influence. The alienation was due as much to his general instability as
to the disparity between his pessimistic temper and the joyous
exaltation of Zarathustra-ism. His striking reversion to orthodoxy was
by no means illogical. Between pessimism and faith there exists a
relation that is not very far to seek. When a person has forfeited his
peace of soul and cannot find grace before his own conscience, he might
clutch as a last hope the promise of vicarious redemption. Extending the
significance of his own personal experience to everything within his
horizon, and erecting a dogmatic system upon this tenuous
generalisation, Strindberg reached the conviction that the purpose of
living is to suffer, a conviction that threw his philosophy well into
line with the religious and ethical ideas of the middle age. Yet even at
this juncture his cynicism did not desert him, as witness this comment
of his: "Religion must be a punishment, because nobody gets religion who
does not have a bad conscience." This avowal preceded his saltatory
approach to Roman Catholicism.
In the later volumes of his autobiography he minutely describes the
successive crises through which he passed in his agonizing search for
certitude and salvation before his spirit found rest in the idea of
Destiny which formerly to him was synonymous with Fate and now became
synonymous with Providence. "Inferno" pictures his existence as a
protracted and unbroken nightmare. He turned determinist, then fatalist,
then mystic. The most trifling incidents of his daily life were spelt
out according to Swedenborg's "Science of Correspondences" and thereby
assumed a deep and terrifying significance. In the most trivial events,
such as the opening or shutting of a door, or the curve etched by a
raindrop on a dusty pane of glass, he perceived intimations from the
occult power that directed his life. Into the most ordinary occurrence
of the day he read a divine order, or threat, or chastisement. He was
tormented by terrible dreams and visions; in the guise of ferocious
beasts, his own sins agonized his flesh. And in the midst of all these
tortures he studied and practised the occult arts: magic, astrology,
necromancy, alchemy; he concocted gold by hermetical science! To all
appearances utterly deranged, he was still lucid enough at intervals to
carry on chemical, botanical, and physiological experiments of
legitimate worth. Then his reason cleared up once again and put a sudden
end to an episode which he has described in these words: "To go in quest
of God and to find the devil,--that is what happened to me."
He took leave of Swedenborg as he had taken leave of Nietzsche, yet
retained much gratitude for him; the great Scandinavian seer had brought
him back to God, so he averred, even though the conversion was effected
by picturings of horror.
"Legends," the further continuation of his self-history, shows him
vividly at his closest contact with the Catholic Church. But the most
satisfactory portion of the autobiography from a human point of view,
and from a literary point perhaps altogether the best thing Strindberg
has done, is the closing book of the series, entitled "Alone." He wrote
it at the age of fifty, during a period of comparative tranquillity of
mind, and that fact is manifested by the composure and moderation of its
style. Now at last his storm-tossed soul seems to have found a haven. He
accepts his destiny, and resigns himself to believing, since knowledge
is barred.
But even this state of serenity harbored no permanent peace; it
signified merely a temporary suspension of those terrific internal
combats.
In Strindberg's case, religious conversion is not an edifying, but on
the contrary a morbid and saddening spectacle; it is equal to a
declaration of complete spiritual bankruptcy. He turns to the church
after finding all other pathways to God blocked. His type of
Christianity does not hang together with the labors and struggles of his
secular life. A break with his past can be denied to no man; least of
all to a leader of men. Only, if he has deserted the old road, he should
be able to lead in the new; he must have a new message if he sees fit to
cancel the old. Strindberg, however, has nothing to offer at the end. He
stands before us timorous and shrinking, the accuser of his fellows
turned self-accuser, a beggar stretching forth empty, trembling hands
imploring forgiveness of his sins and the salvation of his soul through
gracious mediation. His moral asseverations are either blank truisms, or
intellectual aberrations. Strindberg has added nothing to the stock of
human understanding. A preacher, of course, is not in duty bound to
generate original thought. Indeed if such were to be exacted, our
pulpits would soon be as sparsely peopled as already are the pews.
Ministers who are wondering hard why so many people stay away from
church might well stop to consider whether the reason is not that a
large portion of mankind has already secured, theoretically, a religious
or ethical basis of life more or less identical with the one which
churches content themselves with offering. The greatest religious
teacher of modern times, Leo Tolstoy, was not by any means a bringer of
new truths. The true secret of the tremendous power which nevertheless
he wielded over the souls of men was that he extended the practical
application of what he believed. If, therefore, we look for a lesson in
Strindberg's life as recited by himself, we shall not find it in his
religious conversion.
* * * * *
Taken in its entirety, his voluminous yet fragmentary life history is
one of the most painful human documents on record. One can hardly peruse
it without asking: Was Strindberg insane? It is a question which he
often put to himself when remorse and self-reproach gnawed at his
conscience and when he fancied himself scorned and persecuted by all his
former friends. "Why are you so hated?" he asks himself in one of his
dialogues, and this is his answer: "I could not endure to see mankind
suffer, and so I said and wrote: 'Free yourselves, I shall help.' And so
I said to the poor: 'Do not let the rich suck your blood.' And to woman:
'Do not let man oppress you.' And to the children: 'Do not obey your
parents if they are unjust.' The consequences,--well, they are quite
incomprehensible; for of a sudden I had both sides against me, rich and
poor, men and women, parents and children; add to that sickness and
poverty, disgraceful pauperism, my divorce, lawsuits, exile, loneliness,
and now, to top the climax,--do you believe that I am insane?" From his
ultra-subjective point of view, the explanation here given of the total
collapse of his fortunes is fairly accurate, at least in the essential
aspects. Still, many great men have been pursued by a similar conflux of
calamities. Overwhelming misfortunes are the surest test of manhood. How
high a person bears up his head under the blows of fate is the best gage
of his stature. But Strindberg, in spite of his colossal physique, was
not cast in the heroic mold. The breakdown of his fortunes caused him to
turn traitor to himself, to recant and destroy his intellectual past.
Whether he was actually insane is a question for psychiaters to settle;
normal he certainly was not. In medical opinion his modes of reacting to
the obstructions and difficulties of the daily life were conclusively
symptomatic of neurasthenia. Certain obsessive ideas and idiosyncracies
of his, closely bordering upon phobia, would seem to indicate grave
psychic disorder. His temper and his world-view were indicative of
hypochondria: he perceived only the hostile, never the friendly, aspects
of events, people, and phenomena. Dejectedly he declares: "There is
falseness even in the calm air and the sunshine, and I feel that
happiness has no place in my lot."
Destiny had assembled within him all the doubts and pangs of the modern
soul, but had neglected to counterpoise them with positive and
constructive convictions; so that when his small store of hopes and
prospects was exhausted, he broke down from sheer hollowness of heart.
He died a recluse, a penitent, and a renegade to all his past ideas and
persuasions.
Evidently, with his large assortment of defects both of character and of
intellect, Strindberg could not be classed as one of the great
constructive minds of our period. Viewed in his social importance, he
will interest future students of morals chiefly as an agitator, a
polemist, and in a fashion, too, as a prophet; by his uniquely
aggressive veracity, he rendered a measure of valuable service to his
time.
But viewed as a creative writer, both of drama and fiction, he has an
incontestable claim to our lasting attention. His work shows artistic
ability, even though it rarely attains to greatness and is frequently
marred by the bizarre qualities of his style. Presumably his will be a
permanent place in the history of literature, principally because of the
extraordinary subjective animation of his work. And perhaps in times
less depressed than ours its gloominess may act as a valuable antidote
upon the popular prejudice against being serious. His artistic
profession of faith certainly should save him from wholesale
condemnation. He says in one of his prefaces: "Some people have accused
my tragedy of being too sad, as though one desired a merry tragedy.
People clamor for Enjoyment as though Enjoyment consisted in being
foolish. I find enjoyment in the powerful and terrible struggles of
life; and the capability of experiencing something, of learning
something, gives me pleasure."
The keynote to his literary productions is the cry of the agony of
being. Every line of his works is written in the shadow of the sorrow of
living. In them, all that is most dismal and terrifying and therefore
most tragical, becomes articulate. They are propelled by an abysmal
pessimism, and because of this fact, since pessimism is one of the
mightiest inspiring forces in literature, August Strindberg, its
foremost spokesman, deserves to be read and understood.
III
THE EXALTATION OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
In these embattled times it is perfectly natural to expect from any
discourse on Nietzsche's philosophy first of all a statement concerning
the relation of that troublesome genius to the origins of the war; and
this demand prompts a few candid words on that aspect of the subject at
the start.
For more than three years the public has been persistently taught by the
press to think of Friedrich Nietzsche mainly as the powerful promoter of
a systematic national movement of the German people for the conquest of
the world. But there is strong and definite internal evidence in the
writings of Nietzsche against the assumption that he intentionally
aroused a spirit of war or aimed in any way at the world-wide
preponderance of Germany's type of civilization. Nietzsche had a
temperamental loathing for everything that is brutal, a loathing which
was greatly intensified by his personal contact with the horrors of war
while serving as a military nurse in the campaign of 1870. If there were
still any one senseless enough to plead the erstwhile popular cause of
Pan-Germanism, he would be likely to find more support for his argument
in the writings of the de-gallicized Frenchman, Count Joseph Arthur
Gobineau, or of the germanized Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain,
than in those of the "hermit of Maria-Sils," who does not even suggest,
let alone advocate, German world-predominance in a single line of all
his writings. To couple Friedrich Nietzsche with Heinrich von Treitschke
as the latter's fellow herald of German ascendancy is truly
preposterous. Treitschke himself was bitterly and irreconcilably set
against the creator of Zarathustra,(14) in whom ever since
"Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen" he had divined "the good European,"--which
to the author of the _Deutsche Geschichte_ meant the bad Prussian, and
by consequence the bad German.
(14) As is convincingly pointed out in a footnote of J. A. Cramb's
"Germany and England."
As a consummate individualist and by the same token a cosmopolite to the
full, Nietzsche was the last remove from national, or strictly speaking
even from racial, jingoism. Even the imputation of ordinary patriotic
sentiments would have been resented by him as an insult, for such
sentiments were to him a sure symptom of that gregarious disposition
which was so utterly abhorrent to his feelings. In his German
citizenhood he took no pride whatsoever. On every occasion that offered
he vented in mordant terms his contempt for the country of his birth,
boastfully proclaiming his own derivation from alien stock. He bemoaned
his fate of having to write for Germans; averring that people who drank
beer and smoked pipes were hopelessly incapable of understanding him. Of
this extravagance in denouncing his countrymen the following account by
one of his keenest American interpreters gives a fair idea. "No epithet
was too outrageous, no charge was too farfetched, no manipulation or
interpretation of evidence was too daring to enter into his ferocious
indictment. He accused the Germans of stupidity, superstitiousness, and
silliness; of a chronic weakness of dodging issues, a fatuous
'barn-yard' and 'green-pasture' contentment, of yielding supinely to the
commands and exactions of a clumsy and unintelligent government; of
degrading education to the low level of mere cramming and examination
passing; of a congenital inability to understand and absorb the culture
of other peoples, and particularly the culture of the French; of a
boorish bumptiousness, and an ignorant, ostrichlike complacency; of a
systematic hostility to men of genius, whether in art, science, or
philosophy; of a slavish devotion to the two great European narcotics,
alcohol and Christianity; of a profound beeriness, a spiritual
dyspepsia, a puerile mysticism, an old-womanish pettiness, and an
ineradicable liking for the obscure, evolving, crepuscular, damp, and
shrouded."(15) It certainly requires a violent twist of logic to hold
this catalogue of invectives responsible for the transformation of a
sluggish and indolent bourgeoisie into a "Volk in Waffen" unified by an
indomitable and truculent rapacity.
(15) H. L. Mencken, "The Mailed Fist and Its Prophet." _Atlantic
Monthly_, November, 1914.
Neither should Nietzsche's general condemnation of mild and tender
forbearance--on the ground that it blocks the purpose of nature--be
interpreted as a call to universal militancy. By his ruling it is only
supermen that are privileged to carry their will through. But undeniably
he does teach that the world belongs to the strong. They may grab it at
any temporary loss to the common run of humanity and, if need be, with
sanguinary force, since their will is, ulteriorly, identical with the
cosmic purpose.
Of course this is preaching war of some sort, but Nietzsche was not in
favor of war on ethnic or ethical grounds, like that fanatical
militarist, General von Bernhardi, whom the great mass of his countrymen
in the time before the war would have bluntly rejected as their
spokesman. Anyway, Nietzsche did not mean to encourage Germany to
subjugate the rest of the world. He even deprecated her victory in the
bloody contest of 1870, because he thought that it had brought on a form
of material prosperity of which internal decay and the collapse of
intellectual and spiritual ideals were the unfortunate concomitants. At
the same time, the universal decrepitude prevented the despiser of his
own people from conceiving a decided preference for some other country.
He held that all European nations were progressing in the wrong
direction,--the deadweight of exaggerated and misshapen materialism
dragged them back and down. English life he deemed almost irredeemably
clogged by utilitarianism. Even France, the only modern commonwealth
credited by Nietzsche with an indigenous culture, was governed by what
he stigmatizes as the life philosophy of the shopkeeper. Nietzsche is
destitute of national ideals. In fact he never thinks in terms of
politics. He aims to be "a good European, not a good German." In his
aversion to the extant order of society he never for a moment advocates,
like Rousseau or Tolstoy, a breach with civilization. Cataclysmic
changes through anarchy, revolution, and war were repugnant to his
ideals of culture. For two thousand years the races of Europe had toiled
to humanize themselves, school their character, equip their minds,
refine their tastes. Could any sane reformer have calmly contemplated
the possible engulfment in another Saturnian age of the gains purchased
by that enormous expenditure of human labor? According to Nietzsche's
conviction, the new dispensation could not be entered in a book of blank
pages. A higher civilization could only be reared upon a lower. So it
seems that he is quite wrongly accused of having been an "accessory
before the deed," in any literal or legal sense, to the stupendous
international struggle witnessed to-day. And we may pass on to consider
in what other way he was a vital factor of modern social development.
For whatever we may think of the political value of his teachings, it is
impossible to deny their arousing and inspiriting effect upon the
intellectual, moral, and artistic faculties of his epoch and ours.
* * * * *
It should be clearly understood that the significance of Nietzsche for
our age is not to be explained by any weighty discovery in the realm of
knowledge. Nietzsche's merit consists not in any unriddling of the
universe by a metaphysical key to its secrets, but rather in the
diffusion of a new intellectual light elucidating human consciousness in
regard to the purpose and the end of existence. Nietzsche has no
objective truths to teach, indeed he acknowledges no truth other than
subjective. Nor does he put any faith in bare logic, but on the contrary
pronounces it one of mankind's greatest misfortunes. His argumentation
is not sustained and progressive, but desultory, impressionistic, and
freely repetitional; slashing aphorism is its most effective tool. And
so, in the sense of the schools, he is not a philosopher at all; quite
the contrary, an implacable enemy of the _métier_. And yet the formative
and directive influence of his vaticinations, enunciated with tremendous
spiritual heat and lofty gesture, has been very great. His conception of
life has acted upon the generation as a moral intoxicant of truly
incalculable strength.
Withal his published work, amounting to eighteen volumes, though
flagrantly irrational, yet does contain a perfectly coherent doctrine.
Only, it is a doctrine to whose core mere peripheric groping will never
negotiate the approach. Its essence must be caught by flashlike seizure
and cannot be conveyed except to minds of more than the average
imaginative sensibility. For its central ideas relate to the remotest
ultimates, and its dominant prepossession, the _Overman_, is, in the
final reckoning, the creature of a Utopian fancy. To be more precise,
Nietzsche extorts from the Darwinian theory of selection a set of
amazing connotations by means of the simultaneous shift from the
biological to the poetic sphere of thought and from the averagely
socialized to an uncompromisingly self-centred attitude of mind. This
doubly eccentric position is rendered feasible for him by a whole-souled
indifference to exact science and an intense contempt for the practical
adjustments of life. He is, first and last, an imaginative schemer,
whose visions are engendered by inner exuberance; the propelling power
of his philosophy being an intense temperamental enthusiasm at one and
the same time lyrically sensitive and dramatically impassioned. It is
these qualities of soul that made his utterance ring with the force of a
high moral challenge. All the same, he was not any more original in his
ethics than in his theory of knowledge. In this field also his receptive
mind threw itself wide open to the flow of older influences which it
encountered. The religion of personal advantage had had many a prophet
before Nietzsche. Among the older writers, Machiavelli was its
weightiest champion. In Germany, Nietzsche's immediate predecessor was
"Max Stirner,"(16) and as regards foreign thinkers, Nietzsche declared
as late as 1888 that to no other writer of his own century did he feel
himself so closely allied by the ties of congeniality as to Ralph Waldo
Emerson.
(16) His real name was Kaspar Schmidt; he lived from 1806-1856.
The most superficial acquaintance with these writers shows that
Nietzsche is held responsible for certain revolutionary notions of which
he by no means was the originator. Of the connection of his doctrine
with the maxims of "The Prince" and of "The Ego and His Own" (_Der
Einzige und sein Eigentum_)(17) nothing further need be said than that
to them Nietzsche owes, directly or indirectly, the principle of
"non-morality." However, he does not employ the same strictly
intellectual methods. They were logicians rather than moralists, and
their ruler-man is in the main a construction of cold reasoning, while
the ruler-man of Nietzsche is the vision of a genius whose eye looks
down a much longer perspective than is accorded to ordinary mortals.
That a far greater affinity of temper should have existed between
Nietzsche and Emerson than between him and the two classic
non-moralists, must bring surprise to the many who have never recognized
the Concord Sage as an exponent of unfettered individualism. Yet in fact
Emerson goes to such an extreme of individualism that the only thing
that has saved his memory from anathema is that he has not many readers
in his after-times, and these few do not always venture to understand
him. And Emerson, though in a different way from Nietzsche's, was also a
rhapsodist. In his poetry, where he articulates his meaning with far
greater unrestraint than in his prose, we find without any difficulty
full corroboration of his spiritual kinship with Nietzsche. For
instance, where may we turn in the works of the latter for a stronger
statement of the case of Power versus Pity than is contained in "The
World Soul"?
"He serveth the servant,
The brave he loves amain,
He kills the cripple and the sick,
And straight begins again;
For gods delight in gods,
And thrust the weak aside,--
To him who scorns their charities
Their arms fly open wide."
From such a world-view what moral could proceed more logically than that
of Zarathustra: "And him whom ye do not teach to fly, teach--how to fall
quicker"?
(17) By Machiavelli and Stirner, respectively.
But after all, the intellectual origin of Nietzsche's ideas matters but
little. Wheresoever they were derived from, he made them strikingly his
own by raising them to the splendid elevation of his thought. And if
nevertheless he has failed to take high rank and standing among the
sages of the schools, this shortage in his professional prestige is more
than counterbalanced by the wide reach of his influence among the laity.
What might the re-classification, or perchance even the
re-interpretation, of known facts about life have signified beside
Nietzsche's lofty apprehension of the sacredness of life itself? For
whatever may be the social menace of his reasoning, his commanding
proclamation to an expectant age of the doctrine that Progress means
infinite growth towards ideals of perfection has resulted in a singular
reanimation of the individual sense of dignity, served as a potent
remedy of social dry-rot, and furthered our gradual emergence from the
impenetrable darkness of ancestral traditions.