But Strindberg's plays are highly "unpleasant," says some defender of the morality of the stage. True, but they are honestly unpleasant. They differ from the popular play of amorous escapades and half-uttered indecencies, as the mountain torrent differs from the garden fountain. They are written by the impelling force of an idea, whilst the conventional immorality play exists in the interests of frivolous entertainment. However much we may disagree with the _leitmotif_ in Strindberg's naturalistic plays, and realise the limitations of his theses, we cannot ignore them. And do they not, after all, treat of "love," the obsessing object of dramatic interest from the plaintive demi-monde of Dumas _fils_ to the man-hunting Ann of Bernard Shaw? From Sudermann and Pinero to Schnitzler and Capus, through sentimentalism, conventionalism, and cynicism, the theme persists in absorbing dramatic imagination. Compared with Schnitzler, the prince of amorists, Strindberg's _milieu_ is sombre with fateful retribution. Like Strindberg, Schnitzler dramatises the illusion and disillusionment of love; his lovers and mistresses are also on the road to knowledge. The ten couples who pass over the stage in _Reigen_ might be sparks from Strindberg's anvil. But on closer inspection we find that there has been no fire. Schnitzler's world is the play-room of the passions, Strindberg's their inferno. In _Lady Julie_ and _Creditors_, both one-act plays and each with only three speaking parts, he created a new dramatic form. He now assailed the old theatre with the same vigour with which he had attacked old social institutions. In the preface to _Lady Julie_ he contemptuously writes: "The theatre has long appeared to me, as art in general, to be a _Biblia Pauperum_, a bible in pictures for those who cannot read writing or print, and the playwright as a lay preacher who disseminates the thoughts of the period in popular form, so popular that the middle classes, which chiefly fill the theatres, can understand what it is all about without much mental exertion. The theatre has therefore always been a board-school for young people, the half-educated, and women who still possess the primitive capacity for deceiving themselves, and allowing themselves to be deceived, i.e. to accept illusion, receive suggestion from the author."