonitions and stale declamations of the old rhetorical play, the public had asked for a representation of life. Dumas père had responded by writing the drama of personality, Dumas _fils_ by establishing the play of moral problems. Ibsen had built the psychological play on the foundation of Dumas and had endowed the Norwegian language with a new sonority. Scribe had supplied fine technique and neat carpentry for the new French stage, but Paris, the petulant playgoer, sighed for other things. Zola raised the cry of naturalism. The artificial plots of Dumas, Augier and Sardou were to be superseded by dramatic flashes of reality. "I yearn for life, with its shiver, its breath and its strength; I long for life as it is," cried the author of _Thérèse Raquin_, and Strindberg responded. In September, 1887, _The Father_ was published, the first of the series of naturalistic plays through which Strindberg's European reputation as a modern dramatist and a woman-hater was established. The institution in the same year of the Théâtre Libre, by M. André Antoine, provided a stage which was wholly adapted to the revolt against old-fashioned theatricality. M. Antoine was an employee at the gas-works who had a passionate faith in realistic drama. With a group of sympathetic _dilettanti_ he began evening performances in a large room in Place Pigalle without the stage mechanism of the commercial theatre. Success attended the enthusiastic players, and the performances at the Théâtre Libre became the rendezvous of the intellectual and artistic world which gravitates to Paris. The soul of the enterprise, M. Antoine, was manager, actor, scene-painter, and mechanic. The theatre was semi-private. Special invitation cards to elect audiences protected the actors from the attention of gallery-opinion. The actors and authors of the new plays were the hosts in this home of dramatic revolution, where every original playwright was welcome. Strindberg's _The Father, Lady Julie_ and _Creditors_ were amongst the first plays produced, and he, therefore, had the satisfaction of being played in Paris before any appearance on the French stage of the "famous Norwegian blue-stocking." Tolstoy's _Powers of Darkness_, Zola's _Thérèse Raquin_, Emile Fabre's _L'Argent_, an adaptation of the brothers de Goncourt's Sœur Philomène and Villiers' "_L'Evasion_," belonged to the early repertoire. _Ghosts_ was the first of Ibsen's plays to appear; it was followed by _Rosmersholm_. The Théâtre Libre lasted eight years. It had time to create a "modernity" in taste and dramatic expression which produced similar free theatres in Berlin and London, and a vogue of naturalism which included every variety of "life," and which, occasionally, gave