In the preface to _Lady Julie_ he deals with the all-important subject of characterisation. "As modern characters," he writes, "living in a period of transition more hurried and hysterical than its immediate predecessor, I have drawn my characters vacillating, broken, mixtures of old and new.... My souls (characters) are conglomerations of past and present stages of culture, scraps of books and newspapers, fragments of men and women, tom shreds of Sunday attire that are now rags, such as go to make up a soul. And I have thrown in some history of origins in letting the weaker steal and repeat the words of the stronger, in letting the souls borrow ideas, or so-called suggestions from one another." He ridicules the ordinary idea of a strong character. The person "who has acquired a fixed temperament or accommodated himself to a certain rôle in life, who in a word has ceased to grow, was supposed to have character; whilst one who developed, the skilful navigator on the stream of life who does not sail with close-tied sheets, but who knows when to fall off before the wind and when to luff again, was deemed deficient in character.... This bourgeois conception of the fixity of the soul was transferred to the stage, where all that is bourgeois has ever reigned supreme. Such a character became synonymous with a gentleman, fixed and ready-made, one who invariably appeared drunk, jocular, melancholy.... I do not, therefore, believe in simple theatrical characters. And the summary judgments which authors pass on human beings, such as: this one is stupid; that one is brutal; he is jealous; he is mean, etc., should be refuted by naturalists who know the rich complexity of the soul, and who realise that 'vice has an obverse which shows a considerable likeness to virtue.'" The secret of Strindberg's great influence on the theatre of twenty years ago lay in this very conception of character. His men and women are _alive_, moving, changing, growing, shrinking in ceaseless response to the pressure of existence. He is the dramatist of the _perpetuum mobile_ in the modern heart, the interpreter of inexhaustible discontent in himself and others. His personality vibrates in the dialogue, and lifts the idea of the play to the surface in every consecutive scene, but the artist in him is stronger than the idealogue. The curtain and the settled problem do not drop together. Strindberg has answered a question or two, tentatively, in his own manner, but others crowd in upon him and his audience. The absence of finality is felt through the tragic endings, through the strong blend of moods, emotions and desires of his exceptional characters, through the unreasonableness of his prejudices. In spite of pessimism and cynicism a hope of change is communicated to the spectator, which penetrates depression and stimulates the curiosity to live.