The mirror that Strindberg held up to Nature was a cracked one. It was
cracked in a double sense--it was crazy. It gave back broken images of a
world which it made look like the chaos of a lunatic dream. Miss
Lind-af-Hageby, in her popular biography of Strindberg, is too intent
upon saying what can be said in his defence to make a serious attempt to
analyse the secret of genius which is implicit in those "115 plays,
novels, collections of stories, essays, and poems" which will be
gathered into the complete edition of his works shortly to be published
in Sweden. The biography will supply the need of that part of the public
which has no time to read Strindberg, but has plenty of time to read
about him. It will give them a capably potted Strindberg, and will tell
them quietly and briefly much that he himself has told violently and at
length in _The Son of a Servant, The Confession of a Fool_, and, indeed,
in nearly everything he wrote. On the other hand, Miss Lind's book has
little value as an interpretation. She does not do much to clear up the
reasons which have made the writings of this mad Swede matter of
interest in every civilized country in the world. She does, indeed,
quote the remark of Gorki, who, at the time of Strindberg's death,
compared him to the ancient Danubian hero, Danko, "who, in order to help
humanity out of the darkness of problems, tore his heart out of his
breast, lit it, and holding it high, led the way." "Strindberg," Miss
Lind declares, "patiently burnt his heart for the illumination of the
people, and on the day when his body was laid low in the soil, the
flame of his self-immolation was seen, pure and inextinguishable." This
will not do. "Patiently" is impossible; so is "pure and
inextinguishable." Strindberg was at once a man of genius (and therefore
noble) and a creature of doom (and therefore to be pitied). But to sum
him up as a spontaneous martyr in the greatest of great causes is to do
injustice to language and to the lives of the saints and heroes. He was
a martyr, of course, in the sense in which we call a man a martyr to
toothache. He suffered; but most of his sufferings were due, not to
tenderness of soul, but to tenderness of nerves.
Other artists lay hold upon life through an exceptional sensibility.
Strindberg laid hold on life through an exceptional excitability--even
an exceptional irritability. In his plays, novels, and essays alike, he
is a specialist in the jars of existence. He magnified even the smallest
worries until they assumed mountainous proportions. He was the kind of
man who, if something went wrong with the kitchen boiler, felt that the
Devil and all his angels had been loosed upon him, as upon the righteous
Job, with at least the connivance of Heaven. He seems to have regarded
the unsatisfactoriness of a servant as a scarcely less tremendous evil
than the infidelity of a wife. If you wish to see into twhat follies of
exaggeration Strindberg's want of the sense of proportion led him, you
cannot do better than turn to those pages in _Zones of the Spirit_ (as
the English translation of his _Blue Book_ is called), in which he tells
us about his domestic troubles at the time of the rehearsals of _The
Dream Play._
My servant left me; my domestic arrangements were upset; within
forty days I had six changes of servants--one worse than the other.
At last I had to serve myself, lay the table, and light the stove.
I ate black broken victuals out of a basket. In short, I had to
taste the whole bitterness of life without knowing why.
Much as one may sympathize with a victim of the servant difficulty, one
cannot but regard the last sentence as, in the vulgar phrase, rather a
tall order. But it becomes taller still before Strindberg has done with
it.
Then came the dress-rehearsal of _The Dream Play._ This drama I
wrote seven years ago, after a period of forty days' suffering
which were among the worst which I had ever undergone. And now
again exactly forty days of fasting and pain had passed. There
seemed, therefore, to be a secret legislature which promulgates
clearly defined sentences. I thought of the forty days of the
Flood, the forty years of wandering in the desert, the forty days'
fast kept by Moses, Elijah, and Christ.
There you have Strindberg's secret. His work is, for the most part,
simply the dramatization of the conflict between man and the irritations
of life. The chief of these is, of course, woman. But the lesser
irritations never disappear from sight for long. His obsession by them
is very noticeable in _The Dream Play_ itself--in that scene, for
instance, in which the Lawyer and the daughter of Indra having married,
the Lawyer begins to complain of the untidiness of their home, and the
Daughter to complain of the dirt:
THE DAUGHTER. This is worse than I dreamed!
THE LAWYER. We are not the worst off by far. There is still food in
the pot.
THE DAUGHTER. But what sort of food?
THE LAWYER. Cabbage is cheap, nourishing, and good to eat.
THE DAUGHTER. For those who like cabbage--to me it is repulsive.
THE LAWYER. Why didn't you say so?
THE DAUGHTER. Because I loved you. I wanted to sacrifice my own
taste.
THE LAWYER. Then I must sacrifice my taste for cabbage to you--for
sacrifices must be mutual.
THE DAUGHTER. What are we to eat then? Fish? But you hate fish?
THE LAWYER. And it is expensive.
THE DAUGHTER. This is worse than I thought it!
THE LAWYER _(kindly)._ Yes, you see how hard it is.
And the symbolic representation of married life in terms of fish and
cabbage is taken up again a little later:--
THE DAUGHTER. I fear I shall begin to hate you after this!
THE LAWYER. Woe to us, then! But let us forestall hatred. I promise
never again to speak of any untidiness--although it is torture to
me!
THE DAUGHTER. And I shall eat cabbage, though it means agony to me.
THE LAWYER. A life of common suffering, then! One's pleasure the
other one's pain.
One feels that, however true to nature the drift of this may be, it is
little more than bacilli of truth seen as immense through a microscope.
The agonies and tortures arising from eating cabbage and such things
may, no doubt, have tragic consequences enough, but somehow the men whom
these things put on the rack refuse to come to life in the imagination
on the same tragic plane where Prometheus lies on his crag and Oedipus
strikes out his eyes that they may no longer look upon his shame.
Strindberg is too anxious to make tragedy out of discomforts instead of
out of sorrows. When he is denouncing woman as a creature who loves
above all things to deceive her husband, his supreme way of expressing
his abhorrence is to declare: "If she can trick him into eating
horse-flesh without noticing it, she is happy." Here, and in a score of
similar passages, we can see how physical were the demons that endlessly
consumed Strindberg's peace of mind.
His attitude to women, as we find it expressed in _The Confession of a
Fool, The Dance of Death_, and all through his work, is that of a man
overwhelmed with the physical. He raves now with lust, now with
disgust--two aspects of the same mood. He turns from love to hatred with
a change of front as swift as a drunkard's. He is the Mad Mullah of all
the sex-antagonism that has ever troubled men since they began to think
of woman as a temptress. He was the most enthusiastic modern exponent of
the point-of-view of that Adam who explained: "The woman tempted me."
Strindberg deliberately wrote those words on his banner and held them
aloft to his generation as the summary of an eternal gospel. Miss
Lind-af-Hageby tells us that, at one period of his life, he was
sufficiently free from the physical obsessions of sex to preach the
equality of men and women and even to herald the coming of woman
suffrage. But his abiding view of woman was that of the plain man of the
nineteenth century. He must either be praising her as a ministering
angel or denouncing her as a ministering devil--preferably the latter.
It would be nonsense, however, to pretend that Strindberg did not see at
least one class of women clearly and truly. The accuracy with which he
portrays woman the parasite, the man-eater, the siren, is quite
terrible. No writer of his day was so shudderingly conscious of every
gesture, movement, and intonation with which the spider-woman sets out
to lure the mate she is going to devour. It may be that he prophesies
against the sins of women rather than subtly analyses and describes them
as a better artist would have done. _The Confessions of a Fool_ is less
a revelation of the soul of his first wife than an attack on her. But we
must, in fairness to Strindberg, remember that in his violences against
women he merely gives us a new rendering of an indictment that goes back
to the beginning of history. The world to him was a long lane of
oglings, down which man must fly in terror with his eyes shut and his
ears covered. His foolishness as a prophet consists, not in his
suspicions of woman regarded as an animal, but in his frothing at the
mouth at the idea that she should claim to be treated as something
higher than an animal. None the less, he denied to the end that he was a
woman-hater. His denial, however, was grimly unflattering:--
I have said that the child is a little criminal, incapable of
self-guidance, but I love children all the same. I have said that
woman is--what she is, but I have always loved some woman, and been
a father. Whoever, therefore, calls me a woman-hater is a
blockhead, a liar, or a noodle. Or all three together.
Sex, of course, was the greatest cross Strindberg had to bear. But there
were hundreds of other little changing crosses, from persecution mania
to poverty, which supplanted each other from day to day on his back. He
suffered continually both from the way he was made and from the way the
world was made. His novels and plays are a literature of suffering. He
reveals himself there as a man pursued by furies, a man without rest. He
flies to a thousand distractions and hiding-places--drink and lust and
piano-playing, Chinese and chemistry, painting and acting, alchemy and
poison, and religion. Some of these, no doubt, he honestly turns to for
a living. But in his rush from one thing to another he shows the
restlessness of a man goaded to madness. Not that his life is to be
regarded as entirely miserable. He obviously gets a good deal of
pleasure even out of his acutest pain. "I find the joy of life in its
violent and cruel struggles," he tells us in the preface to _Miss
Julia_, "and my pleasure lies in knowing something and learning
something." He is always consumed with the greed of knowledge--a phase
of his greed of domination. It is this that enables him to turn his
inferno into a purgatory.
In his later period, indeed, he is optimist enough to believe that the
sufferings of life cleanse and ennoble. By tortuous ways of sin he at
last achieves the simple faith of a Christian. He originally revolted
from this faith more through irritation than from principle. One feels
that, with happier nerves and a happier environment, he might easily
have passed his boyhood as the model pupil in the Sunday-school. It is
significant that we find him in _The Confession of a Fool_ reciting
Longfellow's _Excelsior_ to the first and worst of his wives. Strindberg
may have been possessed of a devil; he undoubtedly liked to play the
part of a devil; but at heart he was constantly returning to the
Longfellow sentiment, though, of course, his hungry intellectual
curiosity was something that Longfellow never knew. In his volume of
fables, _In Midsummer Days_, we see how essentially good and simple were
his ideas when he could rid himself of sex mania and persecution mania.
Probably his love of children always kept him more or less in chains to
virtue. Ultimately he yielded himself a victim, not to the furies, but
to the still more remorseless pursuit of the Hound of Heaven. On his
death-bed, Miss Lind tells us, he held up the Bible and said: "This
alone is right." Through his works, however, he serves virtue best, not
by directly praising it, but by his eagerly earnest account of the
madness of the seven deadly sins, as well as of the seventy-seven deadly
irritations. He has not the originality of fancy or imagination to paint
virtue well. His genius was the genius of frank and destructive
criticism. His work is a jumble of ideas and an autobiography of raw
nerves rather than a revelation of the emotions of men and women. His
great claim on our attention, however, is that his autobiography is true
as far as the power of truth was in him. His pilgrim's progress through
madness to salvation is neither a pretty nor a sensational lie. It is a
genuine document. That is why, badly constructed though his plays and
novels are, some of them have a fair chance of being read a hundred
years hence. As a writer of personal literature, he was one of the bold
and original men of his time.