THE STRUGGLE FOR SELF-EXPRESSION
A university, said Newman, is a place where "mind comes first and
is the foundation of the academical polity." Strindberg's contact
with the University of Upsala brought his own creative mind into
constant conflict with the custodians of regulations which govern
the traditional pursuit of knowledge. Between 1867 and 1872 he spent
periods at Upsala, during which he made vain attempts to achieve
success as a dutiful learner, submissive to the discipline of
professorial authority. The difficulty was not that he would not or
could not study. He studied too much; his mind absorbed with intuitive
and lightning quickness knowledge from men and books. But he refused
to take opinions on trust; he individualised everything that was
assimilated by his receptive and turbulent mind, and scorned academical
routine.
In the autumn of 1867 August Strindberg went to Upsala to equip himself
with the powers and graces which accompany a "university education." He
possessed the sum of 80 kronor (1 krona = 1s. 2d.), laboriously earned
by private lessons; his father had contributed a few cigars to his
son's outfit and advised him to shift for himself. Margaret, the old
kind-hearted servant, had forced a loan of 15 kronor upon him. Thus he
was again victimised by a woman's heart.
The room which he shared with a friend, was rented for 30 kronor for
the whole term. It contained two beds, two tables, two chairs, and a
cupboard. His dinner was brought by the charwoman for 1 kr. 50 öre per
week. Breakfast and supper consisted of a glass of milk and a bun.
By practising the strictest economy he managed to live, but he soon
discovered that he could not afford to buy the necessary books, nor
the regulation dress-coat, without which no Swedish under-graduate
could solicit the kind attention of the professors. He did not attract
attention as a promising student. His attendance at lectures served
chiefly as a stimulus to his critical faculties. He found the methods
of teaching literature and philosophy tedious and ineffective, the
professors ignorant and plebeian. He borrowed books and selected
his own reading. He taught himself to play the cornet in one of the
University orchestras, thus attempting to soothe the discord of his
soul.
He grew tired of his friend Fritz. "They had worn out their friendship
by living together," he writes in _Fermentation Time_. "They knew each
other by heart, knew each other's secrets and weaknesses, knew what
answer the other would give in argument." He accepted the end of their
friendship as the inevitable result of the exploitation of personality
which he resented in friendship and in love. Personal attractions and
ties were masked warfare in Strindberg's life; he gave and he took,
and generally ended by despising. Throughout life his caustic efforts
to reach the centre of things did not tend to strengthen bonds which
depend on a certain amount of pleasant illusion and benign deception.
His love of nature brought no disillusionment. "It was his dream to
live in the country," he writes of his Upsala time. "He had an inborn
dislike of town, though born in a capital. He had culture-hostility in
the blood, could never get rid of the sense of being a product of
Nature which did not want to be torn from the organic union with earth.
He was a wild plant, the roots of which in vain sought a little soil
between the stones of the pavement; he was an animal longing for the
forest."
The delight in the beauty and fragrance of flowers, the preference for
the simplicity of rural life which he so often expressed show a mood
unaffected by discontent and pessimism. Some sprite of nature-joy dwelt
within him and remained happy in spite of unhappiness. After uttering
curses on the sins of humanity he would be found singing pæans to the
harmony of the plant-world.
* * * * *
At the end of the first term he had spent his eighty kronor and
returned to Stockholm in search of remunerative work. After several
unsuccessful attempts to obtain a post in the country, he found a
situation as teacher at the Stockholm Board-School at a yearly salary
of £50, which to him seemed opulence. He now lived at home, and
contributed to the household expenses.
The schoolmaster of eighteen was again brought face to face with the
problems of poverty. The injustice, under which he had smarted as a
child, was still alive. He was now in the detestable position of the
pedagogical tyrant, but his pity had not diminished. He was expected
to chastise the lazy children, but his heart refused to accept the
prevalent faith in flogging. The children--ugly, stunted, pale,
starved, sickly--appealed to his pity.
"Suffering," he writes, "has stamped on the faces of the lower classes
that expression of hopelessness and torment which neither religious
resignation nor the hope of heaven can obliterate, and from which the
upper classes flee as from an evil conscience."
He studied the penalty of industrialism, and observed that the children
of the manual labourer looked more sickly and less intelligent than
those of the upper class:
"The trade-diseases of the urban working-man seemed to be transmitted;
here one saw in miniature the lungs and the blood of the gas-worker,
ruined through sulphurous fumes; the shoulders and flattened feet of
the smith; the brain of the painter, atrophied through the fumes of
varnish and poisonous paints; the scrofulous eruption of the sweep;
the contracted chest of the bookbinder; here one heard the echo of the
cough of the metal-worker and the asphalt manufacturer; smelt the
poisons of the wall-paper maker; noticed the watchmaker's myopia in new
editions. In truth, this was not a race which possessed the future,
or upon which the future could reckon, and it cannot reproduce itself
for any length of time, for the ranks of the artisans are constantly
recruited from the country."
His sympathy with the working classes was no passing sentiment; it was
the lasting keynote of his plea for social justice which is clearly
heard through the cacophony of some of his later outbursts against the
social order.
Rebellious, contempt of current morals and respectability rose as
a mighty force in the mind of this extraordinary schoolmaster. His
morning duties at the board-school and his afternoon work as private
tutor to the daughters of a well-to-do and refined family compelled
him to outward decorum. But he did not live virtuously. His sense-life
was awake, and he recognised no necessity for restraint. The strivings
after ascetic peace which filled his adolescence had been laid
aside; with the breaking of his faith in the watchful solicitude of
Jesus, natural impulses had been set free. His autobiography records
his early struggles, and his later "fall" with the same detached
imperturbability. He lacks the sense of shame which avoids certain
topics. He observes no reticences. The pages in many of his books are
studded with coarse language and unsavoury references to physical
life. The sexual cynicism which pervades the story of his life is only
relieved by his perfect sincerity.
He describes the pleasures of inebriation with similar frankness. At
the age of nineteen he was already familiar with Bacchic revels. His
brain was inflamed with ideas, congested with unformulated thought. The
narcosis of alcohol attracted him.
"Sometimes melancholy, at other times gay," he writes, "he sometimes
felt an irresistible craving to extinguish the burning fire of thought
and to stop the turmoil of the brain. Shy, he sometimes felt impelled
to come forward, to make an impression, to find an audience, to
appear in public. When he had drunk a great deal, he wished to recite
great and solemn things, but in the middle of the piece, when ecstasy
was at its height, he heard his own voice, became shy, frightened,
thought himself ridiculous, stopped suddenly, changed his tone, took
up the comical, and finished with a grimace. He had pathos, but only
for a while; then self-criticism came, and he laughed at his forced
emotions." Strindberg finds another explanation of his craving for
alcohol in the lack of nourishing diet at Upsala and the dulness of
his home in Stockholm. "Strong liquors gave him strength," he says,
"and he slept well after them." He adds: "Like the rest of the race,
he was born of drunkards, generation after generation from pagan times
immemorial, when ale and mead were used, and the desire had inevitably
become a necessity."
He was not a success as a board-school teacher. There were bargains
with his conscience during scripture lessons, and the prevailing system
of teaching seemed a cruel parody. He shrank from the sights and sounds
and smells of the herd of poor children. Ambition and intellectual
hunger called him to seek experience elsewhere.
His restlessness was increased through reading Byron's _Manfred_ and
Schiller's _Die Räuber_. He tried to translate the former into Swedish,
but discovered to his chagrin that he could not write blank verse. Karl
Moor in _Die Räuber_ laid hold of his imagination with the claims of a
kindred spirit. Here was his own heterodoxy and revolt against laws,
society, customs, religion made manifest in a living, literary figure
by a great writer. Schiller's maturer repudiation of his fierce bandit
did not trouble him. Manfred fleeing from himself to the Alps appealed
to him as a feat of rebellion complementary to Karl Moor's adventures.
At the age of nineteen the rôle of the schoolmaster was exchanged for
that of the student of medicine. His duties at the board-school had
become intolerable, when, one evening, a Mend, an old doctor, knocked
at his door and suggested that he should desert the school and enlist
in the service of Aesculapius. His fatherly friend brushed aside
objections on the ground of poverty by suggesting that Strindberg
should live in his house and, in return, act as tutor to his boys.
In spite of the dreary prospect of eight years of medical studies
the kindly offer was accepted; for the profession of medicine seemed
the portal to enviable knowledge. Not the dry, stereotyped dogmas of
the Church and the University curriculum, but real wisdom penetrating
life's mysteries. "To become a sage who understood life's riddles--that
was his dream for the moment." He disliked the idea of a career in the
service of the State or of being a mere figure, a wheel or a screw, in
the social machinery. The physician seemed to him to be free.
His preparatory studies were carried out at the Technological
Institute. Here the vigorous fantasy of the future alchemist received
the first stimulus through chemical experiments which fascinated him by
revealing the secrets of matter. Here he also studied zoology, anatomy,
botany and physics.
But other powers were at work undermining the solidifying influence
of application to science. In the doctor's house he met writers and
artists. Conversation generally turned on plays, pictures, books,
authors and actors. There was a fine library, offering the world's
literary treasures. There was a collection of pictures and there were
valuable engravings. The intellectual atmosphere was international, and
afforded a pleasant change from the vulgar patriotism which had been
sacred to the pedagogues of the board-school.
The Dramatic Theatre was near at hand. Here a new and gaily attractive
world was opened to him. Standing in the gallery he listened to the
badinage of French comedy and saw the types of the Second Empire in
aristocratic setting. Thus he spent several evenings every week. The
life of the actor seemed strangely interesting, for he was allowed to
express himself, to speak unwelcome truths without losing popularity.
The theatrical profession seemed outside and above the petty rules
of society--a privileged class. It offered special and glorious
opportunities for artistic self-expression.
Meanwhile the experiences of his medical education had become
distasteful. The old physician brought his pupil to see patients,
rich and poor, providing him with diverse "clinical material." He was
asked to assist at early morning operations and to hold the patients.
Whilst Strindberg held the patient's head, the doctor "removed glands
with a fork." The assistant's thoughts were soaring high above the
surgery, in the regions of Goethe's Faust and Wieland's novels; they
were with George Sand, Chateaubriand and Lessing. During cauterisation
the smell of human flesh rose in his nostrils and spoilt his appetite
for breakfast. He describes his state of mind in the following words:
"Imagination had been set in motion and memory would not work; reality
with its bums and blood clots was ugly; æstheticism had seized the
youth, and life seemed dull and repulsive."
A futile attempt to pass a preliminary medical examination at Upsala
precipitated his decision not to enter a profession which was
exclusively occupied with the aches of the body. In spite of the
disappointment of his medical benefactor, he announced his intention of
becoming an actor.
He now lived for some months in an ideal stage-world. After making
arrangements for obtaining practical instruction in the autumn, he
devoted the summer to private studies of the art which appeared to
be his true and only vocation in life. Schiller's lecture, "On the
Theatre as an Institution for Moral Education," saturated his mind with
a lofty and idealistic conception of the ethical and æsthetic mission
of the stage. Was not this the greatest of all human arts? Was it not
a calling worthy of the finest talent and the most devoted labour? He
buried his past restlessness in faithful search for knowledge of the
actor's gifts and graces. Goethe taught him how to stand, sit down,
carry himself, how to enter and leave a room gracefully. He studied the
pose of antique sculpture and practised to walk with uplifted head
and expanded chest, whilst the arms were trained to swing easily and
the hand to be lightly closed with the fingers forming a beautifully
shaped curve. He tried to conquer his shyness and his fear of crossing
open places, and paraded his new artful self in the most frequented
_promenade_ in Stockholm.
The doctor's house was made the scene of his dramatic exercises. Here
he prepared the performance of _Die Räuber_ and appeared himself as
Karl Moor. When his vocal practices disturbed the peace of the house,
he repaired to Ladugårdsgärdet, the vast fields and hills, on the
east side of Stockholm, which for many years past have been used for
military manœuvres. They now also serve as a starting-point for aerial
flights. But no mechanical wings of flight could equal those, on which
Strindberg's imagination soared towards the realisation of his mission
as an artist and a social reformer.
Here, he tells us, he stormed against heaven and earth. The city, the
church spires of which were visible, represented Society, whilst he
belonged to Nature. "He shook his fist at the palace, the churches,
the barracks, and snarled at the troops which during the manœuvres
sometimes came too near him. There was something fanatical in his
work, and he spared no pains to make his reluctant muscles obedient."
The keen resentment of injustice and the irrepressible sympathy
with the poor and the down-trodden, which the later misanthropy of
the man could never quell, showed forth in an episode of this time,
connected with the unveiling of a statue of Charles XII. Though the
statue had been erected through public donations, the arrangements for
the unveiling were such as to exclude the people from a view of the
proceedings. The people threatened to pull down the stands for paying
spectators which obscured the view, and the troops were called out to
restore order. August was seated at a gay dinner-party at the doctor's
house in honour of some Italian operatic stars, when the sounds of the
battle reached the ears of the company.
"What is that?" asked the prima donna.
"It is the noise of the mob," said a professor.
August could not sit still. The clinking of glasses, the tight
dinner-talk, the jests and laughter jarred on him. Who were these who
spoke of the people as "mob"? Something stirred within his breast with
the call of blood and the passion of identical feeling. He left the
table and went out into the streets.
"'The mob'!" he writes, "the word rang in his ears, whilst he walked
down the street. The mob! they were his mother's former school-fellows,
they were his school-fellows and later his pupils, they were the dark
background which made the light pictures effective in the place he had
just left. He felt like a deserter, as if he had done wrong in working
his way up."
He reached the place where the statue had been raised, and mixed
with the excited crowds. The clatter of hoofs and the sight of the
approaching Life Guards filled him with a mad desire to resist all this
mass of men, horses and sabres. Together they were oppression incarnate.
August placed himself in the middle of the street, right in front of
the approaching cavalry. Through his mind flashed the call to revolt,
the born rebel's impulsive desire for self-immolation.
A hand seized him and pulled him out of danger. He was led home, and
after promising not to return to the scene of struggle the inevitable
reaction set in with exhaustion and high temperature in the evening.
On the day of the unveiling he was present among the undergraduates.
At the end of the ceremony there was a skirmish between the police
and the people. Stones were thrown and order was restored by means of
sabre-cuts. A man standing near Strindberg was attacked by a police
inspector. August rushed at the inspector, seized him by the collar and
shook him.
"Let the man go!" he cried.
"Who are you?" asked the astounded inspector.
"I am Satan," answered the demoniacal liberator, "and I shall take you,
if you don't let the fellow go."
In trying to seize August the inspector released his hold of the man.
At the same moment a stone knocked oft the three-cornered hat of
authority from the inspector's head, and August wrenched himself free.
The police drove the crowd before them at the point of the bayonet.
August followed with other enthusiasts, determined to release the
prisoners. The attempt was, of course, futile; the bayonets were the
strongest.
Strindberg describes how two gentlemen, one middle-aged, the other
young, both highly respectable, with conservative views, were seized
with his own passionate longing to defend the people against the
police. Speechless, they instinctively grasped each other's hands, and
with white, set faces ran to the rescue. When the excitement was over,
and the wave of sympathy had spent itself, they awoke in their normal
selves and were shocked at their own conduct. August himself could
jest over his wild outburst, when half an hour later he was seated in
a restaurant with a chop in front of him and friends around to listen
to an objective account of the whole incident. The middle-aged merchant
of impeccable propriety failed to recognise August, when, by chance,
they met again. The composite consciousness created by the contagion of
strong emotion had ceased to exist.
When his dramatic recitals to the winds which sweep over
Ladugårdsgärdet had been followed by the prosaic training at the school
of the Dramatic Theatre, the conflict between dream and reality was
followed by the usual tragic results. His wish to make his début in
an important part was rudely brushed aside. After some humiliating
experiences, he was given a small part in Björnson's Mary Stuart. He
appeared as a "nobleman," and all his dramatic energy was, perforce,
encompassed in the following sentence: "The Peers have sent an
emissary with a challenge to the Earl of Bothwell."
It was bitterly insignificant, but it was the portal to greater
achievement.
The disillusionment of his first glimpse behind the scenes was manfully
rebutted. The boards and the paint which, when seen from the gallery,
had held so much charm, were now, when scrutinised from the other side,
dusty and ugly. The actors who were permitted to play great parts were,
after all, just like ordinary mortals. They yawned loudly between their
turns, and gave expression to commonplace sentiments as a relief from
the sublimities uttered on the stage.
After some months, during which Strindberg was only a super, he was
heartily tired of the whole thing. The mechanism, living and dead, of
dramatic production disgusted him. He felt repressed and misjudged.
But at the same time he was ashamed of quitting the profession which
he had chosen with such high expectations. He demanded his right to
be tried and judged. He was given an important part and a special
rehearsal, at which he appeared without stage costume and without the
requisite enthusiasm. The elder actors resented the arrangement, and
Strindberg shouted his sentences in a manner which made it clear that
he was in need of further instruction. He was advised to resume his
pupilage. But this he would not do. The humiliation was unbearable.
He cried with rage and decided to commit suicide. An opium pill which
he had treasured with a view to the possibility of having to summon a
catastrophic end to life's difficulties was utilised for the purpose,
but failed altogether of a calamitous effect. A friend, who knew the
better way, re-awakened Strindberg's interest in earthly existence
through a merry drinking bout.
On the following day, he tells us, he felt bruised, wounded, tom,
with quivering nerves and with the fever of shame and drunkenness in
his veins. He lay on his sofa reading Topelius' _Tales of a Surgeon_
and musing over his own troubles. His brain worked at high pressure,
sorting memories, adding and eliminating, calling out personalities. He
heard his characters speak. It was as if he saw them on a stage. After
a few hours he had visualised a comedy in two acts, and in four days
the play was written.
"It was a work," he writes in _Fermentation Time_, "at once painful
and pleasurable, if it even could be called work, for it came of
itself, without his will or effort."
"And when the piece was ready," he tells us, "he drew a deep sigh, as
if years of pain were over, as if an abscess had been lanced. He was so
happy that something sang within him, and he decided to send his piece
to the theatre. This was the salvation."
Macaulay thought that books are written either to relieve the fulness
of the mind or the emptiness of the pocket. He ignored the intimate
correlation between the two motives. The full mind is only too often
made inarticulate by the empty pocket, whilst, on the other hand, the
empty pocket sometimes accelerates processes of the mind which, but for
that stimulus, would never reach fulness. Strindberg was throughout
life the slave of a full mind and an empty pocket.
His first effort in drama had now to be submitted to competent
criticism. He prepared the garret which he rented from the doctor
for the festive reception of two wise friends. A clean napkin on the
table, two candles and a bottle of "punsch" were the outer signs of
the solemnity with which he welcomed his critics. The play was read to
the end in sympathetic silence. The friends then saluted August as an
author.
When alone he fell on his knees and thanked God who had delivered him
out of his difficulties and who had given him the gift of literary
expression. Perhaps no subsequent literary crises of gestation ever
equalled the first in intensity of expectation; I he felt that he had
at last found his vocation, the part he was called upon to play in life.
The material for his first play had been his own family troubles;
his religious doubts now found expression in a play in three acts.
He had also discovered that he could write rhymed verse, presumably
as the result of a visitation of the Holy Ghost. A feverish power of
production followed: in two months he wrote two comedies, a tragic
verse drama and some poems.
The first comedy had been submitted to the manager of the Royal
Theatre. Meanwhile the anonymous author continued to walk the boards,
now buoyed by a secret joy. His turn would come; the thought of the day
when he would be recognised made him bold. In his peasant costume he
felt a prince in disguise.
But the comedy was not accepted. The tragedy which he also sent in met
with the same fate, though he received a kindly hint that it would be
worth his while to perfect himself in the art of dramatic construction,
and that time and experience would be more profitably expended on a
literary career than on further attempts to succeed as an actor. He
was advised to return to Upsala. A tragedy with the title _Jesus of
Nazareth_ was sketched out. It was intended to crush Christianity
completely and for all time. It was only partly written, when, happily,
it was abandoned, the youthful author having succumbed to the magnitude
of his subject.
His last appearance on the stage was ignominious, yet symbolic of his
future as a writer of drama. No part whatever had been found for him.
He offered to act as prompter and was accepted. Thus ended the career
upon which he had entered with such glorious zest.