THE BIOLOGICAL SUPERIOR
Sweden also had a great dramatist and poet in this nineteenth century.
He came some twenty years later than Ibsen, a tormented and highly
emotional man of genius, who just about boxed the compass of thought,
and believed everything there was for a man to believe. He was too much
of a propagandist, even for me; I like an artist to have ideas, but not
so many that they contradict!
August Strindberg’s father was a bankrupt shop-keeper; his mother was a
bar-maid, and three illegitimate children had preceded him. He was
raised in a family of eleven in a small house, and the first emotions he
knew were fear and hunger. He was lonely and unhappy all his life, and
poured out his troubles in a torrent over Sweden.
He began writing at twenty-one; he had the artist’s passion for all
kinds of knowledge, and in those early days he was a Socialist and a
champion of labor, also of the economic emancipation of women. But at
the age of twenty-six he chose a wife, and illustrated the formula we
used to sing in childhood:
Needles and pins, needles and pins,
When a man marries his trouble begins!
His wife bore him some children, and then wished to resume her career as
an actress. Strindberg objected to this, and they quarreled, and after
seven years they parted. The poet considered this an irremediable
tragedy; for he held a mystical idea, that marriage is an actual union
of flesh and spirit, and to tear a couple apart is to maim them both.
Strindberg put his agony into a book, “The Confessions of a Fool”; a
ghastly record, yet one can hardly keep from smiling over it. The author
preaches the doctrine that woman is inferior to man; he pounds upon this
theme--and then proceeds to tell you marital incidents which make it
clear that the woman was fully a match for him!
Strindberg believes that woman is inferior, not merely physically,
intellectually and morally, but biologically; she is a half-way
creature between man and child, and it is her duty to submit herself in
all things to the biologically superior male. But nature for some reason
has failed to inform her that she is inferior, and the perverse creature
insists upon trying to act as if she were equal; so everything goes to
wreck. Somebody said that Herbert Spencer’s idea of a tragedy was a
generalization killed by a fact. Strindberg’s tragedy was the same, but
he never recognized it; he clung to his generalization, not merely
through this marriage, but through two others, which failed in the same
way, and for the same reason.
It is true that some women are predatory; it is true that a great many
women abuse the power they get. That may be expected of every enslaved
race or class or sex. But the only way to become fit for power is to
exercise it, and the only way to get it is to take it. The women who
broke Strindberg’s three marriages were like the suffragettes with
hammers; they were using the only arguments their opponents would heed.
As a result of their efforts, some of us now live in a happier time,
having comrade-wives who do not abuse their share of power, but
co-operate with their husbands in carrying the burdens of life.
But whatever you think about Strindberg’s biological superiority, you
cannot deny the power of the tragedy he wrote upon his thesis. It is
called “The Father,” and shows a man undermined and destroyed by a
cunning, determined woman, who sets out to break him to her will. Also
you have to admit the reality of “Miss Julia,” which portrays the
degeneracy of the ruling classes in Sweden. This high-born young lady,
who starts an intrigue with a man-servant in her household, might be a
page out of a “yellow” Sunday supplement in America.
Strindberg came close to the line of insanity; he spent two or three
years in a sanitarium, and wrote a book about these borderland states,
“Inferno.” Then he took up with Swedenborg, and evolved into a Christian
mystic, and went back into a second childhood of bible-worship. But that
did not keep him from carrying on frantic quarrels with his enemies, and
pouring out many volumes of personalities. Strangely enough, there is a
kind of impersonality in it all, because the man is so tragically
earnest. He is trying to find the truth, and puts himself before us as
a document; no one but Rousseau has done this so completely. Therefore,
we think of Strindberg as one of the great teachers. Let the artist give
us truth, and we can always find use for it.