CHAPTER VI

THE ARTIST

Whilst fighting the battle of realism in fiction Strindberg had

prepared the dramatic form which was to be his contribution to the

"new" theatre, on which the curtain was about to rise. The demand for

a new dramatic art had become imperative. Tired of the admonitions and

stale declamations of the old rhetorical play, the public had asked

for a representation of life. Dumas père had responded by writing the

drama of personality, Dumas _fils_ by establishing the play of moral

problems. Ibsen had built the psychological play on the foundation

of Dumas and had endowed the Norwegian language with a new sonority.

Scribe had supplied fine technique and neat carpentry for the new

French stage, but Paris, the petulant playgoer, sighed for other things.

Zola raised the cry of naturalism. The artificial plots of Dumas,

Augier and Sardou were to be superseded by dramatic flashes of

reality. "I yearn for life, with its shiver, its breath and its

strength; I long for life as it is," cried the author of _Thérèse

Raquin_, and Strindberg responded. In September, 1887, _The Father_

was published, the first of the series of naturalistic plays through

which Strindberg's European reputation as a modern dramatist and a

woman-hater was established. The institution in the same year of the

Théâtre Libre, by M. André Antoine, provided a stage which was wholly

adapted to the revolt against old-fashioned theatricality.

M. Antoine was an employee at the gas-works who had a passionate

faith in realistic drama. With a group of sympathetic _dilettanti_ he

began evening performances in a large room in Place Pigalle without

the stage mechanism of the commercial theatre. Success attended the

enthusiastic players, and the performances at the Théâtre Libre became

the rendezvous of the intellectual and artistic world which gravitates

to Paris. The soul of the enterprise, M. Antoine, was manager,

actor, scene-painter, and mechanic. The theatre was semi-private.

Special invitation cards to elect audiences protected the actors

from the attention of gallery-opinion. The actors and authors of the

new plays were the hosts in this home of dramatic revolution, where

every original playwright was welcome. Strindberg's _The Father, Lady

Julie_ and _Creditors_ were amongst the first plays produced, and he,

therefore, had the satisfaction of being played in Paris before any

appearance on the French stage of the "famous Norwegian blue-stocking."

Tolstoy's _Powers of Darkness_, Zola's _Thérèse Raquin_, Emile Fabre's

_L'Argent_, an adaptation of the brothers de Goncourt's Sœur Philomène

and Villiers' "_L'Evasion_," belonged to the early repertoire.

_Ghosts_ was the first of Ibsen's plays to appear; it was followed by

_Rosmersholm_. The Théâtre Libre lasted eight years. It had time to

create a "modernity" in taste and dramatic expression which produced

similar free theatres in Berlin and London, and a vogue of naturalism

which included every variety of "life," and which, occasionally, gave

undue preference to lubricity and morbidity.

The Swedish edition of _The Father_ was followed by a French edition,

containing a sympathetic prefatory letter by Zola. The three acts of

this tragedy present a drawn-out duel between man and woman for the

possession of the soul of the child. The father, a cavalry captain, is

intellectual, serious, studious, lovable. His wife is stupid, selfish

and diabolically resourceful in the choice of weapons for the final

defeat of the ill-used man. He is mentally poisoned by the suggestion

that he is not the father of the child. Laura, the wife, has herself

administered the poison in order to shatter the man's peace of mind,

and break the foundation of his love for the child. Her hatred knows no

bounds. She not only seeks to drive him mad, but contrives by skilful

intrigue to procure evidence of his insanity. She informs the doctor

that her husband suffers from extraordinary delusions regarding the

uncertainty of paternity, and that he talks of little else. When the

doctor meets the Captain the question which is eating his mind shows

itself as an obsessing idea. Everybody and everything conspires to make

the man appear a raving lunatic. Finally, even the old nurse who has

been a true and good woman is induced to betray him. He believes in

her kindness of heart, and allows her to approach him. She slips the

strait-jacket over him, thereby adding the last link to the chain of

feminine treachery and cruelty which has enslaved him. Subjugated,

robbed of his faith and his mind, the man dies--the victim of woman.

In the preface Zola expressed his interest in the boldness of the

idea. "Your Laura," he wrote, "is woman as she is in her conceit and

in her mystical unconsciousness of her qualities and faults." _The

Father_ was one of the few dramatic works which had the power of moving

him deeply. But he found a certain want of reality in the characters

and the construction of the play. The nameless captain and his cruel

entourage were thought-forms, lacking the solid dimensions which Zola

identified with reality. In a critical appreciation of Strindberg,

published in 1894, Georg Brandes praised _The Father_ as a tragedy of

concentrated energy, magnificent in its composition and powerful in

its effect. "There is something eternal in The Father," he writes, "an

unforgettable psychology of woman, showing typically feminine weakness

and vice." Brandes thinks the symbolism of the final scene, in which

the man of intellect is ruined by woman, inherently true. He adds: "The

strength of the indignation and the hatred which have produced the

drama are impressive. This tragedy is a cry of anguish which clings

to one's memory, which grips and terrifies through the depth of the

passionate suffering that uttered the cry."

Laura may be regarded as the most complete type of Strindberg's

Inferno-women. She has not even the _beauté du diable_ which creates

an illusion of goodness in some of his types. She is the man-eater,

the destroyer of all that is noble, consistent, progressive in man.

Strindberg sees a cannibalistic tendency in woman which makes marriage

a feast of horror, and this is a theme to which he often returns. In

_The Father_ the distraught man says to his child: "You see, I am a

cannibal, and I will eat you. Your mother wanted to eat me, but she

could not. I am Saturn who ate his children, because it had been

prophesied that they would eat him. To eat or to be eaten? That is the

question. If I do not eat you, you will eat me, and you have already

showed me your teeth." ...

The callous egotism with which Laura kills her husband is shown by the

following words, with which she assaults him: "Now you have fulfilled

your function as an unfortunately necessary father and bread-winner,

you are not needed any longer, and you must go. You must go, since you

have realised that my intellect is as strong as my will, and since you

will not stay to acknowledge it."

It is perhaps not unnatural that the Captain should throw a lighted

lamp at Laura after listening to this speech. But the speech itself is

certainly unnatural, and would be more in keeping with the sentiments

of a female spider--if that callous insect could formulate her

generative philosophy--than those of a woman. As a self-expository wife

Laura severely taxes our credulity.

_Lady Julie_[1] is a different type. She is the pretty, neurotic,

sensual, useless woman, blue-blooded and empty-minded, destined to

total extinction in the process of natural selection. Her tragedy is

unfolded in a play of one act, which is the quintessence of Strindberg

as a "naturalistic" dramatist. The scene is laid in the Count's

kitchen. The Count's daughter, Lady Julie, is alone in the house

with Jean, the valet, and Christine, the cook. It is St. John's Eve;

the farm hands belonging to the estate are assembled for the annual

midsummer dance. They do not dance in the kitchen, but there is

midsummer madness in the air. Christine is betrothed to Jean who treats

the products of her culinary art with epicurean disdain. He knows his

value as a man and a servant. Jean is an excellent valet, well-made,

well-behaved, who knows when to show self-confidence and when to

cringe. Lady Julie has graced the servants' dance with her presence.

She has favoured Jean with such marked attention that the people have

begun to gossip. Alone with him in the kitchen she encourages him to

make love to her. The valet is uneasy; the man is eager to make himself

master of the Count's daughter, but the servant shrinks from the

sacrilege. But Lady Julie taunts him with his unmanliness, tempts him

with her beauty, and the effervescence of her highly-strung nerves. A

strange love-scene follows.

The sound of approaching country-folk forces Jean and Lady Julie to

hide from their prying eyes. They do not wish to be found alone in the

kitchen. Jean's room is near at hand and becomes their refuge, whilst

the peasants make the kitchen the scene of their midsummer merry-making.

When the kitchen is deserted, Lady Julie and Jean reappear. There is

an autumnal chill in the air. For Lady Julie is no longer Lady Julie.

The valet is master. They are both conscious of the monstrous breach of

social etiquette which has been committed. And the grey dawn will not

only bring the shame of day, but the home-coming of the Count.

Jean is chivalrous. He proposes immediate flight to Switzerland or the

Italian lakes. There, he thinks, they can start an hotel--a first-class

hotel for first-class guests. He waxes enthusiastic over the joys

of the hotel-owner. She will be mistress of the house, queen of the

accounts, before whom the guests will humbly lay their gold.

She cannot rise to his enthusiasm. She wants the comfort of love:

_Julie_. That is all very fine. But, Jean, you must give me

courage. Say that you love me. Come and take me in your arms.

_Jean_ (_hesitating_). I would like to, but I dare not. Not here

in this house. I love you without doubt. Can you doubt it?

_Julie_ (_shyly, with true womanly feeling_). You! Say "thou" to

me. Between us there are no longer any barriers. Say "thou."

_Jean_ (_troubled_). I cannot. There are still barriers between us

so long as we remain in this house. There is the past, there is

the Count. I have never met anyone who compelled such respect from

me. I have only to see his gloves lying on a chair to feel quite

small. I have only to hear his bell, and I start like a shying

horse. And when I now look at his boots, standing there so stiff

and stately, it is as if something made my back bend. (_He kicks

the boots_.) Superstition, prejudice which have been driven into

us from childhood, but which may be as easily forgotten again. If

you will only come into another country, into a republic, people

will cringe before my porter's livery. People shall cringe, but

I shall not cringe. I was not born to cringe, for there is stuff

in me; there is character in me; and if once I grip the lowest

branch, you shall watch me climb. To-day I am a lackey, but next

year I am a proprietor; in ten years I shall be independent, and

then I go to Roumania and get myself an order. I can--mark well I

say I _can_--a count.

_Julie_. Fine, fine!

_Jean_. Ah, in Roumania a man can buy a count's title, and then

you will be a countess--my countess.

_Julie_. What do I care for what I have cast aside! Say that you

love me, or else--ah, what am I else?

_Jean_. I will say it a thousand times--later on. But not here.

And, above all, no sentimentality, or all is lost. We must keep

cool like sensible people. (_He takes out a cigar, cuts the end,

and lights it_.) Sit down there, and I will sit here, and then we

can chat as if nothing had happened.

_Julie_ (_in despair_). Oh, my God! Have you no feelings?

_Jean_. I! Why, there is no one more sensitive than I, but I can

command my feelings.

_Julie_. A short time ago you would have kissed my shoe, and

now----

Jean (_coldly_). Yes, before. But now we have something else to

think about.

They cannot flee without money. Jean suggests that she can steal the

necessary sum in her father's room. He taunts her with her weakness

until she robs her father. They prepare to leave the house. The girl

wants to bring her greenfinch. Infuriated by her sentimentality,

Jean snatches the bird from her and kills it. The man's brutality

and meanness are suddenly revealed to her; her brain reels under the

humiliation which she has brought upon herself. She hurls curses at

the head of the impudent domestic. The morning has come, and Christine

enters the kitchen on her way to church. The girl appeals to her,

seeks her sympathy, but Christine's feelings of propriety are too

shocked to allow of any pity for the fallen girl. She leaves them. The

Count returns. They hear him in his room, know that he will discover

the theft. His daughter is half demented with fear, remorse, shame; she

is incapable of deciding what to do. Jean's servant conscience has been

awakened by the arrival of his master. The Count is there to command,

Jean to obey. And when Lady Julie wants him to tell her what to do he

hands her a razor--with the complacency with which he might hand his

mistress the riding-whip. She leaves the kitchen and kills herself.

Such are the outlines of this painful play, the most "successful" of

Strindberg's naturalistic dramas. Again we have a struggle between

man and woman, but this time the opposites of class and blood are

added to those of sex. The healthy egotism, the common instincts of

self-preservation in the valet endow him with a physical stability

against which Lady Julie's emotions break like foam against a rock. She

goes, he remains. Like _The Admirable Crichton_, Jean knows that there

must be masters and servants in this world of inequality, and, though

his passions for once mastered his conviction, he is soundly submissive

to social law and order. In Lady Julie, Strindberg has sketched the

useless, unnatural, pleasure-loving, hysterical woman of the leisured

classes whom he detests.

In the preface to the play he analyses this type of woman. "Lady Julie

is a modern character," he writes, "not as if the half-woman, the

man-hater, had not existed in all times, but because she has now been

discovered, has appeared on the scene, and created a disturbance." In

such women he sees a danger to the race, for, as a rule, they attract

degenerate men, and transmit their own misery to another generation.

They sell themselves for "power, decorations, distinctions, diplomas,"

and produce beings of undecided sex to whom life is useless. For such

psycho-pathological creatures Strindberg sees no hope beyond that of

elimination through contact with reality (Jean was "reality" to Lady

Julie), or a fatal outburst of long-suppressed sexual instincts. "The

type is tragic," he concludes, "offering the spectacle of a desperate

struggle against nature; tragic as a romantic inheritance which is now

being destroyed by the naturalism which only seeks happiness; and only

strong and good species are compatible with happiness."

Justin McCarthy translated _Lady Julie_ into English, and expressed

his admiration for the unalloyed realism of the piece in an article in

_The Fortnightly Review_. The mental intensity with which Strindberg

visualised the character of Lady Julie is strangely impressive.

There is no extravagant or jejune theorising; it is drama vehemently

conceived and true to its creator. But the horror which moved Justin

McCarthy when reading the play, and which most readers experience, is

a product of Strindberg's peculiar misogyny which, for the purposes

of the play, he coupled with the ordinary standard of convention and

morality. Lady Julie's disgrace is unpardonable from the point of view

of society. She dies in deference to its verdict. We cannot imagine a

drama by Strindberg, in which tragedy is woven out of the misconduct

of a Lord Julius instead of a Lady Julie. A young "blood," neurotic,

suffering from ennui, and seeking temporary distraction in the company

of Jeanne, the valet's daughter, would not have inspired a naturalistic

drama of sex and caste. There is a wealth of material which can be

used to _épater le bourgeois_ in the idea of a well-bred woman's

precipitous "return to nature." The commonplace spectacle of a similar

descent on the part of a well-bred man affords none.

In _Comrades_ we meet the type of woman who surpasses _Lady Julie_ in

anti-social attributes. Laura is something of a female tigress, the

mother whose claws are ready to tear all but the cub; Lady Julie, with

her hysteria I and her caprices is still the womanly woman. But Bertha

who is united to her "comrade" Axel in a marriage of equality is worse

than they. She is plain, mannish, ambitious; a mental parasite who

suppresses her womanhood and simulates her husband's talents. The rival

of man, the unsexed, simian-brained shrew, Strindberg's _bête noire_.

_Comrades_ is a four-act comedy of marriage. Axel Alberg and his wife

are Swedish painters in Paris. They have each painted a picture which

has been submitted to the Salon. In Act I we find Axel at work in the

studio. He is a good fellow, honest, painstaking, generous. Friends

call and discover his embarrassing position as a married comrade. There

is the doctor, mature in experience and philosophical in outlook,

who when Axel asks him if he does not believe in woman answers: "No,

I don't. But I love her." There is the sensible, matter-of-fact

Lieutenant Starck, who will stand no nonsense from women, and whose

happy, normal wife knows that woman's real happiness is found in

subjection unto her husband. They are shocked to hear of Bertha's

tastes and habits. Bertha comes home. She has kept her nude male model

waiting, and her poor husband has had to pay five francs in consequence

of her unpunctuality. This is a small part of the sacrifices he has

made for her artistic career. In the scenes that follow we see Bertha

insisting on keeping the household accounts, though her head cannot

grapple with the simplest problems of addition and subtraction. She has

made false entries, and deliberately deceives Axel as to the manner in

which the funds of the comradeship are expended. She coquettes with

Willmer, a young writer, and receives presents from him. Intent upon

securing the acceptance of her picture, she makes nefarious use of

Axel's love for her.

_Bertha_. Will you be very kind to me? Very?

_Axel_. I always want to be kind to you, my dear.

_Bertha_. Do you? Look here, you know Roubey, don't you?

_Axel_. Yes, I met him in Vienna, and we became good friends.

_Bertha_. You know that he is a member of the jury?

_Axel_. Well, what about that?

_Bertha_. Yes, now you will be angry. I know it.

_Axel_. If you know it, don't make me angry.

_Bertha_ (_caresses him_). You won't sacrifice anything for your

wife--nothing.

_Axel_. Go and beg? No, that I won't do.

_Bertha_. Not for yourself, for your picture will probably be

accepted all the same, but for your wife?

_Axel_. Don't ask me.

_Bertha_. I should really never ask anything of you.

_Axel_. Yes, things which I can do without sacrificing....

_Bertha_. Your manly pride.

_Axel_. Let us leave it at that.

_Bertha_. But I should sacrifice my womanly pride, if I could help

you.

_Axel_. You have no pride.

_Bertha_. Axel!

_Axel_. There, there, forgive me.

_Bertha_. I am sure you are jealous of me. I am sure you would not

like my picture to be accepted.

_Axel_. Nothing would delight me more, I assure you, Bertha.

_Bertha_. Would it also delight you if I were accepted and you

were refused?

_Axel_. I must feel (_laying his hand on his heart_). I am sure

it would be an unpleasant feeling--sure. Both because I paint

better than you, and because....

_Bertha_. Say it straight out,--because I am a woman.

_Axel_. Yes, also for that reason. It is strange, but I have a

feeling as if you women were intruders, forcing your way in and

demanding the spoils of the battle which we men have fought whilst

you sat by the fireside. Forgive me, Bertha, for saying this, but

such thoughts come to me.

_Bertha_. You are just like all other men, exactly.

_Axel_. Like all other men. I hope so.

_Bertha_. And lately you have assumed such superiority; you used

not to be like that.

_Axel_. I suppose that is because I am superior. Do something

which we men have not already done.

_Bertha_. What! What are you saying? Are you not ashamed?

Bertha changes her tone, and plays the humble comrade who is sorely

in need of a little encouragement. Axel rejects her arguments, but

eventually goes to Monsieur Roubey. During Axel's absence a letter

arrives containing the information that his picture has been refused.

Bertha guesses its contents and revels in the luxury of pity and

_schadenfreude_. Axel returns, after finding Madame Roubey at home,

(a meeting cleverly foreseen by Bertha) with the news that Bertha's

picture has already been accepted. He congratulates Bertha on her

success. He is confident that his picture will also be accepted. She

hands him the letter. The _scène de rupture_ is inevitable.

_Axel_ (_lays his hand on his heart and sits down_). What ...

(_controls himself_). This is a blow which I did not expect. This

is most unpleasant.

_Bertha_. Well, perhaps I can help you now.

_Axel_. You look as if you enjoyed my defeat, Bertha. Oh, I feel a

great hatred of you stirring within me!

_Bertha_. I look happy, perhaps, because I have had a success, but

when one is tied to a man who cannot rejoice in one's happiness it

is difficult to feel sorry when he is unhappy.

_Axel_. I don't know what has happened, but it seems to me that

we have become enemies now. The struggle for a position has come

between us, and we can no longer be friends.

_Bertha_. Does not your sense of justice tell you that the one who

was most competent won the battle?

_Axel_. You were not the most competent.

_Bertha_. But the jury thought so.

_Axel_. The jury? But you know very well that you cannot paint as

well as I do.

_Bertha_. Are you sure of that?

The dialogue that follows is a crescendo of the sex-against-sex

quarrel. "A comrade," concludes Axel, "is a more or less loyal

competitor, but we are enemies." Bertha, selfish, mean, inebriated

by her triumph, goes out to celebrate her victory in the company of

friends. Axel stays at home to nurse his sorrow. The curtain descends

upon the dejected husband begging his wife not to come home drunk.

Act II shows us Bertha usurping Axel's place as teacher. She finds

fault with his technique, and snatches the brush out of his hand to

show him how to paint. Her puny mind reels with the desire to humiliate

him. Malicious tongues have whispered that he has painted her picture,

that he has good-humouredly let her reap the honour of his toil. Bertha

is casting about for a means of crushing Axel for ever. To-morrow

they will give an evening-party. Her friend Abel--another of the

emancipated, heartless, false, perverse, masculine women of artistic

Bohemia--makes a welcome suggestion. Why not arrange to have Axel's

rejected picture sent home at the very hour when their friends are

assembled in the studio? The idea fascinates Bertha, but she dare not

be responsible. "I should like it to be done, but I don't want to be

concerned in it," she says. "I want to stand guiltless and to be able

to swear that I am innocent." And Abel undertakes to manage the matter.

The sex-war reaches its climax in Act III. Axel has tom himself

free from the meshes of his decaying love. Now he knows Bertha as

she really is. He has discovered her dishonest book-keeping, her

money transactions with Willmer, her insidious efforts to emasculate

his soul--he realises the full horror of her short hair, and of

their union. He has broken his marriage-vows, and throws down the

wedding-ring. He is free. But Bertha's malignity clings to him:

_Bertha_. And this, all this noble revenge, simply because you

were inferior to me.

_Axel_. I was your superior when I painted your picture.

_Bertha_. When you painted my picture! Say that again and I will

strike you.

_Axel_. You who despise brute force are always the first to appeal

to it. Strike me if you like.

_Bertha_ (_advancing towards him_). You think I have not the

strength.

_Axel_ (_seizing both her wrists and holding them_). No, not that.

Are you convinced now that I am also physically the stronger? Bow

down, or I will break you!

_Bertha_. Dare you strike me?

_Axel_. Why not? I only know of one reason why I should not.

_Bertha_. And that is----?

_Axel_. That you are irresponsible.

_Bertha_ (_struggling to free herself_). Ah, let me go!

_Axel_. Not until you have begged my pardon. Down on your knees.

(_He forces her down with one hand_.) Now look up to me from

below. That is your place, the place you yourself have chosen.

_Bertha_ (_gives in_). Axel, Axel, I don't know you e any longer.

Can this be you who swore to love me, you who begged to be allowed

to support me?

_Axel_. Yes, I was strong then and believed I had strength to do

it. But you clipped the hair of my strength while my tired head

lay in your lap. During sleep you stole my best blood, and yet

enough remains to subdue you. Stand up, and let us have done with

speeches. There is business to be talked over. (_Bertha gets up,

then sits down on the sofa, weeping_.)

_Axel_. Why are you crying?

_Bertha_. I don't know. Perhaps because I am weak.

_Axel_. You see! I was your strength. When I took back what was my

own you had nothing left. You were like a rubber ball which I blew

out; when I threw you down you collapsed.

_Bertha_ (_without looking up_). I don't know if it is as you

say, but since we quarrelled my strength has left me. Axel,

believe me, I have never felt for you what I now feel.

_Axel_. Really! What do you feel?

_Bertha_. I can't say. I don't know if it is love, but....

_Axel_. What do you mean by love? Is it not a secret longing to

eat me alive once more? You begin to love me. Why not formerly,

when I was good to you? Goodness is stupidity. Let us be wicked.

What do you think?

_Bertha_. Yes, I would rather have you a little wicked than weak.

(_Gets up_.) Axel, forgive me, but don't desert me. Love me, oh,

love me!

But Axel is not caught again. He consents to allow the party to take

place, as if they were still good comrades, but he is determined to

obtain a divorce. In Act IV we again meet the happy pair, Starck,

Willmer, Abel, Dr. Östermark, the _raisonneur_ of the play, and his

divorced wife, Mrs. Hall, a dubious middle-aged woman whom Bertha

imagines to be a victim of man's brutality and a living argument in

favour of the woman's movement. She and Abel have arranged, not only to

punish Axel by confronting him with his unsuccessful picture, but to

disconcert Dr. Östermark by confronting him with the wife and daughters

whom he has not seen for eighteen years. But Bertha's calculations

are faulty, as usual. The picture is carried into the studio by order

of the _concierge_ who has protested against its unexpected appearance

at the door. Axel is annoyed. She wants everybody to see the picture,

to look at it closely. They do, and it turns out to be Bertha's picture.

[Illustration: August Strindberg--Portrait in Oil by Chr. Krogh, 1893]

[Illustration: August Strindberg--Portrait in Oil by Richard Bergh, 1906.]

The last scenes of the play show us a shame-faced Bertha recovering

from the fainting-fit which followed upon the sight of the picture. She

knows that Axel has nobly changed the numbers in order to give her a

better chance. She knows that circumstances have combined to unmask her

completely. He is the stronger, and she offers him her love. Relentless

in his masculine strength, Axel shakes her off, turns her out into the

street. "You once asked me to forget that you are a woman," he cries,

"well, I have forgotten it." She reminds him of a man's duty to his

wife. Axel hands her some bank-notes. Bertha departs consoled and Axel

goes to meet his mistress. "I want comrades at the _café_, but at home

I want my wife," he cries, before the final exit of Bertha.

_Comrades_ has been confounded with the typical _comédie rosse_. But

here, as in _Lady Julie_, the collision of character is presented

with the intensity which is possible only when a dramatist treats

of a question which to him is vital. One inadequately described as

a "tragedy," the other as a "comedy," there is in both plays the

pessimistic despair of the absolutely sincere anti-feminist. It raises

them high above the facile farce of passion, satiety and change.

Bertha is to Strindberg the New Woman--a creature to be shunned and

exterminated. Nietzsche thought that the "beautiful and dangerous cat,"

which is woman, should never be visited without a whip. Strindberg

would not only bring the whip, but poison to the defeminised monster

who wishes to be the rival of man.

In _Comrades_ the dramatist presents his characters with that ironical

smile which is the condiment of life's bitter draughts. There is a

general consciousness of _blague_ pervading the studio. The doctor who

finds the wife, on whom he once lavished a romantic love, a drunken

slattern, her daughters in a second union in the service of vice, helps

the reeling woman out of the house and expresses his feelings thus:

"Oh, Dolce Napoli! Joy of life, where art thou? Went away as she did.

Such was the bride of my youth!... Oh, Dolce Napoli! I wonder if the

cholera-sick fishing harbour is so sweet, after all! Blague probably.

Blague, blague! Brides, love, Naples, _joie de vivre_, ancient, modern,

liberal, conservative, ideal, real, natural--blague. Blague all the

way."

_Creditors_ is a one-act play in which we meet the erotic woman, the

alluring, treacherous, unmoral creature of instinct and passion, who

battens on men's souls--in short, the vampire. After the _blague_ of

_Comrades_ the anguish of _Creditors_. There are two men and one woman

in the piece. Tekla has been married to Adolf, a painter, for seven

years. Adolf adores her--their love has been a ceaseless giving on

his part. He has merged his personality in hers, he has laid his art

as a sacrifice on the altar of his devotion. He has thought of her,

painted her, modelled her, given her the treasures of his mind, filled

her soul until his own is empty, and now he is weak whilst she is

strong. They are staying at the seaside place, to which they come every

summer. Tekla has been away for a week when the curtain rises on Adolf

engaged in modelling the figure of his wife. He is a nervous wreck,

semi-epileptic, with crutches by his side. He is talking confidentially

to Gustaf, whose acquaintance he has made during Tekla's absence. He

does not know that Gustaf is the husband from whom Tekla was separated

before he married her, does not know that Gustaf is the _creditor_ to

whom they are both in debt. Gustaf induces Adolf to tell the story of

his married life, of his sacrifices, his self-effacement, his reckless

giving. He subtly leads Adolf to realise Tekla's voracious egotism,

her falseness, her voluptuousness, plays upon his jealousy, rouses

his suspicions, wrecks his peace of mind. Adolf is fascinated against

his will by the force and coolly analysing mind of Gustaf. He cannot

understand why there is something in Gustaf's manner of speaking, and

in his eye which reminds him of Tekla. Gustaf replies that Tekla and he

may be distant relatives, as are all human beings.

They discuss Tekla's first husband. Adolf has never seen him, but

knows that he is an idiot, for Tekla has written a book in which the

ridiculous man is described. Gustaf shows Adolf that he is treated

as the second idiot by Tekla. He asks why Tekla sent away her child.

Adolf hesitates to tell his friend, then confesses that at the age of

three the child showed a likeness to the first husband which Tekla

found unendurable. Gustaf asks Adolf if he has never felt jealous of

the first husband. "Would it not nauseate you to meet him when out for

a walk, when his eyes on your Tekla would say to you: We instead of

I--We?" Adolf admits that the thought has haunted him. Gustaf draws a

picture of the torment caused by the indelible memory of the third.

"But they know that _one_ sees them in the darkness--and then they are

frightened and in their fright the figure of the absent one begins

to haunt them, to assume dimensions, to change until he becomes a

nightmare disturbing their sleep of love, a creditor who knocks at the

door, and they see his black hand between theirs, they hear his grating

voice in the silence of the night which should only be disturbed by

their beating pulses. He does not prevent their union, but he disturbs

their happiness. And when they feel his invisible power of disturbing

their happiness, when at last they flee--but flee in vain from the

memory which persecutes them--from the debt they have left behind, and

the judgment which frightens them, they lack the strength to bear their

transgression and find a scapegoat which must be slaughtered...."

Tortured by the suggestion that Tekla has now been unfaithful to

him, which every sentence spoken by Gustaf drives more deeply into

the inflamed brain, Adolf consents to test Tekla's fidelity by means

devised by Gustaf. When she comes home Adolf is to study her manner,

and lead her to reveal her real self, whilst Gustaf listens in another

room. When the husband has reached the limit of his power of deduction

he is to go out, and leave to Gustaf the rôle of inquisitor. Adolf is

to be a secret witness of the second examination. He can hear all in

the adjoining room.

Tekla comes home. She is playful, loving, treats him as her naughty

child--just as Gustaf said she would, if guilty. She has enjoyed

herself, and Adolf's solemn tones of reproach and impending disaster

cause a revulsion of feeling, in which she shows herself as the

heartless coquette, the _mangeuse d'hommes_, to whom conjugal monotony

is insupportably dull. Adolf goads her vanity by saying that she has

reached the age, when admirers are no longer troublesome. She wishes to

assure him of the contrary, warns him, threatens that in future he will

have to play the ridiculous part of the jealous and deceived husband

who, lacking evidence, can only injure himself.

Adolf tells her that her plumes are borrowed, that he has endowed her

with sense, electrified her once empty brain, made her famous by his

pictures and his deification. She concludes that he means to tell her

that he has written her books. The rhythm of the quarrel rises until

Adolf in the throes of an approaching fit, cries: "Be quiet. Leave me.

You destroy my brain with your clumsy pincers--you thrust your claws in

my thoughts and tear them to pieces."

At the sight of Adolf's condition Tekla grows tender. He recovers,

and she makes him beg her forgiveness. After summoning his remaining

strength he leaves her. Gustaf enters the room. There is a touching

scene of recognition, embarrassment and assurances of mutual respect.

The virile mind of Gustaf soothes Tekla's overwrought nerves.

She allows him to understand that her present husband is feeble,

backboneless, and unreasonably jealous.

They revive memories. Gustaf observes that she still wears the

ear-rings which he gave her. The magnetism of old associations, old

regrets, draws them together. Gustaf puts his arm round her waist;

she resists and confesses herself afraid of his presence. She does not

wish to do any real wrong to Adolf, for she knows that he loves her.

But Gustaf knows more than she does. He shows her the tom pieces of her

photograph, thrown on the floor by Adolf some time before. He makes

her see clearly that Adolf treats her with contempt. He begs her to

liberate herself from Adolf's sick fancies, and to come back to the man

of will. Some scruples, a short struggle, and she promises to meet him

in the evening when Adolf will be away.

The sound of something falling comes from the adjoining room. Gustaf

assures her that it is nothing--probably a dog that has been locked

up. But Tekla is smitten with sudden understanding. She sees through

Gustaf's plot, knows that her husband has heard everything. The

horrible revenge of the man she betrayed revolts her, yet impresses

her by its diabolical consistency. Gustaf is about to leave her,

declaring that the debt has been paid, when the door is opened, and

Adolf appears, deadly pale, a cut across the cheek, his eyes vacant,

and foaming at the mouth. He falls. Tekla throws herself over the body,

from which life is fast ebbing. "Adolf, my beloved child, say that you

are alive, forgive, forgive; Oh, God! he does not hear, he is dead. Oh,

God in Heaven!" And the curtain falls as Gustaf exclaims: "Really, she

loves him too! Poor thing!"

_Creditors_ has added an important psychological factor to Strindberg's

usual duel of sex. Here we have, not only the sinful nature of woman,

the instinctive selfishness, the absence of moral sense, but the

operation of a mysterious law of unity, which assists in the downfall

of the woman and the victory of the stronger man. Tekla, once mother

of Gustaf's child, is held to him by cords of a sympathy which may be

called physiological, and which constitutes nature's irrefrangible

banns of marriage.

The thesis has since been fully developed in Paul Hervieu's _Le

Dédale_. Here the dissonance of divorce and re-marriage resounds

through a highly artistic presentment of the conflict between religion,

morality, affection and "nature." Marianne de Pogis has left Max, her

husband, because of his infidelities. She re-marries and finds in

Le Breuil, her second husband, the virtues which her former husband

lacked. Her child by the first marriage falls ill, and she meets her

first husband by its bedside. She remains in his house to nurse the

child, and succumbs to the old love which has never died. The end is

tragic. She cannot go back to Le Breuil. Hervieu cuts short the agony

of three souls by the death of the two men. Le Breuil kills Max and

himself; together they go over the rock into the foaming waters where

human passion is extinguished. Strindberg also summons death as the

only solution of Adolf's martyrdom, but, with characteristic sense of

the hideous interminableness of life's complexities, leaves Tekla and

Gustaf to loathe the tie which they cannot break. Gustaf is the strong

man who, knowing woman, despises her and masters her. Adolf is the

woman-worshipper, the slave who has sold his masculine birthright for

worthless favours. He is killed by disillusionment.

The production of _The Father, Lady Julie,_ and _Creditors_ at the

Théâtre Libre was followed by their performance at the Théâtre de

l'Œuvre in Paris, another experimental theatre which was founded in

1893 by M. Lugné-Poë. _Lady Julie_ was part of the early repertory

of the Freie Bühne, an advanced playhouse which had been established

in Berlin in 1889 to meet the demand for realism on the stage. _The

Father_ and _Creditors_ were performed in Copenhagen in 1889, and the

latter play was soon presented at the Residenz Theater in Berlin. The

Independent Theatre in London, founded by Mr. J.T. Grein in 1891,

introduced Ibsenism to England, and suffered the penalty of the

pioneer. Strindbergism might have wrecked the undertaking before the

work was accomplished. Mr. Grein's services to the British playgoer

have not yet been fully appreciated. He broke one or two windows in

the suffocating theatre of banalities and bon-bon amours. Thanks to

his courage we can now enjoy an increased amount of oxygen. But the

West-End stage still thrives on airlessness. The popular long-run

play, in which the charming actress appears as mannequin for the

best costumier, whilst social inanities are paraded as absorbing

problems--with a happy ending--contracts the lungs of all who in the

drama seek a mirror and a criticism of life. To find modern dramatic

art they must perforce go to the sporadic centres of unconventional

and non-commercial performances, or to the semi-private stages of

societies which fight the prevalent stagnation by bold experimental

presentation of new dramatic ideas. Strindberg's plays are practically

unknown in England. The Adelphi Players produced _The Father_ in July,

1911, and _Lady Julie_ in April, 1912. The Stage Society, which is the

descendant of Mr. Grein's Independent Theatre, has played _Creditors_.

The Stronger, an atmospheric sketch with two characters, of whom the

one maintains silence, whilst the other uses her tongue, was acted

by Madame Lydia Yavorskaia and Lady Tree in 1909. Of the remainder

of the fifty-one plays by which he has encompassed many "schools" of

playwriting, evolved new dramatic forms, and tested different methods

of expression the British public knows little or nothing.

* * * * *

Naturalism has passed away. The shallow materialism, the false

simplicity of presentation, with which it sought to kill romantic

methods of dramaturgy, proved fatal. They were found to be as unreal

as the old-fashioned conventions of the stage. But there were other

qualities in the movement which have not died, but profoundly

influenced the character-drawing and scenic development of the modern

drama. Hauptmann, Hervieu, Wedekind, Schnitzler, Gorky, Tchekhov

have transmuted and individualised the permanent elements of the

early realism. As an exponent of naturalism Strindberg's personality

towered high above the first noisy purveyors of what M. Jullien named

"slices of life"--some distressingly indigestible. It is true that

the fabric of his drama was woven out of the ever-recurring theme of

sexual antagonism. He described it with the undertone of personal

suffering--the suffering of experience and of pity--with which Tolstoy

made his peasants articulate in _Powers of Darkness_, or Henry Becque

the ill-used women in _Les Corbeaux_.

But Strindberg's plays are highly "unpleasant," says some defender of

the morality of the stage. True, but they are honestly unpleasant. They

differ from the popular play of amorous escapades and half-uttered

indecencies, as the mountain torrent differs from the garden fountain.

They are written by the impelling force of an idea, whilst the

conventional immorality play exists in the interests of frivolous

entertainment. However much we may disagree with the _leitmotif_ in

Strindberg's naturalistic plays, and realise the limitations of his

theses, we cannot ignore them. And do they not, after all, treat of

"love," the obsessing object of dramatic interest from the plaintive

demi-monde of Dumas _fils_ to the man-hunting Ann of Bernard

Shaw? From Sudermann and Pinero to Schnitzler and Capus, through

sentimentalism, conventionalism, and cynicism, the theme persists in

absorbing dramatic imagination. Compared with Schnitzler, the prince

of amorists, Strindberg's _milieu_ is sombre with fateful retribution.

Like Strindberg, Schnitzler dramatises the illusion and disillusionment

of love; his lovers and mistresses are also on the road to knowledge.

The ten couples who pass over the stage in _Reigen_ might be sparks

from Strindberg's anvil. But on closer inspection we find that there

has been no fire. Schnitzler's world is the play-room of the passions,

Strindberg's their inferno.

In _Lady Julie_ and _Creditors_, both one-act plays and each with only

three speaking parts, he created a new dramatic form. He now assailed

the old theatre with the same vigour with which he had attacked old

social institutions. In the preface to _Lady Julie_ he contemptuously

writes:

"The theatre has long appeared to me, as art in general, to be a

_Biblia Pauperum_, a bible in pictures for those who cannot read

writing or print, and the playwright as a lay preacher who disseminates

the thoughts of the period in popular form, so popular that the middle

classes, which chiefly fill the theatres, can understand what it is all

about without much mental exertion. The theatre has therefore always

been a board-school for young people, the half-educated, and women who

still possess the primitive capacity for deceiving themselves, and

allowing themselves to be deceived, i.e. to accept illusion, receive

suggestion from the author."

The influence of Edmond de Goncourt, who called the theatre an

exhibition of spouting marionettes and a place for the exercise of

educated dogs, can be traced in this passage. Rudimentary, incomplete

processes of thought, dependent on imagination, are, concluded

Strindberg, necessary to theatrical enjoyment. With the development of

reflection, investigation, and the higher mental attributes, decay of

pleasure in theatrical performances would follow as the shell drops

from the ripe fruit. In the theatrical crisis which raged in Europe at

this time (1888), and in the moribund state of drama in England and

Germany he saw evidence of an approaching extinction of the theatre.

It would, however, be a mistake to invest these views with a greater

seriousness than they contained. As Henry Becque pointed out in

his "Souvenirs," _la fin du théâtre_ has repeatedly been proclaimed

by dissatisfied critics, without causing the slightest impediment

in the ceaseless flow of dramatic production. In the preface to _Le

Fils Naturel_, Dumas had compared the moralising functions of the

stage to those of the Church. Strindberg replied, twenty years later,

by predicting the downfall of both as vehicles of human progress.

Hot-headed attacks on the theatre precede the evolution of new dramatic

forms; they are the outcome of the modernity which is ever at war

with methods which have become classic. "To save the theatre, the

theatre must be destroyed, the actors and actresses must all die of

the plague," is the sweeping verdict of Eleonora Duse,[2] but there

is no disparagement in the reflection that the melancholy prophecies

are often uttered by dramatists who are misunderstood and rejected. In

Anton Tchekhov's _The Seagull_, published in 1900, the familiar protest

is heard: "To me the theatre of to-day," says the poet Constantine,

through whom the author speaks, "is no more than an antiquated

prejudice, a dull routine." He protests against the trivialities, the

commonplace morality, the repeated dishing up of the same story in

a thousand varieties. He wants to flee, as Maupassant fled from the

Eiffel Tower. Each malcontent finds solution in his own new method of

drama. Rousseau's letter to d'Alembert contains the genuine criticism

of the theatre, with which no born dramatist can sympathise. From the

effect of fostering artificial emotions, of indulging in sham joys

and sorrows, there is no escape through improvement of dramatic form.

Whether for good or ill it remains with us. But there is happily little

danger of the rationality, in which Strindberg saw the doom of the

theatre.

The choice of naturalistic subjects was to be a contributing factor in

the process of rationalism. Of the painful impression created by _Lady

Julie_ Strindberg writes:

"When I chose this subject from life, just as it was told to me

some years ago when it stirred me deeply, I found it suitable for a

tragedy, for it still makes a painful impression to see a happily

placed individual go to the wall, and still more to see a family die

out. But the time may come when we shall be sufficiently evolved and

enlightened to contemplate with indifference the coarse, cynical, and

heartless drama which life offers, when we have laid aside the inferior

and unreliable registration-machines which we call feelings, and which

will be superfluous and injurious when our organs of judgment are fully

developed....

"The fact that my tragedy makes a sad impression on many is the

fault of the many. When we become strong, as were the first French

revolutionaries, it will make an exclusively pleasant and cheerful

impression to see the royal parks cleared of rotting, superannuated

trees which have too long stood in the way of others with equal right

to vegetate their full life-time; it will make a good impression in the

same sense as does the sight of the death of an incurable.

"The reproach was levelled against my tragedy, _The Father_, that it

was so sad, as though one wanted merry tragedies. People clamour for

the joy of life, and theatrical managers order farces, as though the

joy of life consisted in being foolish, and in describing people as if

they were each and all afflicted with St. Vitus's Dance or idiocy. I

find the joy of life in the powerful, cruel struggle of life, and my

enjoyment in discovering something, in learning something. Therefore

I have chosen an unusual, though instructive, case, in other words, an

exception, but a great exception which confirms the rule, and which

is sure to offend the lovers of the banal. The simple brain will

further be shocked by the fact that my motives behind the action are

not simple, and that there is not one view alone to be taken of it. An

event in life--and this is a comparatively new discovery--is generally

produced by a whole series of more or less deep-seated motives, but

the spectator chooses for the most part the one which is easiest for

him to grasp, or the one most advantageous to the reputation of his

judgment. Take a case of suicide as an example. 'Bad business,' says

the bourgeois. 'Unhappy love!' say the women. 'Sickness!' says the

disease-ridden man. 'Shattered hopes!' the bankrupt. But it is possible

that the motives lay in all of these causes, or in none, and that the

dead man hid the real one by putting forward another which has thrown a

more favourable light on his memory."

In an essay entitled _On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre_, written

in March, 1889, and published in the first volume of a collection of

plays and essays under the title _Things Printed and Unprinted_,

Strindberg proclaims the regenerating powers of the Naturalistic

Theatre in the following words:

"Let us have a theatre, where we can be horrified by the horrible,

where we can laugh at what is laughable, play with playthings; where we

can see everything without being shocked, if that which has hitherto

been concealed behind theological and æsthetical hangings is revealed.

Though old, conventional laws may have to be broken, let us have a

free theatre, where everything is admitted except the talentless, the

hypocritical and the stupid."

He distinguishes between true and false naturalism, and deprecates

the commonplace dulness of the subject chosen by Henry Becque in _Les

Corbeaux_. To Strindberg the choice of such subjects depends on a

soullessness or a lack of temperament, which must bore the spectator

instead of stimulate him. He calls such a dramatic method simple

photography which "includes everything, even the speck of dust upon the

lens of the camera. This is realism," he writes; "a method, latterly

exalted to an art, a little art which cannot see the wood for the

trees. This is the false Naturalism which believed that art consisted

merely in sketching a piece of nature in a natural manner, but it is

not the true naturalism which seeks out those points in life, where the

great conflicts occur, which loves to see that which cannot be seen

every day, rejoices in the battle of elemental powers, whether they be

called love or hatred, revolt or sociability; which cares not, whether

a subject be beautiful or ugly, if only it is great."

"I do not know the modes," cried Socrates, "but leave me one which

will imitate the tones and accents of a brave man, enduring danger or

distress, fighting with constancy against fortune." The Naturalism

of which Strindberg was a prophet might have chosen these words as

a motto. Socrates continued: "And also one fitted for the work of

peace, for prayer heard by the gods, for the successful persuasion or

exhortation of men, and generally for the sober enjoyment of ease and

prosperity." With this side of man's natural life young Naturalism had

no sympathy. That came with years of discretion.

The transformation of the diffuse drama in many acts into the concise

and dynamic one-act play with few characters, and the simplification of

stage technique, were the salient points in Strindberg's proclamation

of Theatre Reform. He held that there is generally but one scene,

towards which the playwright mounts on devious paths, and that author

and audience alike are made to endure painful side-shows for the sake

of one thing worth seeing. A man's dramatic talent may outlast his

one-act play, but it is taxed to depletion in the construction of five

acts, just as the imaginative patience of the audience is exhausted by

the long intervals.

The Greek art of the one-act play had been revived in the eighteenth

century in the _Proverbes Dramatiques_ of Carmontelle, developed by

Musset and Feuillet, and had finally found a modern interpretation in

the style of the _Quart d'Heure_ of which _Entre Frères_ by Guiche and

Lavedan is a typical example. When writing _Lady Julie_, Strindberg

had in mind the monographic novels of the brothers de Goncourt. The

dialogue in Lady Julie is interrupted twice. There is singing and

a folk-dance. Such diversions do not leave the spectator time to

escape from the suggestion of the playwright, or to lose the precious

illusion. The performance of Lady Julie lasts an hour and a half,

and Strindberg saw no reason why the public should not be educated

to endure one act which lasts the whole evening. There may be mental

diversions, such as are provided by monologue, pantomime and ballet;

but people can listen for hours to sermons and speeches, and may

consequently learn true dramatic concentration.

The scenery should be simple. "With the aid of a table and two chairs

the strongest conflicts which life offers could be presented," he

writes of the genre of the proverbe, "and by that form of art it

became possible to popularise the discoveries of modern psychology."

The decorations should only be suggestive of place and time.

An impressionistic representation of a corner of a room and its

furniture--not the whole room--is all that is needed. Grotesque

scene-painting should be abolished together with the stagey villain who

can create no illusion of wickedness. Footlights were an abomination

to Strindberg. M. Ludovic Céller[3] tells us of their humble and

smoky origin in the tallow candles which, for economical reasons,

were placed on the floor to illuminate the darkness of stage and

auditorium. Whatever their origin, they have a power of distorting

facial expression against which Strindberg vehemently protested. His

protest has been echoed by numerous reformers of the theatre. But the

footlights remain to disfigure noses and blacken eyes in accordance

with time-honoured custom. With proper side-lighting and less paint

on the faces of the actors Strindberg saw possibilities for the mimic

art, which are hidden under shadows and heavy layers of powder and

rouge. The visible orchestra was another obstacle to scenic progress;

in the shrinking of stage and auditorium to a size compatible with

artistic presentation, he saw another means of improvement. In the

small, simplified theatre, with well-regulated light effects and actors

with natural intonation and gestures, Strindberg found a chance for the

continuance of the theatre. Many of his ideas have been realised in the

Künstler Theater of Munich.

In the preface to _Lady Julie_ he deals with the all-important subject

of characterisation. "As modern characters," he writes, "living in a

period of transition more hurried and hysterical than its immediate

predecessor, I have drawn my characters vacillating, broken, mixtures

of old and new.... My souls (characters) are conglomerations of

past and present stages of culture, scraps of books and newspapers,

fragments of men and women, tom shreds of Sunday attire that are now

rags, such as go to make up a soul. And I have thrown in some history

of origins in letting the weaker steal and repeat the words of the

stronger, in letting the souls borrow ideas, or so-called suggestions

from one another."

He ridicules the ordinary idea of a strong character. The person

"who has acquired a fixed temperament or accommodated himself to a

certain rôle in life, who in a word has ceased to grow, was supposed

to have character; whilst one who developed, the skilful navigator on

the stream of life who does not sail with close-tied sheets, but who

knows when to fall off before the wind and when to luff again, was

deemed deficient in character.... This bourgeois conception of the

fixity of the soul was transferred to the stage, where all that is

bourgeois has ever reigned supreme. Such a character became synonymous

with a gentleman, fixed and ready-made, one who invariably appeared

drunk, jocular, melancholy.... I do not, therefore, believe in simple

theatrical characters. And the summary judgments which authors pass on

human beings, such as: this one is stupid; that one is brutal; he is

jealous; he is mean, etc., should be refuted by naturalists who know

the rich complexity of the soul, and who realise that 'vice has an

obverse which shows a considerable likeness to virtue.'"

The secret of Strindberg's great influence on the theatre of twenty

years ago lay in this very conception of character. His men and women

are _alive_, moving, changing, growing, shrinking in ceaseless response

to the pressure of existence. He is the dramatist of the _perpetuum

mobile_ in the modern heart, the interpreter of inexhaustible

discontent in himself and others. His personality vibrates in the

dialogue, and lifts the idea of the play to the surface in every

consecutive scene, but the artist in him is stronger than the

idealogue. The curtain and the settled problem do not drop together.

Strindberg has answered a question or two, tentatively, in his own

manner, but others crowd in upon him and his audience. The absence

of finality is felt through the tragic endings, through the strong

blend of moods, emotions and desires of his exceptional characters,

through the unreasonableness of his prejudices. In spite of pessimism

and cynicism a hope of change is communicated to the spectator, which

penetrates depression and stimulates the curiosity to live.

Amongst the one-act plays which were written between 1887 and 1897,

_Samum_, _Pariah, The Stronger, Playing with Fire_ and _The Link_

present the typical characters of psychic intensity and neuropathic

activity. _Samum_ is the story of the revenge of an Arabian girl and

her lover upon a hapless Frenchman, lieutenant in a Zouave regiment.

She kills him, not with a dagger, for that might involve the punishment

of her tribe, but with words. With the help of "Samum," the hot,

suffocating wind of the desert which blows phantoms into the white

man's brain, she thrusts suggestion after suggestion into his mind. She

makes the sick man believe that he has been bitten by a mad dog; she

offers him sand instead of water in the drinking bowl, and rejoices

when he dreads the drink; she invokes hideous pictures of the defeat of

his regiment, the faithlessness of his wife, the death of his child,

before his fevered imagination. She finally makes him stare in a mirror

at the ghastly image of a skull, and tells him that this is his face,

that he is dead. And when the Frenchman, murdered by horror, sinks back

dead, Youssef, her lover, proud of race and proud of the woman's black

magic, hails her as the worthy mother of his child.

_Pariah_ is a dialogue which bears the mark of the master-craftsman

in the dramatic presentation of psychological events. It is a contest

of minds founded on a tale by Ola Hansson. Two middle-aged men, one

an archæologist, the other a somewhat mysterious man of unknown

occupation, who has returned to Sweden from America, have met in the

country. The archæologist is engaged in recovering antique ornaments

from the bowels of the earth. In the room where the two men face each

other there stands a box, containing bracelets and trinkets of gold

which he has found. Herr X., the archæologist, talks of his poverty,

of how easily he might appropriate to his own use some of the gold

he has found. Debts could be paid, and his wife's anxiety allayed

by one single bracelet. So simple and yet impossible to do. Herr Y.

listens to the reasons which prevent Herr X. from becoming a thief

though there can be no fear of detection. Incapable of stealing

himself, Herr X. expresses his pity for others who fall under similar

temptation. He suspects that the man by his side is in need of such

pity--his conduct has already betrayed the convict. By a series of

psychologically timed questions Herr X. unmasks Herr Y., who, taken

by surprise, confesses that he has served a term of imprisonment for

fraud. The wild anger which for a moment surged through the brain of

the criminal has given way to servile admiration of the superior mind.

He kisses the archæologist's hand. All is known, and yet there is no

condescension on the part of the stronger man. Herr Y. tells the story

of how he came to write a false signature; he wishes to persuade Herr

X. of his spiritual innocence, show him that he was the victim of an

uncontrollable impulse which never defiled his real self. Herr X. has

fallen into an introspective mood. Hesitating, half afraid of what he

is doing, he confides to Herr Y. that he has killed a man--a worthless,

drunken old servant, and without intention to inflict deadly injury,

it is true, but such is the fact: he is a murderer. In reply to Herr

Y.'s eager questions why he escaped without punishment, Herr X. gives

the reasons, why he believed it to be a greater wrong to give himself

up to justice than to conceal the deed--there were his parents, his

career, his fitness for life. Herr Y. has the scoundrel's alert sense

of opportunity. He begins by pointing out his moral superiority over

Herr X., and ends by trying to extort money. Let Herr X. only put his

hand in the box, and transfer some of its contents to Herr Y., and

nothing more will be said of the crime. Let him refuse to do this, and

the whole story will be told at the nearest police-station. The end of

this incisive piece of psychology shows us Herr Y., driven to flight by

the cold-blooded logic of Herr X., who demonstrates that the would-be

accuser is a forger who is "wanted," and whose dread of the police

authorities is a guarantee of his discretion in the matter.

* * * * *

_The Stronger_ is a contest of temperaments carried out by one voice

only. Two women--the wife and the mistress of one man--have met in

a café. Mademoiselle Y. sits silent, whilst Madame X. talks. But

her silence conveys more than speech. It drives Madame X. to reveal

the humiliation she has suffered, it drives her through jealous and

angry recriminations to a triumphant and vindictive assertion of her

superior position as the legal wife and mother. As an ironical and

adroit study of two types of the soul feminine, and by the skilful

handling of the monologue the piece is one of the best of its genre.

_Playing with Fire_ is a triangular comedy of marriage, in which

conjugal fidelity is saved at the eleventh hour through sudden and

truly Strindbergian disillusionment which makes the friend of husband

and wife depart like a rocket from the house of temptation, whilst the

peace of an orderly lunch descends upon the family. _The First Warning_

is a conjugal squabble, and one of the weakest dramatic episodes

conceived by Strindberg. The character of the jealous and enslaved

husband, who has made six vain attempts to flee from the devastating

charm of his wife, is a diluted réchauffé of an incident related in

_The Confession of a Fool_, including the significant moment when

the wife is subjugated by the shock of losing her first front tooth,

and the attendant discovery of the vanity of all things of beauty.

The dialogue is unreal, and Strindberg's sketch of the young girl so

unnatural that we may be grateful that the type has not been more

frequently chosen for "naturalistic" treatment.

_The Link_, a tragedy published in 1897, is a masterly divorce-court

scene. Here Strindberg draws the shame and agony of the broken

marriage-tie with bitter realism, and yet with a delicate touch of that

all-human compassion before which the flowers of satire wither. The

Baron and the Baroness have decided to separate, and proceedings for a

deed of separation have been entered by the husband. There is a link

between them which cannot be broken--the child whom they both love; and

for his sake they are determined not to expose their differences before

the hungry eyes of scandal-mongers. The husband is willing to let the

mother have the custody of the child. But the questions of the judge

pierce the veneer of amiability. Who is the cause of dissension? What

has brought them before the Court? The answers bring accusations and

recriminations, a parade of quarrels and dissensions, angry revelations

of infidelity, disgust, espionage, lies, hatred, and, when the Court

exercises its legal power of depriving both parents of the custody

of the child, the torture of vain regret and empty lives. There is

consummate art in the picture of the emotional revolution, through

which husband and wife are forced into self-damning revelations. The

minor characters of the jurymen and court officials are drawn with a

calm observation and quiet humour which form an effective background

to its central tragic figures. Incidentally, the inadequacy of the law

to secure justice for the wronged is shown, and the lawyer in the play

has some affinity with the legal luminaries in M. Brieux's _La Robe

Rouge_. But Strindberg's judge is a righteous man who chafes under the

limitations and responsibilities of his profession.

[Illustration: August Strindberg--1904 (Photo by Andersson, Stockholm.)]

[Illustration: August Strindberg--1906 (Photo by Haminqvist, Stockholm)]

Those, whose knowledge of Strindberg's writings is limited to his

naturalistic plays, have judged his powers as a literary artist from

an entirely inadequate point of view. When Justin McCarthy spoke of

the real Strindberg, as revealed in _The Father, Lady Julie_ and

_Comrades_, he ignored, not only the volumes of essays, stories and

novels which preceded the plays mentioned, but those which were

published at the same time. Strindberg has been described as a man who

had no interest to spare for social problems, or politics, or the great

movements of his time--as a dramatist whose knife was forever delving

in the pathological tissue of passions, and whose eyes saw nothing

but the broad and sombre outlines of inevitable tragedy. Those who

know _The People of Hemsö_ (1887), a novel of the fishermen's life

in the Stockholm Archipelago, fresh as the salt breeze of the sea,

bright with sunshine, and the jollity of a man with steady nerves,

who is thoroughly at home in a boat and in a hut, are familiar with

another side of Strindberg. Or the volume of short stories entitled

_Fisher Folk_ (1888), with its sketches of life on the island, broadly

humorous, impressive in its unaffected narrative of the struggles and

ambitions of the hardy toilers among the rocks. The stories bring us

in the midst of the island folk: we know their practical, wind-dried

minds where superstition lurks in a corner; we see their sparse

bodies--sometimes fed on herring-heads and potatoes. We attend the

dance which the poor, hunch-backed tailor gives to the young people as

an offering on the altar of joy, and lament with him the devastation

wrought by terpsichorean orgies in his garden. We accompany Westman,

the ungodly pilot who has harpooned a seal from his little boat,

and is dragged out to sea by the cruel monster in spite of pitiful

recitals of the Lord's Prayer, and offers of a pure silver chandelier

to the local church. We are made to participate in the people's life.

In both books there is a wealth of descriptive power, and there is

something fundamentally healthy in the figures of the common people

whom he draws, a natural pathos in their vulgarity, and even in their

criminality.

There are some who see exclusively _das Dämonische_ in Strindberg,

and who picture him as perpetually skirting precipices of moral

and intellectual negation, or as a Lucifer who never emerges from

consuming tongues of fire. They have nothing to say of such books as

his _Sketches of Flowers and Animals_ (1888). Here we meet him, a

mild and patient gardener, sowing his salad and spinach, revelling in

the reward which his cool cucumbers offer after having been carefully

tended by loving hands. Here he initiates us into his cult of the

flower, his adoration of colour and form in the plant world; he

anticipates Maeterlinck in his sensitive studies of the intelligence

of flowers and the mysteries of seeds. His _Fables_ are stories of

birds, insects and bushes, betraying an intimate knowledge of nature,

and sparkling with a good-humoured satire. In these books there are

strokes of brilliant imagination, there is a womanly tenderness for

the lives of plant-children. In one of his stories[4] he tells us of

a tall fir that can feel and suffer, and his description of the spirit

within the tree which sobs under the wood-cutter's axe, and which some

day we shall recognise, reminds us of Fiona Macleod's _Cathal of the

Woods_. Strindberg's love of Nature had many qualities in common with

Thoreau--there is the same pleasure in cultivating the cabbage-patch,

the same ecstatic contemplation of green life. Thoreau could find his

way in the wood during the night by the touch of his feet. Strindberg,

treading his way through the forest in the dark hours, knows whether he

walks on soil, clubmoss or maidenhair, "through the nerves, of his large

toe."[5]

There is also a practical, homely side of Strindberg, which is

generally ignored, qualities appertaining to the small farmer with a

keen eye to profitable cultivation of the land. Without these qualities

he could not have written _Among French Peasants_ (1889), which is

a series of articles on the life and conditions in agricultural

France. They are the product of the mind of a true son of the

soil, equipped with a journalist's power of rapid generalisation.

Strindberg travelled through France, notebook in hand, stayed amongst

the peasants, measured hay and corn, attended weddings and fairs,

annotating the prices of meat and butter, studied the ravages of

the phylloxera and geological formations. The book is crammed with

facts and comparative statistics of town and country, wheat and wine,

village education, libraries, labourers' wages, cheese-making, the best

fertilisers, and other matters of import to rural economy.

He shirked no trouble, avoided no obstacles to equip himself as a

writer on gigantic subjects. His encyclopædic grasp of a many-sided

subject is shown in this book, and in his numerous essays on

sociological questions. It carries with it a certain superficiality,

and readiness to theorise from insufficient data which may necessitate

a graceful retraction of opinions, once loudly proclaimed. But there is

ample compensation in the freshness and vigour of a mind which bears

crop after crop without exhausting itself. Such a quickly grown crop,

verdant and luxurious in ideas, is the essay, written in 1884, _On the

General Discontent, its Causes and Remedies_, in which he inveighs

against the evils of a false Culture, and within the space of a hundred

pages lets Society pass in review before his critical pen in the types

of the king, the bureaucrat, the physician, the teacher, the merchant,

the sailor, the artisan, the manufacturer, the labourer, the servant,

the scientist, the author, the journalist, and the artist, and finally

prescribes the pills of self-help, self-government and limitation of

useless luxuries, artfully mixed. There is much of Rousseau, Tolstoy,

Spencer, Mill and de Quesnay in the social philosophy, with which he

wished to build on the ruins, wrought by _The Red Room_ and _The New

Kingdom_. The ideal peasant--in Tolstoyan garb--was then Strindberg's

hope for humanity.

When he wrote _At the Edge of the Sea_, in 1890, the horrors of

unchecked democracy had been revealed to him. It is the story of a

highly intelligent, refined and super-sensitive man who is forced

to live amongst coarse and ignorant people, and who is gradually

driven to insanity and suicide. This book is the apex of Strindberg's

novelistic art. The scene is again laid on one of the islands outside

Stockholm, the life of the fisherfolk is once more described. But the

tone and the colour are changed. There is the same brilliancy in the

description of scenery, and the psychological imagination is more

lavish than ever, but the mists of Nietzscheanism lie heavily over the

book. The distinction between "slave-morality" and "master-morality" is

emphasised with truly Dionysian pessimism.

The same influence coloured the preface to _Lady Julie_, and the novel

_Tschandala_, published in 1889, and led Mr. Edmund Gosse into the

error of describing Strindberg as "the most remarkable creative talent

started by the philosophy of Nietzsche." Strindberg was certainly

not "started" by Nietzsche who was entirely unknown to him until the

autumn of 1888, when George Brandes brought the two writers together.

A correspondence between Nietzsche and Strindberg began in 1889, and

continued until Nietzsche's illness. Nietzsche read Strindberg's novels

with interest, and Strindberg duly acknowledged the influence which

Nietzsche exercised upon him, but protested against the mistaken view

expressed by Mr. Gosse and others, in the following words: "Those

who have followed my career as a writer at its different stages of

development know sufficiently well how early I adopted the so-called

Nietzschean standpoint with regard to conventional morals, and the

emancipation of women to give me my due, and Nietzsche his with clear

consciences."

The statement that Strindberg was a Nietzschean _pur et simple_ is as

absurd as the statement that he was a Darwinist or a Methodist. He

passed through the fatalism of Hartmann, the pessimism of Schopenhauer,

the naturalism of Zola, the realism of Turgenev and Dostoevsky. On one

occasion he speaks of Balzac as his master, on another he calls himself

a Voltairean. These influences are but lights on the way. He passes on,

and speaks to us with a new tongue. When charged with inconsistency

he might well have answered with Walt Whitman: "I am large--I contain

multitudes."

[1] _Fröken Julie_, the Swedish name of this play, has been translated

into English as "Miss Juliet" and "Miss Julia." The meaning of the

Swedish title and the idea of the play are more faithfully rendered by

the title _Lady Julie_. In the choice of a title for his feminine type

of aristocratic degeneracy, Strindberg was probably influenced by Anna

Maria Lenngren's _Fröken Juliana_, a well-known satirical poem on a

similar subject which belongs to classical Swedish literature. Up to

the middle of the nineteenth century the title "Fröken" was exclusively

used-when addressing the unmarried daughters of the hereditary nobility

of Sweden. An unmarried daughter of a Swedish count is a countess,

though she is addressed as "Fröken." Upon marriage with a commoner she

may use or drop her title.

[2] _Studies in Seven Arts_, by Arthur Symons.

[3] _"Les décors, les costumes et la mise-en-scène au XVII siècle."_

[4] Confused Sensations.

[5] The Confession of a Fool.

CHAPTER VII

SELF-TORMENTOR AND VISIONARY

He restlessness of Genius is a sore trial to Mediocrity. Mediocrity

in the Critic's chair, whose business it is to pass judgment upon the

artist and his work, to affix a label to his back, and to place him

on a particular shelf where the public can find him. The literary

artist is expected to have a point of view which he has reached through

certain early influences, to express himself in a certain form, and,

when mature, to be measurable and easily recognisable in size and

colour. If his personality and his writings make the critic's work easy

he will be blessed by his contemporaries, or possibly condemned. But

he will always be understood, and in the understanding there is solid

comfort. You may sneer at the gods of society, you may shake your fist

at law and authority, you may ridicule humanity, but you must, like Mr.

George Bernard Shaw, always say the same thing. Voltaire is always

expected to contemplate the world with a truly Voltairean smile of

irony, Rousseau to cling innocently to Nature, Swift to see humanity

only from the satirist's vantage-point.

The man of genius who, conscious of the limitations of a single point

of view, seeks another, who strides across the hilltops of past thought

in rapid search of a higher one, who hugs philosophies and drops them,

holds faiths and deserts them, is a phenomenon before which the critic

feels uneasy. He calls in the doctor, and together they prepare the

last label of madness--red, like a warning against poison--and hurl

it at the extraordinary man when he happens to pass at a convenient

distance. Believing that there is nothing further to be said, they

return to their respective vocations.

From the points of view of Mediocrity and Eugenics Strindberg presented

the typical signs of degeneration, irrespectively of the traits and

characteristics which are inadequately defined as the insanity of

genius. He was a truth-seeker, and, consequently, a fault-finder. He

knew peace and comfort like other men, and brief hours of sunshine,

but spiritual discontent compelled him to be a nomad, a wanderer in

many lands. Hence the critic's failure to classify him as a romanticist

or realist, a socialist or individualist, a pessimist or humorist,

a maniac or mystic, or to map out his life into periods and squares

of thought. There was something of the eternal recurrence in him, an

alchemical consciousness of all in all. He leaves beliefs, parts with

influences, conquers new lands through violent crises of awakening

which well-nigh wreck the body, and returns to the first camp, richer

and yet the same. Through soul-sickness and hallucinations, through

delirium and phrenopathic punishments he is led to the super-sanity

of genius. He becomes the visionary of things hidden, the medium of

spirits, the sinner on the road to Damascus, the prophet of divine

justice.

Mistakes and bitter experiences prepared the way for the religious

crisis of 1894. In 1887 he left Switzerland and France for Bavaria,

where he wrote _The Father_ and The _People of Hemsö_. He lived in

Denmark from the autumn of 1887 to the summer of 1889. The prosecution

of _Married_ had inspired cautiousness in the hearts of Swedish

publishers, and Strindberg had only with difficulty found a publisher

for _The Father_ and _Lady Julie_. The plays were promptly attacked

by Swedish critics, amongst them Professor Warburg, author of a

history of literature, who thought their naturalism an unmistakable

form of decadence. When Strindberg returned to his country in 1889

the hostility aroused by _Married_, and augmented by lively tales of

the author's views on morality took an unexpectedly practical form.

When yachting along the west coast for the purpose of collecting

material for a great work on _The Scenery of Sweden_, he was actually

refused permission to land in one of the fishing villages.[1] During

the two years which he now spent in Sweden he became embittered by

the enmity of his critics. He isolated himself on one of his beloved

islands outside Stockholm, wrote and painted. In the autumn of 1892 an

exhibition of his pictures was held in Stockholm. It was impressions

of the sea which his brush had chosen--ice, mist, storm--and painted,

not only with a tender feeling for island scenery, but disclosing

considerable technical merit and accuracy of hand. The principal

cause of suffering lay in Strindberg's eroticism, his interminable

suspiciousness against his wife which made his divorce in 1892 a

merciful end to a marriage of torment. There is much in the repulsive

pages of _The Confession of a Fool_ which betrays its author's lack of

mental balance; the incessant puling over the woman's wickedness, and

the attendant self-appreciation are not apt to command the reader's

sympathy. The same may be said of the second volume of _Married_,

published in 1886. There are a carelessness of style, and a bluntness

of accusation against womankind which make the book inartistic. The

_ad captandum_ controversialist has overruled judgment; there is a

tone of personal irritation in the stories which Strindberg tells

us were written "in self-defence" against the attacks, made upon

him by feminists. Like John Knox, when he wrote _The First Blast of

the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regimen of Women_, Strindberg was

actuated by a kind of religious fervour. Like John Knox he detested

"this monstriferous empire of women," whilst his admiration for

the dangerous sex repeatedly cast him in chains of bondage. Like

Schopenhauer he mocked all womankind "long of hair and short of

sense," and threw misogyny to the winds before the first pair of

charming eyes or dainty feet.

In the autumn of 1892 we find Strindberg in Germany. The curse of

marriage is no longer upon his head. He lives at Friedrichshagen, near

Berlin, with his friends, the Swedish writer Ola Hansson, and his

wife Laura Marholm who has written an interesting psychological study

of Strindberg. Strindberg has passed through one of those "deaths,"

in which he found temporary Nirvana when the battle of thoughts had

been too sanguinary. He has forsaken literature, thrown away the pen

as a worthless tool of a tormented imagination which can scratch but

not solve the riddle of the Sphinx. He has been re-born--a scientist.

The exact sciences--chemistry, physics, astronomy--hold out hopes of

complete replies to questions which the playwright can dress in human

shape but not analyse.

Strindberg's friend, Gustaf Uddgren,[2] has described a visit to him

at this time. His study was bare and uninviting. On the floor there

lay stacks of scientific books piled up against the wall. They had

been bought with the first money he had earned in Germany, and none had

been wasted on the luxury of a bookcase. The room contained a large,

old easel, not unlike a brown skeleton; a writing-table from which the

usual heaps of manuscript and notes were conspicuously absent; and, for

the comfort of the body, a few easy chairs and a sofa, arranged so as

to give the impression of a drawing-room. Strindberg did not wish to

discuss literary subjects. He was glad to have left off writing, and

looked forward with eager joy to scientific research. Uddgren tried in

vain to induce him to talk about Walt Whitman. Strindberg preferred to

discuss Red Indians with his guest who knew something of the wild west.

After a few months at Friedrichshagen Strindberg moved to Berlin.

He was in need of change and expansion. In the evenings he was now

found in a little Wein Stube in Unter den Linden which is called "Zum

Schwarzen Ferkel." It had already won fame as the favourite resort of

Heine and E.T.A. Hoffmann. Here he was the centre of a literary and

scientific coterie. Guitar in hand, amidst sympathetic friends, he

became Dionysos, the singer of glad tidings, of wine-born joy. He

improvised songs, and the nights were made short with wit and sparkling

discussions. The Polish writer, Stanislav Przybyszewski, became much

attached to Strindberg who found in him whirling depths of imaginative

thought which attracted him, and made him seek his society on the

principle of _similia similibus curantur_. Amongst other friends of the

coterie were Holger Drachmann, Gunnar Heiberg, Adolf Paul, and Edvard

Munch. "Zum Schwarzen Ferkel" is impregnated with the Strindbergian

spirit. The landlord proudly shows the visitor the portraits which

Strindberg gave him, and the picture by Strindberg, entitled _Die

Welle_, which hangs on the wall.

The plunge into the "exact" physical sciences, from which he had

expected so much, proved disappointing. The boundaries of experimental

research were soon reached by his penetrative imagination. He had a

passion for facts, but he could not, like the typical man of science,

content himself with systematised classification of things observable.

His speculative writings are studded with allusions to scientific

theories, and show an extensive knowledge of the history of chemistry

and botany, of the facts of astronomy, geology, and zoology. He

garnered the fruits of nineteenth-century science with the pleasure of

the true dilettante, and having tasted them, declared them insipid.

The imaginative processes of his mind continued where those of others

stop; he passed from the visible to the occult, from rigid induction

to extravagant fancy. Beyond the uttermost limits of science he came

to see another world, in which chemistry became alchemy, astronomy

astrology, physics the servant of magic, and the form of man the

tool of mighty forces. He became a student of magnetism, hypnotism,

telepathy, spiritism, of the secret knowledge which has persisted

throughout the ages as the pearl within the oyster.