_August Strindberg_
August Strindberg is one of the most wonderful and perfect examples
of a type which, in our vacillating age, frequently rises to the
surface and endeavours to make its mark everywhere; a type full
of aggressiveness and impatience, seldom made after a pattern and
frequently full of imperfections, but with touches of real genius as
well as barren wastes, full of lapses, but full of promises for the
future. It is a mixed type. The strange combinations in his character,
the seeming contradictions and the flaws in his education make it a
very difficult study for the average person. It would require a genius,
one to whom the many hostile elements appear microscopically enlarged.
The mixture of races, that inseparable ingredient in human physiology,
is as yet an unexplored region of investigation. The question is one
with which Strindberg has been greatly troubled, and he has contributed
abundant material for its solution.
He has done more. The great literature that he has created is more
priceless as raw material to the psychologist than as a work of art.
In all his writings Strindberg occupies the reader’s mind in a twofold
manner: first, with the psychological results to which he individually
attains; secondly, with the psychological results to which the reader
_malgré lui_ attains, and which often contradict the others on matters
of chief importance. Whoever studies Strindberg finds himself in the
presence of a double mirror; in the one he sees the world reflected in
Strindberg’s mind, and in the other as an antidote, he sees the mind of
Strindberg presenting its own solution in the moment of its birth and
reflecting its psychology in the reader’s soul.
Strindberg’s collected works are really only biographical contributions
towards the solution of the riddle of his ego. He has never ceased to
speculate on the mystery of his own being, and this speculation has
always vented itself in indignant storming against outward enemies.
What does he mean by his angry guesses at the riddle of the woman
sphinx? You have but to turn this sphinx round and it is no longer a
woman. It is the man sphinx--the riddle that is himself.
No writings have ever been of a more personal character than those of
Strindberg. But perhaps no writings have ever issued from an ego that
was less complete. I should like to express it as follows: In a mixed
type like Strindberg’s no unity has as yet been able to form itself
beneath the threshold of consciousness, for there the instincts of
different races and epochs rush helter skelter. All that he has written
fell as an instantaneous reflection on his soul, and was thrown back in
an impressionist picture. In Strindberg’s works we find no transitions,
no coherence. And since he has always presented himself as a riddle
to the passing crowd, it is quite fair to regard the riddle as common
property, which any one may seek to solve if he is not afraid to do so.
I
I have often met Strindberg and have received the most contradictory
impressions concerning him. But in one way he was always the same,
and that was in his outward manner. He demanded respect, and he
invariably treated himself with the greatest respect. There was always
something subdued and severe about him as though he were keeping
guard over an invisible and holy relic, against which neither he nor
others might sin; his voice, when he spoke, was low and imperious, and
his threatening gaze was always ready to quell any signs of feminine
flippancy, although he would have been very unwilling to be deprived of
it altogether.
That was Strindberg as he appeared to the multitude. But for those who
knew him better, there was another Strindberg, not more sociable and
affable than the first, but one who was certainly not pompous, who was
a thorough Swede, a boon companion whose good hours fell at the first
cock-crowing, a humourist with an indistinct smile who played at chess
with life, and cared less about the results of the game than for its
subtle tactics, a man of great foresight, unreliable, impulsive, a man
whose intellect impressed you and who wished to be impressive, and who
in addition to this possessed the cunning of a boy.
The keynote, which was the solution to the nature of this contradictory
and purposely mysterious being, was a suspicion that knew no bounds;
suspicion for its own sake, suspicion as a principle, as the
prerogative of a superior intellect, a suspicion against every one and
everything which ended by becoming a suspicion of himself.
Strindberg has Finnish-Lapp blood in his veins. He comes of a
poverty-stricken middle-class family which was undergoing a period
of great pecuniary distress at the time of his birth. His father had
known better times, but through his union with a servant-girl he had
dropped out of the social circle to which he belonged. Three children
were born before marriage, the author soon after the wedding. The
mother was always ailing, and she died of consumption after the birth
of her twelfth child. While the boy was growing up, the father and
mother, with seven children and two servants, inhabited three rooms.
The furniture consisted chiefly of beds and cradles. Children lay on
ironing-boards and chairs, children lay in cradles and beds. Baptism,
funeral! Baptism, funeral! Sometimes two baptisms one after the other
without a funeral. The father was only seen at meals; his name was used
to frighten the children, and “Papa shall hear of it,” was equivalent
to a whipping.
Education consisted in scolding and pulling the hair. Stern discipline
was enacted in the home. Lying was unmercifully punished, disobedience
likewise, and in after years corporal punishment was superseded by the
menace: “What will people say?”
These facts are quoted from Strindberg’s many-volumed autobiography,
_The Maid-Servant’s Son_, in which he lays down the law with inveterate
bitterness against his origin, his childish impressions, the order of
society, the system of education, and against all bonds and fetters,
customs and duties, which chain a man down from his first days to his
last. He knows from the very beginning that he has not the courage
to break loose from them, and that is why he pursues them with such
untiring and embittered vengeance.
August Strindberg wrote _The Maid-Servant’s Son_ in his altruistic,
socialistic period, when he believed in a social revolution that was to
bring about the radical redress of his personal wrongs.
Strindberg is in this instance the link of a chain which winds through
central Germany, but has scarcely forced its way as yet to the North
and the South, for the North and Bavaria are peasant districts, and
are, therefore, almost inaccessible to socialism. The middle class
with its overflow into the proletariat is the real fostering soil of
socialism. From a home like the one that Strindberg describes, the
more gifted sons must necessarily go forth as socialists, if they have
brains to think and souls to feel; or if they have any aspiration in
their blood which calls itself the “honest ambition” of the bourgeois,
they as surely become “jobbers” and “snobs”--or if they are geniuses,
they aspire to the “super-man,” and with a juggler’s _salto mortale_
flee past their misery into space. Strindberg’s nature was possessed
of a considerable share of all three categories. Chiefly genius,
which, among the many surprises of life, always prepares for itself
the greatest, for geniuses live in a state of continual astonishment
at the revelation of the great unknown in themselves, till at last,
like Strindberg, they move about with an invisible crown on their
heads, one might call it a crowned consciousness, for which they claim
respect from all the world. The sure sign of a young bourgeois from
a populous town is that he always requires a crowd of admirers. His
self-confidence needs to be upheld by constant applause. Hence the
striving for recognition, the love of advertising, and the longing to
be puffed, which is the peculiarity of the newest literature proceeding
from the middle class. Hence the prolonged cries of despair when
this recognition or its material expression is lacking. The horizon
of the bourgeois townsman is naturally bounded by the thin luminous
line of those whom he sees in possession; the men who have enough,
and more than enough, who inhabit the golden islands where enjoyment
dwells; and whither he yearns to go, to take them by storm as a
revolutionary, or enter them in triumph as a crowned genius. It is
not their individuality merely which stamps these things with their
personal value, they have a priceless, an imaginary worth, and only
when they are his--the outward show of refinement, the elegant home,
the newest fashion in dress, the woman of the upper class as wife and
worshipper--everything “first-class,” in fact, only then does he feel
himself in the full possession of his ego. These characteristics show
themselves early; they are the phenomena of the age. It is interesting
to observe whether the strongest personal emotion in a child is the
desire for affection or the longing to occupy the first place. With
the boy in the autobiography the last was the case; he wanted to be
the favourite in the upper court--in other words, with his father and
mother. When he found that the place he coveted was already occupied
by his brothers and sisters, he would not accept of his grandmother’s
proffered affection, but despised it, for the simple reason that his
grandmother was a person of no great importance in the household.
This absence of spontaneous affection is a trait which meets us
everywhere in Strindberg’s personal biography and his other literary
works; it is a peculiarity that is extremely common in our day,
although it is not often met with in geniuses, because genius is
usually accompanied by a greater warmth of temperature. It is perhaps
partly accounted for by the natural temperament of the people of
northern Sweden, who are to the highest degree possessed of what the
French call “la fougue,” which burns like a conflagration and not like
the all-pervading heat of a continual flame. But there is a deeper
reason still which is to be found in the isolation and excessive
inadequacy of Strindberg’s nature, the restless, nomadic tendency,
the savage impulse which impels him to obliterate his footmarks, to
make himself inaccessible, mysterious, terrible, for all of which
his autobiography presents many an authentic proof. It may be his
inherited, restless, undomesticated Finnish-Lapp blood which feels
itself imprisoned in a small bourgeois family, and gazes around
distrustfully like a wild animal in a cage. It is the blood of a race
that remains always apart, that does not allow itself to be fathomed,
but with the true nomadic instinct seeks to wipe out all traces of its
own existence. It does not give its whole affection, as a child it has
no comrades, as a man no friends, only a few stray acquaintances and
boon companions. It is the blood that scents the enemy everywhere,
that dreads the enemy yet goes in search of him if only for the sake
of the long lonely raids which it remembers in the past. What in other
phenomena of the age would signify a dying, a complete withering of the
expansive faculty, was in Strindberg a beginning, a youthfulness of
culture, so that one can point to him with tolerable certainty as an
atavism--a reversion that is driven forward by a tremendous force, a
combination of atavism and genius.
There is one special feature of this poverty of feeling in the
autobiography which is peculiarly striking and suggestive, it is
namely this, that the boy is not only lonely with regard to his
parents, his brothers and sisters and comrades, but he is also lonely
in his first love. Strindberg has not omitted to give us a study on
sex in his _Story of the Development of a Soul_, as the sub-title is
called. Psychological and physiological studies on this subject are
sufficiently plentiful in modern Scandinavian literature, and some of
them are contributions of permanent value to culture, contributions
towards a truer knowledge of mankind, casting a bold and honest light
on the unknown territory of human existence, such as will only be
understood and appreciated in a more subtle and less prudish future.
With regard to Strindberg’s contribution on the subject, the
circumstances are not quite the same. But one thing is certain, that
whatever has been confided to publicity on this subject in the north,
however far-fetched and plain-spoken as regards the history of the
strongest natural impulse, it is but the first seedling of a future
literature--a pan-Germanic literature which will come perhaps soon,
perhaps not until after our time. In these confessions everything
is natural, productive and honest; souls and bodies, physical and
spiritual emotions are one. Not so with Strindberg. It would need a
searching discussion, a full statement of every single point in his
autobiography, in order to prove the apparent and hidden crookedness
of the emotions, the poisonous hostility of his terrified gaze at the
opposite sex. From the very beginning his relationship to woman is as
insipid as is usually the case in the middle class, and as brutal as
the wildness of the nomads. The German passion, expanding with the
first emotion of love in the desire for a reciprocative affection on
the part of the woman, is not to be found. And here it is important to
remark that this peculiar trait in his character is the origin of the
celebrated drama which bears the device: “Battle of the Sexes.” There
is also another point of importance connected with it, and that is
that Strindberg from the first represents the man as good, suffering,
tender-hearted, normal. That is not psychology, but it is the same in
his later works. While his psychology of the woman is very deep, the
man who is the unhappy victim of this brute is always the same brave,
honest and worthy fellow. There are two sides to that. In the first
place it is mere sophistry, in the second it points to a distinctive
racial feature.
We find here a resemblance which few people would have looked for in
Strindberg, and which certainly no one among his countrymen has as yet
perceived. It points to the east, to Russia. Not only to the Russia of
Tolstoy and Dostoievsky, but further to the east and deeper into the
secret history of the races. It points to Asia, to the barren plains
where wandered the Mongolian hordes. Yellow faces with prominent cheek
bones and projecting skulls, faces with an expression of cruelty and
suffering, envy and greed, terrible conquerors who exterminated the
ruling races of ancient Scandinavia and the old Norse blood in Russia,
amalgamated the gentle, lyrical, Slav temperament with their own
fierce blood, and left memorials of their victories in mounds of dead
men’s skulls. Since those days every one who knows the Russian race
discovers the same conflicting elements; on the one hand the gentle
lyrical faculty, the melancholy sensibility, which makes the Russians
born psychologists, makes them the only intuitively psychological
people in the world, and on the other hand the brutality of the
Mongolian blood which, after long intervals of peace, vents itself
in deeds of horrible cruelty. Hence that profound untrustworthiness
that lies at the background of the Russian character. And here we must
seek the connecting link if we would understand Strindberg. For this
same Mongolian blood, thinned, it is true, forms the ancestry of that
nomadic race from whence the Finnish Lapps and Strindberg himself are
descended. It also forms the lower class in Finland from whence his
first wife, although of noble birth, originated. Her features bore
traces of the Finnish type as distinctly as Strindberg’s own, and
perhaps this accounts for the strong attraction that he felt towards
her, for he doubtless felt the need of one of the same type in order to
complete himself.
The Finns in Finland are a people belonging to an ancient culture, they
are a poetical people, whereas the Russian Mongolians and the Swedish
Lapps are quite uncultured. The chief characteristic in Strindberg’s
nature is the close proximity of genius and barbarism.
Strindberg is very un-Swedish in his outward appearance. The Swedish
type is tall, slender, broad-shouldered, and the complexion, when it
is not ashen grey, is fresh and delicate, the head small with fair
hair. Strindberg is a strong powerful man with sloping shoulders, and
latterly he has assumed a corpulence that is characteristic of the
Russians; his penetrating, far-seeing eyes have the uncertain, livid
hue which is never found in the north except among mixed races, his
jaws and cheek bones are broad and prominent, his hair long, black and
curly, the slight moustache turned upwards, the mouth small and pointed
as though he were about to whistle, the lips gracefully curved, and a
complexion the colour of leather. This phenomenon is crowned with a
powerful, square skull. The ears are diminutive and lie close to the
head. His hands are remarkably round and small.
Behind this powerful forehead all the ideas that have moved the second
half of this century have fermented, but only one thing original and
new has taken shape, and that is the sombre instinct of sex hatred.
Strindberg’s one act has been to drag out this enmity from beneath
the threshold of consciousness, where it had hitherto lain, to lend
it speech and clothe it with an artistic form. He grasps hold of
woman like an impetuous bourgeois, and treats her like a captured
savage. Strindberg is like an instrument on which the age has played
her shrillest tunes, but the strings have retained no recollection
of them. As a young man he was a sincere Pietist; later on he became
a pessimistic Altruist, then a Socialist and Utilitarian; he has
experienced social contrasts and class warfare as few have done, and
has reproduced them as none of his contemporaries have ever done. He
has writhed beneath the ineradicable consciousness of belonging to
a lower class, and his daily habits and sole ambition were fixed on
asserting himself as a member of the upper class. He was reckless,
unruly, but he does not seem to have had any of that proud confidence
in his own greatness which is the birthright of great personalities,
who look upon themselves as the beginning and the starting point, and
to whom the idea never occurs of fatiguing themselves in the race after
that which is theirs by right. Strindberg is a genuine son of this
plebeian age, for it needed a Nietzsche endowed with volcanic power to
enable him to rise above himself and to proclaim himself a super-man.
His self-psychology is full of contradictions, and it requires the
reader’s critical attention to disentangle the undercurrent of personal
confessions from the artistic super-structure. It is very interesting
to watch how the absence of spontaneous affection changes to a painful
yearning for tenderness; when, for example, as a child, he has the
feeling of being dependent on his busy mother, a common woman who did
not bestow much love on him. It is still more interesting to watch how,
on the occasions when he fell in love, he seems always to have had a
reason. There is his first love-affair as a boy of fifteen, when the
object of his affections is a thirty-year-old girl, who is excitable
and hysterical. She is engaged to be married, and forms a centre of
attraction; young men and old men admire and rave about her, amongst
others his father, and it is an immense gratification to be able to
draw her away from them.
Already a feeling of repugnance--so often described by him in his later
works as though it were the usual accompaniment of love--pervades their
amorous _tête-à-têtes_, when she evinces her motherly superiority and
completely captivates him; it is always the same manœuvring that he
describes in his later women. But when writing from memory he can never
depict them ludicrously and repulsively enough, cannot sufficiently
indulge in expressions of antipathy and repugnance with regard to them,
and this same characteristic is very apparent in his last book, called
_A Fool’s Confession_. Here also a former love and destined bride is
described as an utterly worthless being, just as the noble lady whom
he married was afterwards unmasked as an abyss of iniquity. The same
is the case with the newly-married wife of the super-man in _By the
Open Sea_. It is an abiding feature of Strindberg’s works to separate
with a shudder of disgust or in a paroxysm of anger and hatred after
having tasted love. It is a characteristic feature of the Slav, and
may possibly be a heritage from the savage blood of the Mongolians. We
find it invariably, although not so strongly expressed, in Tolstoy’s
otherwise pleasing descriptions. There are only two possible ways of
accounting for it in Strindberg’s literary productions; it must be due
either to the author’s temperament, or else to his experience of women.
For a long time I accepted the latter explanation, but after having
learned to know him, and having often read his entire creative works, I
am compelled to think that it would be too shallow an interpretation.
This rage against woman is connected with his indignation at every
bond, every pressure, every circumstance and relationship that
threatens to become permanent. Everywhere we find the same longing
to escape, to leave no mark behind, to isolate himself, to hide.
Everywhere in his studies, his interests, his opinions, the same sudden
change, the same hatred of his broken fetters, and every intellectual
and spiritual stage of development that is past appears to him like
a broken fetter. In all Strindberg’s writings we trace the struggle
for the possession of his ever-changing ego; we continually observe
an exaggerated self-consciousness, making vain and angry attempts to
attain to his real self, reproving the whole of modern science for
the sake of justifying and explaining the non-existence of a central
point, a unity of the ego which is the missing centre of gravity in
the unknown. Everything in him is temperament, nothing the result of
coherent thought; he hates coherence as derogatory to himself, he
is determined to be incomprehensible, understood by none, and he
introduces a dummy as a sort of pattern man, like the unhappy “Father,”
or like Axel, in _The Comrades_, who withdraws his own pictures from
the Salon in order that his wife may exhibit hers--which he himself
has painted; like the second man in _The Creditors_, who submits to
being sucked to death by a female vampire; like the “Fool,” in _The
Fool’s Confession_, who worships another man’s wife as though she were
a pure Madonna. When he sees the steamer passing by, on which she is
travelling to visit some relations, he goes further and further into
the sea, magnetically drawn towards the ship in which she is, and
afterwards becomes her husband only to discover by degrees incredible
details of iniquity in her. But he does not part from her, he does not
experience that unconquerable feeling of positive aversion after which
parting is no longer an act of the will, but an almost unconscious
proceeding. Who is there who is not acquainted with all these traits in
Russian literature? Turgenev has already described the weak man who is
held captive by a brutal and licentious woman, the man who is passive
and allows himself to be ruined by her, while all the while he looks on
as a spectator might, and despises himself.
Despises himself! Here we find the difference, and perhaps also, if I
may say so, the psychological quicksand in Strindberg’s works. I take
for granted that we are all agreed that the great Russian writers are
honest psychologists. I would certainly make an exception of some of
Dostoievsky’s writings, some things he has concealed, and one could
point out certain places where he has substituted a false trait and
purloined an experience upon which the plot was built. But the earlier
works of Turgenev, Garschin, Tolstoy, were never false either in
themselves or with regard to their public. And when the men in them
allowed themselves to be loved by a woman who claimed for herself “the
man’s prerogative,” they saw clearly what they were doing and despised
themselves for it.
Not so Strindberg’s man. He cries out beneath the iron-soled slipper,
but none the less he holds himself in high esteem; he esteems himself
all the more highly for his forbearance with the daring she-devil who
derides him on account of it; in this matter he possesses a higher
degree of development, and before all else, he is incredibly moral.
Strindberg’s man is--especially in the stories where he manifests his
hatred of women--moral to a degree such as in the New Testament is
only expected of a Bishop, of whom it is said he must be the husband
of one wife, and elsewhere only by Björnson and Young Men’s Christian
Associations. Strindberg’s man is always strictly monogamous, because
monogamy denotes a higher stage of development; his woman, on the
other hand, is always polygamous, because woman and polygamy represent
a lower stage of development. This monogamous man is devoted to the
polygamous woman, the worse she is, the more devoted he becomes, and
the more she treats him with contempt, the more tightly his fetters
bind him to her. There is something in this that resembles a trait in
the character of the “maid-servant’s son,” of whom it is related in the
autobiography that “he was quite indifferent to the fresh, red-cheeked
girls whom he met at the dancing lesson, while on the contrary, the
highly anæmic and hysterical girls, with the pale, waxlike complexions
and black lines under their preternaturally bright eyes, had an
irresistible attraction for him.” ...