his reason can master most easily, or else the one reflecting most favourably on his power of reasoning.  A suicide is committed.  Bad business, says the merchant.  Unrequited love, say the ladies.  Sickness, says the sick man.  Crushed hopes, says the shipwrecked.  But now it may be that the motive lay in all or none of these directions.  It is possible that the one who is dead may have hid the main motive by pushing forward another meant to place his memory in a better light.

In explanation of Miss Julia’s sad fate I have suggested many factors:  her mother’s fundamental instincts; her father’s mistaken upbringing of the girl; her own nature, and the suggestive influence of her fiance on a weak and degenerate brain; furthermore, and more directly:  the festive mood of the Midsummer Eve; the absence of her father; her physical condition; her preoccupation with the animals; the excitation of the dance; the dusk of the night; the strongly aphrodisiacal influence of the flowers; and lastly the chance forcing the two of them together in a secluded room, to which must be added the aggressiveness of the excited man.

Thus I have neither been one-sidedly physiological nor one-sidedly psychological in my procedure.  Nor have I merely delivered a moral preachment.  This multiplicity of motives I regard as praiseworthy because it is in keeping with the views of our own time.  And if others have done the same thing before me, I may boast of not being the sole inventor of my paradoxes—­as all discoveries are named.

In regard to the character-drawing I may say that I have tried to make my figures rather “characterless,” and I have done so for reasons I shall now state.

In the course of the ages the word character has assumed many meanings.  Originally it signified probably the dominant ground-note in the complex mass of the self, and as such it was confused with temperament.  Afterward it became the middle-class term for an automaton, so that an individual whose nature had come to a stand still, or who had adapted himself to a certain part in life—­who had ceased to grow, in a word—­was named a character; while one remaining in a state of development—­a skilful navigator on life’s river, who did not sail with close-tied sheets, but knew when to fall off before the wind and when to luff again—­was called lacking in character.  And he was called so in a depreciatory sense, of course, because he was so hard to catch, to classify, and to keep track of.  This middle-class notion about the immobility of the soul was transplanted to the stage, where the middle-class element has always held sway.  There a character became synonymous with a gentleman fixed and finished once for all—­one who invariably appeared drunk, jolly, sad.  And for the purpose of characterisation nothing more was needed than some physical deformity like a clubfoot, a wooden leg, a red nose; or the person concerned was made to repeat some phrase like “That’s