Whilst literary Berlin was acclaiming Strindberg as the naturalistic

playwright, his mind was centred on the hyperchemical speculations

which later on found expression in his _Antibarbarus I or the

Psychology of Sulphur or All is in All_, and in _Sylva Sylvarum_.

Whilst wings of imagination were lifting him to new planes of thought,

there was a sudden jerk on the chain which bound him to earth. He

fell in love. The ideal woman had again appeared, now in the person

of Fräulein Frida Uhl, a young Austrian girl, daughter of Hofrath

Friedrich Uhl, in Vienna. They became engaged, and art-loving Berlin

was one day surprised to see Strindberg escorting his fiancee to

the National Gallery. He was attired in the fashionable apparel of

the Berlin dandy. A check suit of a large pattern, a short yellow

overcoat, a garish tie, a grotesque walking-stick, and an immaculate

silk hat which, according to the account given by Gustaf Uddgren,

retained its place with difficulty on the leonine mane, gave him an

appearance of unwonted worldliness. They were married in April, 1893,

and spent the honeymoon at Gravesend. An injunction had meanwhile been

granted against the German edition of _The Confession of a Fool_, and

Strindberg returned to Berlin in order to appear before the Court in

the action which followed. The prosecution failed. Strindberg and his

wife spent the winter at her father's country place at Armstädten, on

the Danube, where he returned to his esoteric studies, and wrote his

_Antibarbarus_. In August, 1894, Strindberg went to Paris. His wife

had accompanied him, and left their child in Austria. The tie was now

irksome to him; _les hautes études_ and not woman had again become the

mistress of his soul. In November he sent his wife back to her parents.

"It was with a feeling of wild joy," he writes, "that I returned from

Gare du Nord, where I had left my dear little wife who was going to

our child who had fallen ill in a distant country. The sacrifice of

my heart was thus made complete." Their last words, "When do we meet

again?--Soon," were deceptive; an intuition truly told him that they

had parted for ever. He had placed human affection on the altar of

truth-seeking, thus practising the motto with which _Inferno_ opens:

Courbe la tête, fier Sicambre!

Adore ce que tu as brûlé,

Brûle ce que tu as adoré!

At the Café de la Régence he sat down at the table where he used to sit

with his wife, "the beautiful wardress of my prison who spied on my

soul day and night, guessed my secret thoughts, watched the course of

my ideas, jealously observed my spirit's striving towards the unknown."

He felt free, a sense of mental expansion, of liberated power, a call

to reach the arcanum of human knowledge.

In Paris he was now the playwright of the day. The success of _Lady

Julie_ and _Creditors_ was followed by a brilliant performance of _The

Father_ at Théâtre de l'Œuvre in December. All Paris talked of his

originality and of his misogyny which provided a piquant sensation,

and a subject for interesting gossip in literary and dramatic circles.

He was interviewed and photographed--he was the _cher maître_ of the

theatrical manager who expected from him a sensible appreciation of

his possibilities for further triumphs on the stage. In Berlin he

was the literary lion of the moment. His plays and novels lay in the

booksellers' windows in attractive German dress, his portrait was

exhibited, his personality was discussed. He was saluted as a leader of

a new movement. But he turned his back on all this. Another self was

shed; a voice within whispered the old burning "Beyond this"--drove him

across the borderland of sanity, and into the chaos of unhuman desires.

He left the café, and returned to his rooms in Quartier Latin. From

their hiding-place in his trunk he took six crucibles made of fine

porcelain, bought with money which he "had stolen from himself," made

up a fierce fire in the stove, and pulled down the blinds for the

night's experiment. His theory regarding the composition of sulphur

which had met with such merciless ridicule was now to be put to the

final test. A packet of pure sulphur and a pair of tongs completed

the equipment of the laboratory. The sulphur burnt with infernal

flames, and towards the morning he was able to demonstrate that it

contained carbon. He believed that he had solved the great problem,

overthrown orthodox chemistry, and gained scientific immortality. He

had not noticed that the intense heat had burnt his hands, and caused

the skin to fall off in flakes, but the pain of undressing in the

morning made him conscious of the injury. The joy in the pursuit of the

problems which haunted him was, however, greater than the pain, and

the experiments were continued night after night. He had proved the

existence of carbon in sulphur, now he had to show that it contained

hydrogen and oxygen. The burns on his hands became filled with

fragments of coke, they were bleeding, and caused him great pain, but

he persisted in the work. He avoided his friends, and sought absolute

loneliness. Meanwhile he wrote love-letters to his wife, relating

to her the wonderful discoveries which he had made. She replied by

warnings against such futile and foolish occupations, in which she

saw nothing but waste of money. Irritated by her want of sympathy,

Strindberg sent her a letter of farewell to wife and child, in which he

led her to understand that a love affair had absorbed all his thoughts.

She replied by instituting proceedings for divorce.

The charge which he had made against himself was not true, and he was

soon the prey of remorse. His injured pride had led him to write a

letter which he describes as shameful and unpardonable, and in the

loneliness which followed he saw himself as a suicide and assassinator.

On Christmas Eve the vision of his deserted wife and child by the

Christmas tree caused him to flee from the company which he had sought,

and visit café after café, where he failed to find comfort in the usual

glass of absinthe. During the night the feeling of being persecuted

by an unknown power, bent on preventing his great task, overcame him.

He slept badly, and was repeatedly awakened by a cold current of air

sweeping across his face. Poverty, his persistent enemy, did hot

leave him in peace. He lacked the necessary means to pay for rent

and regular meals. His hands were black and swollen through neglect,

and symptoms of blood-poisoning in the arms set in. The news of his

helplessness and misery spread amongst his countrymen in Paris. He

was sought out by a persistent countrywoman who raised a sum of money

amongst the Swedes in Paris, and Strindberg was brought to the Hospital

of Saint Louis, his cup of humiliation filled to overflowing.

At the hospital he felt imprisoned amongst ghosts, punished by having

to live in the midst of people with the faces of the dead and dying,

the wrecks of humanity who offended his sense of beauty by appearing

without a nose or an eye, with a split lip or a mortifying cheek.

Amongst these derelicts Strindberg watched the gentle ministrations

of the old sœur de charité. She was kind to him, allowed him little

privileges, called him her boy, and he responded by calling her "my

mother." "How blissful," he writes, "to say this word mother which

had not passed my lips for thirty years. The old woman who belongs to

the Order of Saint Augustine, and who wears the costume of the dead

because she has never taken part in life, is gentle as self-sacrifice,

and teaches us to smile at our pains, as if they were pleasures, for

she knows how beneficial suffering can be. Not a reproachful word, no

expostulations or sermons." "This nun has played a part in my life,"

he adds, and, when writing down his _Inferno_ experiences three years

later, he sends her thoughts of gratitude for having shown him the path

of the cross.

During the months which he spent in the hospital his chemical

speculations continued to absorb his interest. He submitted his

insufficiently burnt sulphur to an independent analysis which confirmed

his demonstration that it contained carbon. The chemist at the hospital

encouraged his researches, and Strindberg laid the results before the

public in an article which appeared in _Le Temps_, and brought him

requests for further articles on his theories. He left the hospital

in February, and spent two months in chemical work during which he

became a student at the Sorbonne, and used the analytical laboratory.

At the conclusion of his experiments he was satisfied that sulphur is a

ternary combination consisting of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen.

A superstitious faith in signs and warnings had meanwhile developed.

A mysterious meaning in the names of the streets and places which

he passed made itself known to him--rue Beaurepaire, rue Dieu, Porte

Saint-Martin--a gorgeous signboard above a dyeing business, displaying

his own initials on a white silver cloud surmounted by a rainbow,

became a good omen of the future. The chemist Orfila revealed himself

as a kind patron saint to whom he was strangely led, first by finding

his chemical treatise in a bookseller's shop, then by discovering his

grave in the course of a morning walk in the Montparnasse cemetery, and

finally by being attracted to Hotel Orfila--the monasterial guest-house

from which women were excluded.

In his daily experiences he discerned the guidance and punishment of

an unseen hand which, for a high and inscrutable purpose, was leading

him out of his past folly. Sometimes the Unknown One delivered him into

the hands of demons; at other times he received the grace which saved

him from temptations and evil. The idea of persecution permitted for

the sake of the chastisement needed by his spirit became paramount.

The simultaneous playing of three pianos in the rooms adjoining his,

the unexpected presentation of the hotel bill, an inexplicable noise

in the room, during which the plaster of the ceiling fell on his head,

roused his suspicions. He moved to Hotel Orfila which looked like a

monastery. It harboured Roman Catholic students, and an atmosphere of

mysticism.

Annoyances, revelations, and delusions of persecution now crowded in

upon him. Strange dreams foretold the future, commonplace objects

assumed fantastic shape. One day, when looking at the embryo of a

sprouting walnut under the microscope, he saw two little white hands

folded as if in prayer. Immovable, perfect in form, they were there,

the hands of a child or a woman, raised beseechingly towards him.

Shortly before the incident he had sinned grievously against his child.

Seized by an uncontrollable longing to be reunited to his wife, in

spite of the divorce proceedings, he had wished--with a concentrated

and occultly sharpened desire--that the child might fall ill, and

thus become a link of reunion. There were other mysteries. The coal in

his stove burned itself into grotesque shapes, works of some kind of

elemental sculptor, which were so realistic that the sparrows, feeding

on crumbs by his window, were frightened by the sight of them. His

pillow-case, crumpled by the after-dinner nap, showed him one day a

head in marble modelled on the lines of Michel-Angelo; another day a

mighty Zeus rested on his bed; one night, after a festive evening with

friends, he was received by the devil himself in correct middle-age

attire, thus competing with Blake who one day, whilst ascending the

stairs of his house, saw Satan glaring at him through a window.

From sulphur he turned to iodine as a subject of original

experimentation, and then, oblivious of Aristotle's injunctions, to

the goldmaker's art. He did not possess "the most precious stone of

the philosophers," by which base metals are changed into gold, and

he had to be unorthodox--even when practising the alchemistic art.

He therefore rejected the alchemical faith that gold alone is free

from sulphur, and commenced experiments with solutions of sulphate of

iron in support of the theory that gold contains iron and sulphur. He

succeeded in making gold--his special gold of art--but it vanished

when put to the ordinary chemical test. Signs and guidance from unseen

Powers encouraged him to persist in spite of failure. Whilst out for

a walk his eyes were riveted by the letters F and S intertwined. At

first he thought of his wife's initials, and of her faithful love, but

such a commonplace interpretation was quickly dismissed. The letters

meant _Fer_ and _Soufre_--the secret of the generation of gold was thus

laid bare before his eyes. Another time two pieces of paper lying at

the foot of a monument attracted his attention. One bore the imprint

207, the other 28. What could this be but a reminder of the atomic

weights of lead (207) and silicum (28)? Subsequent experiments in

which he extracted gold from lead and silicum confirmed the wisdom of

the exegesis made. But the spirit of gold is fickle. One day, after

repeated failures, when standing naked to the waist as a smith before

the fiercely burning furnace, he looked into the crucible, and saw a

skull with a pair of glittering eyes. The eyes looked into his soul

with a supernatural irony, and the goldmaker was struck by paralysing

doubt, by fear of the consequences of his folly.

One day he was forcibly reminded that the fruits of his labour should

be consecrated to Wisdom, not Mammon. He had written an article in _Le

Temps_, and drawn public interest to his theory that iodine could be

made from benzine. An enterprising agent called on him, and showed

him that his idea contained possibilities for a highly successful

commercial undertaking, and that a patent might be worth millions of

francs. Strindberg repudiated the suggestion, though the agent offered

him 100,000 francs if he would go with him to Berlin, and subordinate

his experiments to industrial usages. Unpaid bills and the usual want

of money caused him to give more serious thought to the offer made.

After some time he was willing to meet the agent and a chemist, for the

purpose of making a conclusive experiment, and to turn his art into

much-needed cash. He collected his retorts and reagents, and arrived at

the agent's office on the day appointed. It happened to be Whit-Sunday,

and the office, which looked out on a dark and grimy street, was so

dirty that the result was one of those mental revolutions to which

hyper-æsthetic senses are subject. "Memories of childhood were

awakened," he writes. "Whitsuntide, the feast of joy, when the little

church was decorated with foliage, tulips, and lilies, when it was

opened for the children's first Communion, the girls clad in white

like angels ... the organ ... the tolling of the bells...."

A feeling of shame overcame him, he returned home determined not to

turn science into a business. He cleared his room of the chemical

apparatus, swept and dusted it, and made it beautiful with flowers. A

bath and clean clothes added to the feeling of purification, and during

a walk in the Montparnasse cemetery gentle thoughts of peace filled his

mind. _O crux ave spes unica_--these words from the graves carried a

message of the future. Not love, not gain, not honour for him, but the

cross, the only path to wisdom!

This unfitness for practical life, this sudden change of personality,

through which the poet or the child within are confronted with

unbearable conditions, brings a smile to the lips of the man who is

thoroughly "fit." The man of the world does not only keep religion and

business in water-tight compartments, he keeps dreams for the night,

and poetical recollections for important occasions, such as weddings

and funerals. He is not troubled by unexpected visitants from his

subconscious self which cause inconsistencies and poetic delirium. He

may well deplore the unpracticality of men like Renan who dreamily

allow themselves to be exploited by "sharper" brains, whilst they

spend years in contemplation of their own complexity. "I am a tissue

of contradictions," wrote Renan, "... one of my halves is constantly

occupied in demolishing the other, like the fabulous animal of Ctesias

who ate his paws without knowing it."[3]

Instead of selling his process of manufacturing iodine, Strindberg

returned to the hyperchemical task which he had set himself: to

eliminate the barriers between matter, and that which is called spirit.

An object worthy indeed of concentrated effort, worthy even in the

face of the inevitable failure of seeking to grasp that which to human

intelligence is unknowable!

Meanwhile he went "mad." Mad as Tasso and Cellini, Poe and Blake. We

cannot dispute the madness, but we may hold that the madness of genius

is more valuable to humanity than the sanity of mediocrity.

In Strindberg we can clearly distinguish between cerebral derangements

causing auditory hallucinations as well as delusions of persecution,

and the super-conscious activity which produced the state of

_clairpsychism_, which is generally classed with insanity. Dr. W.

Hirsch has studied Strindberg's disease from the ordinary alienist's

point of view, and concluded that he suffered from _paranoia simplex

chronica_--a diagnosis which is empty of meaning when applied to

such a mind. Dr. S. Rahmer[4] made Strindberg the subject of a more

comprehensive psychopathic study, and defined his case as one of

_melancholia daemomaniaca_. The inadequacy of such diagnoses will be

apparent to every serious student of _Inferno_ and _Legends_--the

books which are mostly extracts from the diary in which he recorded

his madness--and of plays like _To Damascus, Advent, Easier, The Dream

Play_, and _The Great Highway_, which give evidence of his lucidity,

and of the mysticism which he distilled from mental torture.

There is nothing original in the fact that a man describes his own

madness in prose or verse. Such descriptions may even be regarded as a

distinct genre of literary activity, perverse and detestable to those

who, like Mr. Balfour, want only the "cheerful" note in literature, but

of infinite interest to those who place a truthful account of the

human soul above one which is pleasing. Nathaniel Lee's poems, Lenan's

_Traumgewalten_, Hoffmann's _Kreisler_ possess a psychological interest

which no clamour for literary cradle-songs can remove. Strindberg's

self-revelations have a touch of that exultation which, through a

dominant curiosity, survives the most complete cheerlessness, horror,

and pain--that joy of which Charles Lamb wrote to Coleridge: "Dream

not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy

till you have gone mad," and which made him look back upon his lunacy

"with a gloomy kind of envy."

[Illustration: August Strindberg--1906]

[Illustration: August Strindberg--1907. Photo's: A. Malmström, Stockholm.]

Comparisons between Rousseau's _Confessions, Dialogues_, and

_Rêveries_, and Strindberg's _Inferno_ readily suggest themselves.

Both writers reveal, by their minute analysis of sick thoughts, the

consciousness of a lunacy which is a necessary experience on the

road to spiritual health, and, therefore, shameless. There is much

similarity in the stories of persistent attacks by invisible enemies,

of plots, and persecutions, in the egocentric deductions from natural

phenomena and the events of the world. But there is also a great

difference. Rousseau manages to keep a watchful eye on the preservation

of friendly relations with the world throughout his aberrations, whilst

Strindberg recklessly defies its judgment.

Strindberg's persecutional mania developed rapidly during the spring

and summer of 1896. Every object, every incident was charged with a

sinister meaning. He became obsessed with the idea that his former

friend, Przybyszewski, whom he writes of as Popoffsky, intended to

murder him. The reason for this suspicion lay in Strindberg's former

intimacy with the woman who afterwards became Przybyszewski's wife. One

day his ear caught the strains of Schumann's _Aufschwung_, played by an

unseen musician in an adjoining house. He became strangely agitated.

The pianist who played _Aufschwung_ in such a manner could only be

Przybyszewski, and the music must be a prelude to the revenge which he

was about to inflict on Strindberg. With the horror of his impending

fate mingled remorse and self-accusation. "My friend, the Russian,"

he writes, "my disciple who called me father because he had learnt

everything from me, my _famulus_ who looked upon me as master, and

kissed my hands because his life began where mine ended. It is he who

has come from Vienna to Paris in order to kill me...." The reflection

that he had not borne the Pole's efforts to injure him meekly, but

retaliated, at first invested the thought of death with a sacrificial

grandeur. But when _Aufschwung_ was played every day between four

and five fear of death increased. He felt a fierce hatred of the man

who thus hunted him down. He sought confirmation of his suspicions

by questioning the coterie of artists which met at Mme. Charlotte's

_crêmerie_ in rue de la Grande Chaumière. The answers seemed to him

evasive, and Strindberg withdrew from the circle of friends, convinced

that there was a widespread plot against him. The Norwegian artist,

Edvard Munch, was at this time painting Strindberg's portrait, and was

alternately trusted by him, and suspected as an accomplice in the crime

contemplated.

His inflammable fancy saw warnings of danger everywhere. A large dane,

lying outside Munch's house, was a sign that he must not enter it, and

he returned, thanking the powers which had protected him. Another time

he turned away from the house after seeing a child sitting outside the

door with a card in its hand which happened to be a ten of spades. In

the Luxembourg Gardens two dry twigs, broken by the storm, lay in such

a manner as to form the Greek letters P and Y--the first and the last

letters of the dreaded name. He implored, the help of Providence, and

recited the Psalms of David against his enemies.

The terror of being delivered into the hands of his persecutors was

temporarily dispelled by a sense of divine protection, of nearness

to the Lord. On March 29th Balzac's _Seraphita_ had fallen into his

hands, by chance apparently, but really, he thought, through heavenly

guidance. The day was the anniversary of Swedenborg's death, and

the coincidence became a token of a spiritual bond between him and

the great Swedish seer which outlasted his disease, and remained a

source of illumination until his death sixteen years later. Orfila

and Swedenborg now spoke to him in his hours of hope; he conversed

with them as Blake conversed with Dante, Virgil, and Moses. The Old

Testament shed strength upon him. He found comfort in the Book of Job,

for Satan had obtained leave to tempt him, as Job was tempted. There

were moments when he felt drawn away from life by a heavenly nostalgia,

sustained by a realisation of spiritual worth which, at other times,

increased his sense of guilt by adding the sin of pride to the many

others for which he atoned. Of such moments he writes: "I despise

the earth, this impure and unworthy world, humanity and the works of

humanity. I see in myself the righteous man to whom the Almighty has

sent trials, and whom the purgatory of earthly life shall make worthy

of approaching deliverance."

His customary chair at the Brasserie des Lilas was engaged one evening,

when he came to seek oblivion in the glass of green absinthe. On

another occasion the glass was mysteriously upset, and on a third a

chimney above him caught fire, and sent two large pieces of soot into

his glass. In these and similar incidents he recognised a guiding hand,

tribulations arranged for the purpose of breaking him of a dangerous

habit. One is reminded of Rousseau's belief that unfavourable winds had

been prepared, as a special trial, for his journey.

Short intervals of spiritual calm did not allay Strindberg's fear of

Przybyszewski. Though substantially unfounded, and, though he was in

possession of incontrovertible evidence that the Pole was not in Paris,

the fear increased until he was mastered by terror. Hotel Orfila was no

longer a retreat of peace. Women were admitted--a circumstance which

in itself was calculated to disturb his nerves--and with them followed

a host of troubles. A mysterious stranger had taken the room adjoining

his, and seemed to imitate all Strindberg's movements. Strindberg sat

writing at his table, so apparently did the stranger. When Strindberg

rose and pushed back his chair, the stranger did likewise. When

Strindberg went to bed, the stranger also went to bed. The unseen

enemy was there dose to him, watching every movement, waiting for an

opportunity to slay him by infernally subtle means. Outside the hotel

there were signs of danger. One day he felt Quai Voltaire and Place

des Tuileries shake under his feet. Another day a sudden feeling of

lameness proved to him that he was being poisoned, and that the Pole

had contrived to send gas through the wall. He thought of giving

information to the police, but the possibility that he might be

imprisoned as a lunatic restrained him. He could no longer work or

sleep. There were whispering voices around him; the shadow of a woman

on the wall outside his window suggested the fearful revenge of his

feminist protagonists. One night he felt an electric current passing

through his body. The stranger and his accomplices were evidently

doing their murderous work in a thoroughly scientific manner. With the

thought, "They are killing me. I will not be killed," he rose from the

bed, found the proprietor, and obtained another room for the night.

This happened to be under the one tenanted by the terrible stranger,

and Strindberg's suspicions were confirmed by hearing a heavy object

being dropped into a bag, and securely locked up. Evidently an electric

machine, he thought. On the following day he packed up his belongings,

and hurriedly left Hotel Orfila.

His suspicions fell on friends and foes alike. One day, after a

sitting, Munch received a post card from Strindberg which put an end to

further visits:

"When last you came to see me you looked like a murderer, or the

accomplice of a murderer. I only want to inform you that the

Pettenkofer gas-oven in the room next to mine is unusable, and

therefore unsuitable for the purpose. Sg."[5]

Side by side with the mania of which the message to Munch is typical,

Strindberg retained a sanity during this time which Uddgren had

occasion to observe. He went to see Strindberg at Hotel Orfila, and saw

the traces of the torture through which he had passed in his haggard,

ashen face. Uddgren had heard that Strindberg's insanity was on the

point of breaking out, but in the course of a long talk with him he

could find no signs of brain-softening. The mania, the eccentricities,

the flashing imagination, the instinct for self-martyrisation were

there intensified, but not the incoherency which he had observed

in other literary friends who were victims of insanity. It is also

remarkable that throughout Strindberg's period of lunacy his writings

were accepted and printed.

After the flight from Hotel Orfila he hid himself in an hotel in rue

de la Clef. All went well for some time. Feeling that he was at a safe

distance from his persecutors, he abandoned his incognito, and sent

his address to Hotel Orfila. There was an immediate recurrence of the

attacks. An old man, with "grey and wicked eyes like a bear," carried

empty cases, pieces of tin, and other mysterious objects into the room

adjoining his. In the room overhead a noise of hammering and dragging

began which suggested the installation of an infernal machine. The

noisy preparations were followed by the sound of a revolving wheel,

suggestive of preparations for his execution. "I am sentenced to

death," he thought; but by whom? By the pietists, catholics, jesuits,

theosophists? Was he condemned as a sorcerer or as a black magician? Or

was it by the police? Was he suspected of being an anarchist? In the

manners of the landlady and the servant he read suspicion and contempt.

The struggle seemed hopeless. Preparing to die at the hands of his

enemies, he arranged his papers, wrote necessary letters, and said a

solemn farewell to Nature as represented by the Jardin des Plantes.

"Farewell," he cried, "stones, plants, flowers, trees, butterflies,

birds, snakes, all created by God's good hand." Resigned and at peace

with Fate he re-entered his hotel, but his anguish returned at the

sight of the change which had been made in the room adjoining his.

On the mantelpiece lay sheets of metal isolated from each other by

pieces of wood, and on the top of each pile a book or a photographic

album had been placed, so as to give an innocent look to what could be

nothing but accumulators, infernal machines. Two workmen on the roof of

a neighbouring house were handling some objects, and pointing to his

window--the chain of evidence was complete.

At night he made the last toilet of the condemned, took a bath, shaved,

and attired himself in a manner worthy of a solemn parting from the

body and its miseries. Waiting for the end, he reflected that he could

harbour no fear of hell in another world--he had passed through a

thousand hells in this life. Anguish endowed him with a burning desire

to quit the vanities and deceptive pleasures of the world. "Born

with a heavenly nostalgia," he writes, "as a child I cried over the

uncleanliness of existence; amongst relatives and in society I felt a

stranger, far away from the land of my home. Ever since my childhood I

have sought my God, and found the devil. I carried the cross of Christ

in my youth, and I have denied a God who is content to rule over slaves

who love those who whip them."

After a few hours' sleep he was awakened by the sensation of being

lifted out of bed by a pump, sucking his heart. He had scarcely put his

feet on the floor before he felt an electric douche fall upon his neck,

and press him to the ground. He rose, snatched his clothes, and rushed

out into the garden. A light cough from the room, wherein dwelt his

enemy, was answered by a cough from the other room. The conspirators

were clearly signalling to each other. To return to the room of horror

was out of question. He dragged an arm-chair into the garden, and

finally went to sleep under the star-lit sky, soothed by the presence

of the flowers. On the following morning he fled to friends in Dieppe,

cursing his unknown enemies. His friends were horrified at his

appearance, and when his kind hostess led him to a looking-glass he saw

in his own face, not only the traces of suffering and neglect, but an

expression which filled him with shame and detestation of himself. "If

I had then read Swedenborg," he writes, "the imprint left by the evil

spirit would have explained to me my mental state and the events of the

last weeks." Despite the efforts of his sympathetic friends to convince

him that the house was free from dangers of any kind, the night brought

new terrors. Sitting at a table, and waiting for the sinister moment

when the clock should strike two, Strindberg was determined bravely

to face the worst. Uncovering his chest, he challenged the unknown

persecutors to strike him. The response was the sensation of an

electric current directed against his heart, gradually increasing in

strength until he could resist it no longer. As if struck by a clap of

thunder, he felt his body filled by a fluid which was suffocating him,

and drawing out his heart.

He rushed downstairs where another bed had been made up for him in

case of need. He lay down, and tried to collect his thoughts. Could

this be electricity? No, for he had used the compass as indicator,

and the result had been negative. Whilst pondering on the mysterious

force, another discharge of "electricity" struck him with the strength

of a cyclone, and lifted him out of bed. He tried in vain to escape.

His own graphic description of what followed shows the agony through

which he passed. "I hide behind walls, I lie down by the thresholds,

and in front of the stoves. Everywhere, everywhere the furies seek me

out. My soul's anguish overpowers me. The panic terror of everything

and nothing gets hold of me, and I flee from room to room, and end

my flight on the balcony, where I remain crouching." At dawn he went

into his friend's studio, where he lay down on a rug. Even here he was

disturbed, but now by rats, and, fearing that he might be a victim

of delirium, he fled to the hall, where the door-mat became his

resting-place. He hurriedly left Dieppe for the south of Sweden, and

sought refuge in the house of his friend, Dr. Eliasson, in Ystad.

Strindberg had rightly surmised that his friends in Dieppe were

convinced of his insanity. His conduct during the first days of his

stay in Ystad caused his medical friend to treat him with the firmness

and authority necessary towards one who is mentally irresponsible.

The result was that Strindberg suspected that the doctor intended

to imprison him in a lunatic asylum, and to appropriate his secret

of gold-making. The month which he spent at the doctor's house was

devoted to a cold-water cure which did not assuage his misery. The

shape and material of the bed in which he had to sleep suggested

electrical devices of evil, the nightly assault by the vampire which

sucked his heart was repeated, and brought him out of bed in terror

of death; he heard voices, saw signs, feared he was being poisoned by

hemlock, hashish, digitalis, or daturine. One night he heard the doctor

handle a very heavy object and wind up a spring, and through the wall

which separated them he felt the approach of the electric current.

It reached his heart. Seizing his clothes he fled through the window

into the street, and to the house of another physician who succeeded

in calming him, and--so he believed--in intimidating his treacherous

friend, and thus saved Strindberg's life.

These delusions of horror were suspended by a letter from his wife

which breathed love and pity, and in which she invited him to come

to Austria and see his little daughter. The thought of the child, of

holding her in his arms, of begging her to forgive him, of making

her happy by a father's tenderness, brought about a spiritual

metamorphosis. He left Sweden, and arrived at his mother-in-law's

country house on the Danube in September, 1896. During the months which

he spent there he did not meet his wife-a separation which he bore with

equanimity, in consequence of "an indefinable lack of harmony in our

temperaments"--but he saw the child daily.

"Every man, if he is sincere, may tread again for himself the road to

Damascus-a journey which must vary for each individual soul," wrote

Victor Hugo. Here, in the presence of the child, Strindberg was brought

face to face with his own sinfulness. He had set out to persecute, but

the light from heaven had prostrated him and struck him with blindness.

Before the scales could fall from his eyes his penance must be made

complete. He had left an infant of six weeks. The little girl of two

and a half years, who now met him, scrutinised his soul with eyes

full of serious inquiry, and then allowed her father to clasp her to

his breast. "This is Dr. Faust's resurrection to earthly life, but

sweeter and purer," he writes. "I cannot cease carrying the little

one in my arms, and feeling her little heart beat against mine. To

love a child is for a man to become woman; it is to lay aside the

manly, to experience the sexless love of the dwellers in heaven, as

Swedenborg called it." But an incident soon occurred which disturbed

his peace. At supper he gently touched the child's hand in order to

help her. She cried out, and, drawing back her hand with a look full

of horror, said, "He hurts me." Another evening he was humiliated by

the mysterious conduct of the child. Pointing at an invisible person

behind Strindberg's chair, she began to cry with fear, and said, "The

sweep is standing there." Her grandmother who believed in clairvoyance

in children made the sign of the cross over the child's head, and-a

painful silence fell upon the company.

Whilst he accepted these trials as punitive messages and warnings,

his scarified soul became receptive to Roman Catholic influences. His

wife's mother and aunt were Catholics; his child had been brought up in

that faith. He had seen human souls sanctified by a catholic mysticism

which bore humility and fortitude. The symbols, the certainty, the rich

imagery of the Catholic Church had appealed to him, when the poverty of

philosophical speculation had made him despair of human intelligence.

He had bought a rosary in Paris because it was beautiful, and because

"the evil ones were afraid of the cross." One day an image of the

Madonna, carried through the streets of Paris on a cart following a

hearse, had strangely attracted him. Like Tasso's vision of the Virgin

in the midst of his feverish torment by noises and tinkling bells,

Strindberg's gaze on the image of all-merciful motherhood brought

comfort. At first attracted to Catholic prayers, and to the ideal of

the monastic life by the instinct which makes the man in pain seek an

anodyne, he was gradually led to a deeper understanding of esoteric

Christianity. Swedenborg continued to reveal the mysteries of symbols

and correspondences to him; in the scenery around the Austrian village

he found, not only an exact replica of a Swedenborgian hell, but the

original of a landscape which had precipitated itself in the zinc bath

used in his gold-making experiments in Paris.

[Illustration: August Strindberg--1902]

[Illustration: August Strindberg--1908--In his home in Stockholm.

Photo by A. Blomberg, Stockholm]

Strindberg's early blasphemies and atheism were the fruits of an

inverted religiosity which left him no peace. His devotional mood

could find no bridge of union with his scientific mood. The search

for knowledge and the search for God led to different goals. Whilst

his brain struggled for breadth, his heart cried for the narrow depth

of dogma and creed. His researches into occultism and the philosophy

of religions, his acquaintance with theosophy did not reconcile his

religion with his science. The sense of sin, of having sought unlawful

knowledge haunted him in his studies of black magic and Satanism, and

in the exercise of the occult powers of which he was conscious. Though

Strindberg had not read Huysmans' _Là-Bas_ and _En Route_ when he wrote

_Inferno_, there is a strong resemblance between the books and the

religious evolution of the authors.

Strindberg accepted the doctrine of reincarnation as a Christian

tenet, and the corollary of a Karmic law which compels us to suffer

for sins committed before birth, but he resisted what he believed to

be the central teaching of theosophy, i.e. the necessity for killing

personality. A theosophical friend sent him Madame Blavatsky's _Secret

Doctrine_ which Strindberg criticised severely, though he knew that

his outspokenness would deprive him of a friend and a benefactor. He

declined to join a "sect" which denied a personal God, the only one

who could satisfy his religious needs. He declared Madame Blavatsky's

masterpiece to be "detestable through the conscious and unconscious

deceptions, through the stories of the existence of Mahatmas,"

interesting through the quotations from little-known authors,

condemnable, above all, as the work of "a gynander who has desired

to outdo man, and who pretends to have overthrown science, religion,

philosophy, and to have placed a priestess of Isis on the altar of the

crucified One."

In spite of this denunciation, Strindberg had absorbed many

theosophical ideas, and his later writings are not altogether free from

the influence of the despised "gynander" and the theories of occult

science which she expounded.

During the time spent in Austria Strindberg slowly recovered his

mental balance, whilst his visionary powers and spiritual clairvoyance

were in process of development. He stayed with his wife's mother and

aunt, two pious and gentle old women, who treated his soul-sickness

with Christian forbearance and healing sympathy. He was still subject

to "astral" attacks, to "electric" discharges, to nightmares and

ghostly visitations. Unacquainted with the higher aspects of

psychical research and modern theories of psychological phenomena,

he was as yet unable to bring about order in the unruly house of his

mind. Whether we use spiritualistic language and call him a medium,

or that of psychology and label the messages which reached him

"teleological automatism," there can be no doubt that the keynote of

his soul's gloom and glory was a hyper-sensitiveness which made him

a lightning-conductor for the psychic currents of his time. We may

turn away with disdain from the pitiful picture of Strindberg at his

writing table, warding off the imaginary attacks of elementals, incubi,

lamiæ, by thrusts in the air with a dalmatian dagger, and we may smile

at the childish superstition with which he accepted the oracular

guidance of the cock on the top of Notre Dame, or the direction chosen

by a ladybird visiting his manuscript. But that there were within him

cryptopsychic gifts of telepathy, clair-audience, and divination, a

somnambulistic consciousness of a reality other than that which is

cognisable to the senses, no student of psychic forces can doubt.

In December, 1896, Strindberg returned to Sweden. Swedenborg's _Arcana

Cœlestia_, which he now read, dissipated his fears of persecution by

showing him that all the horrors through which he had passed, were

recognised by Swedenborg as incidental to the purgation of soul which

is the highest object of life. Strindberg found that, before receiving

his momentous revelations, Swedenborg had passed through nightly

tortures resembling his own. By informing him of the real nature of

the horrors Swedenborg liberated him from the electricians, the black

magicians, the destroyers, the jealous gold-makers, and the fear of

madness. "He has shown me the only path to salvation: to seek out

the demons in their dens within myself, and to kill them ... through

repentance."

_Inferno_ was composed in Lund, the little University town in the south

of Sweden, between May 3rd and June 25th, 1897. _Legends_, which is

but a rifacimento of the struggle to slay the "demons in their dens,"

was begun in Lund, and finished in Paris in October, 1897. In March,

1898, Strindberg went back to Lund, free from haunting obsessions of

evil, master of his madness, enriched by religious experiences which

produced an exuberant rise of new ideas. He had crossed the Rubicon.

Henceforth he shared in that direct vision which makes paralysing doubt

impossible, and which is the prerogative of God's fools all over the

world. To the end of life his mind retained intellectual disquiet;

there remained in him a strain of the wild man, an over-balance of

curiosity which set up eternal enmity between him and convention. The

Swedish critic, Oscar Levertin, succinctly summed up Strindberg in the

Italian proverb: _All soul, all gall, all fire_. But after 1898 there

is a calm light which the unruly flames cannot hide. His spiritual

wrestlings continue through the zenith of his literary production, but

they leave him stronger.

A comparison between his views on the "nature of man" in 1884 and in

1910 is interesting. In an essay on _The Joy of Life_, written in

1884, he greatly offended the Swedish Mrs. Grundy by the following

passage: "After long centuries of the voluntary or involuntary lie, of

artificialising custom and speech, a general craving for brutality is

sometimes awakened, a delirious desire to throw off one's clothes and

walk about naked, to reveal the indecent, to approach the repulsive,

to be a happy and joyous animal." In an article on _Religion_, written

in 1910, and published in _Speeches to the Swedish Nation_, he wrote:

"I apply my biblical Christianity to my own personal and inner use,

so as to curb my somewhat riotous nature, rendered riotous by the

veterinary philosophy and animal doctrine (Darwinism) in which I was

brought up. The fact that I practise, as far as I can, the Christian

doctrines should not, I maintain, give people reason to complain. For

it is only through religion, or the hope for something better, and the

realisation of the inner meaning of life as a time of probation, a

school, possibly a house of correction, that we can bear life's burden

with sufficient resignation. In the understanding of the relative

insignificance of external conditions of life, compared with the

possession of hope and faith, one finds that moral courage to renounce

everything--which the ungodly lack--to suffer everything for the sake

of a mission, to speak out when others remain silent."

In the same "speech" he says: "Since 1896 I call myself a Christian

(see _Inferno_). I am not a Catholic, and have never been one,

but during seven years' life in Catholic countries and in intimate

relationship with Catholics I discovered that there was no difference

between Catholicism and Protestantism, or merely an outward one, and

that the schism which took place once was purely political, or was only

concerned with theological points which in reality have nothing to do

with religion. This was the cause of my tolerance towards Catholics

which found a special expression in my _Gustavus Adolphus_, and gave

rise to the fable about my being a Catholic. I am entered on the parish

register as a Protestant, and shall remain one, but I am probably not

orthodox, nor am I a pietist, but rather a Swedenborgian."

At the time when _Inferno_ was written Strindberg was, however,

more completely under the spell of Rome than he acknowledges in his

later writings. He contemplated retreat in a Belgian monastery, and

in _Inferno_ he tells us that, when he read Sar Peladan's _Comment

on devient Mage_, "Catholicism held its solemn and triumphant entry

into my life." He found many points of contact between Swedenborg's

mystical philosophy and that of the Catholic Church. The profound

influence on modern thought exercised by Swedenborg, and which is

clearly discernible in the writings of Goethe, Emerson, Balzac,

Tennyson, Mrs. Browning, Ruskin, Coventry Patmore, and Carlyle, is

evidence of the spiritual catholicity of the great Swedish mystic.

Superficial criticism is apt to dismiss Swedenborg as a deluded

ghost-seer, whose psychical derangements are responsible for a

farrago of communications on heaven and hell, prodigiously wearisome

in details and lacking the saving grace of humour. Such criticism is

made by those who know nothing of the intellectual versatility, and

the scientific achievements of Swedenborg. His writings on anatomy,

physiology, geology, and metallurgy alone would have entitled him to a

distinguished place among the pioneers of science. Swedenborg studied

mechanics, engineering, mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, and music,

and took a keen interest in handicrafts.

There is a striking resemblance between Swedenborg and Strindberg in

this versatility of mood and thought. It is emphasised by many minor

traits of character and taste, such as the great love for children and

flowers which both evinced. Separated by more than a century and a

half, Strindberg found himself the spiritual descendant of Swedenborg.

To him he dedicates his first _Blue Book_ (1907) in the following

words: "To Emanuel Swedenborg, Teacher and Leader, this book is

dedicated by the Disciple." The _Blue Books_ deal with every thinkable

subject--religious, philosophical, scientific--in an aphoristic and

combative manner which is pervaded by a curious mixture of pride and

humility. Here speaks the High Priest of Knowledge, here quivers the

helpless embryo of the humanity which is to come. In these motley pages

the Teacher and the Disciple talk of telepathy, chemistry, astronomy,

meteorology, spectral analysis, atoms and crystals, the psychology

of plants, the secrets of birds, the formation of clouds, Darwinism,

radium, woman, the secrets of chess, the secrets and magic of numbers,

the Mesopotamian language, hieroglyphics, Hebraic research, symbolism,

clairvoyance, and a hundred other subjects. In the preface to _The

Bondswoman's Son_ Strindberg speaks of his Blue Book as the synthesis

of his life. The Disciple is worthy of the Master; to the Swedenborgian

and eighteenth-century conception of the natural world and the

spiritual world Strindberg has added the craving for a synthetic

interpretation of facts, which was characteristic of the nineteenth

century, and which found its foremost representatives in Spencer and

Comte. In his sense of truth, in his work for the correlation of

knowledge, in his readiness to forsake pleasant beliefs for unpleasant

facts, Strindberg realised Swedenborg's description of a certain phase

of angelic life: "To grow old in heaven is to grow young."

The renewal of intellectual youth, with its baffling polymathy and

selfcontradictions, led Strindberg to question the composition of his

own soul. In the preface to _The Bondswoman's Son_ he confesses that he

has sometimes wondered if he has incarnated different personalities.

Dissociated fields of consciousness may be a psychopathic phenomenon,

or indicative of an advanced state of psychic evolution. The problem

has been approached from many points of view. The mystery of

personality metamorphosis, of primary and secondary individualities,

contained within the frame of one human body, is now a recognised

subject of inquiry in the domain of abnormal psychology. Cases of

multiple personality in which there is an absolute division between

the "entities," and in which the memories do not intermingle, have

been carefully studied and classified. The ease with which Strindberg

apostatised, the mutually destructive theories which he advanced at

different periods of life, the power with which he could objectify his

past selves, and repeatedly paint "the face of what was once myself,"

point to a multiplicity of consciousness which, though not rare in

genius, was especially active in him. In the preface to _The Author_,

written in 1909, Strindberg says of himself as the writer of the book

twenty years earlier: "The personality of the author is just as much a

stranger to me as to the reader--and just as unsympathetic."

There is undoubtedly a gulf between the personality responsible for the

preface to _Lady Julie_ with its crude materialism, and the sensitised

consciousness of the man who pours out his soul in the _Blue Books_

and in _Alone_. Nietzscheanism was but a cloak, with which Strindberg

covered the _cor laceratum_, which always suffered acutely through

the misfortunes of others. The cloak did not fit him. In _Alone_,

the dulcet autobiographical finale to the agitato of _Inferno_, we

find him in self-imposed and vicarious suffering for the sins of a

neighbouring grocer who has failed in business through incompetence and

dishonesty. "I went through all his agony," he writes; "thought of his

wife, of the approaching quarter-day, of the rent, of the cheques."

Strindberg now lived in open enmity with the theories of the survival

of the fittest and natural selection; his conception of the evolution

idea led him to repudiate the current belief in the descent of man as a

glorification of brute-nature, and to cry: "What a shame to have paid

homage to the Ape-King, the seducer of my youth!"

To the natural capacity for suffering was added that imposed on him

through the development of his psychic powers. He did not only live

the lives of others "telepathically"; his sensibility became so

exteriorised as to receive impressions at a great distance. Thus he

used to feel, when one of his plays was being performed for the first

time in some part of Europe, though he had received no information in

regard to the performance. In 1907 he told Uddgren that, after going to

bed at ten in the evening, he was sometimes awakened by the sound of

loud applause which caused him to sit up in bed, wondering if he was

at a theatre. Such a telepathic ovation was invariably followed by the

news of some dramatic success. In the first _Blue Book_, "the Disciple"

relates the following: "In a company I interrupted myself with a smile

in the middle of an animated conversation. 'What are you smiling at?'

somebody asked. 'The southern express pulled up at the Central Station

just now,' was the reply. Another time something similar happened, and

I said: 'The curtain has now fallen on the last act in Helsingfors, and

I heard the applause after my first night.' I perceive the talk of the

people in restaurants after the performance as ringing in the ears. I

can hear this all the way from Germany when I have a first performance,

though I have no previous knowledge of being played."

He records the psychic rapport which sexual union establishes between

him, and the woman he loves. When she is absent, and thinks kindly

of him, he perceives the fragrance of incense or jessamine; when she

is travelling he knows if she is on a steamer or in a train. He can

distinguish the throbbing of the propeller from the thumping of the

buffers on the railway carriage.

The most remarkable passage in the _Blue Book_ is perhaps the following

summary of his _clairpsychism_:

"I feel at a distance when somebody touches my fate, when enemies

threaten my personal existence, but also when people speak kindly of

me or wish me well; I feel in the street if I meet friend or enemy; I

have participated in the suffering caused by an operation on a person

towards whom I feel comparatively indifferent; I have twice gone

through the death agony of others with attendant physical and mental

suffering; the last time I passed through three diseases in six hours,

and rose well when the absent one had been liberated through death.

This makes life painful, but rich and interesting."

[1] _Bøken on Strindberg_ af Gustaf Uddgren.

[2] _En Ny Bok on Strindberg_.

[3] _Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse_.

[4] Grenzfragen der Literatur und Medizin, Munich, 1907.

[5] _En Ny Bok om Strindberg af Gustaf Uddgren_.

CHAPTER VIII

THE THEATRE OF LIFE

Strindberg's fiftieth birthday was celebrated quietly in Lund in

1899. A general feeling of distrust and bewilderment was prevalent

amongst his countrymen. At the age of fifty he had returned to Sweden,

apparently healthy in mind and body, in the prime of life, charged with

a literary vitality which confounded current theories of his insanity.

He had calmly and unostentatiously resumed his task of writing drama.

The haunted, feverish expression had left his countenance; he had

made himself a new visage, upon which were stamped self-mastery and

tranquillity of mind. And, yet, he had recently published _Inferno_ and

_Legends_, and laid bare his soul's misery and delirium in throbbing

pages, over which the reviewers had poured acrid contempt. He had

written _To Damascus_ in a gust of mediæval repentance, and uncovered

himself in the transports of asceticism. With a sigh of relief his

enemies had laid aside their opposition to his indiscretions and

revelations, his materialism and transcendentalism, his socialism and

individualism. They felt that there was no need to take a lunatic

seriously. His friends had waited patiently for the "dancing star"

which they knew would arise out of the chaos.

[Illustration: August Strindberg--Bust by K.I. Eldh (Bought by the

Swedish State. In the National Museum, Stockholm)]

[Illustration: August Strindberg--Portrait by Carl Larsson, 1899. (In

the National Museum, Stockholm)]

_The Saga of the Folkungs, Gustavus Vasa_ and _Eric XIV_ appeared in

1899, and showed that the author of _Master Olof_ had returned to the

art with which, twenty-seven years earlier, he had given his country

its greatest historical play. With the precision of the somnambulist

who takes up the thread of mental events, regardless of the time that

has passed, Strindberg resumed the story of _Master Olof_ where he had

left off. In _Gustavus Vasa_ we again meet Olof, the renegade, but he

is now--as befits his character--a secondary person, duly subservient

to the Power of the Time, King Gustavus Vasa. With _Gustavus Vasa_ and

_Eric XIV_ Strindberg attained to mastery of a dramatic art, in which

he stands unsurpassed. The art of writing _the psychological drama of

history_ is his, and his alone. No other dramaturge of modern times

has approached him in clarity of historical vision, or in imaginative

reconstruction of living characters which are at once true to their

time and to all times.

No period of Swedish history lends itself better to dramatic treatment

than that dominated by the first of the Vasas, Gustavus Erikson,

the chosen king of the people, the incarnation of will, of a wholly

masculine personality. The king's struggle to quell the rebellious

spirit of the freemen of Dalecarlia, the vast inland county north of

Stockholm, to whom he owes his throne and his power, is the subject

of the play. The wrath of the king pervades the first act with an

atmospheric suggestion of fateful horror which is the antithesis

of melodramatic art, and shows Strindberg's power of restraint and

concentration in the unfoldment of tragedy. The king has marched to

Dalecarlia in order to punish the stiff-necked peasants who think that

they can make and unmake kings with impunity. When the curtain rises

upon the assembled leaders of the peasants the king is not seen, but

his presence is felt. Master Olof has arrived as the emissary of the

sovereign; solemn messengers bid the veterans of the soil to remain

seated until they are called to appear before the king. There is a

sense of suppressed fear in the room; the quiet, slow-thinking men,

dad in white sheep-skin coats, suspect something, but cannot grasp the

unthinkable audacity of the king's plans. One by one they are called

out, but no one returns. Then a messenger from the king brings in three

blood-stained sheep-skin coats, and throws them on the table. This is

the king's warning to those who remain, and who are permitted to live.

In the five acts of this play Strindberg lets us see the human

qualities of Gustavus Vasa; the dramatist draws a living soul, not

a marionette; a man, hot-tempered, hard, strong, with a vein of

irresoluteness running through the granite of his will, a man whose

strength is blended with the weakness of the child within that

never grows up. We see in him the inconsistency of all flesh: the

mighty reformer of the Roman Catholic Church who upholds evangelical

Lutheranism and yet clings to catholic habits; the brutal tyrant who

has a way of his own of enforcing obedience by bringing his little

steel hammer in ominous contact with obstinate heads, and who yet

remains the kind, fatherly friend of his people. The patriarch who

has identified himself with his country before the Lord, who has

stood forth as a prophet of patriotism, and who is forced by growing

self-knowledge to separate the personal from the impersonal, is at

last humiliated by the goodness of others. Threatened by rebels who

march towards Stockholm from the south, outwitted by his treacherous

allies in Lübeck, the old king trembles at the news that the sturdy men

of Dalecarlia are on their way to Stockholm. The retribution for his

harsh deeds of suppression is upon him, and he bows his head before

the chastisement of God. But the men of Dalecarlia are made of stuff

which outlasts a few fallen heads. They have come in their thousands to

help their king and their country to put the common enemy to flight.

Engelbrecht, their leader--jolly, true and a little tipsy--bursts into

the king's palace, and proudly offers him the arms and the devotion of

the men in sheep-skin coats, true representatives of the Swedish spirit.

Eric, the king's dissolute and epileptic son, heir to the throne, is

in every way a contrast to his father: he is the chronic weakling who

oscillates between unholy desire and self-disgust, the born pariah

in the realm of the mind, whether he be clad in purple or in rags.

Of such, we think, the Kingdom of Heaven is not made. Yet Strindberg

shows us Eric's glimpse of heaven. In the fourth act Eric and his boon

companion and evil counsellor, Göran Persson, bent on the pleasures of

the tavern, meet Karin, the flowergirl. She asks Eric to buy her wreath

of flowers:

_Prince Eric_ (_looks fixedly at the girl_). Who--is--that?

_Göran Persson_. A flowergirl.

_Prince Eric_. No--it--is--something else--do you see?

_Göran Persson_. What am I supposed to see?

_Prince Eric_. You ought to see what I see, but you can't.

The girl kneels before the prince. He takes the wreath from her hands,

places it on her head, and asks her to rise. "Rise, my child," he says,

"you must not kneel before me, but I shall kneel before you. I do not

want to ask your name, for I know you, though I have never seen you, or

heard anything about you." He begs her to ask a favour of him. She asks

him to buy her flowers. Eric takes a ring off his finger, and gives it

to the girl. She dare not wear it, and returns it. She leaves them, and

Eric asks Göran if he has not seen the marvellous apparition, heard the

wonderful voice. Göran has heard nothing but the voice of a common

lass, a little cheeky.

_Prince Eric_. Hold your tongue, Göran, I love her.

_Göran Persson_. She is not the first one.

_Prince Eric_. Yes, the first one, the only one.

_Göran Persson_. Well, seduce her then.

_Prince Eric_ (_draws his sword_). Take care, or by God----

_Göran Persson_. Is he going to prick me now again?

_Prince Eric_. I do not know what has happened, but from this

moment I detest you; I cannot live in the same town as you; you

pollute me with your eyes, your whole being stinks. Therefore I

leave you, and never want to see you before my face again. I leave

you as if an angel had come to fetch me from the dwellings of the

wicked; I detest the past, as I detest you and myself. (_Follows

Karin_.)

Though Strindberg shows an understanding of love's miracles--with

which he is not generally credited--he makes no attempt to endow the

first meeting between Eric and the peasant girl who became the mother

of his children, and finally his queen, with a greater transfiguring

power than it possessed. Here, as in all his historical dramas, he

writes with the sense of the importance of the infinitely small, with

the knowledge that "characters" and events arise out of the mind's

contact with things that seem insignificant to the superficial

observer. The wooden rigidity which the ordinary historian gives to

the figures of the past, is the result of the incapacity to visualise

the daily, the commonplace, in lives lived long ago. Strindberg's

psychological conception of characters of the past is based on an

almost microscopical power of seeing details. His own hypersensitive

emotional memory initiated him into the manner, in which history is

made by mood and temper, aches and pains--as well as by deliberate

purpose of will and political programmes. Whether it be true or not

that the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes was due to the toothache of

Louis XIV, and that history was thus made by the ill-timed activity of

molar nerves, psychological research into the origin of great events

on the world's stage would reveal causes which the historian does not

deign to consider.

_Eric XIV_, the drama of the reign of the mad son of the sane King

Gustavus, is a masterpiece of life-like presentation. Searching

comparisons between the arts of Strindberg and Shakespeare are otiose.

But in the dramatic treatment of lunacy the author of _Eric XIV_ may

well be compared with the author of _Hamlet_, _Lear_, and _Macbeth_.

The dramatic verisimilitude of Strindberg's lunatics is made perfect

through an experiential familiarity with the nethermost adventures

of the mind, which Shakespeare lacked. In _Eric XIV_ the monomania

of persecution, the fitful _délires de grandeur_, the half-conscious

cruelty are drawn with a spontaneous realism which is heightened by

a terrible psychological accuracy of analysis. Strindberg has drawn

almost as many mad and half-mad folk as Shakespeare. He can describe

every form of mental derangement, and has not forgotten the soul

obsessed by God and, therefore, detached from the world. In _The Saga

of the Folkungs_ the Voice of the Unseen speaks through an obsessed

woman who sees the souls of people, and is able to reveal the hidden

treachery of those who surround King Magnus. "One must be mad," says

a barber in this play, "to have the courage to reveal all secrets at

once." In _Easter_, the most mystical of Strindberg's plays, he draws

an exquisite character of a young girl who is "mad," whose soul is pure

and lovely, and who sees and hears things that happen far away. To her,

also, all secrets are open; she can see the stars during the daytime,

and, though her head is "soft," her spirit dwells in the realms of

pure beauty. There is a fool in To Damascus; there is the frenzy of

despair in _The Father_. The novels _Remorse, At the Edge of the Sea_

and _The Gothic Rooms_ present a gallery of psycho-pathological types.

Strindberg's novelistic treatment of lunacy has a natural profuseness

of imagination, not unlike that of E.T.A. Hoffmann and Dostoevsky. It

therefore bears little resemblance to the more artificial composition,

typified by Paul Hervieu's _L'Inconnu_ or Guy de Maupassant's _Le

Horla_.

The scenes in _Eric XIV_ are constructed with a finished workmanship,

and an economy of events which make it one of Strindberg's most

playable pieces. Consumed by jealous hatred of his brother, Johan,

Eric keeps him a prisoner; a prey of malignant suspicion against

everybody, Eric commits atrocious murders and endures frantic remorse.

At last, Eric's excesses can no longer be endured by the people. He is

imprisoned, and Johan becomes king. In _Eric XIV_ the psychological

dissection of character does not hinder the dramatic movement of

the play; the playwright combines brilliant impressionism with due

subservience to the laws of the theatre. In _The Saga of the Folkungs_

he has allowed the psychological treatment to usurp the domain of

drama. The play deals with a period in Swedish history when two brother

kings occupied the throne. Here, too, we have sombre tragedy. There

is no lack of dramatic elements, for the horrors of plague, hanging,

flagellants and execution are shown upon the stage. But Strindberg

has psychologised his characters so intensely that the flesh has, as

it were, fallen away from their souls, and with that the obscurity of

motives and objects which creates the deception upon which human action

is built, and which is essential to drama. The effect of the play on

the spectator is the intense, yet real, terror of a nightmare, from

which we vainly struggle to awaken. The over-balance of psychological

analysis mars some of the later historical dramas. It makes some of the

transcendental plays and the chamber plays mere dramatic dialogues,

pictures of minds in conflict; it gives us the Shadow Theatre of

the Soul, and leads Strindberg to bold defiance of the rules of

dramaturgy--including those laid down by himself.

The cycle of the Vasa plays--_Master Olof_, _Gustavus Vasa_ and _Eric

XIV_--bears the mark of the consummate craftsman. Their strength is

the strength of reality, their beauty a perfect proportion of dramatic

construction. A row of historical plays followed: _Gustavus Adolphus_

(1900); _Engelbrecht_ (1901); _Charles XII_ (1901); _Gustavus III_

(1903); _Queen Christina_ (1903); _The Nightingale of Wittenberg_

(1903); _The Last Knight_ (1908); _The National Director_ (1909); _The

Earl of Bjälbo_ (1909). Of these, _Gustavus Adolphus_ with its breadth

of battlefield panorama; _Charles XII_ with its narrow searchlight

on the declining figure of the lion-hearted, but beaten king; _Queen

Christina_ with its flamboyant sketch of the clever and capricious

daughter of Gustavus Adolphus, are eminently playable. _Gustavus

III_ has pointed dialogue, cameo-like pictures of word-fencing; it

faithfully paints the decadent time when Sweden was steeped in the

sterile scepticism of France; it portrays the reaction which led to the

assassination of the King of Masquerades, but the play is not woven

with the dramaturgic skill of the former dramas. _The Last Knight_

is an historical jugglery with ideas in five acts which strains the

dramatic form beyond its measure of elasticity.

* * * * *

It would require a separate volume to deal adequately with

Strindberg's historical writings. It is not only his dramas which bear

testimony to the originality of his historical conception, but a number

of treatises, essays, and stories, such as _Studies in the History

of Culture, The Swedish People, Swedish Destinies and Adventures,

Historical Miniatures_, and _The Conscious Will in the History of the

World_. His independent historical researches unearthed documents and

accumulated evidence with a painstaking thoroughness which should

have endowed him with a special "authority." But he has been derided

and abused because of his lack of a truly professorial treatment of

historical characters. His powers of visualisation and interpretation

have given offence to historical specialists. He has been accused of

distorting the calm faces of royal personages, of encumbering his

pictures of the past with ugly and unnecessary details. He has been

condemned because there is a twentieth-century atmosphere about his

characters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But we may

well ask: Has any historical chronicler or dramatist ever given a

faithful representation of the past except through the medium of his

own personality, his own time? There are anachronisms in _Hamlet_;

so there are in _Eric XIV_. In a wider sense, all historical writings

are anachronistic. In that sense Strindberg's history is less burdened

with errors than that of most writers. The offence which Strindberg

committed--if it be an offence--is that he saw and threw upon the

canvas the lasting psychological features which persist through the

vicissitudes of time, through the altered conditions of morality,

custom, and nationality. He saw the eternally human beneath the masks

of canonised and apotheosised individuals.

_Gustavus Adolphus_, Strindberg's drama of the fair hero-king of Sweden

who played an illustrious part in the Thirty Years' War, and who landed

with twenty thousand men in Pomerania in 1630 as friend and protector

of oppressed Protestants in Germany, has all the elements of a powerful

historical play. It has been severely criticised in Sweden and in

Germany. Strindberg has himself explained that the Swedes objected to

his portrait of Gustavus Adolphus because he had made him too small,

and the Germans objected because he had made the conquering hero

too great. Strindberg did not hesitate to show the blemishes on the

historical idol of Sweden: the weakness, the impetuousness, the spells

of fear, the carelessness, the moral elasticity which characterised

Gustavus Adolphus. Nor did he hesitate to show the horrors and

self-deception of war, the blackguardly deeds which are glorified

by militarism, or the petty quarrels between Catholics, Lutherans,

and Calvinists which prolonged the strife. The king is represented

as being brought--by the force of events--to see the unworthiness of

the cause which he espouses, and for which he finally dies. This was

an unpardonable offence against the sacro-sanctity of tradition, and

the fact that Strindberg's Gustavus Adolphus lost none of his heroic

qualities by being stripped of pseudo-angelic ones did not temper the

wind of the general condemnation. The famous generals of the Swedish

army, Horn, Banér, Tott, Brahe, Torstensson, Stenbock, have been shorn

of none of their glory.

In _Charles XII_ Strindberg repeats the offence committed in _Gustavus

Adolphus_. With irreverent and destructive hands Charles XII broke the

greatness of Sweden,[1] builded by Gustavus Adolphus, and Strindberg

mercilessly analyses the foolhardy mind of Charles XII, through which

his campaigns and his country were foredoomed to disaster.

The attacks made upon Strindberg by those who cling to stereotyped

methods of historical judgment have but served to show the importance

of the method which he inaugurated. It will undoubtedly guide the

historian of the future. The average historian moulds his material to

the conventional view; he has no place for the shapes of originality

which, but for his cramped pages, would stand forth lifelike and real.

Mr. William Archer tells us that the historical dramatist must not

flagrantly defy or disappoint popular knowledge or prejudice. But

popular knowledge can take no account of the deeper psychological

traits which it is the business of the historical dramatist to

discover. Mr. Archer holds that the dramatist must not run counter to

"generally accepted tradition." "New truth, in history," he adds, "must

be established either by new documents, or by a careful and detailed

reinterpretation of old documents; but the stage is not the place

either for the production of documents or for historical exegesis."[2]

Those who thus separate the known past from the revivifying influence

of imaginative art seek to impose the academic view of history upon the

artistic conscience. That conscience is never free from impressions

of the accumulated experience of the past. Every play which depicts

yesterday's customs, manners, costumes, conflicts of thought and

morality is "historical," and artistic exegesis alone can make real

to us that which is absent from school treatises, statistics and

blue-books.

The series of plays which have been designated as symbolical,

transcendental, mystical and mad--according to the mental outlook of

the reader--bring us nearest to the real Strindberg, to the essential

in his imaginative art which, though illusive and often completely

submerged, yet stands forth as the structure of his life. To this

series belong _To Damascus_, I and II (1898), _Advent_ (1899), _The

Dance of Death_, I and II (1901), _Easter_ (1901), _The Crown Bride_

(1902), _Swanwhite_ (1902), _The Dream Play_ (1902), _The Great

Highway_ (1909). In these plays we have the eternal questions of the

human mind, the joys of illusion, the sorrows of knowledge, the fruits

of sin and hatred, the rise through pain and suffering, the soul's

battle with relentless fate, the awful mystery of existence, and the

ultimate hope of something better to come, cast into the weird and

haunting shapes of the people of Strindberg's inner world; the souls

that are at once real and unreal, mad and sane, acting in the solid

world of matter, and held in shadowy bondage by the mists of dreamland.

Here we meet them all, the souls that have gone by, that are here

around us, that are yet to come. They meet us with tears and smiles,

with lies and truth, with virtue and vice, pathetic and repulsive,

lovable and loathsome--humanity.

[Illustration: Strindberg in his library in the "Blue Tower," 1911. His

Last Home in Stockholm]

Strindberg suggests the soul's corruption and the soul's ineffable

sweetness with the same impassioned power of creation. In _Swanwhite_,

the charming fairy play in which the influence of Maeterlinck is

discernible, the budding love between a fairy-like princess and a

chivalrous prince is described with a delicacy which brings the reader

into a land of romance and roses, of stainless purity and spring-like

innocence. In _Advent_ we are brought into the house of wickedness, of

cruel, designing, ancient wickedness. The old judge and his wife are

steeped in every variety of human treachery and vileness. They die, and

we follow them into the darkness of hell, where the seven deadly sins

have grouped themselves around the throne of the monarch. Through the

pain of being made to see themselves as they really are, they cry out

for light. In both pieces the "supernatural" plays the most important

part; the wicked stepmother in _Swanwhite_ exhales a breath of evil

before which the rose fades, and the dove falls dead; the ill-treated

children in _Advent_ are comforted by a mysterious playmate, clad in

white, who brings light into the dark cellar in which they have been

imprisoned. The story in _The Crown Bride_ of a peasant girl, who kills

her child, is told with an exalted simplicity, and given a setting

of the old fairy-faith of Dalecarlia which peoples the rivers with

nature-spirits and the forests with _trolls_. Here, as in the other

fairy plays, things are endowed with souls, and the fierce hatred

between the two old peasant families is reflected by every object that

surrounds them. Unknown forces are all the time engaged in a mystic

underplay which is the real action of the piece.

The law of _karma_--the chain of cause and effect--runs through all

these plays, and binds together the psychological sequence where the

dramatic construction fails. In _Easter_ Strindberg has drawn the

anguish of a little bourgeois family, labouring under the misfortunes

following upon the father's defalcations. He is in prison, and Elis,

his son, a schoolmaster, who is meticulously honest, is weighed down

by shame, and tormented by the fear that the man to whom the father

is heavily indebted, will exercise his right and seize the furniture.

The family look upon this man, Lindkvist, as an ogre, and when they

learn that he has come to live in the same town they are in constant

fear that he will ruin them. Throughout the three acts of this very

playable piece Strindberg gives a highly finished and concentrated

picture of those multiple and long-lived sufferings of the innocent,

which follow in the wake of transgressions committed by the guilty.

But he makes Lindkvist an arbiter of fate, a messenger of hope who

shows that good as well as evil is minutely recorded in the great Book

of Events. For long ago when Elis' father was a young man, and before

he placed himself within the meshes of the law, he did Lindkvist a

kindness. That kindness has never been forgotten; it lay like a seed

of life in Lindkvist's soul, and, as it grew, it made him a generous

man. And thus Lindkvist forgives and forgets, and the spirit of Easter

is resurrected in the hearts of the family. Eleonora, the pure and

tender-spirited girl who went mad on the day when her father was sent

to prison, is wrongfully suspected of having stolen a daffodil plant in

the shop of the adjoining florist. The symbolism of the piece is made

complete by the strange play of the shadow of paternal crime on the

guiltless child. In her mad innocence of the world's ways Eleonora has

taken the flowerpot and left a shilling and her name on the counter,

but the coin and the name are not seen by the agitated shopkeeper who

is anxious to brand the suspected culprit. The "theft" is at last

satisfactorily explained. Eleonora speaks with the wisdom of many lives

when she says: "I was born old ... I knew everything already when I

was born, and when I learnt something I only recollected. When I was

four years old I knew men's ... thoughtlessness and foolishness, and

therefore people were unkind to me."

The force of suggestion, the primary importance of thought form the

keynote of several of Strindberg's plays. In _Eric XIV_ he lets Göran

Persson say to Eric: "King and friend, you so often use the word hate

that at last you imagine yourself to be the enemy of humanity. Don't

use it! The word is the first realisation of the creative force, and

you throw a spell over yourself by this incantation. Say 'love' a

little oftener, and you will imagine yourself loved." _There are Crimes

and Crimes_, a play in four acts which has been a great theatrical

success, is built around the subtle force of evil thought. Maurice, a

dramatist of the Bohemian world in Paris, who is about to receive the

laurels of fame deserts his mistress and his child to follow a woman

bent on pleasure only; in the elation of their passion they wish death

to Maurice's child and destruction to all obstacles in their way. The

child dies mysteriously in the morning, and through a combination of

malign circumstances Maurice is accused of being the murderer. He is

innocent, but he has sinned in thought, and when, at the end of the

fourth act, he is mercifully extracted from the vortex, into which he

has brought himself, the Abbé says to him: "You were not innocent,

for we are also responsible for our thoughts, words, desires, and you

murdered in thought when your evil will wished for the death of your

child."

_There are Crimes and Crimes_ does full justice to Strindberg as an

accomplished stage craftsman; in _The Dance of Death_ we have, perhaps,

the most sharply chiselled dramatic form of all his later plays. It is

a symphony of married hatred and misery in which the orchestration is

perfect. The dialogue is at once natural and calculated; the silent

play of the piece even more intensely suggestive than the spoken

words. We get glimpses of the dramatic art of bygone days: that of

Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; we are mercilessly ground in the

mill of a ghastly nineteenth-century problem play. The figure of the

Captain of the Fortress, the untruthful, scheming old rascal who has

attained to a diabolical mastery in the art of making others unhappy

and uncomfortable, is drawn with a supreme irony which makes it unique

in vital drama. Amongst Strindberg's realistic plays it has another

distinction: it represents his only stage-creation of a vampire-like

_husband_. The wife is naturally not far behind him. Death stands

behind the central figures of the play, the dancing death of Holbein

and Saint-Saëns. The strains of his tune drown the jarring notes of

conflict, and bring the voice of hope to the Captain's lips: "Wipe

out, and pass on!"

The trilogy _To Damascus_, with its autobiographical wanderings on the

crooked paths of experience, is perhaps the strangest literary play

ever written. It contains the elements of the old miracle and morality

plays, the soul's battle with itself and with the Devil, its final

renouncement of the world and entry into the new Life. "The Stranger"

meets "The Lady"; together they journey from station to station on

the road of suffering and disillusionment. They part in hatred, and

meet again in the vicissitudes of love. They separate finally as

The Stranger attains to peace, religious peace, in the monastery of

dead passions on the top of the hill. The stages that He between the

beginning and the end of the journey are described in scenes which are

both possible and impossible. The Beggar, The Doctor, The Sister, The

Mother, The Old Man, The Confessor, The Abbess, The Fool, The Shadows,

and The Children all take their assigned parts as separate individuals.

And yet they seem to be one and the same, fragments of a multiple

personality. All things and all thoughts come back in this play like

the top spun by a skilful player of diabolo. The Stranger climbs a

mountain, and arrogantly threatens the Lord of the skies with a cross

which he has snatched from a Calvary. He falls, and is found in raving

delirium by the kind Samaritans of the Convent who bring him to their

hospital. He regains consciousness, and finds himself seated at a table

in the Refectory in company with the shades of all whom he has injured,

or with whose fate his own is bound up. The scene is one of the deepest

religious realism. It has a touch of that crushing and unreasonable

sense of guilt which often accompanies the return to physical life of

one who has been to the very gates of death. The curse of Deuteronomy

is read by The Confessor, and every word brands the memory of The

Stranger with the seal of The Law. Of this consciousness of guilt The

Stranger says: "There are moments when I feel as if I carried within me

all the sin and sorrow and uncleanliness and shame of the world; there

are moments when I believe that the wicked act, crime itself, is an

imposed punishment."

The world gives a banquet in honour of The Stranger, who has succeeded

in making gold. But the banquet is so arranged as to show the envy

and hatred and treachery which lie behind the festive speeches,

the fickleness of public approval. In the portrait gallery of the

monastery The Stranger is shown the real selves of great men who have

been honoured for their consistency, whilst they have been bundles

of inconsistencies--Napoleon, Luther, Voltaire, Goethe, Bismarck.

The yearning for the peace that passeth all understanding is well

expressed when The Stranger, bruised and tired, weary of searching and

self-disgust, sees the white monastery on the hill and cries:

"Anything so white I never before beheld on this dirty earth, except in

my dreams; yes, this is my youth's dream of a house wherein dwell peace

and purity. I greet thee, white house.... Now, I am at home."

It is as if the heat of imagination, which produced some of

Strindberg's great books, were too great to permit him to leave a

subject, when, artistically, it is finished. After _Inferno_ he wrote

Legends which was but a faint echo. The theme of _To Damascus_ is

weakly repeated in _The Great Highway_, a drama in verse and prose

which also deals with the soul's fearful struggle and disillusionment.

_To Damascus_ contains some shallow thoughts and some banalities of

expression, but it is a powerful creation, magnificently conceived. In

_The Great Highway_ the mysticism falls flat, the play does not grip by

any poetic power; it is an _olla podrida_ of its author's philosophy

of life which sometimes is not even lukewarm. But it does contain some

gems of lyrical beauty, and one or two passages in which Strindberg

reaches his own heights.

The _Dream Play_ is a new conception and a new art. In a memorandum to

the play Strindberg writes: "In this Dream Play, as in the previous

one _To Damascus_, the author has sought to imitate the disconnected,

but apparently logical form of the dream. Anything may happen;

everything is possible and probable. Time and space do not exist;,

on an insignificant background of reality imagination spins threads

and weaves new patterns: a mixture of memories, experiences, free

fancies, absurdities and improvisations. The characters split, double,

multiply, evaporate, solidify, diffuse, clarify. But one consciousness

reigns above them all--that of the dreamer; it knows no secrets, no

incongruities, no scruples, no law."

The texture of _To Damascus_ is solid compared with that of _The Dream

Play_. The story of the descent of the Daughter of Indra into matter,

of human life as typified by The Glazier, The Officer, The Lawyer, The

Bill-poster and The Poet, is told without any dramatic sequence, such

as is required by the theatre of to-day. It is a play written for a

stage not yet built, to be performed by some diaphanous visitants from

the astral world. Strindberg calls _The Dream Play_ a Buddhistic and

proto-Christian drama. It is more than that: it is pre-cosmic.

The paradoxical versatility of a man who holds all the keys of

successful drama in his hands, and yet sacrifices the theatre to the

transcendentalism of his ideas, is not easily explained. Strindberg

told Dr. John Landquist, now editor of the posthumous edition of his

collected works, that he really found it difficult to write modern

plays, and that he loved pomp and circumstance in drama.[3] That

love is displayed in the sumptuous repast introduced into the second

part of _To Damascus_, at once coarsely barbaric and uncomfortably

ethereal, a strange combination of the Banquet of Life and the Swedish

_hors-d'œuvre_ table. And yet, this is the man who wrote the Chamber

Plays: _Storm, The Burned Lot, The Pelican, The Black Glove_ and _The

Spook Sonata_ (1907), in which the figures move, physical, yet free

from the three dimensions, impersonated ideas, brain-spectres who walk

the boards with unsteady feet. This is the man who wrote the preface

to _Lady Julie_, who sought the realisation of his theatrical ideal in

the one-act play with two or three characters, and who later came to

write _Gustavus Adolphus_ with fifty-four characters, _Midsummer_ with

thirty-two characters; who created twenty-four characters for _Gustavus

Vasa_, and twenty for _Eric XIV_ and _The Saga of the Folkungs_

respectively, and whose dramatic lavishness necessitated a succession

of five-act dramas. It seems strange that the author of saga plays,

like _The Journey of Lucky Peter_, and _The Keys of Heaven_, with its

parodied Sancho Panzaisms, should have composed _The Dance of Death_;

that the conscience-stricken visions of To Damascus should be followed

by _The Slippers of Abu Casem_. This ingenious "toy for children"

Strindberg dedicated to his youngest daughter, the little Anne-Marie,

on her sixth birthday.

The two great Norwegian dramatists presented an orderly development

in the choice of dramatic form, which makes the study of their art

an exercise in the logic of temperament. The natural romanticism of

Ibsen's early plays passed into the classical art of _Ghosts_. The

intellectual modernism of the later Ibsen was the ripeness anticipated

by every shrewd observer of the course of his mind. The art of Ibsen

is complex, yet simple. Born out of the depths of his love of truth

and his love of beauty, it arose, well-formed, palpable, a thing for

all the world to see and hear, an indictment of the gigantic social

fraud to which all must ultimately listen. It is essentially exoteric.

So is the art of the rival and minor playwright, Björnson, who has

given the world its most perfect dramatised sermons. Strindberg's art

is incalculable, subtle, the caprice of a spirit that cannot exhaust

itself: esoteric because it is ever rooted in the unconscious. His

plays may be read and seen by the many, but at present they will be

understood only by the few.

In versatility of dramatic form Hauptmann stands nearest Strindberg.

He has almost as many strings to his harp as the Swede--he has written

naturalistic plays and fairy drama, social plays and mystical drama,

farce, comedy, romance and realism. Both dramatists are impelled by

pity for human suffering, but the pity that guides Hauptmann, and

which is typified by _The Weavers_, is an elemental, earthbound pity,

concerned with food and poverty, lack of shelter and work. Strindberg's

pity is transcendentalised; it hovers round the greater mysteries of

existence itself, seeks to extract the human spirit from the curse of

illusions. Hence the absence of finality in his writings. No book gives

the impression of being quite finished; they all transmit the ache for

a new point of view. Whilst Maeterlinck has evolved a philosophy of

spiritualised tranquillity, and administers a soothing narcotic for

the Soul Rampant in the twilight of his charmed castles, Strindberg

walks on, acutely conscious of the thorns upon which he treads. Whilst

Björnson, satisfied, proclaims his ideal of physical purity, and throws

down _A Gauntlet_ at vice, Strindberg is haunted by the ideal of the

human soul's unattainable purity from dross. Whilst Bernard Shaw cuts

the world's perplexities with a joke, a flashing paradoxical joke,

Strindberg raises his bands in threatening condemnation at the God-head

Himself. In Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's _Elën_, Samuel says to Goetze:

"Science will not suffice. Sooner or later you will end by coming to

your knees." Goetze: "Before what?" Samuel: "Before the Darkness."

Strindberg was brought to his knees by the Darkness, but he rose with

the dawn that followed.

During the thirteen years that passed between the quiet celebration of

Strindberg's fiftieth birthday, and the national festivities with which

the Swedish people acclaimed him on January 22nd, 1912, his countrymen

were gradually made aware of his greatness. Men of all parties

fearlessly proclaimed his genius over the open grave, though some would

never have ventured to do so if they had not felt quite sure that he

could not prepare any further shocks of surprise.

It is impossible to present a study of the experiences which caused

the corrosive bitterness in Strindberg's attacks on everything and

everybody, without reference to the unjust and Pharisaical criticism

to which he had to submit. On the other hand, there can be no doubt

that it was difficult to live with Strindberg. The Swedes had to live

with him, and the household of those who set themselves up to guard the

propriety and integrity of literary art was day by day threatened by

his revolutionary ideas, his personal attacks on spotless individuals,

his coarse-grained descriptions of indescribable things. We must

therefore extend sympathy to his detractors as well as to him. There

is, besides, a reversionary power in the mere passage of time which

calls for special tolerance. The reviewers of the _Athenæum_ and

_Blackwood's Magazine_, who suggested that Ruskin's _Modern Painters_

had emanated from Bedlam, are more entitled to our sympathy than the

object of their criticism.

The Swedes have a peculiar fear of praising that which is their own.

They labour under a feeling that such praise is egotistical, blustering

and discourteous to others. In Swedish peasant homes the housewife

does honour to her guests by loud depreciation of the contents of her

house and its offerings, no matter how well-appointed the home may

be. The trait persists in the judgment of cultured people on national

qualities, art and literature. It is certainly graceful, and makes the

Swede an excellent companion, a polite and generous appreciator of the

talents of others. But it is inimical to the toleration of a forceful

and self-confident personality within one's own family or nation,

and favourable to the mediocritisation of boisterous originality.

If Strindberg had been an Italian or a Spaniard he would in all

probability have been the recipient of the Nobel Prize during his

life-time, in addition to posthumous honours.

[Illustration: Strindberg in his study, 1911.]

[Illustration: The Strindberg Theatre in Stockholm.]