August Strindberg
“I seek God and find the Devil.”
“My hate is boundless as the wastes, burning as the sun, and stronger than my love.”
The above quotations give some idea of that black pessimism which is, at any rate, the most patent characteristic of Strindberg. Yet neither quotation, motto, nor catch-word can do justice to the multifarious life and character of this man. For Strindberg, more than any other European author of our age, has boxed the whole compass of our modernity with its tumults, its aspirations, its perversities; its glaring searchlights of science, its pallid flames of mysticism, and its needle ever pointing to the two opposite though connected poles of sex. He is in turns the most rabid of atheists, the most devout of Catholics, the most esoteric of occultists; now the most Utopian of Socialists, now the most uncompromising of individualists. Running the gauntlet of three unhappy and dissolved marriages, he has become the European specialist in conjugal infelicity, to say nothing of being credited with innumerable conquests, which he himself would doubtless have designated as captures. His novels, his autobiographies, and his equally subjective dramas all exhale the most sulphurous hate against the distorted anomaly of the new woman, yet he is an Orpheus who, scorning the prosaic joys of some normal and uninteresting Eurydice, surrenders himself with almost pathological gusto to be torn to pieces by the monstrous mænads of modernity. The paroxysms of his hate alternate with moods of the most sentimental idealism, and the harsh impetus of his onslaught is only equalled by the, at times, abject meekness of his romantic devotion.
Before, consequently, we embark on some slight survey of Strindberg’s life and of the more characteristic of his numerous works, let us endeavour to lay hold of the clues of one or two primary features which will serve as a guide in the, at first sight, extremely tangled labyrinth of his psychology.
Now the dominant emotion in Strindberg’s temperament is fear. It is this fear which, at times assuming the dimensions of paranoia or systematised delusion and persecution mania, largely supplies the explanation to his whole attitude towards Man, Woman, and God. He possessed also a vehemently explosive egoism and a gigantic intellect, at times dominating his fear and functioning with the most powerful precision, but as often as not interpreting the whole external world in the terms of some preconceived subjective emotion. Add also a morbidly hypertrophied sexual sensibility, together with a distinct strain of genuine idealism, and one may perhaps be able to envisage with some accuracy the cardinal points of our author’s brain.
August Strindberg was born in 1849, the son of a mésalliance between a shipping agent and a servant girl. The circumstances of his childhood tended to magnify that morbid sense of fear which, according to our most eminent psychologists, is always innate and never altogether acquired. The two parents, the seven children, and the two servants lived in two rooms, and the family always appeared to him like “a prison in which two prisoners watched each other, a place where children were tortured and maids brawled.” His mother died when he was thirteen, to be succeeded by the inevitable stepmother. His school life also was unhappy, but his description of it, though no doubt perfectly consistent with actual hardship, exhibits at the same time the reactions of a morbid sensibility to the hard facts of external life. “Life was a penitentiary for crimes which one had committed before one was born, so that the child always went about with a bad conscience.”
Note also, at the same time, the presence of the combative aggressive element in the boy who would lose nearly every game of chess by the inconsidered vehemence of his attack, or would break open chests of drawers in the fury of his desire to obtain their contents. And observe the early manifestations of that fundamental emotion which was to obtain throughout his life alternative outlets in the two parallel channels of religion and sex. Thus, like Byron, he experienced a violent passion for a girl before the age of puberty. So far, again, as religion was concerned, he had a great horror of darkness and the unknown, and his deity would appear to have been a god rather of fear than of love. And though Scandinavians as a race take Christianity far more seriously than the inhabitants of any other European country, he would appear to have possessed, even for a Scandinavian, the religious temperament to an unusual degree. Thus, he said his prayers on his way to school, and evinced a precocious desire to become a priest. But the religious element became dormant amid the chequered vicissitudes which signalised his youth and his adolescence. He started to study medicine at the University of Upsala, but his lack of funds broke into his college career and compelled him to earn his own living. He is by turns telegraph clerk, editor of an insurance paper (for which purpose he specially learns the higher mathematics), tutor in the family of a rich Jewish physician, actor in the Karl Moor of Schiller’s Robbers, journalist on a daily paper (where the drastic offensiveness of his criticisms made his position on the staff intolerable), and librarian in the Royal Library of Stockholm (when he specially learns Chinese for the purpose of compiling a catalogue). His struggles were bitter and continued, and the acuteness of his privations manifests itself in a deep consciousness of class hatred against the prosperous and not infrequently dishonest philistinism of the day.
Note, also, the occurrence of combined religious and persecution mania in the crises of his illness and despondency. For at such times he takes the Devil himself as seriously as the Deity, believes in an “Evil God to whom the Creator had handed over the world,” and “has the consciousness of being personally persecuted by personal powers of evil.” These emotional outbursts are all the more interesting because intellectually he had become the most fanatical of freethinkers, had read with profit Buckle’s History of Civilisation in England, and was a fervent disciple of the new naturalism. During this period he had already begun to write dramas, none of which, however, have any substantial significance with the possible exception of the historical drama Meister Olof, which was unsuccessfully performed in 1877-8, and into which the already misogynous author had introduced the character of the prostitute, “in order to show that the difference between her and the ordinary woman is not so enormously great.”
In 1879, however, Strindberg achieved a succès de scandale with his novel The Red Room. The satire of this book (written, it will be remembered, during his freethought years), may, no doubt, be the milk of Christian charity when compared with the concentrated vitriol of the Black Flags of his Catholic period, and the various scenes and pictures may, no doubt, strike the critic as episodic and lacking in systematic cohesion, yet the work has some claim to recognition by reason of the vivid force of its description of contemporaneous life. The naïvely idealistic hero, the shady actress passing from seduction to seduction with all the facility of the experienced ingénue, the respectable director of the shoddy insurance company, the insidious Jewish financial broker, the cynical journalist, the grim but benevolent doctor, are all portrayed in a style which at once shines and chills with all the brightness of the coldest steel. Viewed psychologically, the book is significant as exhibiting the Socialistic fury of an embittered man “whose class-hatred lay in his blood and in his nerves,” and who revenges himself on the system which had conspired against him, by exposing with sinister precision its most repulsive truths.
The cynicism of The Red Room was succeeded by the Utopian romanticism of the dramas, Das Geheimniss der Gilde, Frau Margit, Gluckspeter. The change in mood is probably to be ascribed to the vogue of The Red Room, and to the initial success of his alliance with his first wife, Siri von Essen, the actress, whom he had married in 1878, and who was subsequently to enjoy the ambiguous blessing of being officially immortalised in The Confession of a Fool.
This mood, in its turn, was soon replaced by a concentrated and fanatical misogynism which was to dominate practically every book which Strindberg was subsequently to write. The fundamental cause was, no doubt, the morbidly irritable and suspicious nature of the man himself. Strindberg’s whole attitude towards woman, however, is only fully understood by some appreciation of the New Woman Movement, which under the auspices of Ellen Key flourished vigorously in Sweden in the “eighties.” Like, for instance, our own Suffragette agitation, or indeed, any popular craze, however intrinsically meritorious, this movement, which was, above all, a crusade for sexual equality, was attended by wild and perverse extravagances. Not merely the genuinely masculine woman, but every little doll of a woman in every little doll’s house, became obsessed with the imperative necessity of the emancipation of her own body and the self-development of her own soul. A holy war of the sexes was proclaimed, and the sacred shibboleth of the New Thought, the New Ethics, and the New Love was soon in the mouth of every woman possessed of the true feminine esprit de corps. And with the praiseworthy object of adjusting the balance of nature, and of arriving so far as possible at the ideal harmony of an almost perfect equation, in some cases even the little boys would be brought up as girls, while, conversely, the little girls would be educated as boys.
But the misogynism of Strindberg was something far more than a merely intellectual appreciation of the Anti-Feminist standpoint. Even making allowance for the considerable impetus doubtless given to his attack by reason of his personal matrimonial complications, the cause lay far more deeply ingrained in his own constitution. For the arrogation by the female of equal rights to the male would of itself tend to provoke the violent apprehensiveness of a man always morbidly alarmed at the slightest suggestion of any interference with his own personal rights, and always scenting a grievance with all the superhuman flair of the true maniac of persecution. Strindberg’s hatred of woman is thus to a large extent the hatred self-begotten of fear out of its own spirit, and without the superfluous aid of a concrete reality. If, too, we identify Strindberg himself with some of his men characters (e.g. Kurt in The Death Dance, Axel in Playing with Fire, or the narrator of The Confession of a Fool), who render to the objects of their passion acts of the most abject servility, and who kiss the feet of women almost as frequently as their lips, we would hazard the suggestion that he himself (who owns to having found in his reverence for woman a substitute for his reverence for God) would in certain moods welcome with morbid alacrity this new feminine domination, while his reaction from this inverted attitude would but lash his misogynism to even more hysterical paroxysms.
These considerations may perhaps explain why in so many of his works the Strindberg woman and the Strindberg man are so highly specialised. The typical Strindberg woman is a fiend with the physique of a Madonna and the soul of a vampire, who sucks dry the life-blood of her heroic victim. The typical Strindberg man is a Samson shorn of his strength, writhing in the toils of some Delilah, protesting vociferously, and yet taking a morbid delight in his own bondage. English readers will remember the not altogether unanalogous case of John Tanner, that converse Don Juan of Mr. Shaw, who, with all his fanfaronnade of masculine independence, is, as he has from the beginning feared, anticipated and desired, successfully hunted down by his sly and dashing Donna Juana.
After the publication of The Red Room, Strindberg visited both Switzerland and Paris, where he was invited to meet Björnsen, entered into relations with the Théätre Libre of M. Antoine, had one or two of his plays produced, and meditated an unfortunately written satire on the French capital. In 1883 he produced Swedish Destinies, a volume of essays on contemporary problems, whose romantic masquerade would seem to have effectively concealed its underlying satire.
The most significant work, however, which he published at this period was the volume of twelve (subsequently expanded to twenty) short stories, entitled Marriage. These tales all treat of the various phases, economic, social, psychological, and physiological, of the sexual problem, which he observed either in his own life or in the couples whom he saw in a Swiss pension. The characteristic of this work is its extraordinary seriousness. For to Strindberg the sexual problem provides neither the excuse for the philosophic flippancy of the cynic, nor for the priggish modernity of the ethical or intellectual snob, but is the one obsessing reality of actual life.
Compared with the black pessimism of this work (relieved though it may be at times by a ray of tender sentiment or deep paternal feeling), the grimmest stories of Wedekind are benignly jovial and the most scabrous tales of De Maupassant but innocently sportive. Neither smile, nor even leer, ever breaks the set visage of this stern irony, which seems indistinguishable from life itself. There are no artificial climaxes or ostentatious flourishes of style to prick the senses of the reader. Described in a language of the most brutal phlegm and the most forceful simplicity, the facts of reality do their own unaided work. Each story is no mere dexterously elaborated incident, but a condensed life. How powerful, for instance, is such a story as Asra, the history of the pious youth afflicted with anæmia by reason of his own continence, and dying two years after his marriage with that superabundantly healthy ethical worker who subsequently married twice again, had eight children, and wrote articles on over-population and immorality. And how genuinely awful is Autumn, that frigid anti-climax of a stale and re-hashed honeymoon:
“And she sang, ‘What is the name of the land in which my darling dwells?’ But, alas, the voice was thin and sharp. It was at times like a shriek from the depths of the soul that fears that the noon is passed, and that the evening is approaching. When the song was over, she did not at first dare to turn round, as though she was expecting that he would come to her and say something. But he did not come; and there was silence in the room. When at last she turned round on her chair, he sat on the sofa and cried. She wanted to get up, take his head in her hands, and kiss him as before; but she remained seated, motionless, with her gaze turned to the floor....
“They drank coffee, and spoke about the coolness of the summer weather, and where they would spend the summer next year. But the conversation began to dry up; and they repeated themselves. At last he said, after a long, undisguised yawn, ‘I’m going to bed now.’ ‘So will I,’ she said, and got up, ‘but I will go first and have a look on the balcony.’
“When she came back, she remained standing and listening at the door of the bedroom. All was quiet inside, and the boots were outside the door. She knocked, but there was no answer. Then she opened the door, and went in. He slept! He slept!”
Though, moreover, the characters in Marriage are more normal and average than in any other of Strindberg’s works, the author airs again and again his pet sexual grievances. Corinna, in particular, and The Duel, are savage attacks respectively on the ethical amazon and the womanly woman who makes her very womanliness an engine of tyranny, while the Breadwinner narrates how an apparently quite impeccable husband and father, writing himself to death to support his family, was driven to suicide by the naggings and exactions of a querulous and discontented wife.
Marriage was succeeded by the Utopian Swiss Tales; but the strenuous economic struggles to which Strindberg was now subjected forced him to discard as insipid the vague compromise of free-thought and to drink the bracing tonic of a Nietzschean and self-reliant atheism. “God, Heaven, and Eternity had to be thrown overboard if the ship was to be kept afloat; and it had to be kept afloat because I was not alone... I became an atheist as a matter of duty and necessity.”
Yet it is interesting to observe that, taking the solution of the World-Riddle as a matter of acute personal importance, he studies the whole history of mankind to satisfy himself that he is right in his conclusion, and that the element of superstition is still so strong that when his child is ill he prays, atheist that he is, with all the fervour of a Christian Scientist. To the period of his atheism are to be ascribed, with the exception of Black Flags, his most powerful, most drastic work, his two packed volumes of one-act plays, the autobiographic Confession of a Fool, and the Nietzschean novel, The Open Sea.
Note also that his matrimonial misery and his divorce from his first wife had given an additional poison to a sting which was always morbidly eager to inject its venom.
The plays of Strindberg belong to the naturalistic school of problem-play which was in full vogue during the period of their composition. Technically their originality lies in the intensity of their concentration. Though many of them are one-acters and they nearly all observe the unity of place, they resemble less the ordinary curtain-raiser than the one solitary act round which the ordinary modern play is usually written. Each play is nothing but climax. Though in some cases they are nearly as long as ordinary drama, it is rare that they have any subsidiary characters. Even the protagonists are too occupied with the urgencies of their own immediate crises, and with exposing the nakedness of their own souls, to have time for either the artificial jewels of the Pinerovian epigram or the flying rockets of the Shavian dialectic. The problem is stuck too deep into their lives to require any artificial flourishing. Observe, too, that nearly every play is a variation on one theme, the mutual hate, fear, and war of a malevolent humanity. Their very love but sharpens their enmity, and they draw blood with nearly every word.
The three-act play, The Father, ventilates the author’s chronic grievance of the ruin of the man by the woman. The plot is cruel in its simplicity. The husband, though in a state of acute nervous disorder, is not certifiable. The wife, anxious for a freer life, smuggles a doctor into the house, plays adroitly on the man’s pet mania that he is not the father of his own daughter, forges in his handwriting a letter branded with insanity, goads him into throwing a burning lamp at her, and with the aid of his old nurse gets him by a ruse into a strait-jacket, in which he succumbs to a stroke. Yet with all its concentrated sensationalism, and work though it may be of a constitutional maniac of persecution, the play is too deep, too sincere, too fundamentally convincing to be ever near that line which separates the realm of tragedy from the pandemonium of melodrama. With what ghastly irony does the daughter innocently prick the sensitive sore in her father’s brain:
[Rittmeister sits huddled up on the settee.
BERTHA. Do you know what you’ve done? Do you know you’ve thrown the lamp at Mamma?
RITTMEISTER. Have I?
BERTHA. Yes, you have. Just think if she’d been hurt?
RITTMEISTER. What would that have mattered?
BERTHA. You are not my father if you can talk like that.
RITTMEISTER (gets up). What do you say? Am I not your father? How do you know that? Who told you so? And who is your father, then? Who?
But of all Strindberg’s plays, indisputably the most powerful is Miss Julie, that gripping tragedy of the over-sexed young woman who on an oppressive mid-summer evening insists on being seduced by her father’s butler. The girl is of noble birth, and the duel of sex is intensified by the duel of class. In the fifty pages of this play, with its three characters of the woman, the butler, and the cook, which observes rigorously the Aristotelian unities, every element of the highest and gravest tragedy is introduced with the most accurate and natural psychology—the exaggerated dancing of the daughter of the house, who competes with her own cook for the favours of her own butler-lover; the ribald grins and songs of the servants; the mingled insolence, common sense, and respectfulness of the domestic; the hysterical reaction of the déclassée and dishonoured girl. The following passages may perhaps give some faint idea of this work’s sustained and infernal power:
[John opens the cupboard, takes a bottle of wine out, and fills two used glasses.
THE YOUNG LADY. Where do you get the wine from?
JOHN. From the cellar.
THE YOUNG LADY. My father’s burgundy.
JOHN. Ain’t it good enough for his son-in-law?
THE WOMAN. Thief!
JOHN. Are you going to blab?
THE LADY. Oh—oh—the accomplice of a thief....
JOHN. You hate men-folk, miss?
THE LADY. Yes, as a rule!... But at times, when I feel weak—ugh!
JOHN. You hate me, too?
THE LADY. Infinitely! I could have killed you like an animal....
And how clutching is the climax, when the girl, a simultaneous prey to nausea with life and to fear of death, persuades her domestic to hypnotise her into suicide at almost the precise minute when her father is ringing for his boots:
THE YOUNG LADY. Have you never been in a theatre and seen the mesmerist? He says to the subject: “Take the broom”; he takes it. He says “Sweep”; and he sweeps....
JOHN (takes his razor and puts it into her hand). Here is the broom—go now where there’s plenty of light—into the barn—and—(whispers into her ear).
Miss Julie is remarkable as being the only one of Strindberg’s works in which the man comes off victorious with the exception of the four-act Comrades, that sombre comedy of Parisian artist life, where the crowing wife bullies her self-sacrificing husband on the score of having ousted him from the Salon by her own successful picture, only to be told that he had simply changed the numbers, and to be finally ejected from her perverted home by that reasserted man whose efficiency she had despised and exploited, but whose virile despotism she now begins to love.
In The Creditor, Strindberg treats again his favourite theme of the vampire woman and the spoliated man. Thekla, the usual worthless, demoniac female, having dissolved her marriage with the schoolmaster Gustav, has married the artist Adolph. The scene is the sea-side. Thekla has gone off on some jaunt. Her new husband, who is apparently even more miserable without than with his wife, is a nervous wreck. He makes the acquaintance of the old husband, who presents himself incognito to readjust the balance of his matrimonial account. Gustav plays with masterly hypnotism on the suggestibility of his colleague, making him doubt himself, his vocation, his health, and at last his wife. And then when his wife returns, and the enfeebled husband has made an abortive attempt at asserting his theoretic virile superiority, he makes love to the wife, is detected by the visitors, and goes back to his own solitary misery, to leave his wife stranded and his new confrere dead. Note, too, that here again the human triangle is complete in itself, and that the agony is protracted to the last shred of its passion without ever flagging for one single moment.
Space prohibits any complete discussion of the remaining plays in the cycle of Strindberg’s Eleven One-acters. Yet we would mention Motherly Love, a variation on the theme of Mrs. Warren. The souteneuse mother, with all her loathsome affectation of wounded parental feeling, plays judiciously on the morbidly filial conscience of a clean-minded but weak-willed actress-daughter, prevents her from obtaining respectable friends or advancement on the stage, in order to preserve for herself her sole professional stock-in-trade.
Equally impressive is The Bond, which expresses in one divorce-court scene the whole mordant tragedy of wrangling matrimony and authentic parental affection.
In a lighter vein is Playing with Fire, the one real comedy which Strindberg ever wrote. In this the delightful ménage of a young son, a young wife, a young friend of the family, a young charity cousin, and a philistine but by no means senile father, everybody is flirting with everybody else. Particularly admirable in its mixture of the comic and the ironic is the character and attitude of the conceited and ultra-modern artist-husband, genuinely jealous of that friend and of that wife whom he loves so sincerely, and yet throwing them into each other’s arms in a compounded mood of priggish bravado and authentic affection. The friend, apprehensive lest he may have a bad conscience, is anxious to take a room in the village.
THE WIFE. Why don’t you stay with us? Out with it.
THE FRIEND. I don’t know. I think you ought to be left quiet. Besides it might happen that we should get fed up with each other.
THE WIFE. Are you fed up with us already? I tell you, it won’t do. I tell you that if you stay out there in the village, people will begin to talk.
THE FRIEND. Talk? What will they talk about?
THE WIFE. Oh, you know perfectly well how stories get put together.
THE SON. You stay here—there’s an end of it. Let them talk. If you stay here, it goes without saying that you’re my wife’s lover, and if you stay in the village, it goes without saying that you’ve broken with each other, or that I’ve kicked you out. Consequently, I think it more honourable for you to be regarded as her lover—eh, what?
THE FRIEND. You certainly express yourself with considerable lucidity; but in a case like this, I’d rather prefer to consider which is honourable for you two.
As we have already hinted, an additional bitterness had been introduced into Strindberg’s misogynism by the unhappiness of his own first marriage, which was dissolved in 1889. It is this marriage which Strindberg celebrates in that phenomenal piece of official sexual autobiography, The Confession of a Fool, which has successfully scandalised the whole Continent of Europe. In comparison with this book the New Machiavelli is but the tamest Sunday-school reading, and the romantic confessions of Mr. George Moore the merest healthy pranks of robustious youth. This work throughout has the real spontaneity of the genuine diary rather than the studied frankness of the elaborate literary artificer. The young librarian is in Stockholm. A young lady makes advances to him. “She has an adventurous appearance, hovering between the artist, the blue-stocking, the daughter of the house, the fille de joie, the new woman, and the coquette.” She presses her suit, looks at him in an unambiguous manner, and “he only owes his virtue to her extraordinary ugliness.” He is introduced to her friends, the Baron and Baroness X. He becomes the ami de famille. But the demon of sex is at work, and simply through keeping step with her in walking he will experience a unification of their whole nervous systems. Honourable man that he is, he runs away from danger, starts for Paris in a steamship, and is seen off amid the combined tears of the married pair. The ship sails. His nerves break down; and in an hysterical paroxysm he insists on being disembarked, is attended by a priest and doctor at a small hotel, and returns post-haste to Stockholm. The Baroness runs away to a watering-place. But matters only progress with even greater rapidity on her return. The Baron is largely occupied with a cousin; and an official declaration takes place between the wife and the lover. With ultra-modern honesty they immediately apprise the husband, who while giving them the widest margin within which to exercise their platonic affections, yet reposes implicit trust in their combined honour. A financial crash, however, disposes of the Baron; and the gentleman is landed with his lady. There ensue all the joys and agonies of a ten-years’ union. The couple are linked in the burning bonds of a mutual love and a mutual hate. The author has to sacrifice his own well-being and career to push forward his wife in her amateurish efforts in journalism and acting. From that time “legal prostitution enters into the marriage....” She belongs to the public, she makes up and dresses for the public, and she consequently becomes “a prostitute who will finally send in her bill for such and such services.”
The moods alternate with the regularity of a pendulum. If at one moment “the nest of love has become transformed into a dog-kennel,” and the author is morbidly jealous of nearly every man and every woman with whom his wife has the slightest acquaintance, strikes his wife, and endeavours to drown her; it is only subsequently, in the last stages of servile uxoriousness, to idolise her again as a martyr and as a saint. Six times does he leave her (expending on one occasion in debauchery the proceeds of his pawned wedding-ring), and six times does he return, only to draw up at last this monstrous dossier of his conjugal life: “The story is at an end, my beloved one; I have revenged myself; the account is squared.”
Not altogether inexplicably, Strindberg has been much attacked on the score of this book. He has been charged with wickedly defaming an innocent and deserving woman. Yet even though the book be objectively false, it is subjectively true. It is impossible to doubt its prodigious sincerity, even though this merely be the implicit sincerity of persecution mania. Every single nuance of the emotions of a man who honestly thinks that he is being unscrupulously exploited is faithfully described. The book may shock by its vehement coldness, its abnormal callousness, its matter-of-fact explicitness; yet from the literary standpoint, its entire absence of affectation, the drastic ease of its simplicity, the swift naturalness of its diction, cannot fail to convince. It stands out from the whole of European literature as the superlative masterpiece of suspicious love and monstrous morbid hate.
In the great novel, By the Open Sea (1890), Strindberg’s Nietzschean mood achieves its grand zenith. The hero, Axel Borg (whom we may already remember from The Red Room), “instead of, like the weak Christians, embracing a God outside himself, took what he could seize with his own hands and in his own self, and sought to make his own personality into a complete type of humanity.” Borg, who combines with the ideals of the superman the hyper-sensitiveness of the neurotic, lives the single life as an inspector of fishery in a little village on the Swedish coast, where the sea “frightens not like the forest with its dark mystery, but brings quietude like an open great big true eye.” He is pursued and caught by an over-sexed young woman, realises her worthlessness, and sails out to commit suicide.
“Out toward the new Star of Christmas, ran his voyage, out over the Sea, the All-Mother, from whose bosom the first spark of life was kindled, the inexhaustible source of fertility and love, life’s origin and life’s foe.”
This book, with its splendid nature-descriptions, the tragic dignity of its hero, and the azure swiftness of its limpid style, is one of Strindberg’s most impressive feats. Yet even here the author’s characteristic traits can be distinctly traced. The noble male is ruined by a despicable woman; while here, too, the cosmic mysticism of the professed atheist (whose mood can perhaps be best expressed by the worn cliché of “being in tune with the infinite”), reveals only too clearly the emotional bias of a fundamentally religious temperament.
This temperament was soon to manifest itself in the most tragic form. Jaded with literature, and unhappy again in his second marriage with the Austrian authoress, Frida Uhl, in 1893, Strindberg embarked on the study of chemistry, took rooms in the Latin quarter, attended the Sorbonne laboratories, and imagined that he had revolutionised science by the discovery of a new element in sulphur. He had by now attained the, to him, crucial period of the late “forties,” and the chronic excesses of his emotionalism now assumed a religious form, to the accompaniment of the most acute mania of persecution.
His experiences in these years, 1895-8, are described in the Inferno and the Legends, works which the mystic and the psychologist can read with equal if heterogeneous edification. In these books, which are based on Strindberg’s diaries during the actual time, the aberrations of a disorganised brain are set out with the most unconscious literary art. His delusions became systematised with all the ingenuity of the paranoiac. Every casual suggestion thrown up by his memory, or the events and associations of every-day life, every bit of science that he had ever studied or of mysticism that he had ever felt, are all utilised to build the infernal scheme of his mania. He is “the innocent sacrifice of an unjust persecution,” the prey of unknown powers, the conducting-point of electrical streams from unknown agencies. He asks for a miracle and sees in the heavens the ten commandments and the name of Jehovah. His friend Popoffski (in point of fact, the Polish-German novelist Przybeszewski) has come to Paris; it is with the sole object of killing him by poison. His usual seat at his usual café is occupied; he is the victim of a universal conspiracy. Eventually the hells of his torment burn themselves out in an abject ecstasy of atonement, in Catholicism, Swedenborgianism, and the bastard hybrid of a scientific occultism.
From this time the religious obsession sits upon most, if not all, of his subsequent work. To this mood are due the officially religious dramas To Damascus, Midsummer, the extremely weak Advent and Easter, his new-found theory of The Conscious Will in the World-History, his historical dramas (where the characters, particularly Luther, were too subjectively conceived to be historically convincing), and his Dream-Play (where telephones, lawyers, theatres, enchanted woods, Indra’s daughter, military officers, married couples, casinos, poets, and ballet-dancers all combine to weave the filmy phantasmagoria of a Buddhistic reality). We may also mention in this connection the Blue Books, the official synthesis of his life (a series of miniature essays on such apparently heterogeneous subjects as, inter alia, Troy, Christ, electro-chemistry, botany, surds, Assyriology, optics, geology, Hammurabi, astrology, morphium, Swedenborgianism, spermatozoic analysis, mystic numbers, Kipling, and Jehovah).
Although, speaking generally, Strindberg achieved his masterpieces during the period of his atheism, many of his later works have indisputable value. The play Intoxication (1900), for instance (though the killing through sheer unconscious force of will, by the hero, of the child of one mistress, in order to gratify the caprice of another, may strike the unimaginative critic as slightly melodramatic, and his eventual retirement into a Catholic monastery as somewhat of an anti-climax), is a work of extraordinary power.
So also is the Death Dance (1900), in which the middle-aged captain and his passée wife grind each other to ruin and despair beneath the mutual mill-stones of their hate, “that most unreasonable hate, without ground, without object, but also without end.” Does not the author plumb the extreme depths of human malevolence in the passage in which the wife in company with her cousin is expecting her paralytic husband to fall down dead?
KARL. What are you looking at over there, dear, by the wall?
ALICE. I’m seeing if he’s tumbled down.
KARL. Has he tumbled down?
ALICE. No, more’s the pity. He deceives me in everything.
We would also mention the Maeterlinckian beauty of the Crown Bride and Swan White (1900), the heroine of which is an idealisation of the author’s third wife, the actress, Harriet Bosse; the delicate fantasy of Tales (1908); and the Swedish Miniatures, of which the Sacrifice Dance in particular is a positive masterpiece of swift bloodiness.
Cruelty, moreover, is an integral element in at any rate primitive religion. This may conceivably explain why, faithfully fulfilling what he personally professed to have found a joyless duty, Strindberg successfully performed in Black Flags, his celebrated roman à clef, the intellectual flaying and dismemberment of all Stockholm Bohemia. It is amusing to remember that he successfully consulted the oracle of the Book of Job before he published the work in 1905, to face the protesting shrieks of his victims with all the devout conscience of some early priest of Thor who gravely officiates at some blood-stained human sacrifice.
It is outside the purpose of this essay to discuss whether these descriptions of the intellectual and sexual clique of the Swedish capital constitute a fair portrait or a monstrous defamation, or whether, for instance, Hanna Paj is a malignant travesty or a euphemistic delineation of that lady whom all who have the slightest acquaintance with the Continental Feminist Movement will immediately recognise.
As a sheer piece of satire the book waves its black flag unchallenged amid all the fluttering multicoloured pennons of modern European literature. What matter if the characterisation be true or false? So far, at any rate, as the non-Swedish reader is concerned, the illusion is complete. Kilo, “the little bookseller, with the suffering eyes of a sick dog”; Falkenstrom, the idealist, whose wife is induced by her bosom friend to join some alleged monstrous cosmopolitan masonic sisterhood; Hanna Paj, the feminist lecturer, the fury with the flag of hate on which was written the device, “Revenge on Man”; Smartman, the debonair intriguing editor with his two sets of rooms—all these pictures of “the galley-slaves of ambition linked together in the fetters of interest, these murderers and thieves who steal each other’s thoughts, addresses, friends, and personalities,” are perfectly convincing. Above all there stands out the delineation of Lars Peter Zachrisson, “the intellectual cannibal,” the “broker of literature, the promoter of mutual admiration societies, the speculator in reputations, the founder of syndicates for the manufacture of celebrities,” the morphia maniac, the tippler “who laughs humorously in his moustache and weeps tears of whisky from his eyes,” the father of “that resurrected corpse, that wandering shame, whose face was known to all, and who was branded with his own name.” And how devilish is the description of this domestic hell of human hate, where he mocks his wife on her failing charms and encourages her gluttony with the specific object of spoiling her figure, where the mother in her turn brings up her children like a breed of dachshunds whom she sets to bait their father, and where the two spouses yet feel some inexplicable need of being together in the same room for the purpose of that mutual nagging and mutual reviling which constituted the chief interest in their miserable existence.
To sum up, we have seen how throughout his life the persecution mania of Strindberg expressed itself in his attitude to sex, religion, and society, as like at once some veritable Rhadamanthine recorder, and some cowering victim of divine vengeance, he dispenses and fears those words of doom in his black adamant of diction. Yet it is impossible casually to brush the man aside as some mere paranoiac. The very torments of his soul fructified in the stupendous genius of his intellectual production. With all his perversities, with all his aberrations, Strindberg remains the blackest, and in his own particular spheres the most drastic, intelligence in the whole of our European literature.