Strindberg’s next novel, _Tschandala_, is one of his least known
works; as literature it is of comparatively small importance, but as
a contribution to the psychology of the author it is an exceedingly
valuable production.
Strindberg had gone to spend the summer in a country lodging where
the proprietors are notoriously bad people. An ordinary man would
have perceived the fact at once, but Strindberg’s imagination began
to work and swelled itself into a book of gigantic proportions. The
outward circumstances remain the same, but the scene is pushed back a
century and becomes a war between the patrician with the great mind
and the plebeians with the small minds, who do all that they possibly
can to ensnare him and to bring about his ruin. The only reason given
is the envy felt by inferior minds and small souls for the great and
noble. It is difficult to understand how a learned and distinguished
man can exist with his wife and children amid such extremely revolting
surroundings as those described, unless he is too poor to make a
change; it is still more difficult to understand why he should have any
dealings with the populace, unless it is that he takes a psychological
interest in their study. The landlady’s gipsy lover, who rules the
house, has got him almost in his power, when the distracted lodger
resolves on a plan whereby to annihilate him, well knowing that the
ignorant man is subject to superstitious fear. He allures him into the
meadow at night, and by the aid of a magic lantern he causes superhuman
figures to pass before him. The trick is successful. The tormented and
ignorant landlord dies from his fear of ghosts.
This single instance proves to how great an extent Strindberg works
upon his own experiences, and it also shows that his imagination is of
a nature to magnify everything to a degree that is quite immense. It
is a characteristic trait in his nature. His imagination is not the
weak, tame, conventional imagination of a bourgeois, which is elsewhere
commonly met with in literature. It is the imagination of a savage, in
which every impression is echoed a thousandfold on the sounding-board
of fear. It is fresh as the wind that blows from the mountains and no
less incessant. It is always at first hand, and that is the secret of
its power. After reading Strindberg you may raise objections against
his arguments, but at the moment you are forced to agree with him.
There has never been an author who could convince with such brutal
authority as he.
As long as you are under his immediate influence, everything seems
possible, even probable. While recognising the truth of the principal
traits, you forget the numerous errors that are never absent, the
superabundance of evil qualities which he never omits to pile upon his
enemies--woman and the lower orders--with both of whom he once felt
himself related, and by whom he now feels himself pursued.
The second reason of his immense influence is that he is such a perfect
son of this torn, restless, over-stimulated age, this age with its
combination of decadence and barbarism. His writings are full of the
plebeian snobbishness, the moralising hypocrisy, the perverse instincts
of the sons of the present day, while at the same time they contain
the direct opposite: the superhuman effort to rise above himself, to
attain beyond good and evil, the unbaptised, grandiose sensuousness,
the indignation against feminism and the cult of woman. His is the cry
of an indignant nature in a corrupt civilisation. His is the duplicate
personality of to-day, cankered and yet healthy, at once the whited
sepulchre of the dead past and the vessel of the future. He reflects
his secret sufferings, his half-conscious untruthfulness, his conscious
boasting, the god and the beast in him.
Yet all combined could not have made his name a torch which will burn
long and be held for that which it is not--one of the eternal stars.
It was a twofold influence that helped to create the red flame which
proceeds from him: his language, in the first place, which only
produces its true effect in the original. German gives it quite a
different character, harsh and barren. But in Swedish it is like the
sea that breaks upon the shore and thunders from afar, like the trumpet
that brays its battle signal through the night, like the short hollow
beat of fortune: “I am there, I am there!”
There are northern writers who can be rendered in German, taught new
nuances, enriched with new words and new rhythm, and in whom the
symphonies of the German language may be heard to advantage. But if
any one tries to translate Strindberg the result is disappointing; in
Swedish the sound is like bell metal, in German it resembles tin.
Materialism is the second influence which makes Strindberg a giant of
his age. He has the materialist’s philosophy of life, the materialist’s
ideal, the materialist’s cult of the intellect, and the materialist’s
interpretation of the sexes. However deep the problem, his
interpretation is always flat. In his descriptions everything is clear,
sharp and rectangular; he is like an inquisitor who only enquires into
that which lies above the threshold of consciousness, and only sees
the growth on the rough, hard surface. The rich fruitful soil in the
unseen, where everything that exists must grow organically like the
seed in mother earth, is as good as undiscovered by the great and noble
mind of the materialist.
As a materialist he does not acknowledge the mystic element--which
is love--in the relations between man and woman; but the union,
without love, of two persons of culture leads in course of time to
degeneration, and this degeneration he has always very consistently
described.
_Woman: “Fin de Siècle”_
_Guy de Maupassant_
I
I had been to a hypnotic _séance_ and was on my way home across the
Paris boulevards. The sirens of the _trottoirs_ were sitting in front
of the brightly-lit _brasseries_ with their lords, drinking beer,
while others were still wandering up and down under the wide awnings
in front of the _cafés_. The thought occurred to me how much the type
had altered during the last four years; it used to be the fashion
to be as slim as a willow, with stays like a coat of mail, but now
loose, negligent figures were to be seen under tight-fitting dresses,
and where formerly people used to wear buds, they now decorated
themselves with full-blown flowers. The rattling of the omnibuses
mingled with the strident music of a Roumanian band in one of the
neighbouring _brasseries_, and one’s eyes were dazzled by the glitter
of real and false diamonds, and by the glances of their wearers, real
or false as the case might be. The faces of the multitude as they
swept past me were confounded in my mind with those I had just seen
in the over-heated hall where the hypnotic _séance_ had taken place.
The perfumes that were wafted through the air were transformed in
the memory of my olfactory nerves to the penetrating scents of musk,
patchouli and _poudre-de-riz_, which the Parisian ladies carry with
them into all theatres, omnibuses, and picture galleries whither they
go, charging the atmosphere with a strong, oppressive, artificial
odour, exquisitely compounded, and dry as the colours of the majority
of modern French artists--a suspicious atmosphere, the excessive
sensibility of which suggests sickness and hidden corruption. Again
I seemed to see the faces of those who surrounded me in the close
atmosphere of the small room where the newest fashionable pastime, a
demonstration of the “magic circle,” had taken place--empty, weak,
brutal, affected faces, such as form the larger portion of every
popular assembly; and suddenly I realised, what my instinct had long
since told me, the difference that exists between the expression on the
faces of this race and the expression on the faces of that other race,
to which I myself belonged, and which in its national varieties I had
taken infinite trouble to understand, perhaps not altogether without
success.
This _séance_ of hypnotic, magnetic experiments was given by a new
literary and theosophical set of young Frenchmen, called “the Adepts”;
the people who assembled to witness the performance were members of
the lower middle class, and ladies and gentlemen from all circles of
society. The discovery of which I have spoken came upon me suddenly
from under the giant roof of a straw hat trimmed with a wreath of
roses, where I caught sight of a strange, death-like, glassy look in
the eyes of a smiling beauty of uncertain age. I was struck by the
number of cadaverous physiognomies which rendered it almost impossible
to guess the age of Parisians, whether men or women. Young people
wore the same expression as those of riper years, and even extreme
youth had something ashen grey in the complexion, something that was
like a breath of mildew, unpalpable, deceptive, as of premature old
age. In the north everybody looks about as old as he is, not only
according to the fixed sum of his years, but also according to the
varying life-limit which is determined by a person’s vitality. There
we have old and young and middle-aged. But here the majority are
neither old nor young, and for the women there is no middle age. What
is the reason? Is it entirely owing to the art of dress? Or is it
due to that _memento mori_ of an ancient civilisation--a counterfeit
susceptibility? When we compare the French fashion papers with the
faces of young Frenchwomen, the former might be taken for portraits.
Here and there the same sweet smile which renders the mouth small and
pointed, the same studied charm, the same artificial personality and
excessive caution which mask the woman’s real nature until all that
is spontaneous about her--age, soul, instinct--is for ever lost. It
is perfectly true that these expressionless faces are to be met with
everywhere. In Germany there is a large percentage of ladies in good
society whose faces look like copies of the illustrations in magazines
provided for family reading. But beneath it all there is something
else, something absolutely different, a kind of broad, and as yet
unspoilt, natural foundation in the Teutonic race, which compares
favourably with the more and more narrowed, almost extinct nature in
the Gallic race.
That which struck me most about these restless, expressionless eyes,
was not the absence of soul in them which one notices in the German who
broods over his beer and toddy, but an empty look such as you find in
the eyes of a dead animal--an absence of feeling, a vacant stare, the
Narcissus-look of self-reflecting satisfaction....
The omnibus for which I was waiting had not arrived, and I remained
standing in front of a bookseller’s table where the newest publications
were displayed. There in a row, side by side, lay _Flirt_, by Paul
Hervieux; _L’Amour Artificiel_, by Jules Cazes; _L’Inutile Beauté_ and
_Notre Cœur_, by Guy de Maupassant. They lay there like a continuation
of my thoughts, confirming the truth of those observations of which I
had as yet hardly convinced myself. I came nearer and examined _Notre
Cœur_, and meditated on the new element which this book contains,
and on the old element which caused it to run through three editions
in a fortnight. Old mingled with new, boldness with conventionality,
there you have the secret of the best and most critical of modern
French romance writers, Guy de Maupassant, Paul Bourget, and J. K.
Huysmans, combined with that unsurpassable art of telling a story, that
short, simple clearness of diction which renders Guy de Maupassant the
greatest of the three.
An open carriage came driving out of a side street. A pretty little
woman in a light-coloured dress lay back with her head resting against
the cushions as though exhausted with lassitude and ecstasy, and under
her large, yellow straw hat, pressed against her face, was the face of
a man dressed in black who was sitting beside her, kissing her like one
possessed, without ever raising his head, oblivious of all else....
It looked like the old French love, the love of Heloïse and Manon
Lescaut and George Sand. The French women of to-day have ceased to love
like that; it is only paid love that loves in that fashion now. The
ladies of the _bourgeoisie_ and the _hautes mondaines_ do not love any
more, and cannot love any more. That is exactly what those three books,
lying side by side on the bookseller’s table, have to tell: _Flirt_,
_L’Amour Artificiel_, and _Notre Cœur_.