insurgency of his earlier period, or was his attitude merely a
theatrical pose and his social enthusiasm a ranting declamation? In
either case, there opens up this other question: Have we reason to doubt
the sincerity of the mental changes that were yet to follow,--the
genuineness of his pessimism, occultism, and, in the final stage, of his
religious conversion? His unexampled hardihood in reversing his opinions
and going dead against his convictions could be illustrated in nearly
every sphere of thought. At one time a glowing admirer of Rousseau and
loudly professing his gospel of nature, he forsook this allegiance, and
chose as his new idol Rousseau's very antipode, Voltaire. For many years
he was a democrat of the purest water, identified himself with the
proletarian cause, and acted as the fiery champion of the poor
labor-driven masses against their oppressors; but one fine day, no
matter whether it came about directly through his contact with Nietzsche
or otherwise, he repudiated socialism, scornfully denouncing it as a
tattered remnant of his cast-off Christianity, and arrayed himself on
the side of the elect, or self-elect, against the "common herd," the
"much-too-many." License for the best to govern the rest, became
temporarily his battle-cry; and his political ideal suggested nothing
less completely absurd than a republic presided over by an oligarchy of
autocrats. His unsurpassed reputation as an anti-feminist would hardly
prepare us to find his earlier works fairly aglow with sympathy for the
woman cause. He held at one time, as did Tolstoy, that art and poetry
have a detrimental effect upon the natural character; for which reason
the peasant is a more normal being than the lettered man. Especially was
he set against the drama, on the ground that it throws the public mind
into confusion by its failure to differentiate sharply between the
author's own opinions and those of the characters. Literature, he held,
should pattern itself after a serious newspaper: it should seek to
influence, not entertain. Not only did he drop this pedantic restriction
of literature in the end, but in his own practice he had always defied
it, because, despite his fierce campaign against art, he could not
overcome the force of his artistic impulses. And so in other provinces
of thought, too, he reversed his judgment with a temerity and swiftness
that greatly offended the feelings and perplexed the intelligence of his
followers for the time being and justified the question whether
Strindberg had any principles at all. In politics he was by quick turns
Anarchist and Socialist, Radical and Conservative, Republican and
Aristocrat, Communist and Egoist; in religion, Pietist, Protestant,
Deist, Atheist, Occultist, and Roman Catholic. And yet unquestionably he
was honest. To blame him merely because he changed his views, and be it
never so radically, would be blaming a man for exercising his right to
develop. In any man of influence, an unalterable permanency of opinion
would be even more objectionable than a frequent shift of his point of
view. In recent times the presumable length of a person's intellectual
usefulness has been a live subject of discussion which has resulted in
some legislation of very questionable wisdom, for instance the setting
of an arbitrary age limit for the active service of high-grade teachers.
In actual experience men are too old to teach, or through any other
function to move the minds of younger people in a forward direction,
whenever they have lost the ability to change their own mind. Yet at all
events, an eminent author's right of self-reversal must not be exercised
at random; he should refrain from the propagation of new opinions that
have not ripened within himself. Which is the same as saying that he
should stick to his old opinions until he finds himself inwardly
compelled to abandon them. But as a matter of fact, a man like
Strindberg, propelled by an unbridled imagination, alert with romantic
tendencies, nervously overstrung, kept constantly under a strain by his
morbidly sensitive temperament,--and whose brain is consequently a
seething chaos of conflicting ideas, is never put to the necessity of
changing his mind; his mind keeps changing itself.
It must be as difficult for the literary historian to do Strindberg full
justice as it was for the great eccentric himself; when in taking stock,
as it were, of his mental equipment, during one of his protracted
periods of despondency, he summed himself up in the following
picturesque simile: "A monstrous conglomeration, changing its forms
according to the observer's point of view and possessing no more reality
than the rainbow that is visible to the eyes and yet does not exist."
His evolution may be tracked, however, in the detailed autobiography in
which he undertook, by a rigorous application of Hippolyte Taine's
well-known theory and method, to account for his temperamental
peculiarities on the basis of heredity and the milieu and to describe
the gradual transformation of his character through education and the
external pressure of contemporary intellectual movements. This
remarkable work is like a picture book of ideals undermined, hollowed,
and shattered; a perverse compound of cynicism and passion, it is
unspeakably loathsome to the sense of beauty and yet, in the last
artistic reckoning, not without great beauty of its own. It divides the
story of Strindberg's life into these consecutive parts: The Son of the
Servant; The Author; The Evolution of a Soul; The Confession of a Fool;
Inferno; Legends; The Rupture; Alone. The very titles signalize the
brutal frankness, or, shall we say, terrible sincerity of a tale that
rummages without piety among the most sacred privacies, and drags forth
from intimate nooks and corners sorrow and squalor and shame enough to
have wrecked a dozen average existences. There is no mistaking or
evading the challenge hurled by this story: See me as I am, stripped of
conventional lies and pretensions! Look upon my naked soul, covered with
scars and open sores. Behold me in my spasms of love and hate, now in
demoniacal transports, now prostrate with anguish! And if you want to
know how I came to be what I am, consider my ancestry, my bringing up,
my social environment, and be sure also to pocket your own due share of
the blame for my destruction!--Certainly Strindberg's autobiography is
not to be recommended as a graduation gift for convent-bred young
ladies, or as a soothing diversion for convalescents, but if accepted in
a proper sense, it will be found absorbing, informative, and even
helpful.
Strindberg never forgave his father for having married below his
station. He felt that the good blood of the Strindbergs,--respectable
merchants and ministers and country gentlemen,--was worsened by the
proletarian strain imported into it through a working girl named
Eleonore Ulrike Norling, the mother of August Strindberg and his eleven
brothers and sisters. During August's childhood the family lived in
extremely straitened circumstances. When a dozen people live cooped up
in three rooms, some of them are more than likely to have the joy of
youth crushed out of them and crowded from the premises. Here was the
first evil that darkened Strindberg's life: he simply was cheated out of
his childhood.
School was no happier place for him than home. His inordinate pride,
only sharpened by the consciousness of his parents' poverty which
bordered on pauperism, threw him into a state of perpetual rebellion
against comrades and teachers. And all this time his inner life was
tossed hither and thither by a general intellectual and emotional
restlessness due to an insatiable craving for knowledge. At fifteen
years of age he had reached a full conviction on the irredeemable
evilness of life; and concluded, in a moment of religious exaltation, to
dedicate his own earthly existence to the vicarious expiation of
universal sin through the mortification of the flesh. Then, of a sudden,
he became a voracious reader of rationalistic literature, and turned
atheist with almost inconceivable dispatch, but soon was forced back by
remorse into the pietistic frame of mind,--only to pass through another
reaction immediately after. At this time he claims that earthly life is
a punishment or a probation; but that it lies in man's power to make it
endurable by freeing himself from the social restraints. He has become a
convert to the fantastic doctrine of Jean Jacques Rousseau, that man is
good by nature but has been depraved by civilization. Now in his
earliest twenties, he embraces communism with all its implications,--free
love, state parenthood, public ownership of utilities, equal
division of the fruits of labor, and so forth,--as the sole
and sure means of salvation for humanity.
In the "Swiss Stories," subtitled "Utopias in Reality,"(13) Strindberg
demonstrated to his own satisfaction the smooth and practical workings
of that doctrine. It was difficult for him to understand why the major
part of the world seemed so hesitant about adopting so tempting and
equitable a scheme of living. Yet, for his own person, too, he soon
disavowed socialism, because under a socialistic régime the individual
would be liable to have his ideas put into uniform, and the remotest
threat of interference with his freedom of thought was something this
fanatical apostle of liberty could not brook.
(13) The stories deal among other things with the harmonious communal
life in Godin's _Phalanstère_. Strindberg wrote two descriptions of
it, one before, the other after visiting the colony.
In the preface to the "Utopias," he had referred to himself as "a
convinced socialist, like all sensible people"; whereas now he writes:
"Idealism and Socialism are two maladies born of laziness." Having thus
scientifically diagnosed the disease and prescribed the one true
specific for it, namely--how simple!--the total abolition of the
industries, he resumes the preaching of Rousseauism in its simon-pure
form, orders every man to be his maid-of-all-work and jack-of-all-trades,
puts the world on a vegetarian diet, and then wonders why
the socialists denounce and revile him as a turncoat and an
apostate.
* * * * *
The biography throws an especially vivid light on Strindberg's relation
to one of the most important factors of socialism, to wit, the question
of woman's rights. His position on this issue is merely a phase of that
extreme and practically isolated position in regard to woman in general
that has more than any other single element determined the feeling of
the public towards him and by consequence fixed his place in
contemporary literature. That this should be so is hardly unfair,
because no other element has entered so deeply into the structure and
fibre of his thought and feeling.
Strindberg, as has been stated, was not from the outset, or perchance
constitutionally, an anti-feminist. In "The Red Room" he preaches
equality of the sexes even in marriage. The thesis of the book is that
man and woman are not antagonistic phenomena of life, rather they are
modifications of the same phenomenon, made for mutual completion; hence,
they can only fulfill their natural destiny through close coöperative
comradeship. But there were two facts that prevented Strindberg from
proceeding farther along this line of thought. One was his incorrigible
propensity to contradiction, the other his excessive subjectiveness
which kept him busy building up theories on the basis of personal
experience. The prodigious feminist movement launched in Scandinavia by
Ibsen and Bjoernson was very repugnant to him, because he felt, not
without some just reason, that the movement was for a great many people
little more than a fad. So long as art and literature are influenced by
fashion, so long there will be and should be revolts against the vogue.
Moreover, Strindberg felt that the movement was being carried too far.
He was prepared to accompany Ibsen some distance on the way of reform,
but refused to subscribe to his verdict that the whole blame for our
crying social maladjustments rests with the unwillingness of men to
allot any rights whatsoever to women.
Strindberg's play, "Sir Bengt's Wife," printed in 1882, but of much
earlier origin, is interpreted by Brandes as a symbolical portrayal of
feminine life in Scandinavia during the author's early manhood. The
leading feminine figure, a creature wholly incapable of understanding or
appreciating the nobler traits in man, is nevertheless treated with
sympathy, on the whole. She is represented,--like Selma Bratsberg in
Ibsen's "The League of Youth," and Nora Helmer, in "A Doll's House,"--as
the typical and normal victim of a partial and unfair training. Her
faults of judgment and errors of temper are due to the fact so
forcefully descanted upon by Selma, that women are not permitted to
share the interests and anxieties of their husbands. We are expressly
informed by Strindberg that this drama was intended, in the first place,
as an attack upon the romantic proclivities of feminine education; in
the second, as an illustration of the power of love to subdue the will;
in the third, as a defense of the thesis that woman's love is of a
higher quality than man's; and lastly, as a vindication of the right of
woman to be her own master. Again, in "Married" he answers the query,
Shall women vote? distinctly in the affirmative, although here the fixed
idea about the congenital discordance between the sexes, and the
identification of love with a struggle for supremacy, has already seized
hold of him.
To repeat, there was at first nothing absolutely preposterous about
Strindberg's position in regard to the woman movement. On the contrary,
his view might have been endorsed as a not altogether unwholesome
corrective for the ruling fashion of dealing with the issue by the
advocacy of extremes. But by force of his supervening personal grievance
against the sex, Strindberg's anti-feminism became in the long run the
fixed pole about which gravitated his entire system of social and
ethical thought. His campaign against feminism, which otherwise could
have served a good purpose by curbing wild militancy, was defeated by
its own exaggerations. Granting that feminists had gone too far in the
denunciation of male brutality and despotism, Strindberg went still
farther in the opposite direction, when he deliberately set out to lay
bare the character of woman by dissecting some of her most diabolical
incarnations. As has already been said, he was utterly incapable of
objective thinking, and under the sting of his miseries in love and
marriage, dislike of woman turned into hatred and hatred into frenzy.
Henceforth, the entire spectacle of life presented itself to his
distorted vision as a perpetual state of war between the sexes: on the
one side he saw the male, strong of mind and heart, but in the
generosity of strength guileless and over-trustful; on the other side,
the female, weak of body and intellect, but shrewd enough to exploit her
frailness by linking iniquity to impotence and contriving by her
treacherous cunning to enslave her natural superior:--it is the story of
Samson and Delilah made universal in its application. Love is shown up
as the trap in which man is caught to be shorn of his power. The case
against woman is classically drawn up in "The Father," one of the
strangest and at the same time most powerful tragedies of Strindberg.
The principals of the plot stand for the typical character difference
between the sexes as Strindberg sees it; the man being kind-hearted,
good-natured, and aspiring, whereas the woman, setting an example for
all his succeeding portraits of women, is cunning, though unintelligent
and coarse-grained, soulless, yet insanely ambitious and covetous of
power. In glaring contrast to the situation made so familiar by Ibsen,
we here see the man struggling away from the clutches of a woman who
declares frankly that she has never looked at a man without feeling
conscious of her superiority over him. In this play the man, a person of
ideals and real ability, who is none other than Strindberg himself in
one of his matrimonial predicaments, fails to extricate himself from the
snare, and ends--both literally and figuratively--by being put into the
straitjacket.
Without classing Strindberg as one of the great world dramatists, it
would be narrow-minded, after experiencing the gripping effect of some
of his plays, to deny them due recognition, for indeed they would be
remarkable for their perspicacity and penetration, even if they were
devoid of any value besides. They contain the keenest analyses ever made
of the vicious side of feminine character, obtained by specializing, as
it were, on the more particularly feminine traits of human depravity.
Assuredly the procedure is onesided, but the delineation of a single
side of life is beyond peradventure a legitimate artistic enterprise as
long as it is not palmed upon us as an accurate and complete picture.
Unfortunately, Strindberg's abnormal vision falsifies the things he
looks at, and, being steeped in his insuperable prejudice, his pictures
of life, in spite of the partial veracity they possess, never rise above
the level of caricatures.
He was incompetent to pass judgment upon an individual woman separately;
to him all women were alike, and that means, all unmitigatedly bad! To
the objection raised by one of the characters in "The Father": "Oh,
there are so many kinds of women," the author's mouthpiece makes this
clinching answer: "Modern investigation has pronounced that there is
only one kind."
The autobiography of Strindberg is largely inspired by his unreasoning
hatred of women; the result, in the main, of his three unfortunate
ventures into the uncongenial field of matrimony. In its first part, the
account of his life is not without some traces of healthy humor, but as
the story progresses, his entire philosophy of life becomes more and
more aberrant under the increasing pressure of that obsession. He gets
beside himself at the mere mention of anything feminine, and blindly
hits away, let his bludgeon land where it will; logic, common sense, and
common decency go to the floor before his vehement and brutal assault.
Every woman is a born liar and traitor. Her sole aim in life is to
thrive parasitically upon the revenue of her favors. Since marriage and
prostitution cannot provide a living for all, the oversupply now clamor
for admission to the work-mart; but they are incompetent and lazy, and
inveterate shirkers of responsibility. With triumphant malice he points
to the perfidious readiness of woman to perform her tasks by proxy, that
is, to delegate them to hired substitutes: her children are tended and
taught by governesses and teachers; her garments are made by dressmakers
and seamstresses; the duties of her household she unloads on
servants,--and from selfish considerations of vanity, comfort, and love
of pleasure, she withdraws even from the primary maternal obligation and
lets her young be nourished at the breast of a stranger. Strindberg in
his rage never stops to think that the deputies in these cases,--cooks
and housemaids and nurses and so forth,--themselves belong to the female
sex, by which fact the impeachment is in large part invalidated.
The play bearing the satirical title "Comrades" makes a special
application of the theory about the pre-established antagonism of the
sexes. In a situation similar to that in "The Father," husband and wife
are shown in a yet sharper antithesis of character: a man of sterling
character and ability foiled by a woman in all respects his inferior,
yet imperiously determined to dominate him. At first she seems to
succeed in her ambition, and in the same measure as she assumes a more
and more mannish demeanor, the husband's behavior grows more and more
effeminate. But the contest leads to results opposite to those in "The
Father." Here, the man, once he is brought to a full realization of his
plight, arouses himself from his apathy, reasserts his manhood, and, in
the ensuing fight for supremacy, routs the usurper and comes into his
own. The steps by which he passes through revolt from subjection to
self-liberation, are cleverly signaled by his outward transformation, as
he abandons the womanish style of dressing imposed on him by his wife's
whim and indignantly flings into a corner the feminine costume which she
would make him wear at the ball.
* * * * *
Leaving aside, then, all question as to their artistic value,
Strindberg's dramas are deserving of attention as experiments in a
fairly unexplored field of analytic psychology. They are the first
literary creations of any great importance begotten by such bitter
hatred of woman. The anti-feminism of Strindberg's predecessors, not
excepting that arch-misogynist, Arthur Schopenhauer himself, sprang from
contempt, not from abhorrence and abject fear. In Strindberg, misogyny
turns into downright gynophobia. To him, woman is not an object of
disdain, but the cruel and merciless persecutor of man. In order to
disclose the most dangerous traits of the feminine soul, Strindberg
dissects it by a method that corresponds closely to Ibsen's astonishing
demonstration of masculine viciousness. The wide-spread dislike for
Strindberg's dramas is due, in equal parts, to the detestableness of his
male characters, and to the optimistic disbelief of the general public
in the reality of womanhood as he represents it. Strindberg's
portraiture of the sex appears as a monstrous slander, principally
because no other painter has ever placed the model into the same
disadvantageous light, and the authenticity of his pictures is rendered
suspicious by their abnormal family resemblance. He was obsessed with
the petrifying vision of a uniform cruel selfishness staring out of
every woman's face: countess, courtezan, or kitchen maid, all are cast
in the same gorgon mold.
Strindberg's aversion towards women was probably kindled into action, as
has already been intimated, by his disgust at the sudden irruption of
woman worship into literature; but, as has also been made clear, only
the disillusionments and grievances of his private experience hardened
that aversion into implacable hatred. At first he simply declined to
ally himself with the feminist cult, because the women he knew seemed
unworthy of being worshipped,--little vain dolls, frivolous coquettes,
and pedants given to domestic tyranny, of such the bulk was made up.
Under the maddening spur of his personal misfortunes, his feeling passed
from weariness to detestation, from detestation to a bitter mixture of
fear and furious hate. He conceived it as his supreme mission and
central purpose in life to unmask the demon with the angel's face, to
tear the drapings from the idol and expose to view the hideous ogress
that feeds on the souls of men. Woman, in Strindberg's works, is a bogy,
constructed out of the vilest ingredients that enter into the
composition of human nature, with a kind of convulsive life infused by a
remnant of great artistic power. And this grewsome fabric of a diseased
imagination, like Frankenstein's monster, wreaks vengeance on its maker.
His own mordant desire for her is the lash that drives him irresistibly
to his destruction.
It requires no profound psychologic insight to divine in this odious
chimera the deplorable abortion of a fine ideal. The distortion of truth
emanates in Strindberg's work, as it does in any significant satire or
caricature, from indignation over the contrast between a lofty
conception and a disappointing reality. What, after all, can be the
mission of this hard-featured gallery of females,--peevish, sullen,
impudent, grasping, violent, lecherous, malignant, and vindictive,--if
it is not to mark pravity and debasement with a stigma in the name of a
pure and noble womanhood?
* * * * *
It should not be left unmentioned that we owe to August Strindberg some
works of great perfection fairly free from the black obsession and with
a constructive and consistently idealistic tendency: splendid
descriptions of a quaint people and their habitat, tinged with a fine
sense of humor, as in "The Hemsoe-Dwellers"; charming studies of
landscape and of floral and animal life, in the "Portraits of Flowers
and Animals"; the colossal work on the Swedish People, once before
referred to, a history conceived and executed in a thoroughly modern
scientific spirit; two volumes of "Swedish Fortunes and Adventures";
most of his historic dramas also are of superior order. But these works
lie outside the scope of the more specific discussion of Strindberg as a
mystic and an eccentric to which this sketch is devoted. We may conclude
by briefly considering the final phases of Strindberg's checkered
intellectual career, and by summing up his general significance for the
age.
It will be recalled that during the middle period of his life, (in
1888), Strindberg came into personal touch with Nietzsche. The effect of
the latter's sensational philosophy is clearly perceptible in the works
of that period, notably in "Tschandala" and "By the Open Sea."
Evidently, Nietzsche, at first, was very congenial to him. For both men
were extremely aristocratic in their instincts. For a while, Strindberg
endorsed unqualifiedly the heterodox ethics of the towering paranoiac.
For one thing, that philosophy supplied fresh food and fuel to his
burning rage against womankind, and that was enough to bribe him into
swallowing, for the time being, the entire substance of Nietzsche's
fantastic doctrine. He took the same ground as Nietzsche, that the race
had deteriorated in consequence of its sentimentality, namely through
the systematic protection of physical and mental inferiority and
unchecked procreation of weaklings. He seconded Nietzsche's motion that
society should exterminate its parasites, instead of pampering them.
Mankind can only be reinvigorated if the strong and healthy are helped
to come into their own. The dreams of the pacifists are fatal to the
pragmatic virtues and to the virility of the race. The greatest need is
an aggressive campaign for the moral and intellectual sanitation of the
world. So let the brain rule over the heart,--and so forth in the same
strain.