His realism is always mixed with
idealism; his figures are always "doctored," so to speak. And they
have been thus treated in order to enable their creator to drive
home the particular truth he is just then concerned with.
Consciously or unconsciously he sought to produce what may be
designated as "pure cultures" of certain human qualities. But
these he took great pains to arrange in their proper psychological
settings, for mental and moral qualities, like everything else,
run in groups that are more or less harmonious, if not exactly
homogeneous. The man with a single quality, like Moliere's
Harpagon, was much too primitive and crude for Strindberg's art,
as he himself rightly asserted in his preface to "Miss Julia."
When he wanted to draw the genius of greed, so to speak, he did it
by setting it in the midst of related qualities of a kind most
likely to be attracted by it.
Tekla is such a "pure culture" of a group of naturally correlated
mental and moral qualities and functions and tendencies--of a
personality built up logically around a dominant central note.
There are within all of us many personalities, some of which
remain for ever potentialities.
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