"I seek God and find the Devil."
"My hate is boundless as the wastes, burning as the sun,
and stronger than my love."
The above quotations give some idea of that black pessimism which is,
at any rate, the most patent characteristic of Strindberg. Yet neither
quotation, motto, nor catch-word can do justice to the multifarious
life and character of this man. For Strindberg, more than any other
European author of our age, has boxed the whole compass of our
modernity with its tumults, its aspirations, its perversities; its
glaring searchlights of science, its pallid flames of mysticism, and
its needle ever pointing to the two opposite though connected poles
of sex. He is in turns the most rabid of atheists, the most devout of
Catholics, the most esoteric of occultists; now the most Utopian of
Socialists, now the most uncompromising of individualists. Running the
gauntlet of three unhappy and dissolved marriages, he has become the
European specialist in conjugal infelicity, to say nothing of being
credited with innumerable conquests, which he himself would doubtless
have designated as captures. His novels, his autobiographies, and his
equally subjective dramas all exhale the most sulphurous hate against
the distorted anomaly of the new woman, yet he is an Orpheus who,
scorning the prosaic joys of some normal and uninteresting Eurydice,
surrenders himself with almost pathological gusto to be torn to
pieces by the monstrous mænads of modernity. The paroxysms of his hate
alternate with moods of the most sentimental idealism, and the harsh
impetus of his onslaught is only equalled by the, at times, abject
meekness of his romantic devotion.
Before, consequently, we embark on some slight survey of Strindberg's
life and of the more characteristic of his numerous works, let us
endeavour to lay hold of the clues of one or two primary features
which will serve as a guide in the, at first sight, extremely tangled
labyrinth of his psychology.
Now the dominant emotion in Strindberg's temperament is fear. It is
this fear which, at times assuming the dimensions of _paranoia_ or
systematised delusion and persecution mania, largely supplies the
explanation to his whole attitude towards Man, Woman, and God. He
possessed also a vehemently explosive egoism and a gigantic intellect,
at times dominating his fear and functioning with the most powerful
precision, but as often as not interpreting the whole external world in
the terms of some preconceived subjective emotion. Add also a morbidly
hypertrophied sexual sensibility, together with a distinct strain of
genuine idealism, and one may perhaps be able to envisage with some
accuracy the cardinal points of our author's brain.
August Strindberg was born in 1849, the son of a _mésalliance_ between
a shipping agent and a servant girl. The circumstances of his childhood
tended to magnify that morbid sense of fear which, according to our
most eminent psychologists, is always innate and never altogether
acquired. The two parents, the seven children, and the two servants
lived in two rooms, and the family always appeared to him like "a
prison in which two prisoners watched each other, a place where
children were tortured and maids brawled." His mother died when he was
thirteen, to be succeeded by the inevitable stepmother. His school life
also was unhappy, but his description of it, though no doubt perfectly
consistent with actual hardship, exhibits at the same time the
reactions of a morbid sensibility to the hard facts of external life.
"Life was a penitentiary for crimes which one had committed before one
was born, so that the child always went about with a bad conscience."
Note also, at the same time, the presence of the combative aggressive
element in the boy who would lose nearly every game of chess by the
inconsidered vehemence of his attack, or would break open chests of
drawers in the fury of his desire to obtain their contents. And observe
the early manifestations of that fundamental emotion which was to
obtain throughout his life alternative outlets in the two parallel
channels of religion and sex. Thus, like Byron, he experienced a
violent passion for a girl before the age of puberty. So far, again,
as religion was concerned, he had a great horror of darkness and the
unknown, and his deity would appear to have been a god rather of fear
than of love. And though Scandinavians as a race take Christianity far
more seriously than the inhabitants of any other European country, he
would appear to have possessed, even for a Scandinavian, the religious
temperament to an unusual degree. Thus, he said his prayers on his way
to school, and evinced a precocious desire to become a priest. But
the religious element became dormant amid the chequered vicissitudes
which signalised his youth and his adolescence. He started to study
medicine at the University of Upsala, but his lack of funds broke into
his college career and compelled him to earn his own living. He is by
turns telegraph clerk, editor of an insurance paper (for which purpose
he specially learns the higher mathematics), tutor in the family of a
rich Jewish physician, actor in the Karl Moor of Schiller's _Robbers_,
journalist on a daily paper (where the drastic offensiveness of his
criticisms made his position on the staff intolerable), and librarian
in the Royal Library of Stockholm (when he specially learns Chinese
for the purpose of compiling a catalogue). His struggles were bitter
and continued, and the acuteness of his privations manifests itself in
a deep consciousness of class hatred against the prosperous and not
infrequently dishonest philistinism of the day.
Note, also, the occurrence of combined religious and persecution mania
in the crises of his illness and despondency. For at such times he
takes the Devil himself as seriously as the Deity, believes in an
"Evil God to whom the Creator had handed over the world," and "has the
consciousness of being personally persecuted by personal powers of
evil." These emotional outbursts are all the more interesting because
intellectually he had become the most fanatical of freethinkers, had
read with profit Buckle's _History of Civilisation in England_, and
was a fervent disciple of the new naturalism. During this period he
had already begun to write dramas, none of which, however, have any
substantial significance with the possible exception of the historical
drama _Meister Olof_, which was unsuccessfully performed in 1877-8, and
into which the already misogynous author had introduced the character
of the prostitute, "in order to show that the difference between her
and the ordinary woman is not so enormously great."
In 1879, however, Strindberg achieved a _succès de scandale_ with
his novel _The Red Room_. The satire of this book (written, it will
be remembered, during his freethought years), may, no doubt, be the
milk of Christian charity when compared with the concentrated vitriol
of the _Black Flags_ of his Catholic period, and the various scenes
and pictures may, no doubt, strike the critic as episodic and lacking
in systematic cohesion, yet the work has some claim to recognition
by reason of the vivid force of its description of contemporaneous
life. The naïvely idealistic hero, the shady actress passing from
seduction to seduction with all the facility of the experienced
_ingénue_, the respectable director of the shoddy insurance company,
the insidious Jewish financial broker, the cynical journalist, the
grim but benevolent doctor, are all portrayed in a style which at once
shines and chills with all the brightness of the coldest steel. Viewed
psychologically, the book is significant as exhibiting the Socialistic
fury of an embittered man "whose class-hatred lay in his blood and in
his nerves," and who revenges himself on the system which had conspired
against him, by exposing with sinister precision its most repulsive
truths.
The cynicism of _The Red Room_ was succeeded by the Utopian
romanticism of the dramas, _Das Geheimniss der Gilde_, _Frau Margit_,
_Gluckspeter_. The change in mood is probably to be ascribed to the
vogue of _The Red Room_, and to the initial success of his alliance
with his first wife, Siri von Essen, the actress, whom he had married
in 1878, and who was subsequently to enjoy the ambiguous blessing of
being officially immortalised in _The Confession of a Fool_.
This mood, in its turn, was soon replaced by a concentrated and
fanatical misogynism which was to dominate practically every book
which Strindberg was subsequently to write. The fundamental cause
was, no doubt, the morbidly irritable and suspicious nature of the
man himself. Strindberg's whole attitude towards woman, however, is
only fully understood by some appreciation of the New Woman Movement,
which under the auspices of Ellen Key flourished vigorously in Sweden
in the "eighties." Like, for instance, our own Suffragette agitation,
or indeed, any popular craze, however intrinsically meritorious, this
movement, which was, above all, a crusade for sexual equality, was
attended by wild and perverse extravagances. Not merely the genuinely
masculine woman, but every little doll of a woman in every little
doll's house, became obsessed with the imperative necessity of the
emancipation of her own body and the self-development of her own soul.
A holy war of the sexes was proclaimed, and the sacred shibboleth of
the New Thought, the New Ethics, and the New Love was soon in the mouth
of every woman possessed of the true feminine _esprit de corps._ And
with the praiseworthy object of adjusting the balance of nature, and of
arriving so far as possible at the ideal harmony of an almost perfect
equation, in some cases even the little boys would be brought up as
girls, while, conversely, the little girls would be educated as boys.
But the misogynism of Strindberg was something far more than a merely
intellectual appreciation of the Anti-Feminist standpoint. Even making
allowance for the considerable impetus doubtless given to his attack
by reason of his personal matrimonial complications, the cause lay far
more deeply ingrained in his own constitution. For the arrogation by
the female of equal rights to the male would of itself tend to provoke
the violent apprehensiveness of a man always morbidly alarmed at the
slightest suggestion of any interference with his own personal rights,
and always scenting a grievance with all the superhuman _flair_ of
the true maniac of persecution. Strindberg's hatred of woman is thus
to a large extent the hatred self-begotten of fear out of its own
spirit, and without the superfluous aid of a concrete reality. If,
too, we identify Strindberg himself with some of his men characters
(_e.g._ Kurt in _The Death Dance_, Axel in _Playing with Fire_, or the
narrator of _The Confession of a Fool_), who render to the objects
of their passion acts of the most abject servility, and who kiss the
feet of women almost as frequently as their lips, we would hazard the
suggestion that he himself (who owns to having found in his reverence
for woman a substitute for his reverence for God) would in certain
moods welcome with morbid alacrity this new feminine domination, while
his reaction from this inverted attitude would but lash his misogynism
to even more hysterical paroxysms.
These considerations may perhaps explain why in so many of his works
the Strindberg woman and the Strindberg man are so highly specialised.
The typical Strindberg woman is a fiend with the physique of a Madonna
and the soul of a vampire, who sucks dry the life-blood of her heroic
victim. The typical Strindberg man is a Samson shorn of his strength,
writhing in the toils of some Delilah, protesting vociferously, and
yet taking a morbid delight in his own bondage. English readers
will remember the not altogether unanalogous case of John Tanner,
that converse Don Juan of Mr. Shaw, who, with all his fanfaronnade
of masculine independence, is, as he has from the beginning feared,
anticipated and desired, successfully hunted down by his sly and
dashing _Donna Juana_.
After the publication of _The Red Room_, Strindberg visited both
Switzerland and Paris, where he was invited to meet Björnsen, entered
into relations with the Théätre Libre of M. Antoine, had one or two of
his plays produced, and meditated an unfortunately written satire on
the French capital. In 1883 he produced _Swedish Destinies_, a volume
of essays on contemporary problems, whose romantic masquerade would
seem to have effectively concealed its underlying satire.
The most significant work, however, which he published at this period
was the volume of twelve (subsequently expanded to twenty) short
stories, entitled _Marriage_. These tales all treat of the various
phases, economic, social, psychological, and physiological, of the
sexual problem, which he observed either in his own life or in the
couples whom he saw in a Swiss _pension._ The characteristic of this
work is its extraordinary seriousness. For to Strindberg the sexual
problem provides neither the excuse for the philosophic flippancy
of the cynic, nor for the priggish modernity of the ethical or
intellectual snob, but is the one obsessing reality of actual life.
Compared with the black pessimism of this work (relieved though it may
be at times by a ray of tender sentiment or deep paternal feeling), the
grimmest stories of Wedekind are benignly jovial and the most scabrous
tales of De Maupassant but innocently sportive. Neither smile, nor
even leer, ever breaks the set visage of this stern irony, which seems
indistinguishable from life itself. There are no artificial climaxes
or ostentatious flourishes of style to prick the senses of the reader.
Described in a language of the most brutal phlegm and the most forceful
simplicity, the facts of reality do their own unaided work. Each story
is no mere dexterously elaborated incident, but a condensed life. How
powerful, for instance, is such a story as _Asra,_ the history of the
pious youth afflicted with anæmia by reason of his own continence,
and dying two years after his marriage with that superabundantly
healthy ethical worker who subsequently married twice again, had eight
children, and wrote articles on over-population and immorality. And how
genuinely awful is _Autumn_, that frigid anti-climax of a stale and
re-hashed honeymoon:
"And she sang, 'What is the name of the land in which
my darling dwells?' But, alas, the voice was thin and
sharp. It was at times like a shriek from the depths of
the soul that fears that the noon is passed, and that
the evening is approaching. When the song was over, she
did not at first dare to turn round, as though she was
expecting that he would come to her and say something.
But he did not come; and there was silence in the room.
When at last she turned round on her chair, he sat on
the sofa and cried. She wanted to get up, take his head
in her hands, and kiss him as before; but she remained
seated, motionless, with her gaze turned to the floor....
"They drank coffee, and spoke about the coolness of the
summer weather, and where they would spend the summer
next year. But the conversation began to dry up; and
they repeated themselves. At last he said, after a long,
undisguised yawn, 'I'm going to bed now.' 'So will I,'
she said, and got up, 'but I will go first and have a
look on the balcony.'
"When she came back, she remained standing and listening
at the door of the bedroom. All was quiet inside, and
the boots were outside the door. She knocked, but there
was no answer. Then she opened the door, and went in. He
slept! He slept!"
Though, moreover, the characters in _Marriage_ are more normal and
average than in any other of Strindberg's works, the author airs again
and again his pet sexual grievances. _Corinna_, in particular, and
_The Duel_, are savage attacks respectively on the ethical amazon and
the womanly woman who makes her very womanliness an engine of tyranny,
while the _Breadwinner_ narrates how an apparently quite impeccable
husband and father, writing himself to death to support his family,
was driven to suicide by the naggings and exactions of a querulous and
discontented wife.
_Marriage_ was succeeded by the Utopian _Swiss Tales_; but the
strenuous economic struggles to which Strindberg was now subjected
forced him to discard as insipid the vague compromise of free-thought
and to drink the bracing tonic of a Nietzschean and self-reliant
atheism. "God, Heaven, and Eternity had to be thrown overboard if the
ship was to be kept afloat; and it had to be kept afloat because I was
not alone ... I became an atheist as a matter of duty and necessity."
Yet it is interesting to observe that, taking the solution of the
World-Riddle as a matter of acute personal importance, he studies the
whole history of mankind to satisfy himself that he is right in his
conclusion, and that the element of superstition is still so strong
that when his child is ill he prays, atheist that he is, with all the
fervour of a Christian Scientist. To the period of his atheism are to
be ascribed, with the exception of _Black Flags_, his most powerful,
most drastic work, his two packed volumes of one-act plays, the
autobiographic _Confession of a Fool_, and the Nietzschean novel, _The
Open Sea_.
Note also that his matrimonial misery and his divorce from his first
wife had given an additional poison to a sting which was always
morbidly eager to inject its venom.
The plays of Strindberg belong to the naturalistic school of
problem-play which was in full vogue during the period of their
composition. Technically their originality lies in the intensity of
their concentration. Though many of them are one-acters and they nearly
all observe the unity of place, they resemble less the ordinary
curtain-raiser than the one solitary act round which the ordinary
modern play is usually written. Each play is nothing but climax. Though
in some cases they are nearly as long as ordinary drama, it is rare
that they have any subsidiary characters. Even the protagonists are too
occupied with the urgencies of their own immediate crises, and with
exposing the nakedness of their own souls, to have time for either the
artificial jewels of the Pinerovian epigram or the flying rockets of
the Shavian dialectic. The problem is stuck too deep into their lives
to require any artificial flourishing. Observe, too, that nearly every
play is a variation on one theme, the mutual hate, fear, and war of a
malevolent humanity. Their very love but sharpens their enmity, and
they draw blood with nearly every word.
The three-act play, _The Father_, ventilates the author's chronic
grievance of the ruin of the man by the woman. The plot is cruel
in its simplicity. The husband, though in a state of acute nervous
disorder, is not certifiable. The wife, anxious for a freer life,
smuggles a doctor into the house, plays adroitly on the man's pet
mania that he is not the father of his own daughter, forges in his
handwriting a letter branded with insanity, goads him into throwing
a burning lamp at her, and with the aid of his old nurse gets him by
a ruse into a strait-jacket, in which he succumbs to a stroke. Yet
with all its concentrated sensationalism, and work though it may be
of a constitutional maniac of persecution, the play is too deep, too
sincere, too fundamentally convincing to be ever near that line which
separates the realm of tragedy from the pandemonium of melodrama. With
what ghastly irony does the daughter innocently prick the sensitive
sore in her father's brain:
[Rittmeister _sits huddled up on the settee_.
BERTHA. Do you know what you've done? Do you know you've
thrown the lamp at Mamma?
RITTMEISTER. Have I?
BERTHA. Yes, you have. Just think if she'd been hurt?
RITTMEISTER. What would that have mattered?
BERTHA. You are not my father if you can talk like that.
Rittmeister (_gets up_). What do you say? Am I not your
father? How do you know that? Who told you so? And who
is your father, then? Who?
But of all Strindberg's plays, indisputably the most powerful is _Miss
Julie_, that gripping tragedy of the over-sexed young woman who on an
oppressive mid-summer evening insists on being seduced by her father's
butler. The girl is of noble birth, and the duel of sex is intensified
by the duel of class. In the fifty pages of this play, with its three
characters of the woman, the butler, and the cook, which observes
rigorously the Aristotelian unities, every element of the highest
and gravest tragedy is introduced with the most accurate and natural
psychology--the exaggerated dancing of the daughter of the house, who
competes with her own cook for the favours of her own butler-lover; the
ribald grins and songs of the servants; the mingled insolence, common
sense, and respectfulness of the domestic; the hysterical reaction
of the _déclassée_ and dishonoured girl. The following passages may
perhaps give some faint idea of this work's sustained and infernal
power:
[John _opens the cupboard, takes a bottle of wine out,
and fills two used glasses_.
THE YOUNG LADY. Where do you get the wine from?
JOHN. From the cellar.
THE YOUNG LADY. My father's burgundy.
JOHN. Ain't it good enough for his son-in-law?
THE WOMAN. Thief!
JOHN. Are you going to blab?
THE LADY. Oh--oh--the accomplice of a thief....
JOHN. You hate men-folk, miss?
THE LADY. Yes, as a rule!... But at times, when I feel
weak--ugh!
JOHN. You hate me, too?
THE LADY. Infinitely! I could have killed you like an
animal....
And how clutching is the climax, when the girl, a simultaneous prey
to nausea with life and to fear of death, persuades her domestic to
hypnotise her into suicide at almost the precise minute when her father
is ringing for his boots:
THE YOUNG LADY. Have you never been in a theatre and
seen the mesmerist? He says to the subject: "Take the
broom"; he takes it. He says "Sweep"; and he sweeps....
JOHN (_takes his razor and puts it into her hand_). Here
is the broom--go now where there's plenty of light--into
the barn--and--(_whispers into her ear_).
_Miss Julie_ is remarkable as being the only one of Strindberg's
works in which the man comes off victorious with the exception of the
four-act _Comrades,_ that sombre comedy of Parisian artist life, where
the crowing wife bullies her self-sacrificing husband on the score of
having ousted him from the Salon by her own successful picture, only
to be told that he had simply changed the numbers, and to be finally
ejected from her perverted home by that reasserted man whose efficiency
she had despised and exploited, but whose virile despotism she now
begins to love.
In _The Creditor_, Strindberg treats again his favourite theme of the
vampire woman and the spoliated man. Thekla, the usual worthless,
demoniac female, having dissolved her marriage with the schoolmaster
Gustav, has married the artist Adolph. The scene is the sea-side.
Thekla has gone off on some jaunt. Her new husband, who is apparently
even more miserable without than with his wife, is a nervous wreck.
He makes the acquaintance of the old husband, who presents himself
incognito to readjust the balance of his matrimonial account. Gustav
plays with masterly hypnotism on the suggestibility of his colleague,
making him doubt himself, his vocation, his health, and at last his
wife. And then when his wife returns, and the enfeebled husband has
made an abortive attempt at asserting his theoretic virile superiority,
he makes love to the wife, is detected by the visitors, and goes
back to his own solitary misery, to leave his wife stranded and his
new confrere dead. Note, too, that here again the human triangle is
complete in itself, and that the agony is protracted to the last shred
of its passion without ever flagging for one single moment.
Space prohibits any complete discussion of the remaining plays in
the cycle of Strindberg's _Eleven One-acters_. Yet we would mention
_Motherly Love,_ a variation on the theme of Mrs. Warren. The
_souteneuse_ mother, with all her loathsome affectation of wounded
parental feeling, plays judiciously on the morbidly filial conscience
of a clean-minded but weak-willed actress-daughter, prevents her from
obtaining respectable friends or advancement on the stage, in order to
preserve for herself her sole professional stock-in-trade.
Equally impressive is _The Bond_, which expresses in one divorce-court
scene the whole mordant tragedy of wrangling matrimony and authentic
parental affection.
In a lighter vein is _Playing with Fire_, the one real comedy which
Strindberg ever wrote. In this the delightful _ménage_ of a young son,
a young wife, a young friend of the family, a young charity cousin,
and a philistine but by no means senile father, everybody is flirting
with everybody else. Particularly admirable in its mixture of the comic
and the ironic is the character and attitude of the conceited and
ultra-modern artist-husband, genuinely jealous of that friend and of
that wife whom he loves so sincerely, and yet throwing them into each
other's arms in a compounded mood of priggish bravado and authentic
affection. The friend, apprehensive lest he may have a bad conscience,
is anxious to take a room in the village.
THE WIFE. Why don't you stay with us? Out with it.
THE FRIEND. I don't know. I think you ought to be left
quiet. Besides it might happen that we should get fed up
with each other.
THE WIFE. Are you fed up with us already? I tell you, it
won't do. I tell you that if you stay out there in the
village, people will begin to talk.
THE FRIEND. Talk? What will they talk about?
THE WIFE. Oh, you know perfectly well how stories get
put together.
THE SON. You stay here--there's an end of it. Let them
talk. If you stay here, it goes without saying that
you're my wife's lover, and if you stay in the village,
it goes without saying that you've broken with each
other, or that I've kicked you out. Consequently, I
think it more honourable for you to be regarded as her
lover--eh, what?
THE FRIEND. You certainly express yourself with
considerable lucidity; but in a case like this, I'd
rather prefer to consider which is honourable for you
two.
As we have already hinted, an additional bitterness had been introduced
into Strindberg's misogynism by the unhappiness of his own first
marriage, which was dissolved in 1889. It is this marriage which
Strindberg celebrates in that phenomenal piece of official sexual
autobiography, _The Confession of a Fool_, which has successfully
scandalised the whole Continent of Europe. In comparison with this book
the _New Machiavelli_ is but the tamest Sunday-school reading, and
the romantic confessions of Mr. George Moore the merest healthy pranks
of robustious youth. This work throughout has the real spontaneity of
the genuine diary rather than the studied frankness of the elaborate
literary artificer. The young librarian is in Stockholm. A young lady
makes advances to him. "She has an adventurous appearance, hovering
between the artist, the blue-stocking, the daughter of the house,
the _fille de joie_, the new woman, and the coquette." She presses
her suit, looks at him in an unambiguous manner, and "he only owes
his virtue to her extraordinary ugliness." He is introduced to her
friends, the Baron and Baroness X. He becomes the _ami de famille_.
But the demon of sex is at work, and simply through keeping step with
her in walking he will experience a unification of their whole nervous
systems. Honourable man that he is, he runs away from danger, starts
for Paris in a steamship, and is seen off amid the combined tears
of the married pair. The ship sails. His nerves break down; and in
an hysterical paroxysm he insists on being disembarked, is attended
by a priest and doctor at a small hotel, and returns post-haste to
Stockholm. The Baroness runs away to a watering-place. But matters only
progress with even greater rapidity on her return. The Baron is largely
occupied with a cousin; and an official declaration takes place between
the wife and the lover. With ultra-modern honesty they immediately
apprise the husband, who while giving them the widest margin within
which to exercise their platonic affections, yet reposes implicit trust
in their combined honour. A financial crash, however, disposes of the
Baron; and the gentleman is landed with his lady. There ensue all the
joys and agonies of a ten-years' union. The couple are linked in the
burning bonds of a mutual love and a mutual hate. The author has to
sacrifice his own well-being and career to push forward his wife in
her amateurish efforts in journalism and acting. From that time "legal
prostitution enters into the marriage...." She belongs to the public,
she makes up and dresses for the public, and she consequently becomes
"a prostitute who will finally send in her bill for such and such
services."
The moods alternate with the regularity of a pendulum. If at one moment
"the nest of love has become transformed into a dog-kennel," and the
author is morbidly jealous of nearly every man and every woman with
whom his wife has the slightest acquaintance, strikes his wife, and
endeavours to drown her; it is only subsequently, in the last stages of
servile uxoriousness, to idolise her again as a martyr and as a saint.
Six times does he leave her (expending on one occasion in debauchery
the proceeds of his pawned wedding-ring), and six times does he return,
only to draw up at last this monstrous dossier of his conjugal life:
"The story is at an end, my beloved one; I have revenged myself; the
account is squared."
Not altogether inexplicably, Strindberg has been much attacked on the
score of this book. He has been charged with wickedly defaming an
innocent and deserving woman. Yet even though the book be objectively
false, it is subjectively true. It is impossible to doubt its
prodigious sincerity, even though this merely be the implicit sincerity
of persecution mania. Every single nuance of the emotions of a man who
honestly thinks that he is being unscrupulously exploited is faithfully
described. The book may shock by its vehement coldness, its abnormal
callousness, its matter-of-fact explicitness; yet from the literary
standpoint, its entire absence of affectation, the drastic ease of
its simplicity, the swift naturalness of its diction, cannot fail to
convince. It stands out from the whole of European literature as the
superlative masterpiece of suspicious love and monstrous morbid hate.
In the great novel, _By the Open Sea_ (1890), Strindberg's Nietzschean
mood achieves its grand zenith. The hero, Axel Borg (whom we may
already remember from _The Red Room_), "instead of, like the weak
Christians, embracing a God outside himself, took what he could seize
with his own hands and in his own self, and sought to make his own
personality into a complete type of humanity." Borg, who combines with
the ideals of the superman the hyper-sensitiveness of the neurotic,
lives the single life as an inspector of fishery in a little village on
the Swedish coast, where the sea "frightens not like the forest with
its dark mystery, but brings quietude like an open great big true eye."
He is pursued and caught by an over-sexed young woman, realises her
worthlessness, and sails out to commit suicide.
"Out toward the new Star of Christmas, ran his voyage,
out over the Sea, the All-Mother, from whose bosom the
first spark of life was kindled, the inexhaustible
source of fertility and love, life's origin and life's
foe."
This book, with its splendid nature-descriptions, the tragic dignity
of its hero, and the azure swiftness of its limpid style, is one
of Strindberg's most impressive feats. Yet even here the author's
characteristic traits can be distinctly traced. The noble male is
ruined by a despicable woman; while here, too, the cosmic mysticism of
the professed atheist (whose mood can perhaps be best expressed by the
worn _cliché_ of "being in tune with the infinite"), reveals only too
clearly the emotional bias of a fundamentally religious temperament.
This temperament was soon to manifest itself in the most tragic form.
Jaded with literature, and unhappy again in his second marriage with
the Austrian authoress, Frida Uhl, in 1893, Strindberg embarked on
the study of chemistry, took rooms in the Latin quarter, attended the
Sorbonne laboratories, and imagined that he had revolutionised science
by the discovery of a new element in sulphur. He had by now attained
the, to him, crucial period of the late "forties," and the chronic
excesses of his emotionalism now assumed a religious form, to the
accompaniment of the most acute mania of persecution.
His experiences in these years, 1895-8, are described in the _Inferno_
and the _Legends_, works which the mystic and the psychologist can read
with equal if heterogeneous edification. In these books, which are
based on Strindberg's diaries during the actual time, the aberrations
of a disorganised brain are set out with the most unconscious literary
art. His delusions became systematised with all the ingenuity of the
_paranoiac_. Every casual suggestion thrown up by his memory, or the
events and associations of every-day life, every bit of science that
he had ever studied or of mysticism that he had ever felt, are all
utilised to build the infernal scheme of his mania. He is "the innocent
sacrifice of an unjust persecution," the prey of unknown powers, the
conducting-point of electrical streams from unknown agencies. He asks
for a miracle and sees in the heavens the ten commandments and the name
of Jehovah. His friend Popoffski (in point of fact, the Polish-German
novelist Przybeszewski) has come to Paris; it is with the sole object
of killing him by poison. His usual seat at his usual café is occupied;
he is the victim of a universal conspiracy. Eventually the hells of
his torment burn themselves out in an abject ecstasy of atonement, in
Catholicism, Swedenborgianism, and the bastard hybrid of a scientific
occultism.
From this time the religious obsession sits upon most, if not
all, of his subsequent work. To this mood are due the officially
religious dramas _To Damascus, Midsummer_, the extremely weak
_Advent and Easter_, his new-found theory of _The Conscious Will in
the World-History_, his historical dramas (where the characters,
particularly Luther, were too subjectively conceived to be historically
convincing), and his _Dream-Play_ (where telephones, lawyers, theatres,
enchanted woods, Indra's daughter, military officers, married
couples, casinos, poets, and ballet-dancers all combine to weave the
filmy phantasmagoria of a Buddhistic reality). We may also mention
in this connection the _Blue Books_, the official synthesis of his
life (a series of miniature essays on such apparently heterogeneous
subjects as, _inter alia_, Troy, Christ, electro-chemistry, botany,
surds, Assyriology, optics, geology, Hammurabi, astrology, morphium,
Swedenborgianism, spermatozoic analysis, mystic numbers, Kipling, and
Jehovah).
Although, speaking generally, Strindberg achieved his masterpieces
during the period of his atheism, many of his later works have
indisputable value. The play _Intoxication_ (1900), for instance
(though the killing through sheer unconscious force of will, by the
hero, of the child of one mistress, in order to gratify the caprice of
another, may strike the unimaginative critic as slightly melodramatic,
and his eventual retirement into a Catholic monastery as somewhat of an
anti-climax), is a work of extraordinary power.
So also is the _Death Dance_ (1900), in which the middle-aged captain
and his _passée_ wife grind each other to ruin and despair beneath
the mutual mill-stones of their hate, "that most unreasonable hate,
without ground, without object, but also without end." Does not the
author plumb the extreme depths of human malevolence in the passage in
which the wife in company with her cousin is expecting her paralytic
husband to fall down dead?
KARL. What are you looking at over there, dear, by the
wall?
ALICE. I'm seeing if he's tumbled down.
KARL. Has he tumbled down?
ALICE. NO, more's the pity. He deceives me in everything.
We would also mention the Maeterlinckian beauty of the _Crown Bride_
and _Swan White_ (1900), the heroine of which is an idealisation of
the author's third wife, the actress, Harriet Bosse; the delicate
fantasy of _Tales_ (1908); and the _Swedish Miniatures_, of which the
_Sacrifice Dance_ in particular is a positive masterpiece of swift
bloodiness.
Cruelty, moreover, is an integral element in at any rate primitive
religion. This may conceivably explain why, faithfully fulfilling
what he personally professed to have found a joyless duty, Strindberg
successfully performed in _Black Flags_, his celebrated _roman à clef,_
the intellectual flaying and dismemberment of all Stockholm Bohemia.
It is amusing to remember that he successfully consulted the oracle
of the Book of Job before he published the work in 1905, to face the
protesting shrieks of his victims with all the devout conscience of
some early priest of Thor who gravely officiates at some blood-stained
human sacrifice.
It is outside the purpose of this essay to discuss whether these
descriptions of the intellectual and sexual clique of the Swedish
capital constitute a fair portrait or a monstrous defamation, or
whether, for instance, Hanna Paj is a malignant travesty or a
euphemistic delineation of that lady whom all who have the slightest
acquaintance with the Continental Feminist Movement will immediately
recognise.
As a sheer piece of satire the book waves its black flag unchallenged
amid all the fluttering multicoloured pennons of modern European
literature. What matter if the characterisation be true or false? So
far, at any rate, as the non-Swedish reader is concerned, the illusion
is complete. Kilo, "the little bookseller, with the suffering eyes
of a sick dog"; Falkenstrom, the idealist, whose wife is induced by
her bosom friend to join some alleged monstrous cosmopolitan masonic
sisterhood; Hanna Paj, the feminist lecturer, the fury with the flag
of hate on which was written the device, "Revenge on Man"; Smartman,
the debonair intriguing editor with his two sets of rooms--all these
pictures of "the galley-slaves of ambition linked together in the
fetters of interest, these murderers and thieves who steal each other's
thoughts, addresses, friends, and personalities," are perfectly
convincing. Above all there stands out the delineation of Lars Peter
Zachrisson, "the intellectual cannibal," the "broker of literature, the
promoter of mutual admiration societies, the speculator in reputations,
the founder of syndicates for the manufacture of celebrities," the
morphia maniac, the tippler "who laughs humorously in his moustache and
weeps tears of whisky from his eyes," the father of "that resurrected
corpse, that wandering shame, whose face was known to all, and who was
branded with his own name." And how devilish is the description of this
domestic hell of human hate, where he mocks his wife on her failing
charms and encourages her gluttony with the specific object of spoiling
her figure, where the mother in her turn brings up her children like a
breed of dachshunds whom she sets to bait their father, and where the
two spouses yet feel some inexplicable need of being together in the
same room for the purpose of that mutual nagging and mutual reviling
which constituted the chief interest in their miserable existence.
To sum up, we have seen how throughout his life the persecution mania
of Strindberg expressed itself in his attitude to sex, religion, and
society, as like at once some veritable Rhadamanthine recorder, and
some cowering victim of divine vengeance, he dispenses and fears those
words of doom in his black adamant of diction. Yet it is impossible
casually to brush the man aside as some mere _paranoiac_. The very
torments of his soul fructified in the stupendous genius of his
intellectual production. With all his perversities, with all his
aberrations, Strindberg remains the blackest, and in his own particular
spheres the most drastic, intelligence in the whole of our European
literature.