Page:Poet Lore, volume 31, 1920.djvu/162

148 This pilgrimage of his is described in the mystic symbolic dramas entitled To Damascus. This dramatic trilogy reveals to us the soul’s final battle with self and the devil—the past with all its vanity and sorrow—and the final renouncement of the world. Here he bows before and embraces that faith in God which he had combatted in his youth, and endeavored to eradicate entirely from his life in after years. Here we become acquainted with the Stranger and the Lady who journey together from place to place in suffering and disillusionment, tortured by violent, corroding hatred or solaced by ecstatic love. Finally the Stranger attains to perfect peace, that "peace which passeth all understanding," in the monastery of dead passions, the white mansion on the top of the hill which he greets with the following words:

In this play Strindberg's whole stormy life, symbolically masked, passes in review. Here are found pall-mall The Beggar, The Doctor, The Sister, The Mother, The Confessor, The Fool, The Shadows—all but one and the same individuality in different disguise. With the cross in his hand—the symbol of salvation, snatched from a roadside calvaire—The Stranger advances higher and higher towards the sky. But he falls and is found in a state of delirium by some of the inmates of the monastery who bring him to the hospital. After he emerges from the trance he finds himself seated in the Refectory in company with all those whom he has injured in life and with whom his own fate has in some way been bound up. The dominant note of the whole scene is one of overwhelming guilt—that guilt which like a red thread runs through Strindberg’s entire life. The Confessor reads aloud The Curse of Deuteronomy and every word cuts the Stranger to the quick, making him feel the whole crushing weight of the Law, but he suffers it all in resignation for he has reached the rock-bottom of life and accomplished his self redemption—the spiritual deliverance from all those passions which bound him to the past.

This deliverance is the subject of a large number of plays which, generally speaking, resemble To Damascus in thought, contents and dramatic construction. Such are among others Advent, Easter, The Dance of Death and The Dream Play, which