[1]In his autobiography he uses his first Christian name: Johan, and speaks of himself in the third person.
[1]In his autobiography he uses his first Christian name: Johan, and speaks of himself in the third person.
We may agree with Höffding that "every important individuality is a point of view for the human race, from which men catch sight of possibilities and aspects of existence which would otherwise have escaped them." But we must also acknowledge that the strongest individuality is i malleable in the hands of experience, and that contact with humanity wrenches away the mind from cherished points of view.
Though Strindberg was born with defiance of the Decalogue upon his lips, though he lived in perpetual revolt against restraint and intellectual formalism, though he sought above all to think and not to copy, he could not escape that constant pressure of others which is the essential of collective existence.
The University, with its rigid forms of instruction, its standards of learning, had been the cage on the bars of which he hadexercised his muscles of independence. He had craved for freedom; his chronic disgust at the established order had made him fail through paralysis of will, where he might have excelled through natural superiority. And yet he felt strangelyen rapportwith the tradition of the University, when in the spring of 1872 he embarked upon journalism in Stockholm. He went into humble lodgings on borrowed money, and obtained an ill-paid post on a Radical evening paper.
The journalists with whom he now mingled lacked the culture which the University imposes even on its most rebellious alumni. They talked in ready-made phrases and wrote on subjects over which they had no mental mastery. They could harm or help fellow-creatures by the exercise of a power for which they were totally unfitted. Loose-witted and garrulous, they missed central questions and mistook the gossip of the news-hunter for judicial wisdom.
The journalistic profession of that time did not command general respect, and thelittérateursof the Radical press were often treated as a species of social brigands. They were nameless and their activities subterraneous, but they wrote "We" and held the mole'spower of being able to upset the tilled fields of man.
Strindberg plunged into art-criticism, and exposed Count George von Rosen's famous picture "Erik XIV and Karin Månsdotter," in the National Museum of Stockholm, to the fire of his discontent. The ashes of his own drama on "Erik XIV," which he had burnt, lay over his judgment, and the feeling of identity with the oppressed classes, now revived through associations, made him resent Rosen's conception of Göran Persson, the favourite and evil genius of the mad king. Rosen had painted the sly and intriguing counsellor with a fidelity which was opposed to Strindberg's view of Persson, as an enemy of the nobility and a friend of the people. Rosen's standpoint was therefore condemned in Strindberg's articles, which appeared after some editorial trimming of their literary ornamentation.
A brief but eventful attachment to a ladies' illustrated paper, to which he contributed short stories and biography, increased Strindberg's knowledge of the exigences of journalism and the possibilities for feminine exploitation of the impecunious male.
He chose his friends amongst the artists. They were shabbily dressed, cultivated vile manners, were gloriously illiterate, but they had originality of feeling and thought. Without book-knowledge they had the knack of seizing the essence of life and of settling problems with intuitive accuracy. Strindberg still found solace of mind in painting. It was like singing. The brush and the colours gave shape to his vague imaginings. The post-romanticism of Corot pervaded his circle of friends. The idea that one should paint one's own soul, not stocks and stones, captivated him.
The only value of the impression lay in its fusion with individuality. One should therefore paint from memory, with fantasy.
He always painted the sea with its shore in the foreground, and angry-looking firs, some naked cliffs further out, a white light-house and sea-marks. The sky was usually clouded, but at the horizon the clouds broke, and light was let through. He painted sunrise and moonshine, but never clear daylight.
His friends wore long hair, slouch-hats, brightly coloured neckties, and lived like the birds. They dreamt of canvas so large and subjects so great that no studio couldcontain them. A sculptor had made arrangements with a Norwegian to hew the legendary giant out of the Dovre mountain, a painter was going to reproduce the sea—nothing but the sea—with a horizon so vast that the globular shape of the earth should be made visible.
With two friends of the new life Strindberg talked out his melancholy questionings, and sketched the future of regenerated humanity. One was a painter of thirty who had been an agricultural labourer, and who, after some years' training, had found art an inadequate vehicle for thought, and who now "lived on nothing" but the stimulus of his eclectic philosophy.
The friend's name was "Måns," and he had a remarkable faculty for discovering faulty premises in the fabric of August'sdichtung. The other friend possessed the steadiness of the well-established social unit, and contributed a dispassionate and polite scepticism to the review of ideas.
They introduced Strindberg to Buckle's theories. There he found support for his rebellion against the scholasticism of Upsala, and learnt that his disease of doubt was in reality the basis of health. Doubt anddiscontent were the pre-requisites of knowledge and progress—the sole paths towards true happiness.
He felt irritated with all that was old and antiquated. Newspapers worked for the hour only, with no thought for the future. He could not read them without spasms of impatience.
The third volume of the autobiography describes his mental tension in the following passages: "His philosophic friend comforted him and calmed him by La Bruyère's saying: 'Do not distress yourself over the stupidity and wickedness of human beings; you may just as well distress yourself over the falling stone; both are subservient to the same laws; to be stupid and to fall.'
"'Yes, it is all very well to say that. But to be a bird and compelled to live in a mine! Air, light, I cannot breathe; not see!' he burst out. 'I am dying of suffocation!'
"'Write,' said his friend.
"'Yes, but what?'"
Out of the mists of doubt, the volatility of convictions, there rose creatures clad in flesh and blood, the warring selves of his multiple personality. The thin silhouettes of history became instinct with life; and Strindberg'sfirst great drama,The Heretic, afterwards namedMaster Olof, was conceived.
He wrote it during two summer months of quiet life on his island in the Baltic. It was necessary to act, for his newspaper had died and food was scarce. His kind friends, the fishermen, gave him credit, and he could concentrate on his task without the haunting anxiety for to-morrow's meals.
Master Olofdeals with the Swedish Protestant Reformation. In the personality of Olaus Petri, the Swedish Luther, he had found all the elements needed for an historical drama of the soul's battle and final defeat by the world. Olof, the priest with a message, the fanatic who is willing to live and die for the cause of religious and social reform, surrenders to compromise. As Archbishop Olaus Petri he stands forth as the heretic who had purchased peace at the price of spirituality. The tragedy of enthusiasm, wrecked by the practical issues of life, is the theme ofMaster Olof, and it has seldom found a more intense dramatic expression.
Olaus, with the tongue of fire over his head, called to make war on the superstitions and avarice of the Roman Catholic Church, defies the bishops. He is saved from theconsequences of their wrath by the King, who knows the value of the energy which impels the heresy. In Gustavus Vasa, the prudent King who makes Olof his secretary, Strindberg saw the opportunist, the man of worldly wisdom who neutralises great ideas by skimming their froth and rejecting their substance. Olof follows his light and becomes a conspirator against the King. But the King is stronger than he: caught, punished and pardoned, Olof at last becomes a dutiful servant of the State, and of the conservative powers which keep Society immune against the onslaughts of enthusiasts.
In Gerdt the printer, who urged the young Olof to become a Daniel and to speak the truth before kings, Strindberg saw the revolutionary who is the consistent enemy of compromise. In Olof's mother, who dies in the Catholic faith cursing her heretic son, he hears the eternal cry of the Old stabbed by the New; of the stagnant content that dwells in Woman when it is hurt by the passionate discontent that dwells in Man.
The relativity of truth and its perpetual evolution, the inevitable clashing of faiths and convictions, invest the struggle between mother and son with tragic reality. She hasrefused to call his wife anything but a harlot; for is she not living with a priest? She has in vain exerted parental authority to turn her son from the path of perdition. To her, Olof is the apostle of Antichrist, the child in the meshes of Satan, whom passionately she strives to save. "Ask me not," cries Olof to the mother before delivering his heretical sermon. "A mother's prayer can tempt angels in heaven to apostasy."
Two rascally priests pray by her deathbed, their thoughts intent on the bag of gold which tempts their cupidity. She dies comforted by their presence and shrinking from her son's defilement. But death smooths sharp differences, and when her eyes are closed Olof lights the holy candles, places a palm-branch in her hand, and prays for her forgiveness.
The figure of Strindberg's Olaus Petri, burning with religious fervour, proclaiming the true creed of Christ to the people who reply by throwing stones, a reformer who does not perish by his faith but lives by acceptance of common sense, is a contribution to the world's deathlessdramatis personæ. He is very remote from Shakespeare's Wolsey, and the psychological climax is reversed, butthere is an ecclesiastical magnificence in the two characters which forces comparisons.
There is an impressive simplicity in the language, and the author achieves the highest effects in portraiture with few rhetorical devices. The conflict of personalities makes the drama rich in contrasts, but they are softened by an atmosphere of fatalistic resignation before the irreconcilability of ideas. The characters are all right with the limited measure of rightness which is contained in each soul. They are all wrong with the wrongness which is inseparable from human form. InMaster OlofStrindberg spoke as Goethe had spoken inGoetz von Berlichingen.
Master Olofwas written during one of those periods of simple life and isolation which Strindberg sought with the craving of the repentant monk.
Debauch and drunkenness were eschewed, milk took the place of liquids of fermentation. Angling, swimming, fencing and mental gymnastics in the company of three sympathetic friends kept body and mind vigorous.
One of the friends paid his bill and our dramatist returned to town filled with hope and with the sense of relief of one who has at last said what he thinks. The play was sentto the manager of the Royal Theatre, and its author returned to the palette.
Whilst waiting for the verdict Strindberg sought to "idiotise" himself, and to stifle thought by diligent painting during some weeks. One evening at a gathering of press-men, the late editor of the dead evening paper told him that the play had been rejected. He felt suddenly ill and had to leave the company.
The next day he heard the reason for the refusal. Gustavus Vasa and Olaus Petri were distorted and degraded. He knew that he had stripped them of their historical and patriotic aureole, and he had deliberately restored their human contours. But such restoration was not welcome, and he was warned that the public did not want it. A thorough revision of the play was recommended.
The bitterness of failure now worked havoc in his soul. He plunged into the study of social problems. He found human folly supreme in principles of government and in the judgment of majorities and minorities. The curse of nescience was upon all flesh.
"His thoughts struggled like fish in the net and ended in entangling themselves," he writes of this mood. He tried to dismiss suchthoughts. But it was impossible. They returned "like a quiet, great sorrow, bringing despair because the world went its way—idiotically, majestically, inevitably—to the devil." A new rôle, that of sceptic, materialist, atheist, seemed to be his own part in the drama of mind. He strove to free himself from prejudices, social, religious, moral and practical, and ceased to read newspapers. For newspapers praised stupidity, mistook acts of egotism for love of humanity, and insulted intelligence.
"He had but one opinion: that everything was wrong; but one conviction: that nothing could be done to make things better at present; but one hope: that some day the time for interference would come, and that things would then improve."
There is something infinitely pathetic in Strindberg's life-long conflict with social injustice and fatuity. He was like a man digging deep for the straggling roots of a large tree. Sometimes he found one, but he could never put his foot on all at the same time. Social evolution, with its infinite variety of hidden forces, which burst into foliage on the tree of good and evil, yielded but few secrets to his spade. He besieged the soil in his handwith passionate questions and showered curses upon the matter under his muck-rake, but the elusive spirit which makes flowers out of dirt and green life out of black decay escaped him. The scepticism and impetus to transvalue all values which the rejection ofMaster Olofhad accelerated were further developed by the company which Strindberg now found congenial. A coterie of artists, writers and dilettantish philosophers assembled in the evenings in the Red Room of "Berns Restaurant." The tone was free, the clamour for truth loud, and contemptuous of the treasures of the past. The company was heterogeneous and disputatious, but held together by an aggressive scepticism which was beautifully sincere. The axiom that the spring of human action is egoism, was the basis of argument, and hypocrisy was hunted down with relentless severity.
The old was to be destroyed and the new created.
"That is ancient," were words of reproach. As new human beings they must think new thoughts, and new thoughts required new language.
Anecdotes and old jokes were cut short. Phrases and borrowed expressions wererejected. One was allowed to be coarse and to call things by their proper names, but not to be vulgar, not to quote from the latest comic opera or to use witticisms which had appeared in the last number of the comic paper.
Everything was focussed to strictly personal and independent judgment. Strindberg led the way in destructive criticism. Like Spencer before the old masters, he found the artistic perfection of the past centuries over-rated and superseded. The historical Jesus had been exposed to speculative criticism by scholars, and every tyro in the Red Room had the courage to follow.
But Strindberg defied the art-consciousness of the world by attacking Shakespeare. He knew all his plays, had read them in English, and was familiar with the commentators. He inveighed against the loose and disconnected composition inHamlet, the commonplace characterisation, the weakness of the anti-climax. His sling wanted a Goliath. The blind worship of that which is old and famous roused him to battle. Friends who came from Upsala thought alike and talked alike. They had become parrots who repeated the same views on Raphael and Schiller, automatafrom which conventional imitation had plucked every idiosyncrasy.
The happy camaraderie of the Bohemian circle and the race for intellectual independence did not assuage the pangs of physical hunger. After some dinnerless days Strindberg decided to make another attempt to join the profession of his heart. He travelled to Gothenburg on borrowed money, presented himself to the manager of the theatre, and offered his services as actor. His demand for a rehearsal of the play and part which he selected was granted, but he could not command the necessary emotional energy. He was offered an engagement at a small salary, but the condition of waiting for two months before appearing did not commend itself to his impetuous spirit, and he returned dejected to Stockholm. He felt that the charge of changeability which was brought against him was not altogether unjust, and though he was ashamed of his many changes, he could not act otherwise.
The persistence with which Strindberg attempted a theatrical career is strange in view of the lack of self-confidence, with which he was afflicted when face to face with an audience. At viva voce examinations he wasattacked by sudden aphasia, though he knew the answers to the questions. He found difficulty in public speaking, and his linguistic gifts did not help him to speak foreign languages with ease.
In the beginning of 1873 Strindberg found employment as editor of a new paper published in the interests of the insurance system. A less appropriate sphere of activity could scarcely have been devised, but he managed to transform the dry bones of premium and compensation into delectable morsels of brain-food. He penetrated the mysteries of commerce and statistics, studied the relationship between birth-rate and pauperism, and examined Socialism as a solution of economic riddles. But his inability to accommodate himself to existing conditions brought the enterprise to a speedy end. It was never financially sound, and when Strindberg chastised the methods of shipping insurance companies subscriptions began to fall off. A burlesque in which he ridiculed the methods of insolvent companies, and which was privately acted before indignant victims did not add to his popularity as editor. He exposed shams and humbug regardless of consequences. The crash came during thesummer, when Strindberg was seeking peace of mind on his island. A loan had gaily been contracted in the Riksbank to meet the costs of publication.
The day of repayment found Strindberg and his friends of the "Red Room" absolutely incapable of paying the debt. The presence of the printer's bill and the absence of the guarantees offered by the various insurance companies brought him to despair. The catastrophe had been precipitated by the carelessness of his coadjutors; Strindberg had honestly done his part to fulfil the obligations of the loan.
Strindberg fell seriously ill with fever. In delirious dreams he was haunted by futile remorse, by angry creditors and subscribers. In his brain-storms he battled with the evil one, who was permitted to bring deception and suffering to innocent humanity whilst God looked on complacently. His illness was followed by ague, which troubled him for many years.
A plan to find Nirvana in the waves ended in the return of the will to live and a liaison with the housekeeper in the cottage.
The friends who shared the cottage with him had left, and Strindberg fell passionatelyin love. She had been kind to him during his illness, and he felt drawn towards her by invisible cords which, under the circumstances, spelt tragedy. For after a short time she was unfaithful to him, and he fell a prey to tormenting jealousy.
No human experience passed him by lightly; he was a sensitive subject, who received impressions with painful vividness, and responded with the volcanic intensity of surcharged emotion.
The description which he gives inIn the Red Roomof the psychosis of his jealousy is of much interest:
"But as he walked on the shore, through glades and into the forest, design and colour began to mingle as if he had seen it all through tears. The mental shock, remorse, repentance, shame, began to dissolve him, and consciousness was loosened in its fixtures. Old thoughts about a task unfulfilled, about humanity suffering under mistakes and delusions, arose. Suffering enlarged his ego, the impression that he was fighting an evil power stimulated his resistance into wild defiance; the desire to battle with fate awoke, and from a heap of stakes he thoughtlessly picked up a long pointed stick. In his hand it became a spear and a club."He burst into the forest, breaking branches as if he had been fighting its dark giants. He kicked the fungi under his feet as if he were battering in so many empty gnomes' skulls. He yelled as if he were driving wolves and foxes, and opp! opp! opp! echoed the cry through the pine forest."At last he came to a rock which rose as an almost perpendicular wall in front of him. He struck it with his spear as if he wished to hew it down, and stormed up its side. Bushes crackled under his hand, and rustled down the mountain, tom up by the roots; stones rolled down; he put his foot on young junipers and whipped them till they lay broken like down-trodden grass. Thus he forced himself up and stood on the top."The rocks lay below, and beyond them the sea in an enormous circular view. He breathed as if now at last he had sufficient space. But on the mountain there stood a broken fir which was taller than he. He climbed it, spear in hand, and seated himself astride on the top which formed a saddle. Then he took off his belt, made a noose and hung it round a branch, came down from the tree and picked up a large stone which he placed in the sling."Now there was only the sky above him. But beneath him spread the pine forest, head by head, like an army storming his citadel. Beyond it the fjord raged and advanced towards him like cavalry of white cuirassiers; and beyond it lay the naked rocks like a fleet of monitors."'Come,' he cried, and brandished his spear, 'come a hundred, come a thousand,' he called. And spurring his high wooden horse he shook his weapon."The September wind blew from the fjord, and the sun set. The pine forest below became a murmuring crowd. And now he wanted to speak to them. But they murmured incomprehensible words and answered only 'Wood,' when he spoke to them."'Jesus or Barabbas?' he roared. 'Jesus or Barabbas?'"'Barabbas, of course,' he answered himself, when he listened for an answer."Darkness fell, and he felt frightened, dismounted from his saddle, and went home."Was he mad? No! He was only a poet who had sung in the forest instead of at the writing-table. But he hoped that he was mad; he wished darkness to extinguish hislight, for he saw no hope which could illuminate the darkness."His consciousness, which saw through the nothingness of life, wanted to see no more. It preferred to live in illusions, like the sick man who wants to believe that he will get well and therefore hopes it!"
"But as he walked on the shore, through glades and into the forest, design and colour began to mingle as if he had seen it all through tears. The mental shock, remorse, repentance, shame, began to dissolve him, and consciousness was loosened in its fixtures. Old thoughts about a task unfulfilled, about humanity suffering under mistakes and delusions, arose. Suffering enlarged his ego, the impression that he was fighting an evil power stimulated his resistance into wild defiance; the desire to battle with fate awoke, and from a heap of stakes he thoughtlessly picked up a long pointed stick. In his hand it became a spear and a club.
"He burst into the forest, breaking branches as if he had been fighting its dark giants. He kicked the fungi under his feet as if he were battering in so many empty gnomes' skulls. He yelled as if he were driving wolves and foxes, and opp! opp! opp! echoed the cry through the pine forest.
"At last he came to a rock which rose as an almost perpendicular wall in front of him. He struck it with his spear as if he wished to hew it down, and stormed up its side. Bushes crackled under his hand, and rustled down the mountain, tom up by the roots; stones rolled down; he put his foot on young junipers and whipped them till they lay broken like down-trodden grass. Thus he forced himself up and stood on the top.
"The rocks lay below, and beyond them the sea in an enormous circular view. He breathed as if now at last he had sufficient space. But on the mountain there stood a broken fir which was taller than he. He climbed it, spear in hand, and seated himself astride on the top which formed a saddle. Then he took off his belt, made a noose and hung it round a branch, came down from the tree and picked up a large stone which he placed in the sling.
"Now there was only the sky above him. But beneath him spread the pine forest, head by head, like an army storming his citadel. Beyond it the fjord raged and advanced towards him like cavalry of white cuirassiers; and beyond it lay the naked rocks like a fleet of monitors.
"'Come,' he cried, and brandished his spear, 'come a hundred, come a thousand,' he called. And spurring his high wooden horse he shook his weapon.
"The September wind blew from the fjord, and the sun set. The pine forest below became a murmuring crowd. And now he wanted to speak to them. But they murmured incomprehensible words and answered only 'Wood,' when he spoke to them.
"'Jesus or Barabbas?' he roared. 'Jesus or Barabbas?'
"'Barabbas, of course,' he answered himself, when he listened for an answer.
"Darkness fell, and he felt frightened, dismounted from his saddle, and went home.
"Was he mad? No! He was only a poet who had sung in the forest instead of at the writing-table. But he hoped that he was mad; he wished darkness to extinguish hislight, for he saw no hope which could illuminate the darkness.
"His consciousness, which saw through the nothingness of life, wanted to see no more. It preferred to live in illusions, like the sick man who wants to believe that he will get well and therefore hopes it!"
Was he mad? The school of psychologists which sees in every manifestation of thegenus irritabileevidence in favour of a verdict of insanity will conclude that he was. There is urgent need for a psychological restatement of the supernormalities of genius. The wild outbursts of the world's intuitionalists, the devouring fire of their creative passion, must ever remain unintelligible to soul-paupers and to those whose cerebral activities are strictly dependent upon the presence of print. But genius may expect better understanding from those who give careful thought to the processes of mind, and who should have penetrated beyond the definitions of "sane" or "mad." Those who live and die in ignorance of the blessings of Horace's golden mediocrity probably find the compensation which Dryden voiced:
"There is a pleasure, sure, in being mad,Which none but madmen know."
The consciousness of greatness and power which accompanies the unshackling of genius is mistaken for megalomania and contrasted with the accompanying inability to achieve worldly success along well-trodden roads. The result is contempt and ridicule.
Strindberg descended from his peak of glory, and for the seventh time the prodigal son returned to his father's house. He was not welcome. He had proved himself a good-for-nothing, and the family now treated him with open contempt.
Life at home became intolerable and he again fled to the sea. He lived for some time at Sandhamn, amongst pilots and coastguard-men. Acquaintance with the sea-faring life was a tonic to the mind and an incentive to interest in the practical side of life.
"You are twenty-four," said one of these friends to him, "and you are nothing yet. You are surely going to be something, like other people, even if you want to be an author, for one can't live on that."
Wise and timely words. Following his friend's advice, Strindberg aspired to a clerk-ship in the local telegraph office, and diligently practised the art of the telegraph operator. After a month he was allowed tosend off the weather telegrams. The office routine was somewhat painful, but life amongst honest and hard-working seamen showed him new sides of human character, and the steady sense of duty which keeps the mind placid and happy amidst whirlpools and storms.
Two shipwrecks off the coast supplied material for picturesque and vivid description, which he made use of in letters toDagens Nyheter, one of the daily papers of Stockholm. The letters brought him a good offer of work on the staff of the paper, which he thankfully accepted.
At first everything went smoothly. The editorial office was like an observatory, from which one could study the world and watch history in the making. By inapt comparison between the old University and the potentialities of the new Press, his contempt for the former grew.
The pressman is invested with authority. By the aid of modern inventions and the efficient organisation of the news-service, he is enabled to survey events on the world's stage, and to seize its acting personalities whilst they are still warm with speech. He becomes the central nervous system ofpulsating humanity; he is expected to interpret its sensory impressions and to enrich the body-social by concepts and opinions. Strindberg saw the power of the Press, and in the anticipatory joy of being able to express himself freely, he buried his old disgust at the wickedness of journalism.
But the peace was short-lived. He was soon taught that one must not aim at too wide a view-point or express oneself too freely. The ideal and the real newspaper are two very different things. The idea that a newspaper must offer its comment and its opinions to the buying and subscribing public in strict conformity with party colour and convention was not one to which he could give loyal allegiance. He reported the debates in theRiksdagin such a disrespectful manner that a less critical man had to take his place. He reviewed a Christian journal by declaring that the publisher had incurred a heavy responsibility by spreading such errors, with the result that his editor had to appease the indignant publisher.
He gave vent to highly original views on art, and when allowed to act as dramatic critic of the performances at the Royal Theatre, took the opportunity of paying offold scores. There were many complaints against him, and he was even threatened with a thrashing by a theatrical company which was smarting under his attacks. It was evident that his services were not appreciated, and Strindberg relieved the newspaper of his embarrassing presence.
Starvation followed, and under the lash of that whip a few months of distasteful work on another paper. This time, he tells us, was a period of bitter want, illness and humiliation. He dared' not go home; his friends regarded him with pity and suspicion. The circle of the Red Room was dissolved. Depression and dislike of human society overtook him. There were days when he preferred to go without food to meeting people in the restaurant. On other days he followed the same course through want of money. Sometimes he spent the whole day lying on a sofa, his thoughts spun in a circle which held the hope that death or lunacy would set him free, but, when hunger came in the evening, he was driven out to seek help.
At this time of utter misery there occurred one of those sudden changes of circumstance which are interwoven in the sombre warp and woof of Strindberg's destiny like a threadof scarlet. Following a friend's advice he had applied for the post of assistant librarian in the Royal Library of Stockholm. His application was successful, and in 1874 he again placed his foot on the step-ladder of social respectability, redeemed by the titles ofRoyalSecretary and "extraordinarie amanuens."
He threw himself into the depths of human thought, contained in the books of which he was now master, with the eagerness of one who is so thirsty that he wants to drink the sea. New passion, new disillusionment. The great problems of life, those that last through centuries and chaff the impotence of the human mind, remained problems. Like a cow chewing the cud, the philosophers of mankind laboured with the same unanswerable questions. Away then from the intellectual fields where the mind is poisoned and left in irremediable misery! His new work demanded a useful and acceptable contribution to the resources of the library.
He undertook to catalogue Chinese Manuscripts, and devoted a year to the study of the Chinese language. When the catalogue was ready, he handed it with a certain pride of victory to the authorities of the library,for he was now the sinologue of the institution. The ancient culture of the yellow empire attracted him with its atmosphere of somnolent mysticism. It was an opiate to his restlessness. In the Chinese literature he searched for information about Sweden and Swedes, and in the Swedish literature he looked for references to China and its inhabitants.
The result was a "Memoir," which was read at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. Correspondence with sinologues all over the world followed, together with membership of learned societies and a medal from the Imperial Russian Geographical Society. "Thus," Strindberg tells us, "he succeeded in contracting a healthy idiotism which seriously threatened to extinguish all intelligence." He advanced so far on his new path that he even coveted a Russian order.
He was at last somebody and something in the eyes of the world.
Friends recognised him, and saluted him like one who, having been sick and foolish, had tired of his folly, and returned to normal life.
Strindberg's relations to women and his three unhappy marriages were the fountain of soul-racking experience from which he emerged, possibly not wiser, but certainly more powerful as an interpreter of himself and of humanity. The women he loved were injured by him, inasmuch as he made their real and imagined failings the subject of brutal biographical romance. The fact that the blame fell upon him, not upon the victims of his conjugal experimentation, would scarcely compensate for the painful publicity with which he punished the women and unburdened himself.
Worthy people have agitated themselves over the question whether Strindberg was a real evil-liver or not. He was certainly an evil-liver in the sense of conventional morality. In giving free play to the impulses of his ever-expanding personality, he played thecolossal egotist and sinned against the laws of God and man. If by evil-liver we understand a craven sensualist or a man beset with Don Juanesque frivolities, he was not one.
There was nothing of the light-hearted immoralist of the comic stage, or the poetic profligacy of Robert Bums, about Strindberg; he acted throughout the heavy tragedian in the inexorable drama of sex-antagonism.
The exemplary husband and the faithful lover are not, as a rule, found among the torchbearers of literature, though few elect to outrage literary decency by minute public dissections of their past loves.The Confessions of a Fool, which Strindberg himself called "a terrible book," is a nauseating record of his first marriage, in which love and lust, hatred and disgust, adoration and contempt, exultation and misery, are set forth in their psychological relation to a sexual love, the disappointment of which lashed the artist in Strindberg into fury against woman. The ghost of Strindberg's first wife never left his side. In theConfessionshe is portrayed as a beautiful siren with golden hair, adorably small feet and a false heart—a fiend in female form, with the soul of a prostitute and the worst vices of a loathsome debauchée.She reappears in his dramasThe Father, Comrades, The Link; in his stories and essays; in different characters, drawn with a pen dipped in gall, retouched and seen in different perspective, but always the cause of man's degradation or downfall.
Strindberg's first marriage was preceded by a divorce, for his wife Siri von Essen, daughter of Captain Carl Reinhold von Essen, was at the time when Strindberg made her acquaintance the wife of Baron Wrangel, Captain of the Life Guards. The reader of the fourth volume of Strindberg's autobiography, entitledThe Author, and ofThe Confession of a Fool, receives very different impressions of the author's first experience of matrimony. In the former, which deals with the period 1877-87, there is scant reference to the matrimonial tragedy which is the sole and sordid theme ofThe Confession, which relates to the same period.The Authorwas published in 1887,The Confessionwas written in 1888, a German version published in 1893, and the original French edition in 1894. The reason for the omissions inThe Authormay mercifully be found in the desire to shield living persons in Sweden from the fate of being the central figures in achroniquescandaleuse.The Confessionhas never been published in book-form in Sweden, or in the Swedish language.[1]A pirated Swedish translation appeared in instalments in a disreputable paper in spite of the author's protest. Throughout his literary warfare Strindberg has shown scant regard for personal feeling, and when he withheldThe Confessionfrom Swedish readers he probably was conscious of the dire results which would follow upon the publication of his "worst" book. The law-suit following upon the publication ofMarried, in 1884, must have been a warning example. In a letter written from Paris, in 1884, Björnstjerne Björnson relates his impressions of a visit from Strindberg, and refers to the latter's inability to deal with principles and opinions apart from personality.
"He has been a pietist," he writes, "and so he is still, in spite of many experiences—not religiously, but morally. A cause is for him only persons, bring them out, whip them."[2]
InThe ConfessionStrindberg's wife is certainly brought out and whipped. But the whipping was preceded by idolatrous adoration.
"He would and he must have a woman to worship," he writes of some innocentschwärmereiwhich was a prelude to the fugue of marriage. "To worship was his weakness, since the idea of God had been obscured. He was too weak to believe in himself, and his sense of reverence, which was given no nourishment as he had lost reverence for everything, found this expression. He had no friends, and he must, therefore, at any price worship, revere, love."
Of the troubled termination of another love episode, which was not so innocent but which served to arouse his yearnings for pure affection, he writes with true Strindbergian absence of erotic humour:
"If he had now been inclined to be a woman-hater he would, of course, not have looked at a woman again, and condemned the whole sex, but he was a woman-worshipper, and, therefore, he immediately found another."
The woman-worshipper in Strindberg was generally silenced by his inseparable twin—the woman-hater. The woman-worshipperfell in love with the pretty baroness, suffered the torture of the damned in being denied her presence, was enslaved by her "roguish curls, golden as a cornfield on which the sun is shining,"[3]her willowy figure, her movements full, of softness and grace, her elegance in dress, her aristocratic apparition. The woman-hater looked on the "fall" with a sneer, participated with joy-mingled disgust in the intrigue which led to divorce proceedings, hurried marriage, and the premature birth and death of a child, cursed the bondage of ten years of married "hell," and finally related the intimacies of the conjugal struggle in the public confessional in sibilant tones of revenge.
The friendship between the "Royal secretary" and the Baroness began under the happiest circumstances and without any fore-shadowing of coming evil. Strindberg was a welcome guest in the family, a trusted friend of husband and wife, a respectful admirer of the girlish mother who, seen by the side of her little girl of three, seemed Madonna-like in her chaste aloofness. The Baroness dreamt of going on the stage, of devoting herself toart, to a mission, and of thus gaining individual independence. The theatre became a bridge of union between her and Strindberg. The Baron was a sympathetic listener, a pleasant companion, a gallant soldier, who, though warmly interested in Strindberg's personality and career, could not always suppress a slight condescension in his manner towards him.
The aristocracy of birth and the aristocracy of brain presented themselves to Strindberg in a juxtaposition which threw the superiority of the former into pleasant relief. That class-consciousness, which was peculiarly sensitive in him, invested his friendship with the Baron with a special interest. When visiting him at the guard-house he was not altogether free from a sense of awe and admiration engendered by the atmosphere of military power and aristocratic rule. "A son of the people," he writes, "a descendant of the middle classes, cannot but be impressed by the insignia of the highest power of the land."
Before the bowl ofpunschhe enjoyed a sense of social superiority over the lieutenants, an identity with the ruling forces which was rudely shattered when the conversation turned on the riot of 1868, during which the Guardshad charged into the mob, of which Strindberg had been a red-hearted constituent. When the Captain spoke contemptuously of the mob, "the hatred of race, the hatred of caste, tradition, rose between them like an insurmountable barrier." "As I saw him sitting there," writes Strindberg, "the sword between his knees—a sword of honour, the hilt of which was ornamented with the name and crown of the Royal giver—I felt strongly that our friendship was but an artificial one, the work of a woman, who constituted the only link between us."
The birth of Strindberg's illicit passion for the Baroness was followed by alternate spells of adoration and loathing. The picture which he draws of the struggle is highly characteristic.
He makes his attic into a temple of worship, with azaleas, geraniums and roses, and prepares an altar for the adoration of his Madonna with the child. He places her portrait in a semicircle of flower-pots, with the lamplight full on it, and passes the evenings with blinds drawn down in the Holy of Holies. But the strain becomes unbearable. Another evening he is found in the midst of dissolute friends, a partaker in an orgy of youthful blasphemyand desecration of love. Amidst bacchanalian invocation of the satanic, he delivers himself of a rhapsody of insults against the adored woman, dissects her in anatomical terms and coarse allusions, and ends the day by sacrificing his woman-worship on the polluted altar of Aphrodite Pandemos. He wants to flee from temptation, and decides to quit Stockholm for Paris. Embarked upon a cargo steamer bound for Havre, after a touching farewell from his two friends, duty's journey is found to be unendurable. He is tormented with loneliness, overcome by the thought of the dreary voyage and the cruel separation from the beloved. A wild desire to escape from the moving prison, to swim to the shore, seizes him. An opportunity for less dramatic flight offers itself; the pilot cutter is about to leave the steamer for the shore. Strindberg impetuously begs the captain to put him ashore, and the latter, suspecting the sanity of the traveller, allows him and his luggage to depart in the cutter. Once ashore and in the quiet seaside place where, the spring before, he had spent happy hours with her the situation becomes awkward. He is ashamed of his weakness; how is his conduct to be explained? After engaging a room at thehotel he wanders into the forest and runs amuck among the fir trees and the tender associations of the past, the tears raining down his cheeks, his heart in a turmoil of conflicting emotions. He concludes that he must either die or go out of his mind, and chooses a wilfully contracted pneumonia as the most suitable road to extinction. He undresses by the shore, throws himself into the cold water and swims out into the open sea. After a struggle with the waves, he returns exhausted. Beckoning Fate to do her worst, he then climbs an aider tree in a state of perfect nudity. The icy October gale responds, and, when he descends shivering, he is satisfied with the first part of the expiatory act. Back at the hotel he sends a telegram to the Baron, informing his friends of his illness, goes to bed, and drains a cup of poison in the form of an overdose of the sleeping-draught supplied by the local chemist. The next morning brings the Baron and the anxious Baroness, and a return of rude health which neither gale nor poison could shake.
He returns to Stockholm, and the old life is resumed. Frequent calls on the Baroness, weak struggles to resist, are followed by mutual declarations of love. She visits hisattic and the temple of pure adoration is made profane. Her tender conscience finds excuses in her husband's infidelities, her ardent lover is in the ecstasy of conquest. The husband is told everything. The scandal, the family quarrels, the intermixture of the criticism and condemnation of others which follow expel the sinners from their paradise.