Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
file which includes the original illustrations.
See 44025-h.htm or 44025-h.zip:
(https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/44025/pg44025-images.html)
or
(https://www.gutenberg.org/files/44025/44025-h.zip)
Images of the original pages are available through
the Google Books Library Project. See
http://www.google.com/books?id=j8ZMAAAAMAAJ
AUGUST STRINDBERG
THE SPIRIT OF REVOLT
Studies and Impressions
by
L. LIND-AF-HAGEBY
New York
D. Appleton and Company
MCMXIII
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION. THE RIDDLE
I. THE STRUGGLE WITH ENVIRONMENT
II. THE STRUGGLE FOR SELF-EXPRESSION
III. "FERMENTATION TIME"
IV. THE DRAMA OF THE HERETIC
V. MARRIED AND BLASPHEMOUS.
VI. THE ARTIST.
VII. SELF-TORMENTOR AND VISIONARY.
VIII. The Theatre of Life
STRINDBERG'S CHIEF WRITINGS
INDEX
[Illustration: August Strindberg--Bust by Carl Eldh.]
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
August Strindberg. From a Bust by Carl Eldh.... Frontispiece
Strindberg's Parents
August Strindberg (1862 and 1870)
August Strindberg. From Statue by Carl Eldh
August Strindberg (1884)
August Strindberg (1884 and 1897)
August Strindberg. From Bust by Max Levi, 1893
August Strindberg. From Bust by Agnes Kjellberg Frumerie, 1896
August Strindberg. From Portrait in Oil by Chr. Krogh, 1893
August Strindberg. From Portrait in Oil by Richard Bergh, 1906
August Strindberg (1904 and 1906)
August Strindberg (1906 and 1907)
August Strindberg (1902). In His Home in Stockholm (1908)
August Strindberg. From Bust by K.I. Eldh. Bought by the Swedish
State. In the National Museum, Stockholm
August Strindberg. From Portrait by Carl Larsson, 1899. In the
National Museum, Stockholm
Strindberg in His Library in the Blue Tower. His Last Home
Strindberg in His Study (1911)
The Strindberg-Theatre in Stockholm
Harriet Bosse. Strindberg's third Wife as Biskra in Samum, 1902.
Anne-Marie Bosse-Strindberg. Strindberg's only child by his third
marriage
Strindberg's Funeral (May 19th, 1913)
Trades-Unions and Undergraduates in Procession
AUGUST STRINDBERG
THE SPIRIT OF REVOLT
INTRODUCTION
THE RIDDLE
There have been few dispassionate attempts to discern August
Strindberg's place in contemporary literature. His writings and his
personality defied ordinary criticism.
He took upon himself the rôle of destroyer, he mocked men's religion
and men's morality, he ridiculed propriety and poured bitter scorn on
the social order. There was something cometic in the swiftness and
intensity with which he appeared, disturbing the well-ordered orbits of
traditions and conventions. The erratic course of his voyage through
humanity caused alarm. No sooner had people congratulated themselves
that his terrific lust for destruction had passed by their favourite
systems and their cherished ideals, than his ruthless force was upon
them, exposing ugliness and scattering treasures.
He passed on, making enemies, breaking idols, desecrating temples. He
sowed reality and he reaped hatred.
His titanic spirit worked through a brain charged with explosive
mentality. He poured out dramas, novels, stories, with a versatility
and an accumulating energy which in themselves were offensive to the
mediocre and to those who sought to place him within literary shackles.
He discoursed on history, science and statecraft with the calm
assurance of omniscience.
He wrote books which were decidedly and unblushingly "immoral." He
compelled attention by blasphemous outbursts which filled the religious
with righteous indignation and sighs for the _auto-da-fé_. He dissected
the human heart, laid bare its meanness, its uncleanliness; made men
and women turn on each other with sudden understanding and loathing,
and walked away smiling at the evil he had wrought. He turned on
himself with savage hatred, and in books, bearing the mark of the
flagellant and reflecting the agony of a soul in torment, he pointed to
his sins and his stripes.
"He is very evil," said some; "let us put him in prison."
"He is mad," said others; "let us have him declared a lunatic."
"He is most improper," said the majority; "let us ignore him
altogether."
When public opinion was quite sure that Strindberg was evil, mad, and
improper, when he stood convicted out of his own mouth of anti-social
and satanic designs, he stayed the verdict by his own magic. He
wrote more and more, and there came from his pen artistic creations
endowed with virtues which could not have risen in a mind submerged in
vice; pictures of scenery which bespoke a delicate and spiritualised
nature-worship. His mind held a garden of flowers as well as a pile of
putrescence.
On May 14th, 1912, the stillness of death descended on the battlefield
which was Strindberg's life. The literary historian who justly passes
the suspended verdict must hold peculiar and special qualifications.
For the winds of literary taste and fashion cannot touch the giant of
expression. Condemnation by temporary systems of morality and creed
did not alter his course in life and will not disturb him in death.
He was--himself; and he worked ceaselessly at the task of finding
more of himself. Strindberg the atheist, Strindberg the scientist,
Strindberg the spiritualist, Strindberg the mystic, Strindberg the
sensualist, and Strindberg the ascetic, took equally important parts in
his theatre of life. The critic met him day by day in different attire
and pose, incarnations of the elusive self which was stage-manager of
this extraordinary performance. A soul in conflict with itself, good
and evil, fair and foul; sparkling with life and tense with passion
to create, he could not give us peace or contentment. Like Jacob, he
wrestled with God, though not for a night only, but throughout life,
and he fought with the desperation of one who knows that upon the issue
of the struggle depends, not his own blessing, but the liberation of
countless prisoners.
An epitome of humanity, a fragment of the world's eternal and real
drama of birth and death, he cannot be fully understood save by those
who share his cosmic consciousness.
He studied chemistry, astronomy, botany, physics, geology, entomology,
medicine, philology and political economy with a voracity which made
him ridiculous in the eyes of the specialists who are satisfied with a
few well-established formulæ. For him there were no barriers between
specialised departments of human knowledge--all sciences were thrown
into the melting-pot, in which he was preparing the new brew which
would slake the thirst of parched souls. A solipsist who assimilated,
rejected and transmuted the patiently accumulated theories of morals
as the supreme duty of existence, he scorned the slaves of ethical
communism.
The iconoclasm of Ibsen was fired by the realisation of the duties
of the wise prophet amongst his foolish people. The hypocrisies
and foibles of the little souls were the objects of the thundering
chastisement of his trumpet. The white heat of Nietzsche's forge for
the making of Superman was engendered by contempt for the feeble and
sickly. The misanthropy which breathed poison out of Strindberg's
writings, which showed souls and things in hideous nakedness, and
painted sores and disease with horrible realism, was the darkness which
he held high so as to call forth the cry for tight.
The collected works of Strindberg, which will shortly be published in a
new edition, consist of some 115 plays, novels, collections of stories,
essays and poems. Amongst these some seem absolutely antithetical.
It is the constant changeability, the self-contradictions, which made
Strindberg so incomprehensible to his contemporaries. The measure of
his life-force was so liberal that he could afford to continue where
others stop. He shed his skins like the snake and altered his colour
like the chameleon, because he was the personification of perpetual
movement and change. Thus he was endowed with ever-recurring youth;
the decay of the old was immediately followed by birth of the new.
The diary, in which, during the last fourteen years, he recorded
his visions and supernatural experiences, will not be given to the
world for many years to come. Though it depicts the last phase of his
spiritual evolution, the postponement of publication is no doubt wise.
Meanwhile, those who have poured curses on Strindberg's blatant atheism
have been perplexed by his last words.
When death was drawing near, he took the Bible--which always lay on the
table by his bed--held it up and said in a clear voice:
"Everything personal is now obliterated. I have settled with life. My
account has been rendered. This alone is right."
He expressed a last wish that the Bible and a little crucifix which
he used to wear should be placed on his breast after death, and that
he should be buried early in the morning, and not amongst the rich. He
desired to be laid to rest alone on the top of a hill under the firs.
This love of the early morning was part of his craving for more light.
For many years he used to take a solitary morning walk. At seven
o'clock he emerged from his "blue tower" in Stockholm and walked
briskly through the streets and squares of his native town. At nine he
was back at his writing-table--of late years a recluse for the rest of
the day, absorbed in his work.
"Ever since my youth," he writes in _Inferno_, "I devote my morning
walk to meditations which are preparations for my daily work. Nobody
may then accompany me, not even my wife. In the morning my mind enjoys
a balance and an expansion which approach ecstasy; I do not walk, I
fly; I do not feel that I have a body; all sadness evaporates and I
am entirely soul. This is for me the hour of inner concentration, of
prayer, my divine service."
I have often seen Strindberg in the streets of Stockholm. He walked
with his high forehead painfully contracted, the eyes searching and
concentrated, and an expression of haughty bitterness upon his face.
A solitary, suggesting to the passer-by Rodin's _Penseur_ in motion
and the futile wanderings of Ahasuerus; he seemed wrapped in his own
misery, held aloof by suffering and contempt.
One day I met him with a companion. He was holding a little girl by
the hand and talking to her. The child looked up in his face and
Strindberg's expression was changed. Love for the child, respect for
the questions and joys of childhood shone out of the face of the hater.
He was not obsessed by the ugliness of things or the cruelty of human
deception. His face was aglow with the early enthusiasm which, though
slain a thousand times, rises again at the bidding of the Self that
knows the answer to the riddle.
In the early morning of Sunday, May 19th, August Strindberg's body was
laid to rest. It was a glorious spring day with sunshine and blue sky.
Some sixty thousand people were astir to do homage to the memory of one
whom they knew to have been intrinsically true and tragically great.
Royalty, Riksdag, universities, capital and labour, statesmen, writers
and artists assembled to say a united farewell to the man of mystery
who, by his intense sincerity and the exuberance of genius, had at last
melted hatred, and ascended the steps from shame to glory.
In a message after Strindberg's death, Maxim Gorki likened him to
Danko, the hero of the old Danube legend, who, in order to help
humanity out of the darkness of problems, tore his heart out of his
breast, lit it and holding it high, led the way. The masses who mock
and praise so easily, who crucify and raise idols with the same haste,
seldom recognise their real friends. Strindberg patiently burnt his
heart for the illumination of the people, and on the day when his body
was laid low in the soil the flame of his self-immolation was seen pure
and inextinguishable.
CHAPTER I
THE STRUGGLE WITH ENVIRONMENT
Strindberg's childhood and youth, as described by himself in his
autobiographical novel _The Bondswoman's Son_, present psychological
features of exceptional interest. The circumstances of his early
home-life and their effect upon the unfolding forces of his genius
cannot be ignored by anyone who attempts to explain the varied strata
of his artistic production.
His insistent and torturous need for exact self-analysis, coupled with
an equally compelling need to tell the truth, made all his writings
strongly subjective. His autobiography--"the story of a soul's
evolution"--is an intimate revelation of his power to dissect his past
selves, to record minute incidents and to extract reflexes from the
bundle of emotions and thoughts which go to make up character. Nothing
is lost, nothing is too insignificant for careful examination in the
microscope under which he places every cell of himself. The confessions
of Rousseau and Tolstoy have not the nakedness of Strindberg's truth
about himself. Though he never loses sympathy with himself, he scorns
excuses and exposes his sins and his follies with ruthless exactitude.
There is a strange combination of the coolly analysing psychologist
and the passionate flagellant in the descriptions which range from the
struggles of childhood, through the Inferno-period of 1896, to the calm
of _Alone_, and the final visions of light.
The autobiographical novel in four volumes which was published under
the titles _The Bondswoman's Son, Fermentation Time, In the Red Room_
and _The Author_, was written at the age of thirty-seven, and, though
the impressions of childhood are recorded with deep insight into
the child's mind, we cannot forget that they were written down and
interpreted by the man who had behind him years of tumultuous and
bitter struggle for self-expression, and before whom the banquet of
life seemed reduced to dead-sea fruit. In the preface to the fifth
edition of _The Bondswoman's Son_, he tells us that when writing the
volume he believed he stood before death, "for I was tired, saw no
longer any object in life, considered myself superfluous, thrown away."
* * * * *
Johan August Strindberg was born in Stockholm on January 22nd, 1849.
His father, whom in disparagement of his parentage he often calls
"the grocer," was a merchant and shipping agent who had married a
servant-girl, the mother of his three children. The father was a man
of education and natural refinement who passed through many economical
vicissitudes, culminating in bankruptcy at the time of August's birth.
August was born a short time after the union between the parents had
been legalised by the ceremony of marriage, and he was not welcome.
His father bore his troubles with manly fortitude and resignation
and cherished the ideals of the upper classes, whilst the mother
was essentially of the people and remained so. He claimed a distant
ancestral connection with the nobility of Sweden, his family having
descended from the son of a peasant who was born in 1710 at Strinne
in Angermanland, and who married a girl of noble birth. The discord
resulting from the difference between his father and mother gave August
his first impression of that class struggle which I throughout life
held him in the bondage of a haunting problem, and which stimulated the
development of his mordantly critical faculties.
Poverty, with its attendant cares and anxieties, reigned in the house
by Klara churchyard, where, from a flat on the third floor, August
began to survey life's difficulties. He tells us that he recollects
fear and hunger as his first sensations. He was afraid of darkness, of
being beaten, of offending people, of falling down, of knocking against
things, of being in the way, of the fists of his brothers, of father's
and mother's chastisements.
It was not easy to avoid being in people's way, for the parents with
seven children and two servants lived in three rooms. The furniture
consisted mostly of cradles and beds; children slept on ironing boards
and chairs. Baptisms and funerals alternated. The mother developed
phthisis after the birth of her twelfth child.
She was contented with her life, he tells us, for she had risen in the
social scale and improved her own and her family's position. The father
was less satisfied with his fate, for he had descended and sacrificed
himself. He was tired, sad, severe and serious, but not hard.
Strindberg's recollections of his early impressions of the relations
between his father and mother show the inception of the views on women
and marriage which earned for him the title of woman-hater, and which
found their most provocative expression in _The Father_ and _The
Confession of a Fool_.
"This is the father's thankless position in the family," he writes; "to
be everybody's breadwinner, everybody's enemy." He concluded that his
mother did not overwork herself, though his account of the daily life
in the family does not support that view.
As a little boy August was as weak as other little boys. He adored
his mother. He was shy, acutely sensitive, morbidly self-conscious,
keenly resentful of injustice. He was not his mother's favourite, he
was nobody's favourite, and this embittered him. The mother soon became
an object of analysis; he was torn between love for her and contempt
for her faults, which he discovered through making comparisons between
her and his father. He says that a yearning for the mother followed
him through life. The future misogynist was fostered by the child's
passionate and unrequited love for the mother. When in later life
Strindberg's attacks upon women were criticised, he defended himself by
declaring that he chid woman because he loved her so well.
Disgust with the daily drudgery and routine of the household was
aroused at an early age. He speaks of the family as an institution for
providing food and clean clothes, where there is an eternal round of
shopping, cooking, cleaning and washing.
"Glorious moral institution," he cries; "holy family, inviolable,
divine institution for the education of citizens in truth and virtue!
Thou pretended home of virtues, where innocent children are tortured to
speak their first lie, where will-power is crushed by despotism, where
self-reliance is killed by narrow egoism. Family, thou art the home of
all social vices, the charitable institution for all lazy women. The
forge for the chains of the breadwinner, and the hell of the children!"
This passage follows the description of an unjust punishment which
was meted out to August. He was accused of having drunk some wine out
of his aunt's bottle, and upon blushing in response to his father's
question was beaten as the culprit. Fear of the physical pain made
him confess the deed which he had never committed, and, upon telling
his old nurse that he had suffered innocently, he was again seized and
now beaten as a liar as well as a thief. After that day he lived in
constant anxiety. The world was a cruel and unfriendly place; there
were enemies everywhere.
"Who drank that wine?" he repeatedly asked himself. The search for a
satisfactory reply to that question and to Similar questions was not
abandoned, though it was futile. The hostility to social injustice and
enforced criminality to which, later on, he gave literary utterance,
had a remote though ineffaceable connection with the abducted contents
of the wine bottle.
His ideas about God were vague, and chiefly formulated through saying
daily the Swedish child's prayer: "God who loveth children." The
windows of the house over-looked the old churchyard of Klara. When
there was a fire in the night the church bells were tolled in a manner
which struck horror in the heart of the child. The whole household
was awake. "There is a fire," ran the whisper. He cried and tried in
vain to go to sleep again. Then his mother came, tucked him up and
said: "Don't be afraid; God will protect those who are unhappy." The
following morning the servants read in the paper that there had been a
fire, and that two people had been burnt to death.
"That was God's will," said his mother. Sacha incidents did not pass him
by. The apparent inconsistency between the expectation of faith and the
tragic reality troubled him and caused his first religious doubts.
The old church with its graves became the symbol of gloom, and of the
joyless fate from which there is no escape. During the cholera epidemic
of 1854 the child of five watched the paraphernalia and ceremonies of
death from the bedroom window. In the churchyard below, gravediggers
were at work, stretchers were carried past, dark knots of people were
seen to assemble round black boxes. The church bells tolled incessantly.
One day his uncle took him and his brothers inside the church. In spite
of the beautiful walls in white and gold, the sound of the music which
was like that of a hundred pianos, and kneeling white angels, his
attention was riveted on two figures. Amidst the praying congregation
two prisoners in chains were doing penance. They were guarded by
soldiers and dad in long, grey cloaks with hoods over their heads.
He was told that these men were thieves. A feeling of oppression by
something horrible, by an incomprehensibly cruel and relentless force,
overcame August, and he was glad to be taken away.
The initiation into the existence of pain and suffering which awaits
every child held peculiar terrors for him. Acutely sensitive, his
nerves of sympathy responded quickly to the feelings of others. One
day he was taken to the workhouse infirmary to visit his wet-nurse who
was slowly dying. The old women with their diseases, pale, lame and
sorrowing, the long row of beds, the colourless monotony of the ward
and its unpleasant odours fixed themselves in his consciousness. When
he left he was haunted by a strange sense of unpaid and unpayable debt.
For this was the woman who had fed him, whose blood had nourished his.
Through poverty she had been forced to give him that which rightfully
belonged to her own child. August felt vaguely that he was enjoying
stolen life, and he was ashamed of his relief at being taken away from
the sights of the sick-room.
When August was seven the family moved to a larger house. The worst
days of penury were now over, and, though strict economy had to be
practised and every luxury eschewed, there was more freedom from
anxiety for the daily bread. His mind had hitherto been fed by daily
portions of Kindergarten fare. He was now sent to Klara school for
boys, where his sense of the general injustice of things was rapidly
developed through the vigour with which the headmaster wielded his cane.
He was awakened at six during the dark winter mornings, and as his home
was now far from Klara he had to trudge a long way through deep snow,
and arrived at his destination in wet boots and knickerbockers. When
late he was paralysed with fright in anticipation of the headmaster's
morning exercise on those who were unpunctual. He heard the screams of
boys who were already in the dutches of the tyrant.
One morning he was saved by the kindly charwoman, who pleaded for him
and pointed out that he had a long way to walk. It is a pity that the
charwoman who saved Strindberg from a thrashing has not been given a
niche in his gallery of women.
August did not shine in this school, though his knowledge was in
advance of his years, and he had, therefore, been admitted before the
required age. He was the youngest at school and at home, a position
which he vainly resented. This was a school for the children of the
upper middle class. August wore knickerbockers of leather, and strong
coarse boots, which smelt of blubber and blacking. The boys in velvet
blouses avoided him. He observed that the badly dressed boys were more
severely beaten than the well-dressed ones, and that nice-looking boys
escaped altogether.
Strindberg records his early experiences at school with characteristic
vehemence:
"... It was regarded as a preparation for hell and not for life; the
teachers seemed to exist in order to torment, not to punish. All life
weighed like an oppressive nightmare, in which it was of no avail to
have known one's lessons when one left home. Life was a place for
punishing crimes committed before one was born, and therefore the child
walked about with a permanently bad conscience."
At the age of nine he fell in love for the first time. A roseate
shimmer descended over the cane and the Latin grammar through the
presence in the class-room of the headmaster's little daughter. She was
placed at the back of the room, and the boys were forbidden to look at
her. "She was probably ugly," he tells us with his usual realism where
love affairs are concerned, "but she was nicely dressed." During the
French lessons her soft voice rang out above the grating sound of the
boys' answers, and even the hard visage of the teacher melted when he
spoke to her.
August never had the courage to speak to her. His love expressed itself
in gentle melancholy and vague wishes. He felt the victim of a secret
within his own breast and suffered from it. The affair ended with a
frustrated suicidal intention, but the lover did not attain to peace.
His love affairs from the first to the last were tinged with tragedy,
and were the vehicles of his restless and futile search for harmony.
The house in the north of Stockholm, to which the family had moved,
had a large garden and adjoining fields. The father loved the country,
and farming operations on a small scale were part of the daily duties.
The boys were made to work in the garden, and were thus provided with
healthy exercise. A magnificent old oak and bowers of lilac and
jessamine made the old-fashioned garden beautiful. August's bitter
experience of canes, teachers and unattainable feminine charm did not
corrode his inborn love of nature, which remained a source of mental
and physical rejuvenation when others ran dry.
The deep blackness of the freshly tilled soil, the apple trees in
their blossoming glory, the tulips in their gorgeous garb called forth
aspirations in his mind which responded to no human voice. The boy
walking in the garden was filled with a solemnity which neither school
nor church could inspire.
A summer holiday spent at Drottningholm, amidst the smiling islands and
wooded shores of the Lake of Malär, had accentuated his disgust with
the ugly things which abound in towns.
Stockholm's Skärgård, the archipelago which guards the fair capital of
Sweden, and which is the pride of every true child of Stockholm, became
his favourite scenery in later years.
There is something primæval and suggestive of the creation of the world
in these thousands of rocks and islands which rise in ever-varying
form and colour from the blue depths of the Baltic. The keen salt
breezes which sweep round the bare and uninhabitable rocks whisper of
a no-man's land, where the soul is tossed by elements neither friendly
nor hostile, but restful. Through the white stems of the birches,
the deep red of the cottages and the evergreen storm-bent fir trees,
the islands on which the poor fisherfolk live and labour, salute the
passing mariner by a trichromatic call to the simple life.
Upon this world the youthful Strindberg gazed one day. He had walked
through a deep forest, and crept through whortleberries and juniper to
the top of a steep rock. The picture of islands and fjords which lay
spread before his eyes caused him to "shiver with, delight."
That picture, he writes, impressed him as if he had recovered a land
seen in beautiful dreams, or in a former life.
He hid from his comrades; he could not follow them.
"This was his scenery, the true milieu of his nature, idylls, poor
rugged rocks, covered with pine forest, thrown out on wide stormy
fjords with the immense sea as a distant background. He remained true
to this love ... and neither the Alps of Switzerland, the olive-dad
hills of the Mediterranean, nor the cliffs of Normandy could oust this
rival."
Love of nature did not curb August's high spirits in childhood. At the
age of ten he played wild games, climbed trees, slid down mountains on
pieces of wood, robbed birds' nests and shot their innocent owners. He
rode bareback, could swim, sail a boat and handle a gun.
During a summer holiday August and his brothers were sent as boarders
to the house of a sexton. It was the father's wish that his sons
should share in the work on the farm as well as prepare for the
winter's schooling. In the sexton's kitchen August saw the wafers
prepared and stamped for Holy Communion. He mischievously ate them and
reflected that there was not much in the Sacrament. He broke covenant
with his host by rushing into the church, turning the hour-glass on
the pulpit, and delivering a sermon. He ran through the church on
the backs of the pews and threw over the reading-desk, on which the
hymn-book lay. The disjointed pieces of the desk frightened him and
reminded him of possible consequences. Yielding to the first impulse of
self-preservation he knelt and said the Lord's Prayer.
[Illustration: Strindberg's mother, Ulrika Eleonora Norling]
[Illustration: Strindberg's father Oskar Strindberg]
A thought came to him. He rose, examined the reading-desk, saw that
the damage was not irreparable, took off his boot and mended the desk
with a few well-directed blows. He then calmly walked out of the church
feeling that the power within himself was, after all, more reliable
than the God whose help he had invoked. The mysterious interrelation
between whole-hearted prayer and the dormant powers within ourselves is
seldom understood. The child's logic humorously reflected the spiritual
instability of average humanity.
His self-reliance was, however, fitful. Sometimes he wept bitterly,
battling with an uncontrollable duality within his own mind, a divided
will which made him unreasonable and capricious. He developed sudden
antipathies, endured fits of shyness and self-abasement, during which
he had to run away from other children and hide himself. At such times
he would deliberately keep away when good things were distributed, and
on being forgotten, revel in his martyrdom.
August's rebellion against learning lessons developed _pari passu_
with his powers of independent thought. He did not make progress at
Klara school, and his father transferred him to another, where he mixed
with children of people in humble circumstances. Here he felt more at
home; no one looked down on him; his boots and his knickerbockers did
not give offence. His pity was aroused by the poverty of some of his
school-fellows. They were expected to be clean, attentive and polite,
but how could they? They came from homes where no one could afford
to be clean, where families were crowded in small rooms which served
as work-shops as well as nurseries, where the decencies of life were
unattainable luxuries. The contrast between the two schools afforded
August material for continued meditation on class problems.
Latin and Greek were the principal subjects taught. August wanted
to learn in his own way and to translate in his own way. Both in
classics and in history he refused to submit to the discipline of the
schoolmaster. Having formulated his own method of learning and the
proper form of examining pupils he defied the teacher's order. He was
dumb when he should speak, and spoke when he should be silent. When the
exasperated Latin master declared August to be an idiot, the father
unexpectedly took his son's part and moved him to a private school.
This school had introduced rational methods of teaching; flogging was
prohibited, the boys were treated as individuals, and August felt
that he could expand without fear of immediate repression. During the
years that followed, the family attained a position of comparative
affluence and comfort. August lost the dread of being trampled upon or
suppressed from above, and mixed freely with titled youths who were
accorded no privileges by the headmaster who lacked all reverence for
the distinction of birth.
August was wont to parade his knowledge before his mother. At first she
took great pride in her son's gifts and the time when he should wear
the white cap of honour, coveted by every Swedish student, was often
spoken of. But the mother's leanings towards a narrow pietism caused
her to discern the vanity of learning in her son's mind. She warned
him against the wickedness of such pride, and contrasted the humility
of Christ and His contempt of worldly wisdom with the self-conceit of
mere book-learning. The son listened, and concluded that the mother's
resentment of culture was the result of her own ignorance. One evening
the sons were called to the mother's death-bed. August was then
thirteen. Overwhelmed with grief and shivering with the horror of
Death, he sat hour after hour by the bed crying, and thinking over all
the evil he had done.
This was the inevitable end. How could he live without a mother? The
future seemed wrapped in impenetrable darkness and misery. Then oh,
horror!--a shameful thought crossed his mind. Some time before his
mother had shown him a little ring, and said that it would belong to
him after her death. And now, at the solemn and awful moment, the
promise of the ring rose in his unwilling memory. He saw it on his
finger--one bright spot in this sorrowful hour, something to look
forward to.
But only for a moment--such low covetousness, such a shameful thought
by the side of a dying mother must come straight from the devil. The
pangs of remorse and shame were so persistent that the incident fixed
itself in his memory, and years afterwards the recollection made him
blush.
The allurements of thoughts which we ought not to think, and which
range from sudden inconvenient flashes of recognition of the comical
in the midst of the serious business of life, to the haunting ideas
which are the débris of mental combustion, could not be understood by
the boy. Nor did he know that he was destined to live through the gamut
of cerebral phenomena, an exponent of extravagant thought and lawless
ideation.
When the stillness of death fell upon the room the unworthy thought
was far away and August screamed like a drowning child. The father was
softened and spoke kind words to the two boys. Strindberg tells us
with his usual candour that his sorrow lasted scarcely three months.
"Sorrow," he writes, "has the happy quality of consuming itself. It
dies of starvation. As it is essentially an interruption of habits it
can be replaced by new ones." After six months his father married the
housekeeper.
August was now learning five languages, besides his own. Botany,
zoology and the physical sciences aroused his keen interest. He had
collections of insects and minerals, and a herbarium to which he
devoted much time. He developed an insatiable appetite for knowledge,
but he claimed freedom to find his intellectual food without extraneous
interference or restrictions. He not only wanted to know everything,
but he wanted to be able to do everything, to be endowed with all
human talents.
His brother had been praised for his drawings; August wanted to draw.
During the Christmas holidays he copied all his brother's drawings,
but on finding that he could do it without difficulty his interest
waned and he gave it up. All his brothers and sisters could play some
instrument. The house resounded with exercises on the piano, the violin
and the 'cello. August wanted to play, but without practising scales.
He taught himself to play the piano and learnt to read and copy music.
He played badly, but it gave him pleasure. He learnt the names of
composers and the number of opus of everything that was played in the
house, so that he should have superior knowledge.
He was jealous of the accomplishments of others, but the jealousy was
created by unsatisfied ambition, and the consciousness of illimitable
capabilities. Every subject interested him, until he had mastered
it. When he knew the plants, minerals, insects and birds in his
neighbourhood, he turned to other fields of natural science. Physics
and chemistry attracted him. He did not want to repeat the classical
experiments in the text-books; he wanted to make new discoveries. The
lack of money and apparatus restrained him. Ingenuity was necessary.
During the summer holidays he tried to make an electric machine out of
an old spinning-wheel and a window pane. An umbrella was broken and
made to yield a whalebone, out of which, with the help of a violin
string, he made a drill-borer. The square pane had been made circular
through patient knocking with a key-bit. This labour had taken days.
When the time came for boring a hole in the middle and his piece of
quartz made no impression he lost patience, and attempted to force
a hole. The pane was smashed and August's enthusiasm converted into
hopeless fatigue.
Recovered, he decided to construct a _perpetuum mobile_. His father
had told him that a prize was awaiting the inventor of the impossible.
After formulating his theory, which included a waterfall driving a
pump, he collected his material. A number of useful articles were
sacrificed for the purpose: the coffee boiler provided a tube; the
soda-water machine, reservoirs; the strong-box, plates; the chest of
drawers, wood; the bird-cage, wire, etc. At the crucial moment the
ubiquitous housekeeper interrupted him by asking if he would accompany
his brothers and sisters to the mother's grave. Irritation broke the
inventive spell, and in the anger of failure he dashed the artful
apparatus to pieces on the floor.
Reproaches and ridicule did not deter him. He arranged experimental
explosions and manufactured a Leyden jar. For this purpose he flayed
a dead black cat which he found in the street. He anticipated
"Jönköping's Säkerhetständstickor" by making safety matches which he
declares were as good as the later, much-advertised patent.
His wilfulness and lack of mental discipline were necessarily
distasteful to his surroundings. When he wanted to unlock a drawer and
the key could not be found he seized a poker and broke open the lock
with such force that the screws and the plate were tom out.
"Why did you break the lock?" he was asked.
"Because I wanted to get into the chest of drawers," was the laconic
reply.
The father not unnaturally decided to do what lay in his power to curb
the troublesome spirit of independence in his son. August disliked
his stepmother and resented her usurpation of his mother's place.
He was now _gymnasist_[1] and treated with respect in the school.
The lessons took the form of lectures, and the teachers showed due
regard for individual rights and tastes. At home everything was done
to humiliate him. He attributed what he regarded as a systematic
persecution to the mean and revengeful spirit of the stepmother. He
was made to wear old clothes which did not fit him; his gymnasist-cap,
which should have been the pride of his heart, was home-made and an
object of ridicule; he was compelled to work in the stable between
school hours, and commanded to take the groom's place during the
holidays. His weekly allowance for the school lunch was 3 1/2 d., a sum
which he found sufficient for tobacco but not for sandwiches. He had
a healthy appetite and was always hungry. The parsimoniousness of the
home régime subjected him to humiliating experiences at school. Once he
accidentally broke the eye-glasses of a friend. In vain he exhausted
all his inventive resources in attempts to mend them. They had to be
mended by an expert at the cost of 7d. On the following Monday August
brought his friend 3 1/2 d., and after another week discharged his
debt of honour by shamefacedly paying another 3 1/2 d. His miserable
poverty could no longer be kept a secret, and he hated the cause of his
oppression.
At the age of fifteen he fell in love with a woman of thirty. The
love was platonic, an attraction of souls--a contact of minds seeking
spiritual enlightenment along the same path. She was a woman of the
world, engaged to another who lived abroad, animated by religious
emotionalism and half-conscious eroticism. They attended the same
circle for French conversation and added the spice of Gallic expression
to their correspondence, which treated of Jesus, the struggle against
sin, life, death, God in nature, love, friendship and doubt. August
became her conscience, and she was his spiritual mother. Strindberg
publishes some of his French compositions from this period in his
autobiography. All speculations were eventually smashed against the
bedrock of Jesus. The parental authorities objected strongly to
August's friendship, and especially to the atmosphere of French secrecy
in which it was enveloped.
August became absorbed in the struggle for salvation. A puritanism
which despised the cold formalism of the Lutheran State Church and
claimed the free companionship of Jesus was fashionable in Sweden at
this time. The joyful certainty of being among the sheep infected those
susceptible to sudden "revivals" within all classes of society. What
could be of greater importance than being amongst the elected of God,
comforted by the knowledge of righteousness, borne aloft by complete
detachment from the world, the flesh and the devil? August laid
passionate siege to Heaven and clamoured for immediate inclusion among
the children of God.
His motives were complicated. One was fright and a desire to be on
the safe side. For he had read books which predicted a terrible fate
in store for youthful sinners upon attaining the age of twenty-five.
He knew he was a sinner, and, if his body were condemned to painful
afflictions and death, his soul would, at least, be saved. Another was
spiritual jealousy. His stepmother professed great religious devotion.
She and his eldest brother seemed to outshine him in religious fervour.
That could not be tolerated. August imposed severe restrictions upon
himself. All worldly pleasures were to be shunned. One Saturday
evening the family planned an excursion for the following Sunday.
August asked his father's permission to stay at home for conscientious
reasons. He spent Sunday morning in one of the "free" churches, where
the elect gloried in their exclusive and dearly bought salvation.
In the afternoon he studied Thomas à Kempis and Krummacher. The
stepmother had broken the Sabbath. She was inconsistent and a prey to
the temptations of the devil; she could no longer compete with him in
religious virtue. That was balm to the soul, but the peace of Jesus,
which he had been told would descend like a clap of thunder and be
followed by absolute certainty, would not come. He walked alone to Haga
Park, praying all the time that Jesus would seek him out. In the park
he saw happy families absorbed in picnics and carriages filled with gay
men and women. All these were destined to eternal damnation. His reason
protested, but his faith assented. He returned home unharmonious and
unsatisfied. When late in the evening his brothers and sisters related
the incidents of their happy day, his envy was mixed with pangs of
remorse.
The puritanical phase culminated during the confirmation, which had
been postponed by the father, who, knowing the waywardness of the
child, feared the unrestraint of the youth. A number of circumstances
contributed to the reaction which followed upon his first Holy
Communion. He had whipped his reason into submission to an elated
sentiment which in due course exhausted itself. The Sacramental bread
was robbed of its mystery by the fatal familiarity with which he had
treated it in the sexton's kitchen.
But the disintegration of the puritan was accomplished through the
influence of new friends. One of these decided to cure the hungry
dreamer in Strindberg by a good meal. One day on the way to the Greek
lesson, Fritz, "the friend with the eye-glasses," suggested that they
should play truant and lunch at a restaurant. Scruples overcome, August
enjoyed his first meal in a restaurant and his first glass of brandy.
The luxuries of beefsteak and beer in quantitative perfection, and the
audacity with which his friend treated the waiter, made a profound
impression on him. The friend paid for the feast, and August came out a
changed man.
"This was not an empty pleasure, as the pale man had asserted," he
writes. "No, it was a solid pleasure to feel red blood run through
half-empty arteries which were to nourish the nerves for the struggle
of life. It was a pleasure to feel spent strength return and the lax
sinews of a half-crushed will stretched again. Hope was awakened, the
mist became a rosy cloud, and the friend let him see glimpses of the
future as it was formed by friendship and youth."
The friend advised him to earn money by giving private lessons. This
would secure freedom from parental tyranny. He encouraged independence
and self-confidence in August, who, acting upon his advice, obtained
a post as private tutor. By exercising economy in the expenditure of
brains at the gymnasium and limiting his studies to those absolutely
necessary for the final examen, he succeeded in his dual work of
learner and teacher. The sense of sin departed; he was able to take
part in the festivities of his school-fellows. The platonic friendship
with the woman of thirty evaporated with the advent of a less ethereal
admiration for the beauty of waitresses _et hoc genus omne_. He went to
dances and sought jollity in the "punsch-evenings" of the students. A
craving for alcohol had been aroused; under its influence the demons
of gloom and insoluble problems departed.
The change in his attitude to life was hastened by an influence
which now made itself felt for the first time. Literature as a great
tradition and interpretation of human problems became known to him.
The belletristic and the puritanical conceptions of life presented
themselves in their profoundest antithesis. Natural selection did the
rest. His range of reading was wide and varied, as were the demands of
his many-sided self. He devoured Shakespeare, admired Dickens, found
Walter Scott tedious, Alexandre Dumas puerile, and Eugène Sue's Le
Juif Errant grandiose. He detested poetry; it was affected and untrue.
People did not talk in that manner and seldom thought of such beautiful
things. The realisation of God in Nature replaced the desire to seek
God in the churches, and August gradually discovered that he was a
freethinker. The alarm and public prayers of the elect, which he had
deserted, did not alter his course.
During the summer holidays he acted as tutor to an aristocratic family
in the country. Fritz had warned him against saying everything he
thought and doing everything he wanted, or disputing vehemently with
his superiors. But the difficulty of submitting to the conventions of
the social order could not be overcome.
August's plans for the future were vacillating and embarrassing to
the father. For a short time he cherished the idea of becoming a
non-commissioned officer in a cavalry regiment, at another time the
plan of spending his days as a country curate, joined in happy wedlock
to a pretty waitress (a brand snatched from the fire), had captivated
him. But the University conquered. At the University a man could be
poor and badly dressed and yet be counted a gentleman; it was the only
place where one could sing, get drunk and have fights with the police
without losing social standing. There was a secret satisfaction in the
thought.
One day during the tutorage in the country the vicar, who was
overworked, invited August to preach a "proof-sermon." The practice
of permitting serious-minded students and undergraduates to try
their priestly powers was not uncommon. The idea was glorious and
irresistible. The baron, the baroness, the squires and the ladies
would all have to listen reverently to August as the mouthpiece of
the Lord. But he remembered that he was a freethinker. The orthodox
conception of Jesus was no longer his. It was hypocrisy to accept the
offer. And yet, he believed in God, he had thoughts to give, opinions
he wanted to voice. He confessed to the vicar, who reassured him. If he
believed in God, there was no real difficulty--the good Bishop Wallin
had never mentioned Jesus in his sermons. August should only not talk
too much about his aberrations.
[Illustration: August Strindberg 1862--(Reproduced by kind
permission of Messrs. Albert Bonnier, Stockholm)]
[Illustration: August Strindberg 1870]
The week during which the sermon was prepared, was rich in compensation
for years of ignominy. Something within him responded with avidity to
the call of the messenger, the prophet.
The church was filled with people when August mounted the pulpit in
clerical garb and with a beating heart. He prayed to the only true
God to help him when now he wanted to strike a blow for truth. He
spoke of conversion through free will and opened the gates of heaven
to all--publicans and sinners, rulers and harlots--and denounced his
old friends who were sunk in cruel and hypocritical self-conceit. He
was deeply moved by his own eloquence. The vicar and the congregation
forgave the irregularities, and the day ended in mutual satisfaction.
The experience confirmed August's contempt of orthodox religion.
He became the ringleader of a section in the highest class in the
_Gymnasium_ which, in spite of threats and reprimands, refused to
attend morning prayers. Once when the father begged him to go to church
he replied:
"Preach--I can do that myself."
In May, 1867, August passed his _student-examen_. The white cap was on
his head, and the gates of the University were open to him.
[1] Gymnasia are preparatory schools for Universities.