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Title: August Strindberg, the Spirit of Revolt: Studies and Impressions

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AUGUST
STRINDBERG, THE SPIRIT OF REVOLT: STUDIES AND
IMPRESSIONS ***

The Project Gutenberg eBook, August Strindberg, the Spirit of Revolt, by L.
(Lizzy) Lind-af-Hageby

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id=j8ZMAAAAMAAJ

AUGUST STRINDBERG
THE SPIRIT OF REVOLT

Studies and Impressions

BY

L. LIND-AF-HAGEBY

NEW YORK

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

MCMXIII

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION. THE RIDDLE

I. THE STRUGGLE WITH ENVIRONMENT
II. THE STRUGGLE FOR SELF-EXPRESSION
III. "FERMENTATION TIME"
IV. THE DRAMA OF THE HERETIC
V. MARRIED AND BLASPHEMOUS
VI. THE ARTIST
VII. SELF-TORMENTOR AND VISIONARY
VIII. THE THEATRE OF LIFE
STRINDBERG'S CHIEF WRITINGS
INDEX

August Strindberg—Bust by Carl Eldh.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

August Strindberg. From a Bust by Carl Eldh
Strindberg's Parents
August Strindberg (1862 and 1870)
August Strindberg. From Statue by Carl Eldh (not
available)
August Strindberg (1884)
August Strindberg (1884 and 1897)
August Strindberg. From Bust by Max Levi, 1893
(not available)
August Strindberg. From Bust by Agnes Kjellberg

Frumerie, 1896 (not available)
August Strindberg. From Portrait in Oil by Chr.
Krogh, 1893
August Strindberg. From Portrait in Oil by
Richard Bergh, 1906
August Strindberg (1904 and 1906)
August Strindberg (1906 and 1907)
August Strindberg (1902). In His Home in
Stockholm (1908)
August Strindberg. From Bust by K.I. Eldh.
Bought by the Swedish State.
In the National Museum, Stockholm
August Strindberg. From Portrait by Carl Larsson,
1899. In the National
Museum, Stockholm
Strindberg in His Library in the Blue Tower. His
Last Home
Strindberg in His Study (1911)
The Strindberg-Theatre in Stockholm
Harriet Bosse. Strindberg's third Wife as Biskra in
Samum, 1902
Anne-Marie Bosse-Strindberg. Strindberg's only
child by his third marriage
Strindberg's Funeral (May 19th, 1913). Trades-
Unions
and Undergraduates in Procession

AUGUST STRINDBERG

THE SPIRIT OF REVOLT

INTRODUCTION

THE RIDDLE

There have been few dispassionate attempts to discern August Strindberg's
place in contemporary literature. His writings and his personality defied
ordinary criticism.
He took upon himself the rôle of destroyer, he mocked men's religion and
men's morality, he ridiculed propriety and poured bitter scorn on the social
order. There was something cometic in the swiftness and intensity with
which he appeared, disturbing the well-ordered orbits of traditions and
conventions. The erratic course of his voyage through humanity caused
alarm. No sooner had people congratulated themselves that his terrific lust
for destruction had passed by their favourite systems and their cherished
ideals, than his ruthless force was upon them, exposing ugliness and
scattering treasures.
He passed on, making enemies, breaking idols, desecrating temples. He
sowed reality and he reaped hatred.
His titanic spirit worked through a brain charged with explosive mentality.
He poured out dramas, novels, stories, with a versatility and an
accumulating energy which in themselves were offensive to the mediocre
and to those who sought to place him within literary shackles. He discoursed
on history, science and statecraft with the calm assurance of omniscience.
He wrote books which were decidedly and unblushingly "immoral." He
compelled attention by blasphemous outbursts which filled the religious
with righteous indignation and sighs for the auto-da-fé. He dissected the
human heart, laid bare its meanness, its uncleanliness; made men and
women turn on each other with sudden understanding and loathing, and
walked away smiling at the evil he had wrought. He turned on himself with
savage hatred, and in books, bearing the mark of the flagellant and reflecting
the agony of a soul in torment, he pointed to his sins and his stripes.
"He is very evil," said some; "let us put him in prison."
"He is mad," said others; "let us have him declared a lunatic."
"He is most improper," said the majority; "let us ignore him altogether."
When public opinion was quite sure that Strindberg was evil, mad, and
improper, when he stood convicted out of his own mouth of anti-social and

satanic designs, he stayed the verdict by his own magic. He wrote more and
more, and there came from his pen artistic creations endowed with virtues
which could not have risen in a mind submerged in vice; pictures of scenery
which bespoke a delicate and spiritualised nature-worship. His mind held a
garden of flowers as well as a pile of putrescence.
On May 14th, 1912, the stillness of death descended on the battlefield which
was Strindberg's life. The literary historian who justly passes the suspended
verdict must hold peculiar and special qualifications. For the winds of
literary taste and fashion cannot touch the giant of expression.
Condemnation by temporary systems of morality and creed did not alter his
course in life and will not disturb him in death. He was—himself; and he
worked ceaselessly at the task of finding more of himself. Strindberg the
atheist, Strindberg the scientist, Strindberg the spiritualist, Strindberg the
mystic, Strindberg the sensualist, and Strindberg the ascetic, took equally
important parts in his theatre of life. The critic met him day by day in
different attire and pose, incarnations of the elusive self which was stage-
manager of this extraordinary performance. A soul in conflict with itself,
good and evil, fair and foul; sparkling with life and tense with passion to
create, he could not give us peace or contentment. Like Jacob, he wrestled
with God, though not for a night only, but throughout life, and he fought
with the desperation of one who knows that upon the issue of the struggle
depends, not his own blessing, but the liberation of countless prisoners.
An epitome of humanity, a fragment of the world's eternal and real drama of
birth and death, he cannot be fully understood save by those who share his
cosmic consciousness.
He studied chemistry, astronomy, botany, physics, geology, entomology,
medicine, philology and political economy with a voracity which made him
ridiculous in the eyes of the specialists who are satisfied with a few well-
established formulæ. For him there were no barriers between specialised
departments of human knowledge—all sciences were thrown into the
melting-pot, in which he was preparing the new brew which would slake the
thirst of parched souls. A solipsist who assimilated, rejected and transmuted
the patiently accumulated theories of morals as the supreme duty of
existence, he scorned the slaves of ethical communism.
The iconoclasm of Ibsen was fired by the realisation of the duties of the
wise prophet amongst his foolish people. The hypocrisies and foibles of the

little souls were the objects of the thundering chastisement of his trumpet.
The white heat of Nietzsche's forge for the making of Superman was
engendered by contempt for the feeble and sickly. The misanthropy which
breathed poison out of Strindberg's writings, which showed souls and things
in hideous nakedness, and painted sores and disease with horrible realism,
was the darkness which he held high so as to call forth the cry for tight.
The collected works of Strindberg, which will shortly be published in a new
edition, consist of some 115 plays, novels, collections of stories, essays and
poems. Amongst these some seem absolutely antithetical. It is the constant
changeability, the self-contradictions, which made Strindberg so
incomprehensible to his contemporaries. The measure of his life-force was
so liberal that he could afford to continue where others stop. He shed his
skins like the snake and altered his colour like the chameleon, because he
was the personification of perpetual movement and change. Thus he was
endowed with ever-recurring youth; the decay of the old was immediately
followed by birth of the new. The diary, in which, during the last fourteen
years, he recorded his visions and supernatural experiences, will not be
given to the world for many years to come. Though it depicts the last phase
of his spiritual evolution, the postponement of publication is no doubt wise.
Meanwhile, those who have poured curses on Strindberg's blatant atheism
have been perplexed by his last words.
When death was drawing near, he took the Bible—which always lay on the
table by his bed—held it up and said in a clear voice:
"Everything personal is now obliterated. I have settled with life. My account
has been rendered. This alone is right."
He expressed a last wish that the Bible and a little crucifix which he used to
wear should be placed on his breast after death, and that he should be buried
early in the morning, and not amongst the rich. He desired to be laid to rest
alone on the top of a hill under the firs.
This love of the early morning was part of his craving for more light. For
many years he used to take a solitary morning walk. At seven o'clock he
emerged from his "blue tower" in Stockholm and walked briskly through the
streets and squares of his native town. At nine he was back at his writing-
table—of late years a recluse for the rest of the day, absorbed in his work.

"Ever since my youth," he writes in Inferno, "I devote my morning walk to
meditations which are preparations for my daily work. Nobody may then
accompany me, not even my wife. In the morning my mind enjoys a balance
and an expansion which approach ecstasy; I do not walk, I fly; I do not feel
that I have a body; all sadness evaporates and I am entirely soul. This is for
me the hour of inner concentration, of prayer, my divine service."
I have often seen Strindberg in the streets of Stockholm. He walked with his
high forehead painfully contracted, the eyes searching and concentrated, and
an expression of haughty bitterness upon his face. A solitary, suggesting to
the passer-by Rodin's Penseur in motion and the futile wanderings of
Ahasuerus; he seemed wrapped in his own misery, held aloof by suffering
and contempt.
One day I met him with a companion. He was holding a little girl by the
hand and talking to her. The child looked up in his face and Strindberg's
expression was changed. Love for the child, respect for the questions and
joys of childhood shone out of the face of the hater. He was not obsessed by
the ugliness of things or the cruelty of human deception. His face was aglow
with the early enthusiasm which, though slain a thousand times, rises again
at the bidding of the Self that knows the answer to the riddle.
In the early morning of Sunday, May 19th, August Strindberg's body was
laid to rest. It was a glorious spring day with sunshine and blue sky. Some
sixty thousand people were astir to do homage to the memory of one whom
they knew to have been intrinsically true and tragically great. Royalty,
Riksdag, universities, capital and labour, statesmen, writers and artists
assembled to say a united farewell to the man of mystery who, by his
intense sincerity and the exuberance of genius, had at last melted hatred, and
ascended the steps from shame to glory.
In a message after Strindberg's death, Maxim Gorki likened him to Danko,
the hero of the old Danube legend, 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. The masses who mock and praise so easily, who crucify
and raise idols with the same haste, seldom recognise their real friends.
Strindberg 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.

CHAPTER I

THE STRUGGLE WITH ENVIRONMENT

Strindberg's childhood and youth, as described by himself in his
autobiographical novel The Bondswoman's Son, present psychological
features of exceptional interest. The circumstances of his early home-life
and their effect upon the unfolding forces of his genius cannot be ignored by
anyone who attempts to explain the varied strata of his artistic production.
His insistent and torturous need for exact self-analysis, coupled with an
equally compelling need to tell the truth, made all his writings strongly
subjective. His autobiography—"the story of a soul's evolution"—is an
intimate revelation of his power to dissect his past selves, to record minute
incidents and to extract reflexes from the bundle of emotions and thoughts
which go to make up character. Nothing is lost, nothing is too insignificant
for careful examination in the microscope under which he places every cell
of himself. The confessions of Rousseau and Tolstoy have not the nakedness
of Strindberg's truth about himself. Though he never loses sympathy with
himself, he scorns excuses and exposes his sins and his follies with ruthless
exactitude. There is a strange combination of the coolly analysing
psychologist and the passionate flagellant in the descriptions which range
from the struggles of childhood, through the Inferno-period of 1896, to the
calm of Alone, and the final visions of light.
The autobiographical novel in four volumes which was published under the
titles The Bondswoman's Son, Fermentation Time, In the Red Room and The
Author, was written at the age of thirty-seven, and, though the impressions
of childhood are recorded with deep insight into the child's mind, we cannot
forget that they were written down and interpreted by the man who had
behind him years of tumultuous and bitter struggle for self-expression, and
before whom the banquet of life seemed reduced to dead-sea fruit. In the
preface to the fifth edition of The Bondswoman's Son, he tells us that when
writing the volume he believed he stood before death, "for I was tired, saw
no longer any object in life, considered myself superfluous, thrown away."

Johan August Strindberg was born in Stockholm on January 22nd, 1849. His
father, whom in disparagement of his parentage he often calls "the grocer,"
was a merchant and shipping agent who had married a servant-girl, the
mother of his three children. The father was a man of education and natural
refinement who passed through many economical vicissitudes, culminating
in bankruptcy at the time of August's birth. August was born a short time
after the union between the parents had been legalised by the ceremony of
marriage, and he was not welcome. His father bore his troubles with manly
fortitude and resignation and cherished the ideals of the upper classes, whilst
the mother was essentially of the people and remained so. He claimed a
distant ancestral connection with the nobility of Sweden, his family having
descended from the son of a peasant who was born in 1710 at Strinne in
Angermanland, and who married a girl of noble birth. The discord resulting
from the difference between his father and mother gave August his first
impression of that class struggle which I throughout life held him in the
bondage of a haunting problem, and which stimulated the development of
his mordantly critical faculties.
Poverty, with its attendant cares and anxieties, reigned in the house by Klara
churchyard, where, from a flat on the third floor, August began to survey
life's difficulties. He tells us that he recollects fear and hunger as his first
sensations. He was afraid of darkness, of being beaten, of offending people,
of falling down, of knocking against things, of being in the way, of the fists
of his brothers, of father's and mother's chastisements.
It was not easy to avoid being in people's way, for the parents with seven
children and two servants lived in three rooms. The furniture consisted
mostly of cradles and beds; children slept on ironing boards and chairs.
Baptisms and funerals alternated. The mother developed phthisis after the
birth of her twelfth child.
She was contented with her life, he tells us, for she had risen in the social
scale and improved her own and her family's position. The father was less
satisfied with his fate, for he had descended and sacrificed himself. He was
tired, sad, severe and serious, but not hard.
Strindberg's recollections of his early impressions of the relations between
his father and mother show the inception of the views on women and

marriage which earned for him the title of woman-hater, and which found
their most provocative expression in The Father and The Confession of a
Fool.
"This is the father's thankless position in the family," he writes; "to be
everybody's breadwinner, everybody's enemy." He concluded that his
mother did not overwork herself, though his account of the daily life in the
family does not support that view.
As a little boy August was as weak as other little boys. He adored his
mother. He was shy, acutely sensitive, morbidly self-conscious, keenly
resentful of injustice. He was not his mother's favourite, he was nobody's
favourite, and this embittered him. The mother soon became an object of
analysis; he was torn between love for her and contempt for her faults,
which he discovered through making comparisons between her and his
father. He says that a yearning for the mother followed him through life. The
future misogynist was fostered by the child's passionate and unrequited love
for the mother. When in later life Strindberg's attacks upon women were
criticised, he defended himself by declaring that he chid woman because he
loved her so well.
Disgust with the daily drudgery and routine of the household was aroused at
an early age. He speaks of the family as an institution for providing food
and clean clothes, where there is an eternal round of shopping, cooking,
cleaning and washing.
"Glorious moral institution," he cries; "holy family, inviolable, divine
institution for the education of citizens in truth and virtue! Thou pretended
home of virtues, where innocent children are tortured to speak their first lie,
where will-power is crushed by despotism, where self-reliance is killed by
narrow egoism. Family, thou art the home of all social vices, the charitable
institution for all lazy women. The forge for the chains of the breadwinner,
and the hell of the children!"
This passage follows the description of an unjust punishment which was
meted out to August. He was accused of having drunk some wine out of his
aunt's bottle, and upon blushing in response to his father's question was
beaten as the culprit. Fear of the physical pain made him confess the deed
which he had never committed, and, upon telling his old nurse that he had
suffered innocently, he was again seized and now beaten as a liar as well as

a thief. After that day he lived in constant anxiety. The world was a cruel
and unfriendly place; there were enemies everywhere.
"Who drank that wine?" he repeatedly asked himself. The search for a
satisfactory reply to that question and to Similar questions was not
abandoned, though it was futile. The hostility to social injustice and
enforced criminality to which, later on, he gave literary utterance, had a
remote though ineffaceable connection with the abducted contents of the
wine bottle.
His ideas about God were vague, and chiefly formulated through saying
daily the Swedish child's prayer: "God who loveth children." The windows
of the house over-looked the old churchyard of Klara. When there was a fire
in the night the church bells were tolled in a manner which struck horror in
the heart of the child. The whole household was awake. "There is a fire," ran
the whisper. He cried and tried in vain to go to sleep again. Then his mother
came, tucked him up and said: "Don't be afraid; God will protect those who
are unhappy." The following morning the servants read in the paper that
there had been a fire, and that two people had been burnt to death.
"That was God's will," said his mother. Sacha incidents did not pass him by.
The apparent inconsistency between the expectation of faith and the tragic
reality troubled him and caused his first religious doubts.
The old church with its graves became the symbol of gloom, and of the
joyless fate from which there is no escape. During the cholera epidemic of
1854 the child of five watched the paraphernalia and ceremonies of death
from the bedroom window. In the churchyard below, gravediggers were at
work, stretchers were carried past, dark knots of people were seen to
assemble round black boxes. The church bells tolled incessantly.
One day his uncle took him and his brothers inside the church. In spite of
the beautiful walls in white and gold, the sound of the music which was like
that of a hundred pianos, and kneeling white angels, his attention was
riveted on two figures. Amidst the praying congregation two prisoners in
chains were doing penance. They were guarded by soldiers and dad in long,
grey cloaks with hoods over their heads.
He was told that these men were thieves. A feeling of oppression by
something horrible, by an incomprehensibly cruel and relentless force,
overcame August, and he was glad to be taken away.

The initiation into the existence of pain and suffering which awaits every
child held peculiar terrors for him. Acutely sensitive, his nerves of sympathy
responded quickly to the feelings of others. One day he was taken to the
workhouse infirmary to visit his wet-nurse who was slowly dying. The old
women with their diseases, pale, lame and sorrowing, the long row of beds,
the colourless monotony of the ward and its unpleasant odours fixed
themselves in his consciousness. When he left he was haunted by a strange
sense of unpaid and unpayable debt. For this was the woman who had fed
him, whose blood had nourished his. Through poverty she had been forced
to give him that which rightfully belonged to her own child. August felt
vaguely that he was enjoying stolen life, and he was ashamed of his relief at
being taken away from the sights of the sick-room.
When August was seven the family moved to a larger house. The worst days
of penury were now over, and, though strict economy had to be practised
and every luxury eschewed, there was more freedom from anxiety for the
daily bread. His mind had hitherto been fed by daily portions of
Kindergarten fare. He was now sent to Klara school for boys, where his
sense of the general injustice of things was rapidly developed through the
vigour with which the headmaster wielded his cane.
He was awakened at six during the dark winter mornings, and as his home
was now far from Klara he had to trudge a long way through deep snow, and
arrived at his destination in wet boots and knickerbockers. When late he was
paralysed with fright in anticipation of the headmaster's morning exercise on
those who were unpunctual. He heard the screams of boys who were already
in the dutches of the tyrant.
One morning he was saved by the kindly charwoman, who pleaded for him
and pointed out that he had a long way to walk. It is a pity that the
charwoman who saved Strindberg from a thrashing has not been given a
niche in his gallery of women.
August did not shine in this school, though his knowledge was in advance of
his years, and he had, therefore, been admitted before the required age. He
was the youngest at school and at home, a position which he vainly
resented. This was a school for the children of the upper middle class.
August wore knickerbockers of leather, and strong coarse boots, which
smelt of blubber and blacking. The boys in velvet blouses avoided him. He

observed that the badly dressed boys were more severely beaten than the
well-dressed ones, and that nice-looking boys escaped altogether.
Strindberg records his early experiences at school with characteristic
vehemence:
"... It was regarded as a preparation for hell and not for life; the teachers
seemed to exist in order to torment, not to punish. All life weighed like an
oppressive nightmare, in which it was of no avail to have known one's
lessons when one left home. Life was a place for punishing crimes
committed before one was born, and therefore the child walked about with a
permanently bad conscience."
At the age of nine he fell in love for the first time. A roseate shimmer
descended over the cane and the Latin grammar through the presence in the
class-room of the headmaster's little daughter. She was placed at the back of
the room, and the boys were forbidden to look at her. "She was probably
ugly," he tells us with his usual realism where love affairs are concerned,
"but she was nicely dressed." During the French lessons her soft voice rang
out above the grating sound of the boys' answers, and even the hard visage
of the teacher melted when he spoke to her.
August never had the courage to speak to her. His love expressed itself in
gentle melancholy and vague wishes. He felt the victim of a secret within
his own breast and suffered from it. The affair ended with a frustrated
suicidal intention, but the lover did not attain to peace. His love affairs from
the first to the last were tinged with tragedy, and were the vehicles of his
restless and futile search for harmony.
The house in the north of Stockholm, to which the family had moved, had a
large garden and adjoining fields. The father loved the country, and farming
operations on a small scale were part of the daily duties. The boys were
made to work in the garden, and were thus provided with healthy exercise. A
magnificent old oak and bowers of lilac and jessamine made the old-
fashioned garden beautiful. August's bitter experience of canes, teachers and
unattainable feminine charm did not corrode his inborn love of nature,
which remained a source of mental and physical rejuvenation when others
ran dry.
The deep blackness of the freshly tilled soil, the apple trees in their
blossoming glory, the tulips in their gorgeous garb called forth aspirations in

his mind which responded to no human voice. The boy walking in the
garden was filled with a solemnity which neither school nor church could
inspire.
A summer holiday spent at Drottningholm, amidst the smiling islands and
wooded shores of the Lake of Malär, had accentuated his disgust with the
ugly things which abound in towns.
Stockholm's Skärgård, the archipelago which guards the fair capital of
Sweden, and which is the pride of every true child of Stockholm, became
his favourite scenery in later years.
There is something primæval and suggestive of the creation of the world in
these thousands of rocks and islands which rise in ever-varying form and
colour from the blue depths of the Baltic. The keen salt breezes which
sweep round the bare and uninhabitable rocks whisper of a no-man's land,
where the soul is tossed by elements neither friendly nor hostile, but restful.
Through the white stems of the birches, the deep red of the cottages and the
evergreen storm-bent fir trees, the islands on which the poor fisherfolk live
and labour, salute the passing mariner by a trichromatic call to the simple
life.
Upon this world the youthful Strindberg gazed one day. He had walked
through a deep forest, and crept through whortleberries and juniper to the
top of a steep rock. The picture of islands and fjords which lay spread before
his eyes caused him to "shiver with, delight."
That picture, he writes, impressed him as if he had recovered a land seen in
beautiful dreams, or in a former life.
He hid from his comrades; he could not follow them.
"This was his scenery, the true milieu of his nature, idylls, poor rugged
rocks, covered with pine forest, thrown out on wide stormy fjords with the
immense sea as a distant background. He remained true to this love ... and
neither the Alps of Switzerland, the olive-dad hills of the Mediterranean, nor
the cliffs of Normandy could oust this rival."
Love of nature did not curb August's high spirits in childhood. At the age of
ten he played wild games, climbed trees, slid down mountains on pieces of
wood, robbed birds' nests and shot their innocent owners. He rode bareback,
could swim, sail a boat and handle a gun.

During a summer holiday August and his brothers were sent as boarders to
the house of a sexton. It was the father's wish that his sons should share in
the work on the farm as well as prepare for the winter's schooling. In the
sexton's kitchen August saw the wafers prepared and stamped for Holy
Communion. He mischievously ate them and reflected that there was not
much in the Sacrament. He broke covenant with his host by rushing into the
church, turning the hour-glass on the pulpit, and delivering a sermon. He ran
through the church on the backs of the pews and threw over the reading-
desk, on which the hymn-book lay. The disjointed pieces of the desk
frightened him and reminded him of possible consequences. Yielding to the
first impulse of self-preservation he knelt and said the Lord's Prayer.

Strindberg's mother, Ulrika Strindberg's father Oskar
Eleonora Norling Strindberg

A thought came to him. He rose, examined the reading-desk, saw that the
damage was not irreparable, took off his boot and mended the desk with a
few well-directed blows. He then calmly walked out of the church feeling
that the power within himself was, after all, more reliable than the God
whose help he had invoked. The mysterious interrelation between whole-
hearted prayer and the dormant powers within ourselves is seldom

understood. The child's logic humorously reflected the spiritual instability of
average humanity.
His self-reliance was, however, fitful. Sometimes he wept bitterly, battling
with an uncontrollable duality within his own mind, a divided will which
made him unreasonable and capricious. He developed sudden antipathies,
endured fits of shyness and self-abasement, during which he had to run
away from other children and hide himself. At such times he would
deliberately keep away when good things were distributed, and on being
forgotten, revel in his martyrdom.
August's rebellion against learning lessons developed pari passu with his
powers of independent thought. He did not make progress at Klara school,
and his father transferred him to another, where he mixed with children of
people in humble circumstances. Here he felt more at home; no one looked
down on him; his boots and his knickerbockers did not give offence. His
pity was aroused by the poverty of some of his school-fellows. They were
expected to be clean, attentive and polite, but how could they? They came
from homes where no one could afford to be clean, where families were
crowded in small rooms which served as work-shops as well as nurseries,
where the decencies of life were unattainable luxuries. The contrast between
the two schools afforded August material for continued meditation on class
problems.
Latin and Greek were the principal subjects taught. August wanted to learn
in his own way and to translate in his own way. Both in classics and in
history he refused to submit to the discipline of the schoolmaster. Having
formulated his own method of learning and the proper form of examining
pupils he defied the teacher's order. He was dumb when he should speak,
and spoke when he should be silent. When the exasperated Latin master
declared August to be an idiot, the father unexpectedly took his son's part
and moved him to a private school. This school had introduced rational
methods of teaching; flogging was prohibited, the boys were treated as
individuals, and August felt that he could expand without fear of immediate
repression. During the years that followed, the family attained a position of
comparative affluence and comfort. August lost the dread of being trampled
upon or suppressed from above, and mixed freely with titled youths who
were accorded no privileges by the headmaster who lacked all reverence for
the distinction of birth.

August was wont to parade his knowledge before his mother. At first she
took great pride in her son's gifts and the time when he should wear the
white cap of honour, coveted by every Swedish student, was often spoken
of. But the mother's leanings towards a narrow pietism caused her to discern
the vanity of learning in her son's mind. She warned him against the
wickedness of such pride, and contrasted the humility of Christ and His
contempt of worldly wisdom with the self-conceit of mere book-learning.
The son listened, and concluded that the mother's resentment of culture was
the result of her own ignorance. One evening the sons were called to the
mother's death-bed. August was then thirteen. Overwhelmed with grief and
shivering with the horror of Death, he sat hour after hour by the bed crying,
and thinking over all the evil he had done.
This was the inevitable end. How could he live without a mother? The
future seemed wrapped in impenetrable darkness and misery. Then oh,
horror!—a shameful thought crossed his mind. Some time before his mother
had shown him a little ring, and said that it would belong to him after her
death. And now, at the solemn and awful moment, the promise of the ring
rose in his unwilling memory. He saw it on his finger—one bright spot in
this sorrowful hour, something to look forward to.
But only for a moment—such low covetousness, such a shameful thought by
the side of a dying mother must come straight from the devil. The pangs of
remorse and shame were so persistent that the incident fixed itself in his
memory, and years afterwards the recollection made him blush.
The allurements of thoughts which we ought not to think, and which range
from sudden inconvenient flashes of recognition of the comical in the midst
of the serious business of life, to the haunting ideas which are the débris of
mental combustion, could not be understood by the boy. Nor did he know
that he was destined to live through the gamut of cerebral phenomena, an
exponent of extravagant thought and lawless ideation.
When the stillness of death fell upon the room the unworthy thought was far
away and August screamed like a drowning child. The father was softened
and spoke kind words to the two boys. Strindberg tells us with his usual
candour that his sorrow lasted scarcely three months. "Sorrow," he writes,
"has the happy quality of consuming itself. It dies of starvation. As it is
essentially an interruption of habits it can be replaced by new ones." After
six months his father married the housekeeper.

August was now learning five languages, besides his own. Botany, zoology
and the physical sciences aroused his keen interest. He had collections of
insects and minerals, and a herbarium to which he devoted much time. He
developed an insatiable appetite for knowledge, but he claimed freedom to
find his intellectual food without extraneous interference or restrictions. He
not only wanted to know everything, but he wanted to be able to do
everything, to be endowed with all human talents.
His brother had been praised for his drawings; August wanted to draw.
During the Christmas holidays he copied all his brother's drawings, but on
finding that he could do it without difficulty his interest waned and he gave
it up. All his brothers and sisters could play some instrument. The house
resounded with exercises on the piano, the violin and the 'cello. August
wanted to play, but without practising scales. He taught himself to play the
piano and learnt to read and copy music. He played badly, but it gave him
pleasure. He learnt the names of composers and the number of opus of
everything that was played in the house, so that he should have superior
knowledge.
He was jealous of the accomplishments of others, but the jealousy was
created by unsatisfied ambition, and the consciousness of illimitable
capabilities. Every subject interested him, until he had mastered it. When he
knew the plants, minerals, insects and birds in his neighbourhood, he turned
to other fields of natural science. Physics and chemistry attracted him. He
did not want to repeat the classical experiments in the text-books; he wanted
to make new discoveries. The lack of money and apparatus restrained him.
Ingenuity was necessary. During the summer holidays he tried to make an
electric machine out of an old spinning-wheel and a window pane. An
umbrella was broken and made to yield a whalebone, out of which, with the
help of a violin string, he made a drill-borer. The square pane had been
made circular through patient knocking with a key-bit. This labour had
taken days. When the time came for boring a hole in the middle and his
piece of quartz made no impression he lost patience, and attempted to force
a hole. The pane was smashed and August's enthusiasm converted into
hopeless fatigue.
Recovered, he decided to construct a perpetuum mobile. His father had told
him that a prize was awaiting the inventor of the impossible. After
formulating his theory, which included a waterfall driving a pump, he

collected his material. A number of useful articles were sacrificed for the
purpose: the coffee boiler provided a tube; the soda-water machine,
reservoirs; the strong-box, plates; the chest of drawers, wood; the bird-cage,
wire, etc. At the crucial moment the ubiquitous housekeeper interrupted him
by asking if he would accompany his brothers and sisters to the mother's
grave. Irritation broke the inventive spell, and in the anger of failure he
dashed the artful apparatus to pieces on the floor.
Reproaches and ridicule did not deter him. He arranged experimental
explosions and manufactured a Leyden jar. For this purpose he flayed a dead
black cat which he found in the street. He anticipated "Jönköping's
Säkerhetständstickor" by making safety matches which he declares were as
good as the later, much-advertised patent.
His wilfulness and lack of mental discipline were necessarily distasteful to
his surroundings. When he wanted to unlock a drawer and the key could not
be found he seized a poker and broke open the lock with such force that the
screws and the plate were tom out.
"Why did you break the lock?" he was asked.
"Because I wanted to get into the chest of drawers," was the laconic reply.
The father not unnaturally decided to do what lay in his power to curb the
troublesome spirit of independence in his son. August disliked his
stepmother and resented her usurpation of his mother's place. He was now
gymnasist[1] and treated with respect in the school. The lessons took the
form of lectures, and the teachers showed due regard for individual rights
and tastes. At home everything was done to humiliate him. He attributed
what he regarded as a systematic persecution to the mean and revengeful
spirit of the stepmother. He was made to wear old clothes which did not fit
him; his gymnasist-cap, which should have been the pride of his heart, was
home-made and an object of ridicule; he was compelled to work in the
stable between school hours, and commanded to take the groom's place
during the holidays. His weekly allowance for the school lunch was 3 1/2 d.,
a sum which he found sufficient for tobacco but not for sandwiches. He had
a healthy appetite and was always hungry. The parsimoniousness of the
home régime subjected him to humiliating experiences at school. Once he
accidentally broke the eye-glasses of a friend. In vain he exhausted all his
inventive resources in attempts to mend them. They had to be mended by an

expert at the cost of 7d. On the following Monday August brought his friend
3 1/2 d., and after another week discharged his debt of honour by
shamefacedly paying another 3 1/2 d. His miserable poverty could no longer
be kept a secret, and he hated the cause of his oppression.
At the age of fifteen he fell in love with a woman of thirty. The love was
platonic, an attraction of souls—a contact of minds seeking spiritual
enlightenment along the same path. She was a woman of the world, engaged
to another who lived abroad, animated by religious emotionalism and half-
conscious eroticism. They attended the same circle for French conversation
and added the spice of Gallic expression to their correspondence, which
treated of Jesus, the struggle against sin, life, death, God in nature, love,
friendship and doubt. August became her conscience, and she was his
spiritual mother. Strindberg publishes some of his French compositions from
this period in his autobiography. All speculations were eventually smashed
against the bedrock of Jesus. The parental authorities objected strongly to
August's friendship, and especially to the atmosphere of French secrecy in
which it was enveloped.
August became absorbed in the struggle for salvation. A puritanism which
despised the cold formalism of the Lutheran State Church and claimed the
free companionship of Jesus was fashionable in Sweden at this time. The
joyful certainty of being among the sheep infected those susceptible to
sudden "revivals" within all classes of society. What could be of greater
importance than being amongst the elected of God, comforted by the
knowledge of righteousness, borne aloft by complete detachment from the
world, the flesh and the devil? August laid passionate siege to Heaven and
clamoured for immediate inclusion among the children of God.
His motives were complicated. One was fright and a desire to be on the safe
side. For he had read books which predicted a terrible fate in store for
youthful sinners upon attaining the age of twenty-five. He knew he was a
sinner, and, if his body were condemned to painful afflictions and death, his
soul would, at least, be saved. Another was spiritual jealousy. His
stepmother professed great religious devotion. She and his eldest brother
seemed to outshine him in religious fervour. That could not be tolerated.
August imposed severe restrictions upon himself. All worldly pleasures
were to be shunned. One Saturday evening the family planned an excursion
for the following Sunday. August asked his father's permission to stay at

home for conscientious reasons. He spent Sunday morning in one of the
"free" churches, where the elect gloried in their exclusive and dearly bought
salvation. In the afternoon he studied Thomas à Kempis and Krummacher.
The stepmother had broken the Sabbath. She was inconsistent and a prey to
the temptations of the devil; she could no longer compete with him in
religious virtue. That was balm to the soul, but the peace of Jesus, which he
had been told would descend like a clap of thunder and be followed by
absolute certainty, would not come. He walked alone to Haga Park, praying
all the time that Jesus would seek him out. In the park he saw happy families
absorbed in picnics and carriages filled with gay men and women. All these
were destined to eternal damnation. His reason protested, but his faith
assented. He returned home unharmonious and unsatisfied. When late in the
evening his brothers and sisters related the incidents of their happy day, his
envy was mixed with pangs of remorse.
The puritanical phase culminated during the confirmation, which had been
postponed by the father, who, knowing the waywardness of the child, feared
the unrestraint of the youth. A number of circumstances contributed to the
reaction which followed upon his first Holy Communion. He had whipped
his reason into submission to an elated sentiment which in due course
exhausted itself. The Sacramental bread was robbed of its mystery by the
fatal familiarity with which he had treated it in the sexton's kitchen.
But the disintegration of the puritan was accomplished through the influence
of new friends. One of these decided to cure the hungry dreamer in
Strindberg by a good meal. One day on the way to the Greek lesson, Fritz,
"the friend with the eye-glasses," suggested that they should play truant and
lunch at a restaurant. Scruples overcome, August enjoyed his first meal in a
restaurant and his first glass of brandy. The luxuries of beefsteak and beer in
quantitative perfection, and the audacity with which his friend treated the
waiter, made a profound impression on him. The friend paid for the feast,
and August came out a changed man.
"This was not an empty pleasure, as the pale man had asserted," he writes.
"No, it was a solid pleasure to feel red blood run through half-empty arteries
which were to nourish the nerves for the struggle of life. It was a pleasure to
feel spent strength return and the lax sinews of a half-crushed will stretched
again. Hope was awakened, the mist became a rosy cloud, and the friend let
him see glimpses of the future as it was formed by friendship and youth."

The friend advised him to earn money by giving private lessons. This would
secure freedom from parental tyranny. He encouraged independence and
self-confidence in August, who, acting upon his advice, obtained a post as
private tutor. By exercising economy in the expenditure of brains at the
gymnasium and limiting his studies to those absolutely necessary for the
final examen, he succeeded in his dual work of learner and teacher. The
sense of sin departed; he was able to take part in the festivities of his school-
fellows. The platonic friendship with the woman of thirty evaporated with
the advent of a less ethereal admiration for the beauty of waitresses et hoc
genus omne. He went to dances and sought jollity in the "punsch-evenings"
of the students. A craving for alcohol had been aroused; under its influence
the demons of gloom and insoluble problems departed.
The change in his attitude to life was hastened by an influence which now
made itself felt for the first time. Literature as a great tradition and
interpretation of human problems became known to him. The belletristic and
the puritanical conceptions of life presented themselves in their profoundest
antithesis. Natural selection did the rest. His range of reading was wide and
varied, as were the demands of his many-sided self. He devoured
Shakespeare, admired Dickens, found Walter Scott tedious, Alexandre
Dumas puerile, and Eugène Sue's Le Juif Errant grandiose. He detested
poetry; it was affected and untrue. People did not talk in that manner and
seldom thought of such beautiful things. The realisation of God in Nature
replaced the desire to seek God in the churches, and August gradually
discovered that he was a freethinker. The alarm and public prayers of the
elect, which he had deserted, did not alter his course.
During the summer holidays he acted as tutor to an aristocratic family in the
country. Fritz had warned him against saying everything he thought and
doing everything he wanted, or disputing vehemently with his superiors. But
the difficulty of submitting to the conventions of the social order could not
be overcome.
August's plans for the future were vacillating and embarrassing to the father.
For a short time he cherished the idea of becoming a non-commissioned
officer in a cavalry regiment, at another time the plan of spending his days
as a country curate, joined in happy wedlock to a pretty waitress (a brand
snatched from the fire), had captivated him. But the University conquered.
At the University a man could be poor and badly dressed and yet be counted

a gentleman; it was the only place where one could sing, get drunk and have
fights with the police without losing social standing. There was a secret
satisfaction in the thought.
One day during the tutorage in the country the vicar, who was overworked,
invited August to preach a "proof-sermon." The practice of permitting
serious-minded students and undergraduates to try their priestly powers was
not uncommon. The idea was glorious and irresistible. The baron, the
baroness, the squires and the ladies would all have to listen reverently to
August as the mouthpiece of the Lord. But he remembered that he was a
freethinker. The orthodox conception of Jesus was no longer his. It was
hypocrisy to accept the offer. And yet, he believed in God, he had thoughts
to give, opinions he wanted to voice. He confessed to the vicar, who
reassured him. If he believed in God, there was no real difficulty—the good
Bishop Wallin had never mentioned Jesus in his sermons. August should
only not talk too much about his aberrations.

August Strindberg 1862— August Strindberg 1870
(Reproduced by kind
permission of Messrs. Albert
Bonnier, Stockholm)

The week during which the sermon was prepared, was rich in compensation
for years of ignominy. Something within him responded with avidity to the
call of the messenger, the prophet.
The church was filled with people when August mounted the pulpit in
clerical garb and with a beating heart. He prayed to the only true God to
help him when now he wanted to strike a blow for truth. He spoke of
conversion through free will and opened the gates of heaven to all—
publicans and sinners, rulers and harlots—and denounced his old friends
who were sunk in cruel and hypocritical self-conceit. He was deeply moved
by his own eloquence. The vicar and the congregation forgave the
irregularities, and the day ended in mutual satisfaction.
The experience confirmed August's contempt of orthodox religion. He
became the ringleader of a section in the highest class in the Gymnasium
which, in spite of threats and reprimands, refused to attend morning prayers.
Once when the father begged him to go to church he replied:
"Preach—I can do that myself."
In May, 1867, August passed his student-examen. The white cap was on his
head, and the gates of the University were open to him.
[1] Gymnasia are preparatory schools for Universities.

CHAPTER II

THE STRUGGLE FOR SELF-EXPRESSION

A university, said Newman, is a place where "mind comes first and is the
foundation of the academical polity." Strindberg's contact with the
University of Upsala brought his own creative mind into constant conflict
with the custodians of regulations which govern the traditional pursuit of
knowledge. Between 1867 and 1872 he spent periods at Upsala, during
which he made vain attempts to achieve success as a dutiful learner,
submissive to the discipline of professorial authority. The difficulty was not
that he would not or could not study. He studied too much; his mind

absorbed with intuitive and lightning quickness knowledge from men and
books. But he refused to take opinions on trust; he individualised everything
that was assimilated by his receptive and turbulent mind, and scorned
academical routine.
In the autumn of 1867 August Strindberg went to Upsala to equip himself
with the powers and graces which accompany a "university education." He
possessed the sum of 80 kronor (1 krona = 1s. 2d.), laboriously earned by
private lessons; his father had contributed a few cigars to his son's outfit and
advised him to shift for himself. Margaret, the old kind-hearted servant, had
forced a loan of 15 kronor upon him. Thus he was again victimised by a
woman's heart.
The room which he shared with a friend, was rented for 30 kronor for the
whole term. It contained two beds, two tables, two chairs, and a cupboard.
His dinner was brought by the charwoman for 1 kr. 50 öre per week.
Breakfast and supper consisted of a glass of milk and a bun. By practising
the strictest economy he managed to live, but he soon discovered that he
could not afford to buy the necessary books, nor the regulation dress-coat,
without which no Swedish under-graduate could solicit the kind attention of
the professors. He did not attract attention as a promising student. His
attendance at lectures served chiefly as a stimulus to his critical faculties. He
found the methods of teaching literature and philosophy tedious and
ineffective, the professors ignorant and plebeian. He borrowed books and
selected his own reading. He taught himself to play the cornet in one of the
University orchestras, thus attempting to soothe the discord of his soul.
He grew tired of his friend Fritz. "They had worn out their friendship by
living together," he writes in Fermentation Time. "They knew each other by
heart, knew each other's secrets and weaknesses, knew what answer the
other would give in argument." He accepted the end of their friendship as
the inevitable result of the exploitation of personality which he resented in
friendship and in love. Personal attractions and ties were masked warfare in
Strindberg's life; he gave and he took, and generally ended by despising.
Throughout life his caustic efforts to reach the centre of things did not tend
to strengthen bonds which depend on a certain amount of pleasant illusion
and benign deception.
His love of nature brought no disillusionment. "It was his dream to live in
the country," he writes of his Upsala time. "He had an inborn dislike of

town, though born in a capital. He had culture-hostility in the blood, could
never get rid of the sense of being a product of Nature which did not want to
be torn from the organic union with earth. He was a wild plant, the roots of
which in vain sought a little soil between the stones of the pavement; he was
an animal longing for the forest."
The delight in the beauty and fragrance of flowers, the preference for the
simplicity of rural life which he so often expressed show a mood unaffected
by discontent and pessimism. Some sprite of nature-joy dwelt within him
and remained happy in spite of unhappiness. After uttering curses on the
sins of humanity he would be found singing pæans to the harmony of the
plant-world.

At the end of the first term he had spent his eighty kronor and returned to
Stockholm in search of remunerative work. After several unsuccessful
attempts to obtain a post in the country, he found a situation as teacher at the
Stockholm Board-School at a yearly salary of £50, which to him seemed
opulence. He now lived at home, and contributed to the household expenses.
The schoolmaster of eighteen was again brought face to face with the
problems of poverty. The injustice, under which he had smarted as a child,
was still alive. He was now in the detestable position of the pedagogical
tyrant, but his pity had not diminished. He was expected to chastise the lazy
children, but his heart refused to accept the prevalent faith in flogging. The
children—ugly, stunted, pale, starved, sickly—appealed to his pity.
"Suffering," he writes, "has stamped on the faces of the lower classes that
expression of hopelessness and torment which neither religious resignation
nor the hope of heaven can obliterate, and from which the upper classes flee
as from an evil conscience."
He studied the penalty of industrialism, and observed that the children of the
manual labourer looked more sickly and less intelligent than those of the
upper class:
"The trade-diseases of the urban working-man seemed to be transmitted;
here one saw in miniature the lungs and the blood of the gas-worker, ruined

through sulphurous fumes; the shoulders and flattened feet of the smith; the
brain of the painter, atrophied through the fumes of varnish and poisonous
paints; the scrofulous eruption of the sweep; the contracted chest of the
bookbinder; here one heard the echo of the cough of the metal-worker and
the asphalt manufacturer; smelt the poisons of the wall-paper maker; noticed
the watchmaker's myopia in new editions. In truth, this was not a race which
possessed the future, or upon which the future could reckon, and it cannot
reproduce itself for any length of time, for the ranks of the artisans are
constantly recruited from the country."
His sympathy with the working classes was no passing sentiment; it was the
lasting keynote of his plea for social justice which is clearly heard through
the cacophony of some of his later outbursts against the social order.
Rebellious, contempt of current morals and respectability rose as a mighty
force in the mind of this extraordinary schoolmaster. His morning duties at
the board-school and his afternoon work as private tutor to the daughters of
a well-to-do and refined family compelled him to outward decorum. But he
did not live virtuously. His sense-life was awake, and he recognised no
necessity for restraint. The strivings after ascetic peace which filled his
adolescence had been laid aside; with the breaking of his faith in the
watchful solicitude of Jesus, natural impulses had been set free. His
autobiography records his early struggles, and his later "fall" with the same
detached imperturbability. He lacks the sense of shame which avoids certain
topics. He observes no reticences. The pages in many of his books are
studded with coarse language and unsavoury references to physical life. The
sexual cynicism which pervades the story of his life is only relieved by his
perfect sincerity.
He describes the pleasures of inebriation with similar frankness. At the age
of nineteen he was already familiar with Bacchic revels. His brain was
inflamed with ideas, congested with unformulated thought. The narcosis of
alcohol attracted him.
"Sometimes melancholy, at other times gay," he writes, "he sometimes felt
an irresistible craving to extinguish the burning fire of thought and to stop
the turmoil of the brain. Shy, he sometimes felt impelled to come forward, to
make an impression, to find an audience, to appear in public. When he had
drunk a great deal, he wished to recite great and solemn things, but in the
middle of the piece, when ecstasy was at its height, he heard his own voice,

became shy, frightened, thought himself ridiculous, stopped suddenly,
changed his tone, took up the comical, and finished with a grimace. He had
pathos, but only for a while; then self-criticism came, and he laughed at his
forced emotions." Strindberg finds another explanation of his craving for
alcohol in the lack of nourishing diet at Upsala and the dulness of his home
in Stockholm. "Strong liquors gave him strength," he says, "and he slept
well after them." He adds: "Like the rest of the race, he was born of
drunkards, generation after generation from pagan times immemorial, when
ale and mead were used, and the desire had inevitably become a necessity."
He was not a success as a board-school teacher. There were bargains with
his conscience during scripture lessons, and the prevailing system of
teaching seemed a cruel parody. He shrank from the sights and sounds and
smells of the herd of poor children. Ambition and intellectual hunger called
him to seek experience elsewhere.
His restlessness was increased through reading Byron's Manfred and
Schiller's Die Räuber. He tried to translate the former into Swedish, but
discovered to his chagrin that he could not write blank verse. Karl Moor in
Die Räuber laid hold of his imagination with the claims of a kindred spirit.
Here was his own heterodoxy and revolt against laws, society, customs,
religion made manifest in a living, literary figure by a great writer. Schiller's
maturer repudiation of his fierce bandit did not trouble him. Manfred fleeing
from himself to the Alps appealed to him as a feat of rebellion
complementary to Karl Moor's adventures.
At the age of nineteen the rôle of the schoolmaster was exchanged for that
of the student of medicine. His duties at the board-school had become
intolerable, when, one evening, a Mend, an old doctor, knocked at his door
and suggested that he should desert the school and enlist in the service of
Aesculapius. His fatherly friend brushed aside objections on the ground of
poverty by suggesting that Strindberg should live in his house and, in return,
act as tutor to his boys. In spite of the dreary prospect of eight years of
medical studies the kindly offer was accepted; for the profession of
medicine seemed the portal to enviable knowledge. Not the dry, stereotyped
dogmas of the Church and the University curriculum, but real wisdom
penetrating life's mysteries. "To become a sage who understood life's riddles
—that was his dream for the moment." He disliked the idea of a career in the

service of the State or of being a mere figure, a wheel or a screw, in the
social machinery. The physician seemed to him to be free.
His preparatory studies were carried out at the Technological Institute. Here
the vigorous fantasy of the future alchemist received the first stimulus
through chemical experiments which fascinated him by revealing the secrets
of matter. Here he also studied zoology, anatomy, botany and physics.
But other powers were at work undermining the solidifying influence of
application to science. In the doctor's house he met writers and artists.
Conversation generally turned on plays, pictures, books, authors and actors.
There was a fine library, offering the world's literary treasures. There was a
collection of pictures and there were valuable engravings. The intellectual
atmosphere was international, and afforded a pleasant change from the
vulgar patriotism which had been sacred to the pedagogues of the board-
school.
The Dramatic Theatre was near at hand. Here a new and gaily attractive
world was opened to him. Standing in the gallery he listened to the badinage
of French comedy and saw the types of the Second Empire in aristocratic
setting. Thus he spent several evenings every week. The life of the actor
seemed strangely interesting, for he was allowed to express himself, to
speak unwelcome truths without losing popularity. The theatrical profession
seemed outside and above the petty rules of society—a privileged class. It
offered special and glorious opportunities for artistic self-expression.
Meanwhile the experiences of his medical education had become distasteful.
The old physician brought his pupil to see patients, rich and poor, providing
him with diverse "clinical material." He was asked to assist at early morning
operations and to hold the patients. Whilst Strindberg held the patient's head,
the doctor "removed glands with a fork." The assistant's thoughts were
soaring high above the surgery, in the regions of Goethe's Faust and
Wieland's novels; they were with George Sand, Chateaubriand and Lessing.
During cauterisation the smell of human flesh rose in his nostrils and spoilt
his appetite for breakfast. He describes his state of mind in the following
words: "Imagination had been set in motion and memory would not work;
reality with its bums and blood clots was ugly; æstheticism had seized the
youth, and life seemed dull and repulsive."

A futile attempt to pass a preliminary medical examination at Upsala
precipitated his decision not to enter a profession which was exclusively
occupied with the aches of the body. In spite of the disappointment of his
medical benefactor, he announced his intention of becoming an actor.
He now lived for some months in an ideal stage-world. After making
arrangements for obtaining practical instruction in the autumn, he devoted
the summer to private studies of the art which appeared to be his true and
only vocation in life. Schiller's lecture, "On the Theatre as an Institution for
Moral Education," saturated his mind with a lofty and idealistic conception
of the ethical and æsthetic mission of the stage. Was not this the greatest of
all human arts? Was it not a calling worthy of the finest talent and the most
devoted labour? He buried his past restlessness in faithful search for
knowledge of the actor's gifts and graces. Goethe taught him how to stand,
sit down, carry himself, how to enter and leave a room gracefully. He
studied the pose of antique sculpture and practised to walk with uplifted
head and expanded chest, whilst the arms were trained to swing easily and
the hand to be lightly closed with the fingers forming a beautifully shaped
curve. He tried to conquer his shyness and his fear of crossing open places,
and paraded his new artful self in the most frequented promenade in
Stockholm.
The doctor's house was made the scene of his dramatic exercises. Here he
prepared the performance of Die Räuber and appeared himself as Karl
Moor. When his vocal practices disturbed the peace of the house, he
repaired to Ladugårdsgärdet, the vast fields and hills, on the east side of
Stockholm, which for many years past have been used for military
manœuvres. They now also serve as a starting-point for aerial flights. But no
mechanical wings of flight could equal those, on which Strindberg's
imagination soared towards the realisation of his mission as an artist and a
social reformer.
Here, he tells us, he stormed against heaven and earth. The city, the church
spires of which were visible, represented Society, whilst he belonged to
Nature. "He shook his fist at the palace, the churches, the barracks, and
snarled at the troops which during the manœuvres sometimes came too near
him. There was something fanatical in his work, and he spared no pains to
make his reluctant muscles obedient."

The keen resentment of injustice and the irrepressible sympathy with the
poor and the down-trodden, which the later misanthropy of the man could
never quell, showed forth in an episode of this time, connected with the
unveiling of a statue of Charles XII. Though the statue had been erected
through public donations, the arrangements for the unveiling were such as to
exclude the people from a view of the proceedings. The people threatened to
pull down the stands for paying spectators which obscured the view, and the
troops were called out to restore order. August was seated at a gay dinner-
party at the doctor's house in honour of some Italian operatic stars, when the
sounds of the battle reached the ears of the company.
"What is that?" asked the prima donna.
"It is the noise of the mob," said a professor.
August could not sit still. The clinking of glasses, the tight dinner-talk, the
jests and laughter jarred on him. Who were these who spoke of the people as
"mob"? Something stirred within his breast with the call of blood and the
passion of identical feeling. He left the table and went out into the streets.
"'The mob'!" he writes, "the word rang in his ears, whilst he walked down
the street. The mob! they were his mother's former school-fellows, they
were his school-fellows and later his pupils, they were the dark background
which made the light pictures effective in the place he had just left. He felt
like a deserter, as if he had done wrong in working his way up."
He reached the place where the statue had been raised, and mixed with the
excited crowds. The clatter of hoofs and the sight of the approaching Life
Guards filled him with a mad desire to resist all this mass of men, horses
and sabres. Together they were oppression incarnate.
August placed himself in the middle of the street, right in front of the
approaching cavalry. Through his mind flashed the call to revolt, the born
rebel's impulsive desire for self-immolation.
A hand seized him and pulled him out of danger. He was led home, and after
promising not to return to the scene of struggle the inevitable reaction set in
with exhaustion and high temperature in the evening.
On the day of the unveiling he was present among the undergraduates. At
the end of the ceremony there was a skirmish between the police and the
people. Stones were thrown and order was restored by means of sabre-cuts.

A man standing near Strindberg was attacked by a police inspector. August
rushed at the inspector, seized him by the collar and shook him.
"Let the man go!" he cried.
"Who are you?" asked the astounded inspector.
"I am Satan," answered the demoniacal liberator, "and I shall take you, if
you don't let the fellow go."
In trying to seize August the inspector released his hold of the man. At the
same moment a stone knocked oft the three-cornered hat of authority from
the inspector's head, and August wrenched himself free. The police drove
the crowd before them at the point of the bayonet. August followed with
other enthusiasts, determined to release the prisoners. The attempt was, of
course, futile; the bayonets were the strongest.
Strindberg describes how two gentlemen, one middle-aged, the other young,
both highly respectable, with conservative views, were seized with his own
passionate longing to defend the people against the police. Speechless, they
instinctively grasped each other's hands, and with white, set faces ran to the
rescue. When the excitement was over, and the wave of sympathy had spent
itself, they awoke in their normal selves and were shocked at their own
conduct. August himself could jest over his wild outburst, when half an hour
later he was seated in a restaurant with a chop in front of him and friends
around to listen to an objective account of the whole incident. The middle-
aged merchant of impeccable propriety failed to recognise August, when, by
chance, they met again. The composite consciousness created by the
contagion of strong emotion had ceased to exist.
When his dramatic recitals to the winds which sweep over Ladugårdsgärdet
had been followed by the prosaic training at the school of the Dramatic
Theatre, the conflict between dream and reality was followed by the usual
tragic results. His wish to make his début in an important part was rudely
brushed aside. After some humiliating experiences, he was given a small
part in Björnson's Mary Stuart. He appeared as a "nobleman," and all his
dramatic energy was, perforce, encompassed in the following sentence:
"The Peers have sent an emissary with a challenge to the Earl of Bothwell."
It was bitterly insignificant, but it was the portal to greater achievement.

The disillusionment of his first glimpse behind the scenes was manfully
rebutted. The boards and the paint which, when seen from the gallery, had
held so much charm, were now, when scrutinised from the other side, dusty
and ugly. The actors who were permitted to play great parts were, after all,
just like ordinary mortals. They yawned loudly between their turns, and
gave expression to commonplace sentiments as a relief from the sublimities
uttered on the stage.
After some months, during which Strindberg was only a super, he was
heartily tired of the whole thing. The mechanism, living and dead, of
dramatic production disgusted him. He felt repressed and misjudged. But at
the same time he was ashamed of quitting the profession which he had
chosen with such high expectations. He demanded his right to be tried and
judged. He was given an important part and a special rehearsal, at which he
appeared without stage costume and without the requisite enthusiasm. The
elder actors resented the arrangement, and Strindberg shouted his sentences
in a manner which made it clear that he was in need of further instruction.
He was advised to resume his pupilage. But this he would not do. The
humiliation was unbearable. He cried with rage and decided to commit
suicide. An opium pill which he had treasured with a view to the possibility
of having to summon a catastrophic end to life's difficulties was utilised for
the purpose, but failed altogether of a calamitous effect. A friend, who knew
the better way, re-awakened Strindberg's interest in earthly existence
through a merry drinking bout.
On the following day, he tells us, he felt bruised, wounded, tom, with
quivering nerves and with the fever of shame and drunkenness in his veins.
He lay on his sofa reading Topelius' Tales of a Surgeon and musing over his
own troubles. His brain worked at high pressure, sorting memories, adding
and eliminating, calling out personalities. He heard his characters speak. It
was as if he saw them on a stage. After a few hours he had visualised a
comedy in two acts, and in four days the play was written.
"It was a work," he writes in Fermentation Time, "at once painful and
pleasurable, if it even could be called work, for it came of itself, without his
will or effort."
"And when the piece was ready," he tells us, "he drew a deep sigh, as if
years of pain were over, as if an abscess had been lanced. He was so happy

that something sang within him, and he decided to send his piece to the
theatre. This was the salvation."
Macaulay thought that books are written either to relieve the fulness of the
mind or the emptiness of the pocket. He ignored the intimate correlation
between the two motives. The full mind is only too often made inarticulate
by the empty pocket, whilst, on the other hand, the empty pocket sometimes
accelerates processes of the mind which, but for that stimulus, would never
reach fulness. Strindberg was throughout life the slave of a full mind and an
empty pocket.
His first effort in drama had now to be submitted to competent criticism. He
prepared the garret which he rented from the doctor for the festive reception
of two wise friends. A clean napkin on the table, two candles and a bottle of
"punsch" were the outer signs of the solemnity with which he welcomed his
critics. The play was read to the end in sympathetic silence. The friends then
saluted August as an author.
When alone he fell on his knees and thanked God who had delivered him
out of his difficulties and who had given him the gift of literary expression.
Perhaps no subsequent literary crises of gestation ever equalled the first in
intensity of expectation; I he felt that he had at last found his vocation, the
part he was called upon to play in life.
The material for his first play had been his own family troubles; his
religious doubts now found expression in a play in three acts. He had also
discovered that he could write rhymed verse, presumably as the result of a
visitation of the Holy Ghost. A feverish power of production followed: in
two months he wrote two comedies, a tragic verse drama and some poems.
The first comedy had been submitted to the manager of the Royal Theatre.
Meanwhile the anonymous author continued to walk the boards, now
buoyed by a secret joy. His turn would come; the thought of the day when
he would be recognised made him bold. In his peasant costume he felt a
prince in disguise.
But the comedy was not accepted. The tragedy which he also sent in met
with the same fate, though he received a kindly hint that it would be worth
his while to perfect himself in the art of dramatic construction, and that time
and experience would be more profitably expended on a literary career than
on further attempts to succeed as an actor. He was advised to return to

Upsala. A tragedy with the title Jesus of Nazareth was sketched out. It was
intended to crush Christianity completely and for all time. It was only partly
written, when, happily, it was abandoned, the youthful author having
succumbed to the magnitude of his subject.
His last appearance on the stage was ignominious, yet symbolic of his future
as a writer of drama. No part whatever had been found for him. He offered
to act as prompter and was accepted. Thus ended the career upon which he
had entered with such glorious zest.

CHAPTER III

"FERMENTATION TIME"

Goaded by misfortune, the recalcitrant scholar returned to Upsala
determined to distinguish himself by obtaining his degree or by writing a
successful play which would compensate for past failures. His return was
made possible by the possession of a few hundred kronor, left to him under
his mother's will.
With five kindred souls he founded a poetical guild to which the name Rune
—"Song"—was given. The meetings of the brethren were occasions for
improvisation and tippling, for hair-splitting arguments and epicurean
excesses. They philosophised over life and literature, expressed the joy of
existence in music, and alcoholic melancholy in sad tales of suffering.
August wrote and read poetry which breathed idealism, nature-worship and
patriotism. He sang to the guitar, sometimes sentimental folk-songs,
sometimes compositions of a less worthy kind.
The dialectics of the company stimulated August's powers of expression,
though they interfered with his studies.
A friend advised him to write a one-act play in verse. This, he said, would
have a greater chance of being acted than a tragedy in five acts, which
August thought more fitting. The one-act play was written in a fortnight. It

was called In Rome and dealt with Thorvaldsen's first stay in that city. The
idea had long been present in his mind. It burst into dramatic shape with
unmistakable force, and the friends, recognising that it had a living spirit,
prophesied that it would be accepted. The birth of the play was duly
celebrated with carousals, in which the author was acclaimed with generous
admiration.
The psychology of drunkenness was one of the subjects for incisive
discussion and historical analysis at the meetings of the Rune. The members
certainly did not lack practical experience of its mental perplexities, but,
however vinous their youthful judgment of the problems of life generally,
they appraised the possibilities of August Strindberg's art with singular
accuracy.
Strindberg's slender resources did not save him from the pinch of poverty.
He had tasted luxury in the doctor's house. His room in Upsala was squalid;
the rain came through the ceiling, fire-wood was scarce, and occasional
frugal suppers of bread and water were forcible reminders of life's realities.
He managed, nevertheless, to study æsthetics and living languages with a
new ardour. His range of reading was widened, and his critical faculties
were in a continuous process of development.
Ibsen and Björnson dominated the intellectual horizon. August had been
deeply stirred by Brand, when reading it a year earlier, and had felt the soul-
struggles of Ibsen's deliverer to be identical with his own, but he now
reacted against the Norwegian invasion of the Swedish mind. The gloom of
the mountains and fjords of Norway, the poverty and enforced abstinences
of its people were reflected in the minds of its writers, and had no rightful
place amongst the smiling lakes and flower-strewn sward of Sweden. Ibsen's
women now roused the instinctive sex-antagonism in Strindberg; he hated
Nora, and the whole brood of matriarchal ideas, of which he thought Ibsen a
dangerous modern exponent. Strindberg's later writings against women are
indirect replies to Ibsen; and his objections to woman's struggle for
emancipation were expressed with a controversial vehemence which robbed
them of literary effect.
In the autumn of 1870 In Rome was performed at the Royal Theatre at
Stockholm. The author was twenty-one years old. He watched the play,
standing in his old place in the gallery. The inebriation of success was now
followed by acute pangs of self-criticism. He felt as if he had been under an

electric battery, his legs trembled, and he wept with nervousness. A friend
seized his hand to calm him.
"Every stupidity," he writes, "which had slipped into the verse shook him
and jarred upon his ears. He saw nothing but imperfections in his work. His
ears burnt with shame, and he ran out before the curtain fell."
The attacks upon the clergy now seemed stupid and unjust, the glorification
of poverty and pride, mistaken; the description of his relationship to his
father, cynical.
He had found his own play stupid; he was overcome with shame, and death
by drowning in the rapid waters of Norrström seemed the only atonement.
The incident is characteristic of the man. The thoughts which a few months
before had been conjured up by the imaginative contemplation of
Thorvaldsen before the statue of Jason, of the struggle between filial duty
and artistic consciousness, were now outside their author, dismissed, objects
of pity. He had grown, whilst the imperfect words lay dead on the paper.
The evening ended in the company of friends. His searchings after
perfection and his intellectual remorse were assuaged by food and drink and
by the gratification of the lower impulses, to which he yielded without the
sense of shame or sin.
On the following day he read a favourable notice of the play, in which the
language was described as beautiful, and the anonymous author was said to
be a well-known critic who was familiar with the artistic world in Rome.
Thus he made his first acquaintance with the sweets of dramatic criticism. In
Rome has nothing of the fierce personality which, in his later plays,
outraged the critics of Sweden. There are strokes of fine picturing, and there
is charm of phrase, but the piece is meagre in conception and puerile in
expression.
He returned to Upsala and was now, by his father's intervention, lodged in
the house of the widow of a clergyman. It was hoped that a well-regulated
home-life, with sufficiency of food and a minimum of comfort, would
provide his spirits with wholesome restraint. But the reverse happened.
There were a number of undergraduates staying in the house; the table was
laden with good things; card-playing and heavy drinking occupied the
evenings. August was frequently drunk, his brain was saturated with the

clashing opinions of the young men, who loudly wooed their
Weltanschauung; he was dissatisfied, persecuted by doubts and
unreasonable remorse. He was in love—for the eighth time—and the object
of his love was, as usual, unattainable.
In Rome had met with severe, though not altogether unjust criticism in
another paper. His earlier play, The Freethinker, had been printed and
published anonymously through the kind offices of a friend. It fell into the
hands of a hostile journalist who ridiculed it. Strindberg now underwent the
painful experience of mental dissection at the hands of a ruthless critic.
However willingly we may condemn ourselves and indulge in the bitter-
sweet contemplation of the follies of yesterday's ego, the rude touch of
another's flail arouses every fibre of self-defence.
Though he had promised his father to turn his face against the temptations
of authorship and to give single-minded attention to studies, the creative
impulse could not be quelled. He wrote Blotsven, a tragedy in five acts,
which reiterated the religious rebellion of The Freethinker, depicting the
struggle between the spirit of the Viking and proselytising Christianity. The
old Icelandish tales which he now read in the original, and the influence of
Oehlenschläger, had helped to mould the form.
At this time he became absorbed in the mentality of the Danish writer Sören
Kierkegaard. His book Enten-Eller—Either Or—which treats of the struggle
between the flesh and the spirit, and which preaches the life-fearing
asceticism of the helpless sensualist, stirred Strindberg's doubts and self-
reproaches. An elder friend by the runic name of "Is," whose real name was
Josef Linck, managed, by the simulation of much learning, culminating in
intellectual nihilism, to persuade August that his stand-point was untenable.
The friend talked philosophy, æsthetics, world-history, dished up Kant,
Schopenhauer, Thackeray and George Sand, and dyed August's soul with
impotent scepticism.
The result was that Strindberg burnt the MSS. of his Blotsven. The friend
had shown that he was not a poet, and the tears which he shed over the ashes
were embittered by the knowledge that he had deceived his father.
He hurriedly decided to pass his examination in Latin compositions. He had
not made the requisite preparation, called on the Professor in a state of after-

dinner exaltation, demonstrated his independence of spirit, and was
promptly turned out.
The suicide of a student brought the supernatural to the door of the already
over-visited mind. Strindberg had met the unhappy man some days before
and avoided his company. On visiting the place of the tragedy, he was
completely unnerved by the sight of blood and the gruesome associations.
He felt half guilty of murder, could not sleep and was haunted by the dead
man. The Runic brethren watched over him, but his friend "Rejd"
nevertheless found him with a bottle of prussic acid and sinister intentions.
The friend shrewdly suggested a preparatory sacrificial rite of four "toddies"
before the fatal poison was drained. The desired effect was soon apparent.
August had to be carried home, but as the gate of the house was closed his
friends threw him over the fence. He remained in a snow-drift until he had
recovered sufficiently to find his room. But his ghost-ridden soul did not
find peace until he quitted Upsala a few days later.
He confessed his sins to his father and obtained permission to remain at
home, and to prepare for his degree in a less disturbing atmosphere. He now
"felt protected as if he had landed after a night's stormy voyage," and slept
calmly in his old truckle-bed. Blotsven rose from the ashes. He re-wrote it in
a fortnight. It was now condensed into one act under the title The Outlaw,
and was sent to the theatre.
Being thus relieved of the supreme duties to his dramatic daimon, he again
descended to Latin compositions and passed his examen in spite of
continued defiance of the Professor's rules of procedure. The æsthetic thesis,
which he submitted shortly afterwards, was promptly returned to him by the
Professor, with the remark that its contents were more suitable for the fair
readers of an illustrated weekly than for an academical discourse. This was
indeed injustice. August had poured out his most mature views on realism
versus idealism, utilising the Danish dramatist Oehlenschläger as a buffer
between his new and his old self. The essay is re-printed in full in the
autobiography, and is well worth reading. The style is rich in imagery and
analogy, the conclusions audacious, though a gentle world-weariness
pervades every argument. Strindberg's later style as an incisive essayist is
discernible in spite of the periphrastic treatment of dramatic problems from
Sophocles to Shakespeare. The desire to show erudition is apparent on every
page, and the author confesses that the wish to show the Professor his

profound knowledge of Danish literature was one of his motives in choosing
the subject. The Professor's unsympathetic attitude towards his review of
Danish literature was, therefore, mortifying.
His quiet life at home had begun well. The earlier struggle against poverty
had been superseded by well-ordered home-life. August's sisters were now
grown up; he was impressed and felt sanctified by their unostentatious
discharge of daily duties which contrasted so sharply with his own wild and
worthless past. The stem father had been mellowed by time, and August
spent many evenings with him in friendly talk on great subjects.
But rebellion soon drove the son away. August resented some trifling
interference with his liberty, borrowed a few hundred kronor, and settled for
the summer in a fisher-man's cottage on one of the Baltic islands outside
Stockholm. With three of the Runic brethren he now threw himself into a
healthy outdoor life, bathing, sailing, fencing. The body was to be taught
natural goodness, and the counsels of Satan were to be unheeded. He studied
philology, avoided alcohol, and dwelt with Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe.
Natural asceticism and the mental discipline of classifying root-words
would curb his vigorous fantasy and help him to acquit himself with honour
at Upsala. He could expect no further help from the father.
At the beginning of the autumn term he arrived in Upsala hungry and with
one krona in his pocket. He felt justified in borrowing from friends, for he
was confident of the future. With the small sums which he succeeded in
drawing on the bank of friendship he rented a miserable room, which
contained little but a bed without sheets or pillowcases. He lay on it in his
underclothing, reading by the light of a candle stuck in a bottle. Kind friends
were responsible for an irregular supply of food, but no spartan resolutions
could temper the cold weather. He succeeded in borrowing a little wood and
carried it home under cover of darkness. A physicist taught him to extract
the full calorific value from the charcoal. There was a stovepipe in the room
which was hot every Thursday when the landlady did her washing. Then he
stood reading with his hands on his back, leaning against the pipe, with the
chest of drawers doing service as a reading-desk.
His Viking play had meanwhile been accepted. The first performance was
received coldly. The critics were ungracious; he was accused of having
borrowed the form from Ibsen, though the cold restraint and rugged
simplicity of the language were directly inspired by the Icelandish Sagas.

Sick at heart, Strindberg resumed his battle with poverty and dejection. The
darkness of uncertainty was again upon him, when, with the suddenness
which is usually reserved for good boys in fairy tales, Fortuna held out her
hand. He received a letter announcing that the King was interested in his
play and wished to see him. He could not believe his eyes, and suspected
that the letter was a joke. On being re-assured of the genuineness of the
message, he went to Stockholm and was received by Charles XV. The King
smiled as the young author made his stumbling way to the royal presence
through the lines of courtiers, and greeted him with geniality. Charles XV,
himself a poet, expressed the pleasure which he had derived from the Viking
play, and his personal interest in the revival of the old northern tales. After
inquiries regarding Strindberg's financial prospects, the King ordered a
yearly stipend of eight hundred kronor to be paid to him from the privy
purse.
August left the palace, moved and grateful, with the first quarterly
instalment of the monarch's bounty in his pocket.
The short play which had won royal favour is the first work in which
Strindberg's mastery over his dramatic art was foreshadowed. The terse
phrasing fitly embodies the spirit of Norseman valour. It grips the reader
with the force of a drapa, sung in faithful celebration of life's attempts and
hard-won victories. Gunlöd, the daughter of Thorfinn, the old heathen
Viking, has been secretly baptised and loves the Christian Viking, Gunnar.
The human conflict between sorrow and resignation, faith and doubt, is
drawn with a passionate wish to do justice to everyone. Strindberg
possessed that power of visualising and speaking through the characters of a
play with equally apportioned interest, which is essential to the true
dramatist. His own words on his relationship to the Viking play, show that
he was fully aware of this faculty of artistic self-multiplication and of its
penalties:
"Johan[1] had incarnated himself in five persons in the play. In the earl, who
fights against time; in the bard, who surveys and penetrates; in the mother,
who rebels and takes revenge, but who is deprived of her avenging power
through her sympathy; in the girl, who breaks with her father because of her
faith; in the lover, who is burdened with an unhappy love. He understood the
motives of all the characters and pleaded every-one's cause. But a play
which is written for the mediocre, who have ready-made opinions about

everything, must at least be partial to a couple of its characters in order to
win the ordinary audience which is always passionate and partial. Johan
could not do this, for he did not believe in absolute right or wrong, for the
simple reason that all these conceptions are relative. One can be right in
regard to the future and wrong in respect to the present; one is wrong this
year, but considered right next year; the father may think that the son is
right, whilst the mother thinks him wrong; the daughter has the right to love
whomsoever she loves, but the father thinks her wrong in loving a heathen.
This was doubt. Why do men hate and despise the doubter? Because doubt
is evolution, and Society hates evolution because it disturbs the peace, but
doubt is true humanity and will end in equity of judgment. The stupid only
are certain, the ignorant only believe that they have found truth. But peace is
happiness, and pietists therefore seek it in the peace of stupidity. It is said
that doubt consumes the power of action, but is it then better to act without
considering and weighing the consequences of the act? The animal and the
savage act blindly, obeying lusts and impulses, thereby being like men of
action."

Life at Upsala was strangely changed. The royal patronage endowed August
with a distinction, the pleasure of which was evident. The sense of freedom
from the pressure of poverty, of having achieved some measure of success,
expanded his chest and straightened his back. His friends did not recognise
him. They were accustomed to see in August the poor half-starved, erratic
youth who needed their help. In unconsciously looking down, we add to our
self-respect. August no longer needed the pity which had given pleasure to
givers and recipient, and the result was disharmony. The Rune was
weakened through indifference and internal strife, and died naturally, a
victim of competition.
August's good fortune was not of long duration. He, die rebel, the destroyer
of common idols and conventions, had not hesitated to receive the King's
gift. For he had never believed that the ills of the world would be set right
by the abolition of monarchy, and in the King's gift he saw not the grace of
the ruler, but recognition accorded to him by a personal friend and admirer.
But he soon began to chafe under the obligations and restrictions which his

new position entailed. At the end of the term he manfully struggled through
his examination in philology, astronomy and sociology. During the next
term his mental restlessness became acute. The brain was filled with
creative energy, and the path of learning was blocked. Doubt and apathy
chilled his efforts to do the work which was expected of him. Sometimes he
lay all day on a sofa, longing to be free and in the midst of life. He felt
imprisoned by the royal stipend and sought succour in reading the history of
philosophy. But the different systems seemed to him to possess the same
degree of validity, and his head was replete with his own thoughts.
One evening he evoked the anger of one of the professors by attacking
Dante. He declared the composition of the Commedia to be an imitation of
Albericus' vision, and Dante's greatness to be over-rated. Dante was ignorant
of Greek, therefore uncultured; he was no philosopher, as he suppressed
thought by revelation; he was a foolish monk who sent unbaptised children
to hell. He lacked all self-criticism when he classed ingratitude to friends
and treason to one's country among the worst of crimes, whilst he himself
sent his friend and teacher, Brunetto Latini, to the nether world and
supported the German Emperor Henry VII against his native town, Florence.
He showed bad taste, for amongst the six greatest poets of the world, he
placed Homer, Horace, Lucanus, Ovid, Virgil and—himself.
The result of these observations was that Strindberg was dismissed as
insolent and crazy.
A period of increased mental distress and uncertainty followed upon the
explosion. The town was grey and dirty, and the chill of winter lay over the
land. There was no stability in his soul—he felt as if it had been dissolved,
and hovered as a sensitive smoke around him. A forcible new impression
pulled him together. One day he found his friend, the naturalist, painting as a
recreation. This was something that would condense and support an
evaporating ego. To paint green landscape in the midst of dull winter, and to
hang it on one's wall—that was something worth doing!
"Is it difficult to paint?" he asked.
"No, it is easier than drawing. Try it," was the reply.
August borrowed an easel, brushes and paint, locked his door and gave
himself up to colour-worship. When he saw the blue colour give the effect
of a clear sky he was enraptured, and when he conjured up green bushes and

a lawn on the canvas, "he was inexpressibly happy—as if he had eaten
hashish."
One day, when he had locked himself in, he heard a conversation between
his friends outside the door. They talked as if they were discussing someone
who was ill.
"Now he is painting too!" said one of the friends in a tone of deep
depression.
August reflected and came to the conclusion that he was going mad. Fearing
compulsory incarceration, he wrote to the manager of a private asylum in
which the patients were allowed their liberty and to till the soil. He
expressed his willingness to submit to the curative principles of the
institution. The reply was kind and reassuring. The manager had made
inquiries about the would-be patient and found that there was no need for
extreme steps.
Three months, passed and the second instalment of the royal stipend was not
paid. A letter of humble inquiry brought the reply that His Majesty had
never meant to give permanent support to Strindberg, and that it was only a
question of temporary help. A further sum was enclosed, as His Majesty had
graciously decided to help his protégé once more.
The first sense of relief was followed by some anxiety as to the
consequences. The King's promise was no mistake. The real explanation of
the "disgrace" was not easy to find. Some thought the King had forgotten;
others that his proverbial generosity had exceeded his means. Ten years later
Strindberg heard that he had been wrongfully accused of writing defamatory
verses about the King.
He decided to leave Upsala and to seek work in Stockholm as a journalist.
At a valedictory gathering of the old friends he thanked them for their
contributions to his self, "for a personality is not developed out of itself; out
of each soul with which it comes in contact it sucks a drop, like the bee
collecting its honey from millions of flowers, transforming it and passing it
on as its own."
[1] In his autobiography he uses his first Christian name: Johan, and speaks of
himself in the third person.

CHAPTER IV

THE DRAMA OF THE HERETIC

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 had exercised 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 strangely en
rapport with 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 the littérateurs of 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's power 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 could contain 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's dichtung. 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 and discontent 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's first
great drama, The Heretic, afterwards named Master 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 Olof deals 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 of Master 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 the consequences 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 has refused 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 deathless dramatis
personæ. He is very remote from Shakespeare's Wolsey, and the
psychological climax is reversed, but there 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. In Master Olof Strindberg spoke as Goethe
had spoken in Goetz von Berlichingen.
Master Olof was 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 sent to 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 such thoughts. 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 hand with
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 of Master Olof had 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
were rejected. 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 in Hamlet, 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, automata from 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 was
attacked 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 the summer, 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
passionately in 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 in In the Red Room of 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 his light, 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 the genus irritabile evidence 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 to send 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 to Dagens 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 of
pulsating 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 the Riksdag in 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 off old 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 thread of 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 of
Royal Secretary 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.

CHAPTER V

MARRIED AND BLASPHEMOUS

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 the colossal 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 the Confession she 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 dramas The 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,
entitled The Author, and of The 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 of The Confession,
which relates to the same period. The Author was published in 1887, The
Confession was written in 1888, a German version published in 1893, and
the original French edition in 1894. The reason for the omissions in The
Author may mercifully be found in the desire to shield living persons in
Sweden from the fate of being the central figures in a chronique
scandaleuse. The Confession has 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 withheld The Confession from 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 of Married, 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]
In The Confession Strindberg'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
innocent schwärmerei which 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-worshipper fell 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 to art, 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 of punsch he 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 Guards
had 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 blasphemy and
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 the hotel 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 his attic 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.

August Strindberg—1884.

Proceedings to dissolve the marriage are commenced, and the Baroness
spends a few weeks in Copenhagen so as to comply with the legal necessity
of having "deserted" her husband. On her return to Stockholm she is
determined to realise her ideal of going on the stage. She succeeds in
obtaining an engagement under the patronage of two famous actors and
eventually makes a successful début. The requisite publicity is provided not
only by lovers of art, but also by scandal-mongers. The process of
disillusionment has begun. The iconoclast is already master of the idolater,
and Strindberg sees the disjointed skeleton where a few months ago he saw
the beautiful form of a goddess. "Everything was permitted to us now, but
temptation had diminished," he writes in illustration of that lurking element
of the macabre which caused sudden satiety and shattered his love through
the dissociation of his sexual personality. He does not stand by, a passive
onlooker of the dissolution; he assists by bitter invective and gross abuse.
The ex-Baroness on the stage is no longer to him the virginal mother with
whom he had fallen in love; she is an actress "with insolent gestures, bad

manners, boastful, overbearing." The sight of the stockings, destined to
envelop the feet which a short time ago were heavenly, is now revolting. He
notices that her room is untidy, her dress slovenly, that she wears old
slippers, and that her gestures are reminiscent of the street. He discovers
that he has no desire for her company, that she inspires him with disgust.
Such were the first stages of Strindberg's union with the woman, who has
been analysed, divided, multiplied and endowed with every variety of
feminine crime in his writings. Eager to fly from "the repulsive heap of
offal," to which he likens the whole tragedy of the divorce, he went to Paris
in the company of a friend who enjoyed the sudden affluence of a legacy.
This time he safely reached his destination, and experienced no
uncontrollable impulse to abandon the journey. In Paris he received a letter
from the Baroness, in which she told him that she was about to become a
mother and begged him to save her from dishonour.
His love received a fresh stimulus; the shade of the Madonna resumed
temporary physical form. Strindberg returned to Stockholm, willing to
retrieve the past and mould the future by holy matrimony. The wedding
took place in December, 1877. Shortly afterwards a little girl was
prematurely born—a weakly infant who died two days later, thereby saving
the parents the anxiety of keeping its existence secret.
The unfoldment of the story of Strindberg's first marriage, the tragi-comedy
of its rhythm of love and hatred, shows not only incompatibility of temper
and a profound spiritual alienation, but his unfitness to bear with
equanimity prolonged period of domestic enslavement. The superficial
reader of the unpleasant details of The Confession will close the book with
Géronte's question on his lips: "Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galère?"
The sexual psychology of the book, its profound, though brutal exposure of
its author's emotional intemperance, can only be studied in conjunction with
the whole of his autobiographical writings. A mood, a phase, a temper,
appertaining to the woman-hater, are seething in The Confession, and
produce pearls of literary power as well as comicalities, and bêtises which
are reminiscent of a third-rate French novel.
The Author reveals the idealist in quest of true love, a man who can feel the
purity and joy of generative creation, the natural pathos and sacredness of
family life.

Of the psychic rearrangement which preceded the birth of the second child,
Strindberg writes:
"He received the first certainty with fear. How could he receive and bring
up a child, and how would the ideal marriage of his dreams now be
realised? But he accustomed himself to the thought, and the unborn one
soon became a personal acquaintance, a beloved guest who was expected,
and for whose future he wanted to fight. The wife who hitherto had been a
comrade was endowed with another value as mother, and the ugly side of
their relationship, which already had been noticeable, disappeared. A great,
high mutual interest ennobled the relationship, made it more intimate and
roused dormant forces to activity. This time of waiting was more beautiful
than the period of the engagement and the honeymoon, and the arrival of
the child the most beautiful in his life."
Those who see in Strindberg's attitude towards marriage and women
nothing but the ravings of a sacrilegious and obscene mind deliberately shut
their eyes to aspirations, such as the above, which, however fleeting, were
as much a part of the man's attitude as the profanities which even his
warmest panegyrists cannot defend.
Strindberg continues: "When he held the new-born daughter in his arms he
felt that the soul only achieves immortality through transformation in a
younger body, and that a childless life is a carnivore which only eats others
without being eaten. But he also experienced a strange feeling of having
flowered and gone to seed. He was child again in his child, but he himself
felt that he had grown old. He was deposed and there was already a
successor in the house."
The feeling of being deposed did not prevent subsequent acts of unimpaired
autocracy, but the record of the first rush of feelings of paternal solidarity is
of interest in view of the anarchic hostility to the family which Strindberg's
writings so often express.
The troubled course of love had not interfered with the rising wave of
literary productivity. Before marriage he had continued to write short stories
descriptive of coast life, and in addition to his labours as assistant librarian
he had obtained fairly remunerative work as an art-critic. He had
experienced so much disappointment as a dramatist that he decided to
employ another literary form.

In 1877 a collection of short stories appeared, entitled From Fjärdingen and
Svartbäcken, which described the undergraduates' life at Upsala and caused
annoyance by its disclosure of the swamps and pitfalls in the academical
training-ground. These twelve sketches, written with directness of phrase
and a vividness of description which show keen powers of observation,
were met with charges of exaggeration. The superannuated student who
spins out a worthless existence in gasconade and song, supplementing the
weakness of his mind by a few high-sounding philosophical catch-words;
the popular poet who wins applause and friends by impromptu doggerel,
stupid and coarse; the refined and sensitive youth who is hated because he
is a devotee of outer and inner cleanliness and decorum; the wild
spendthrift who smashes windows and extinguishes street-lamps as a
pastime worthy of his caste—these and others are drawn against a
background of traditional cant, humbug and soul-destroying lies. Several of
the stories have autobiographical patches. There is withal a good-humoured
satire, not free from youthful pathos, permeated by sympathy and a personal
note of an experience acutely felt. The book is interesting as the first
specimen of Strindberg's realistic style as a prosaist. The reviews of the
book expressed divergent opinions; Strindberg read them with the
composure of one who knows how such views are manufactured.
Rebuffed by the refusal of theatrical managers to accept Master Olof, he
had re-written it in verse. The new edition was published in 1877, and the
reception brought its author bitter disappointment, and fuller experience of
the indifference which kills. The critics were silent. They ignored the
masterpiece of his youth, and presented a deaf ear to the poetry of the
heretic. One paper declared the play to be humbug. His old colleagues of
the press-table saw no reason for acclamation.
The satire which had shone with a mellow light in the sketches of Upsala
life was fanned into hot flame through contact with the world of Philistines.
Determined to speak his mind untrammelled by accepted standards of
literary form, whether poetic or prosaic, historical or modern, he now wrote
a novel which he called The Red Room. The book was published in 1879,
and produced an outburst of anger and admiration. Voltaire's words, "Rien
n'est si désagréable que d'être pendu obscurément," had been chosen by
Strindberg as a motto for the book and in protest against the treatment he
had received. The force and style of The Red Room effectively protected its

author from continued obscurity. Strindberg's name was made by this book;
henceforth it was the war-cry of opposing factions. As a novel the book fails
through lack of cohesive development of character-study and events. As a
series of sketches of the follies and vanities which permeate the social
hierarchy it compels attention by its direct, speaking style, and the singular
freshness and spontaneity of its satire. The central figure of the book is
Arvid Falk—Strindberg the idealist—a journalist whose contact with the
world results in a series of disillusionments. Everything that is dishonest,
cruel, banal, hypocritical and vile in the social system is exposed to view in
the pages of The Red Room, which still, after thirty years, retain their
freshness and the warmth of the burning moral indignation which caused
them to be written.
He had found in the depth of the human heart the seven deadly sins, and he
traced their poison in every human relationship, under the cloak of
respectability, in the qualities which lead to worldly success and honour.
Oblique finance, dishonest company-promoting, show philanthropy,
unctuous religiosity, servile journalism, create characters which are drawn
in bold and dark outline with strongly concentrated colours, but without the
exaggeration of which he was accused. The characters are so typical of
human weakness and wickedness, the psychological analysis of motives
and acts so accurate, that the indictment of the book remains true in spite of
changes in social form and personal types. The pompous publisher who
grows fat on the brains of young authors, whilst he intimidates them by
depreciation; the editor who finds favour with his party and his employers
by suppressing every unwelcome truth and spreading every useful party lie;
the moneylender who builds up a banking business through exploitation of
the financial ruin of others, are contrasted with the unsuccessful and the
unworldly.
Amongst the artists and intellectual dilettanti who assembled in the Red
Room of Berns Restaurant in the evening, and whose hard struggle for
bread in the day formed such a sharp contrast to the comfort of the time-
servers, Strindberg found the Dionysian madness, without which the sanity
of the rest of the world would have been unbearable. There is still life in the
making, goodness inviolable, a brotherhood that woos the joy and beauty of
life, contemptuous of the badges and labels of Society! But the majority
who writhed under his satirical portraiture did not find compensation in his

exceptions. For the lightning of his satire had not only played upon the
time-worn objects of ridicule—those from which they dissociated
themselves with a smile of tolerant amusement—it had illuminated and rent
the pillars of Society to which they clung with superstitious respect. Had he
not shown how literary and dramatic reputations were made and unmade by
the personal ill-will or good-humour of self-constituted critics? Had he not
handled the activities of the ancient art-critic, who bestowed automatic
praise on all his old friends, and chilly silence on all new painters with
merciless severity? Did not his unseemly badinage with the civil service,
and with the well-established routine in governmental departments, stamp
him as an enemy of Society? Some method of silencing him had to be
found.
The manner in which the book was written was provocative by its idiomatic
phrasing and the naturalness of its scenes—every sentence was charged
with revolt against the ultra-academical style which had been the accepted
standard of good writing. This was a realism in fiction which was
dangerous alike to morals and literary comportment, introduced by a man
who proved himself to be master of a new art in words. The anxiety was
abated, when some outraged critic hit upon the idea that Strindberg was but
an imitator of Zola. This was not true; the author of The Red Room had not
read any of Zola's writings, but he had read Dickens—thoroughly—and
admired the gentle humour with which the great English novelist unmasked
social injustices and their complacent representatives. He had felt a desire
to be able to clothe his indictment of Society in similar form. There is little
similarity between the writings of Dickens and those of Strindberg; the
latter lacked altogether the child-like and detached interest with which
Dickens watched and chronicled the doings of the amazing people around
him.
In Dickens's books there is a distinct line of cleavage between the good and
the bad characters. The Red Room contains well-marked specimens of both,
but most of Strindberg's writings depict the hybrids of good and evil, the
psychological complexity in the human struggle for knowledge. As a
novelist Strindberg shows some affinity with George Gissing. Strindberg's
descriptions of the squalid tragedy of poverty—honest, hopeless, heaven-
forsaken poverty—have the same power of spoiling the enjoyment of a
good dinner as those of Gissing. In New Grub Street Gissing lets Biffen say,

"Show the numberless repulsive features of common decent life." The
repulsive features of human life generally met with protesting resonance in
Strindberg's poignant sensibility; he described them and the result is
"unpleasant."
The publication of The Red Room was followed by an intense literary
activity on the part of its restless author. He had found his tongue, and he
had found an audience.
The versatility of mind and production which was the despair of his critics
became apparent. In 1880 The Secret of the Guild, a comedy in four acts,
was published. The theme of the play is the unsuccessful attempt to
complete a church by a guild of masons in Upsala in 1402. For fifty years
the work has proceeded, but envy, dishonesty and pride of trade have stood
in the way of its completion. The old alderman is deposed and his son
becomes master of the work. Jacques, the son, is a man of action, ambitious
and unscrupulous, who urges on the work without the cautiousness of old
age. The roof is laid, the tower is built, but the secret of success has eluded
Jacques. The tower falls as a result of ignorance of the spiritual secret which
would have preserved it. "The church was built in sin and therefore it lies in
ruins," says the old alderman. The play faithfully reflects the Middle-Age
atmosphere, and harmonises with Strindberg's earlier plays in its vivid
presentation of the struggle between two generations.
Its infusion of faith and Christian symbology had the effect of modifying
the storm of execration, with which pious respectability strove to break the
author of The Red Room.
The performance of Master Olof at the Swedish Theatre in 1880 was a great
success, and it was no longer possible to ignore Strindberg as a dramatist.
Revised five times in deference to criticism and technique, the play had at
last conquered opposition by the richness of its historical imagination, the
splendour of its form and the fiery youthfulness of its treatment of the
oldest of spiritual problems. The tardy acknowledgment was balm even to
Strindberg's sceptical soul, and the two plays which he now wrote breathed
"faith, hope, and charity," as if the gloomy truths of The Red Room had
been forgotten.
The Journey of Lucky Peter[4] satirises humanity and Society in its narrative
of what befell Peter who wanted to see the world and taste its luxuries, but

like all good fairy-tales the drama ends happily, and Peter regains peace of
heart, and finds his dual-soul. And the satire is tempered with a humour, so
sympathetic, an understanding of the doers and victims of evil, so delicate,
that the reader of this fairy-play puts down the book with a sigh of
satisfaction that, after all, the worst experiences in this world prove
themselves to be but necessary milestones of the pilgrim's progress. Lucky
Peter who discovers the nothingness of the rich man's pleasures, of the
king's power, the bitterness of fame, the changeability of human
institutions! We envy him his rapid liberation from the chains of flesh, the
severe tuition under his fairy-teacher. The charm of the play is irresistible; it
has the mysterious eventfulness of Peter Pan and The Blue Bird, but none
of the fatuities which often distort plays for children of all ages. Even when
he entered fairyland Strindberg could not leave his intelligence behind.
In Sir Bengt's Wife, the other play of this period, he gives us an historical
drama of marriage, in which love rises triumphant and purified through
life's difficulties and misunderstandings. Sir Bengt has fallen in love with
the nun who is doing penance for the sinful response of her unruly woman's
heart. He delivers her from the tyranny of the abbess, and the wedding
festivities promise a life-long feast for the bold knight and his fair lady. But
the fates are jealous of so much happiness, such blending of strength and
beauty, and disaster overtakes them in the person of the king's bailiff who
demands the payment of a heavy fine in consequence of the knight's
negligence in not having provided the king with a mounted soldier. Sir
Bengt is unable to pay, and loses his knighthood. The unscrupulous bailiff,
who has designs upon Lady Margit, helps Sir Bengt to accept the services
of a moneylender by which complete ruin is averted. Sir Bengt conceals his
trouble from his bride, and seeks to redeem his position by hard and honest
work. A child is born, but the harmony between husband and wife is
disturbed through misunderstandings. To Lady Margit the change in her
husband is distressing: he works like a peasant, and has become oblivious
of the arts and graces of knightly conduct.
One day when, by ignorance and womanish love of the beautiful, she has
thwarted his plan for the restitution of his property he lifts his hand to strike
her. Protected by the Reformation, which has now been accomplished, she
asks the king to dissolve her marriage with a brutal and unworthy man. The
wicked bailiff is watching the disruption of the home with satisfaction, and

succeeds in gaining Lady Margit's affection. Fortunately she discovers the
villainy of his plan, and tastes the reprobation of "the world" in time. The
dénouement of the play is reached by a reconciliation between husband and
wife, following upon the mutual discovery of sterling merit and the
inviolability of marriage, parenthood and home. The simplicity of the love-
drama, the inherent goodness of the characters, including the Father
Confessor who, to fit the general harmony, kills the phantoms of his lower
nature is scarcely Strindbergian. One dominant note rings clear and
undefiled through the three plays of this period: the sense of the sacredness
of paternity. The pathos and tragedy of fatherhood are interwoven in many
of Strindberg's plays, but generally entangled in a multitude of disturbing
emotions.
Sir Bengt's Wife was published in 1882, The Journey of Lucky Peter in
1883. During the years 1880-82 a work entitled Old Stockholm[5] appeared,
with Strindberg and Claes Lundin as joint authors. It is a popular and
comprehensive account of past customs, institutions and pleasures of the
citizens of the capital of Sweden, profusely illustrated. Strindberg had
collected the material at the Royal Library, and planned to write the whole
work. His health broke down through overwork, and he found it necessary
to engage a collaborator. He managed, however, to write entertainingly on
guilds and orders, legends and superstitions, street music and amusements,
celebration of Christmas and Easter, slang, fauna and flora of the city of his
birth. The Red Room had already shown Strindberg's keen observation of
the character and peculiarities of Stockholm life; the genius loci had in him
a faithful, though not always flattering, raconteur. In Old Stockholm the
comprehensiveness of his knowledge of the history of the Swedish capital
became apparent.
The solidity of his antiquarian and historical research brought him an offer
to write a popular history of Swedish culture which he accepted, on
condition that the independence of his historical sense should not be
suppressed. Having prepared his material he was lost in philosophical
speculation over the absence of an intelligent connection between cause and
effect. "Was not history a capricious muddle, a walk in a circle? Had not
civilisations risen and perished, social systems appeared and disappeared,
religions changed and men remained unwise and unhappy?" He succeeded
in contracting his point of view, and wrote his history with the intention of

counteracting the prevalent method of viewing historical events through the
medium of privileged personages. Others had overrated the personal factor.
Strindberg admits that he under-rated it. The Swedish People met with
angry criticism and resentment of the sceptical manner in which time-worn
and honoured tenets were treated.
The reception of The Swedish People aroused the powers of satire which
had been lulled to sleep during a temporary spell of optimism. The warm
and sunny atmosphere, in which the warrior had rested, gave place to storm
and thunder, and Strindberg gathered his force for a fresh attack on Society.
This time he disdained the form of the novel which, though thin and
undeveloped, had yet made it possible for some of the parties arraigned to
dismiss The Red Room as a piece of clever but fantastic fiction.
The New Kingdom, which appeared in 1882, is a series of satirical
descriptions of the ideals and conduct of the inhabitants of the "new
kingdom" which was supposed to have been created by the Swedish
constitution of 1865. The book is an attack upon everything that average
humanity holds dear; the scorching satire plays like lightning upon royalty,
militarism, history, aristocracy, bureaucracy, the press, the theatre, and, with
special annihilative pleasure, on the Swedish Academy. It was impossible to
deny that Strindberg had descended from generalisations to portraiture, that
well-known and highly-respected personages had been pilloried and
caricatured. Affronted Society declared the book to be simply a lampoon on
spotless individuals. Though the personal attacks were doubtless in bad
form, and, though there are passages in the book which strain ridicule to the
point of the grotesque and the vulgar, the brilliant wit, the profusion of
ideas, and, above all, the incomparably good temper place The New
Kingdom in the forefront of contemporary satirical writings. The genre of
Grenville Murray's Les Hommes du Second Empire had suggested the
form. An affinity with Max Nordau is noticeable in certain chapters, and
especially in that on "The Official Lie"; but Strindberg's exposure of
conventional hypocrisy and social humbug is achieved by a tempestuous
outburst, compared with which Nordau's strictures seem a discursive and
spiritless sermon.
The year which saw the storm of The New Kingdom also witnessed more
moderate winds in the first instalment of Swedish Destinies and Adventures,
a collection of stories in historical setting which showed Strindberg as an

interpreter of the genial and peaceful aspects of life, as a humorous
onlooker whose memory is stored with pictures of the kaleidoscopic reign
of joy and sorrow, sin and virtue. Now and then the fresh narrative is
oppressed by a distant rumble of the preacher who finds it difficult to
suppress his views on women, political economy and over-rated
civilisation.
Swedish Destinies and Adventures had reconciled the critics to Strindberg's
existence. There was talent—undoubtedly; there was a mine of creative
imagination; there was a calm current of lyrical content which the wild
torrents of satire and abuse had not swallowed. Perhaps he might yet be
redeemed, tamed to run a less dangerous and offensive literary course?
The praise won by the historical stories was cut short by the appearance in
1883 of Poems in Verse and Prose. The novelist, the historian, the dramatist
in Strindberg had stood aside to let the poet speak. And the poet spoke in
words which were a challenge to the phrase-mongers and the purists, in hot
and rugged verse which acted like an over-dose of pepper on the jaded
literary palate. There were lapses of metre, there were faults of rhythm, but
the energy of thought sustained the poet on a height from which the
custodians of formal rhyme could not dislodge him. If De Quincey's
differentiation between the literature of power and the literature of
knowledge be applied to Strindberg's first volume of poems there can be
little doubt as to the category to which they belong.
The most typical poems of the series are "Loke's Blasphemies," in which he
lets Loke, the enemy of the deities of Northern mythology, sing his own
song of defiance and contempt for the "Gods of time"; and "Different
Weapons," a finely cut satire on the way his literary executioners had
avoided open duel and resorted to secret poison. The poet introduced his
work by a militant preface, in which he declared that he was a challenger
who was forced to employ the weapons chosen by his opponents. He stated
that the poetic form imposes unnecessary fetters on thought, and is,
therefore, destined to fall into disuse. "Stronger spirits have formerly
broken them, but dared not throw them away. The mediocrities of our time
dare not place such bad verse on the Christmas market as that written by
our great poets. In this respect, i.e. the writing of bad verse, I dare compare
myself with the greatest without danger of contradiction." He intimated that
the metrical blemishes were deliberate sacrifices of form to thought, and

left his detractors to believe or disbelieve in his theoretical perfection as a
poet.
Tired after so many battles, so many literary peregrinations, Strindberg had
left Sweden before the publication of his poems. He settled in Paris with his
family, and, with the industry of mind which in him was identical with life,
proceeded to study the intellectual and artistic resources of the "gay" city.
The result was the conviction that a large town should not be likened to the
heart of a body, but to an abscess which corrupts the blood and poisons the
system.
The most important event during Strindberg's stay in Paris was probably his
contact with Björnson. A friendship sprang up between the two
Scandinavian rebels which was rich in sympathy and exchange of ideas. In
The Author Strindberg gives us his impressions of Björnson, and Björnson
has written an interesting description of Strindberg.[6] Strindberg found
Björnson a complex of personalities, consisting of the preacher, the peasant,
the theatrical manager and the good child. Björnson found Strindberg young
throughout, at home everywhere, free everywhere, an incurable idealist in
whose eye something sinister battled with something roguish.
By the side of the massive Norwegian Strindberg experienced an unusual
sense of security which developed into filial love.
Björnson's democratic drama The King had been attacked as lèse-majesté
and a political scandal. They had many experiences in common, were
relatives in thought. Björnson in exile appealed to whatever vestige of hero-
worship was left in Strindberg's soul. Suffering from nervous depletion, and
in a generally weakened state of health, he adopted a deferential attitude
towards Björnson which, being foreign to his temperament, was logically
bound to be followed by emancipation. Early in their intercourse Strindberg
had made the characteristic discovery that he was endowed with greater
knowledge and a more incisive understanding than Björnson. Björnson
begged Strindberg to be less personal in his satire, apparently unconscious
of the extremely personal nature of his own attacks upon the common
enemy. The tie of friendship was gradually loosened, until Björnson's rôle
of "conscience" and father confessor came to an abrupt end in 1884.
Strindberg was content to dwell for a time amongst the literati of different
nationalities who had assembled in Paris. Free from the stings of the

bourgeois wasps upon whose nest he had trampled, he enjoyed the fresh air
and the keen winds in the great republic of mind. Like other men he knew
the exhilaration which follows upon the jeu d'esprit in the highways of
thought, the intellectual union which rejuvenates and fatigues by its fertility.
But unlike most men he soon tired of even the best company, and the
craving for solitude and independence became imperative.
Paris was deserted for Lausanne. In a little châlet by the shore of the lake he
recovered physical strength and mental poise. The sight of the Alps acted as
a tonic to his nervous system, and solitary morning walks on the shore
brought him the stillness of mind out of which new faith is moulded. The
way to Rousseau was straight and easy; the peace of Nature, the sinlessness,
the simplicity of the peasant's life, as compared with the vitiated conditions
of town labour, impressed themselves on his thought. The diseases of mind
and body, caused by the unnatural oppression of civilisation, were amenable
to treatment, more practical than satire, and more human than the loathing
with which he had decried the false gods and the vulgar tyrants. The
remedies were to be found in a combined "return to Nature," and
reorganisation of the conditions of labour. Socialism, internationalism, the
theories of a broad and humanitarian outlook upon industrial processes of
development which tend towards a more equal distribution of wealth and
power, now fed Strindberg's hunger after social righteousness. He attempted
to throw off national limitations; to feel and act as a European with pan-
national sympathies and interests.
The peace movement presented itself to him as one of the greatest thoughts
of the time. In his youth he had felt at one with the proletariat, trampled
down by the hoofs of militarism. In his satirical writings the peacocks of the
social fowl-yard—the proud bearers of epaulets and tinsel—had received a
full share of his attention. In Switzerland he came into contact with the
organised peace movement, and the result was the novel Remorse, a
powerful analysis of the mental torture endured by a German officer who in
obeying orders has caused three innocent Frenchmen to be shot. The
inhumanity of war and the reality of human brotherhood are here presented
in a manner which makes the story a stirring, yet delicately artistic appeal
against the horrors of the battlefield. Whilst he thus placed himself in the
ranks of the world's peace-makers the struggle with the sex-problem, from
which he never wholly escaped, developed into a battle, the noise of which

was destined to reverberate through his whole life. During the summer of
1884—whilst exposed to the unromantic surroundings of a Swiss mountain
pensionnat—he wrote twelve stories of married life, to which he gave the
innocuous title Married. They were published in Stockholm in September
by Herr Bonnier, and had the effect of a bomb thrown amidst sleepy and
contented people—contented to be rid of the enemy. The book was eagerly
read by everyone, by the high priests of morality as well as by libertines; it
sent shudders of indignation through the respectability which covers vice
and sin with silence, and called forth shouts of delight from the champions
of "free" morals. It was denounced as indecent, and as a grave danger to the
youth of Sweden by representatives of religion and education. The Queen of
Sweden read the book and came to the conclusion that it was injurious to
morality and offensive to religion. She was undoubtedly sincere in her
condemnation, whilst the majority who joined the hue and cry against
Strindberg were but tainted reflections of the purity upon which they prided
themselves. This time the author of The Red Room and The New Kingdom
had placed himself within reach of the law. Within a fortnight of the
publication of Married the book was impounded, and proceedings were
instituted against the publisher.
But it was not the indecency which was the subject of legal proceedings. It
was the sacrilegious handling of Holy Communion in the first story, entitled
"The Reward of Virtue," which afforded the opportunity for legal
repression. True to the irreverent impulse which owed its origin to the
ecclesiastical preparations in the sexton's kitchen, Strindberg had vented his
feelings of opposition to the tenets of Christianity in a tasteless sentence. It
recorded the commercial value of the wafers and the wine and ridiculed the
"insolent fraud" which enabled the priest to foist these articles of commerce
on the congregation, as the flesh and blood of the "Agitator" who was
executed more than 1800 years ago.
The story, which to a great extent was autobiographical, dealt with the
alleged evils of chastity in a youth and consequent declination of mental
faculties. The problems of puberty, which Wedekind subsequently
dramatised with tragic force in Frühlings Erwachen, were amongst the
painful experiences which Strindberg dwelt upon in his autobiography. In
Married the conflict between Nature and virtue is falsely presented. The
auxiliary influences of moral and physical culture are ignored.

Some stories treat of love and marriage, of the transformation of raptures
and idylls into painful struggles for the maintenance of the family, of
helpless young men captured in the economic trap of matrimony, of the
monotony of daily domestic drudgery which makes fretful wives and
impatient husbands out of ardent Romeos and dreamy Juliets. There are
squabbles and reconciliations, there are scenes and intérieurs in the comedy
of marriage, to which the stories bear witness with little regard for the usual
restraint of description. The characters are life-like types of Swedish
middle-class society. They have been drawn with a realism which shows
them as the pathetic puppets of marital fate, or as the unreflecting fools of
sexual idealism. There is the deft touch of Maupassant in the rendering of
love's irony, there is the inevitableness of Balzac and—in the
"indecencies"—not a little of Boccaccio's mirth of imagination.
Withal there is an absence of the cynicism which is a general characteristic
of Strindberg's writings on sexual love; we get a surfeit of realism, but we
also get pages of playful and almost tender sympathy with love's happiness
and sweet illusion. The story of a young couple's improvident marriage, of
their enjoyment of the home with its brand-new things—from the sky-blue
quilts to the well-cut glasses—of the careless happiness which is young and
foolish, and forgets all about work and duty and the wolves without until
the birth of the child and bankruptcy disturb the dream, is an imperishable
gem of human description. And the story of the crotchety and greedy old
bachelor of irreproachable private life and well-timed permissible vices,
who finally marries and becomes an ideal husband and a doting father, is
proof of the author's recognition of family-life as a bridge between egotism
and altruism.
The youth who falls in love with the blossoming girl of fourteen, and is
compelled to postpone marriage until he joins his fate to the faded and
sickly woman of twenty-four, with a worm-eaten nose (who ever saw
anyone with a worm-eaten nose? Strindberg's strength of expression is
embarrassing), spends married life in vain languishing for the perished
beauty of fourteen. Finally—and when too late—he discovers that the lost
angel has all the time been by his side, though disguised in ungainliness of
form and feature. The story is a miniature of man's earthly conduct. The
child is always the apotheosis of sexual union, the redeemer of the petty
nature of husband and wife. The woman who shouts "I am not your servant"

to the exasperated husband does so because she is not sanctified by
motherliness. Though the primitive fidelity with which Strindberg sketches
his matrimonial types, jars on our sensibilities through ineptitudes of diction
and occasional vulgarisms, though we feel irritated with his boneless and
martyrised husbands, Married is at once a work of art, and a plea for the
super-marriage which is yet to come.
When the news of the action against the publisher of Married reached
Strindberg in Switzerland, he hesitated as to the right course to pursue. He
considered the charge of blasphemy to be merely a peg on which his
enemies had hung their long-suppressed lust for revenge. The efforts to
suppress the book as a pornographic publication had proved futile and
absurd, and had served to show well-intentioned people that realism is not
necessarily rank immorality. He resented the attack on freedom of religious
thought. On discovering that the Swedish law punishes denial of the pure
Lutheran doctrine with two years' hard labour, he reflected that, if the law
were enforced Jews, Roman Catholics, Unitarians, Methodists and Baptists
would all be incarcerated in Långholmen—the prison in which certain
newspapers in Stockholm had already joyfully deposited their image of
Strindberg. To plead guilty to the charge of blasphemy was to admit the
existence of a legitimate censorship on thought and religious conviction
which he denied. But the publisher was in danger of being punished, and
Strindberg could not stand by whilst a scapegoat suffered the penalty of his
transgressions. A letter of protest against the proceedings had been ignored.
Another letter to the authorities, in which Strindberg formally admitted his
authorship, was followed by the request that he should appear personally
before the Court. A consultation in Geneva with Herr Bonnier, junior,
followed, and as there seemed little doubt that the publisher would be found
guilty, if the author shirked his responsibility for any motive whatever,
Strindberg left for Stockholm.

August Strindberg—Photo by G. August Strindberg—Photo by Lina
Florman, Stockholm—1884. Jonn, Lund—1897.

He received warnings on the way, gloomy prophecies that the prisoner's cell
was the ultimate destination of his journey. On arriving in Stockholm on
October 2nd, he was met at the station by an inquisitive and admiring
crowd. There were cries for a speech as he stepped out of the train amid
cheers. Did this mean that there were friends as well as enemies awaiting
him? He was not, after all, a vox clamantis in deserto. There were
supporters and sympathisers ready for his message. Standing on the
platform, amid the bustle and noise of the station, he addressed the people
on the meaning and object of his realism. Within a few minutes he
experienced the vicissitudes of the "leader" of a movement: acclaimed by
some and insulted by others, he reached his hotel opposite the station
amidst the excitement which is meat unto the agitator and dross to the
thinker.
In the evening there was a special performance of The Journey of Lucky
Peter which the author was invited to attend. At the theatre he was the
centre of interest, the object of inquisitive glances. The public cheered him
again—was it possible that he too had a following, a circle of responsive
souls willing to stand by him in the struggle for new thought? But no, the

sceptic within him did not believe in this adulation. "No, I am no good as a
'great' man," he reflected. "I can never learn to believe in cheers. They cheer
to-day and boo to-morrow!'"
During the weeks that followed he had ample opportunity for philosophical
studies of the cheering-booing propensity of human nature. The violent
attacks in the Conservative press had all the psychological elements of the
booing which is an essential stimulus to continued self-satisfaction and
placid Phariseeism; the cheering which echoed from another quarter was
not always attuned to the highest aspirations of the hero of the moment.
The trial of the case was painful to Strindberg. He had none of the qualities
which make men revel in loud publicity. Despite the character of his
writings, and the war which he had waged with his pen, he had all the
personal reserve of the sensitive and the recluse. On November 17th the
jury found a verdict of "Not guilty" for the author and publisher of Married.
His friends cheered, working men in the street cheered and triumphantly
escorted Strindberg to his hotel. The victory over the enemies of "free
speech" was celebrated in the evening by a banquet, and on the following
day Strindberg left Stockholm for Geneva, where he joined his wife.
In Sweden the controversy ran high. Married was once more on sale. It was
stated that no less than 3500 copies of the book had been sold during the
short interval between the day of publication and the confiscation.
The advertisement provided by the prosecution now ensured the widest
publicity for the book. Pedagogues and moralists saw not only a grave
danger to the youth of Sweden in the circulation of the book, but the cause
of actual and deplorable corruption amongst the boys in public schools. A
pamphlet entitled Strindberg-Literature and Immorality amongst
Schoolboys, by John Personne, a master in one of the Stockholm public
schools, is a curious document in proof of the animosity against Strindberg
which at this time possessed many excellent people. Herr Personne claimed
to have personal knowledge of the evil wrought by Strindberg's theories,
and his pages bristle with indignation. He flouts the idea that Strindberg is a
man of courage, and accuses him of supplying indecencies at a good price.
He inveighs against the "satanical tricks" by which this "literary
ragamuffin" makes vice appear identical with joy, thereby luring boys to
destruction. One need not be a pedant in matters of moral perception to

sympathise with Herr Personne's motive, despite the acerbity which
characterises his ebullitions. Whatever may be said for realism in the
description of sexual struggles from the artistic and scientific points of
view, it has yet to be proved that youth benefits by free access to the wares
offered by the l'art pour l'art vendors of life's intimacies.
The feminists joined the schoolmasters in bitter denunciation of Strindberg,
though, as yet, there was none of the radical opposition to every phase of
woman's emancipation which developed with deepening experience of
conjugal misery. The first volume of Married was, it is true, written as a
protest against the "sickly" deification of the liberty of woman underlying
the Nora-Cult. In opposing Ibsen, whom Strindberg calls "the famous
Norwegian blue-stocking," he had carried out what to him was a sacred
duty. But the preface to Married contained views on the rights of women
which, but for the general commotion, would have preserved the writer
from the charge of uncompromising enmity towards the souls of women.
After analysing the cause of unhappy marriages in some epigrammatic
pages, he slaughters the "romantic monstrosity" which is Ibsen's Nora, and
presents his scheme for the future regeneration of woman under the title
Woman's Rights.
The first of these is the right to have the same educational advantages as
man. There is to be wholesale educational reform from which class and sex
differences are to be eliminated; "unnecessary" learning is to be abolished
and the substitute is to be found in a universal citizen's examination—a
degree of social competency requiring the arts of reading, writing,
arithmetic and elementary knowledge of the laws of one's country, with
appreciation of the duties and rights of citizenship. To this curriculum one
living foreign language will be added, but there will not be time for much
more, for "the future will require every citizen to earn his living by manual
labour in accordance with the law of nature." The regeneration of woman
and the reform of marriage are thus—according to August Strindberg of
1884—inseparably bound up with socialistic hopes of equality.
In co-education he sees the remedy for the insipid gallantry and sex
mystification which are responsible for so many pangs of disillusionment
after marriage. He wishes the theoretical equality of the sexes to be
enforced in the relations between brothers and sisters. A girl should not
expect a boy to give up his seat to her, and a brother should not count upon

his sisters for the restoration of missing buttons and other creature comforts.
And, last but not least, he proclaims Votes for Women as the prerogative of
the enlightened woman of the future! We may, therefore, claim indulgence
for the woman-hater's life-long growl of discontent against the feminine
sex, for, underlying all his dislike of the present, there was a radiant vision
of the future. There are propositions in this preface which should satisfy
even the most consistent advocates of votes for women. "Woman shall be
eligible for election to every occupation," writes Strindberg; in marriage she
is to retain her own name and not, as now, be a feminine appendix
ignominiously tacked on to the man; she is to be master of her own body,
and of the choice of motherhood. Of the spiritual functions of motherhood
he writes:
"Is anyone wiser or more fit to rule than an old mother who, through
motherhood and the household, has learnt to reign and to administer?"
Through the influence of the mother, he continues, "customs and laws will
be softened, for no one has learnt forgivingness as a mother, no one knows
as she does how patient, how indulgent one must be with erring human
children."
Whilst the waves of the Strindberg storm were beating against the
breakwater of Swedish society, the author of paradoxes was working out his
own matrimonial fate in Geneva and Paris. His dreams of a better future
took form in Real Utopias, published in 1885, a collection of stories in
which the socialistic and utilitarian solution of heart-rending problems is
presented in a novelistic form which shows Strindberg at his best. The style
is instinct with a tender pity for human suffering; there is a keen sense of
character, and a wealth of exuberant descriptive warmth which are in sharp
contrast with the meagre and stunted sociology to which they have been
made subservient. They show the addition of a new string to his lyre, a tone
of southern richness which accentuates the superiority of the artist in
Strindberg to the social philosopher.
At the age of thirty-seven he gathers the riches of his experiences—external
and internal—sits down to draw up an account with life and writes his
Autobiography: The first three volumes deal with the period 1849-79, and
were published during 1886. During the same year the second part of
Married appeared—in many respects the antithesis of the first. After a
prolonged plunge into the depths of subjectivity, Strindberg rose endowed

with a new creative force. He had spoken that which was within him, and
through the process of self-renewal which followed he attained his highest
powers as artist.
[1] The first Swedish edition will shortly appear amongst the collected works of
Strindberg which are being issued by Messrs. Albert Bonnier.
[2] En bok om Strindberg, af Holger Drachmann, Knut Hamsun, Justin Huntly
McCarthy, Björnstjerne Björnson, Jonas Lie, Georg Brandes, etc. (Karlstad,
1894).
[3] The Confession of a Fool. English translation by Ellie Schleussner.
[4] The name of this play has been wrongly translated into English. It is
generally written of as The Journal of Lucky Peter, a mistake which even
appears in the Encyclopædia Britannica.
[5] A third and unaltered edition of this book, which is now regarded as one of
the classical works on the subject, was issued during 1912 (H. Gebers Förlag,
Stockholm).
[6] En Bok om Strindberg (Karlstad, 1894).

CHAPTER VI

THE ARTIST

Whilst fighting the battle of realism in fiction Strindberg had prepared the
dramatic form which was to be his contribution to the "new" theatre, on
which the curtain was about to rise. The demand for a new dramatic art had
become imperative. Tired of the admonitions and stale declamations of the
old rhetorical play, the public had asked for a representation of life. Dumas
père had responded by writing the drama of personality, Dumas fils by
establishing the play of moral problems. Ibsen had built the psychological
play on the foundation of Dumas and had endowed the Norwegian language
with a new sonority. Scribe had supplied fine technique and neat carpentry
for the new French stage, but Paris, the petulant playgoer, sighed for other
things.
Zola raised the cry of naturalism. The artificial plots of Dumas, Augier and
Sardou were to be superseded by dramatic flashes of reality. "I yearn for

life, with its shiver, its breath and its strength; I long for life as it is," cried
the author of Thérèse Raquin, and Strindberg responded. In September,
1887, The Father was published, the first of the series of naturalistic plays
through which Strindberg's European reputation as a modern dramatist and
a woman-hater was established. The institution in the same year of the
Théâtre Libre, by M. André Antoine, provided a stage which was wholly
adapted to the revolt against old-fashioned theatricality.
M. Antoine was an employee at the gas-works who had a passionate faith in
realistic drama. With a group of sympathetic dilettanti he began evening
performances in a large room in Place Pigalle without the stage mechanism
of the commercial theatre. Success attended the enthusiastic players, and
the performances at the Théâtre Libre became the rendezvous of the
intellectual and artistic world which gravitates to Paris. The soul of the
enterprise, M. Antoine, was manager, actor, scene-painter, and mechanic.
The theatre was semi-private. Special invitation cards to elect audiences
protected the actors from the attention of gallery-opinion. The actors and
authors of the new plays were the hosts in this home of dramatic revolution,
where every original playwright was welcome. Strindberg's The Father,
Lady Julie and Creditors were amongst the first plays produced, and he,
therefore, had the satisfaction of being played in Paris before any
appearance on the French stage of the "famous Norwegian blue-stocking."
Tolstoy's Powers of Darkness, Zola's Thérèse Raquin, Emile Fabre's
L'Argent, an adaptation of the brothers de Goncourt's Sœur Philomène and
Villiers' "L'Evasion," belonged to the early repertoire. Ghosts was the first
of Ibsen's plays to appear; it was followed by Rosmersholm. The Théâtre
Libre lasted eight years. It had time to create a "modernity" in taste and
dramatic expression which produced similar free theatres in Berlin and
London, and a vogue of naturalism which included every variety of "life,"
and which, occasionally, gave undue preference to lubricity and morbidity.
The Swedish edition of The Father was followed by a French edition,
containing a sympathetic prefatory letter by Zola. The three acts of this
tragedy present a drawn-out duel between man and woman for the
possession of the soul of the child. The father, a cavalry captain, is
intellectual, serious, studious, lovable. His wife is stupid, selfish and
diabolically resourceful in the choice of weapons for the final defeat of the
ill-used man. He is mentally poisoned by the suggestion that he is not the

father of the child. Laura, the wife, has herself administered the poison in
order to shatter the man's peace of mind, and break the foundation of his
love for the child. Her hatred knows no bounds. She not only seeks to drive
him mad, but contrives by skilful intrigue to procure evidence of his
insanity. She informs the doctor that her husband suffers from extraordinary
delusions regarding the uncertainty of paternity, and that he talks of little
else. When the doctor meets the Captain the question which is eating his
mind shows itself as an obsessing idea. Everybody and everything conspires
to make the man appear a raving lunatic. Finally, even the old nurse who
has been a true and good woman is induced to betray him. He believes in
her kindness of heart, and allows her to approach him. She slips the strait-
jacket over him, thereby adding the last link to the chain of feminine
treachery and cruelty which has enslaved him. Subjugated, robbed of his
faith and his mind, the man dies—the victim of woman.
In the preface Zola expressed his interest in the boldness of the idea. "Your
Laura," he wrote, "is woman as she is in her conceit and in her mystical
unconsciousness of her qualities and faults." The Father was one of the few
dramatic works which had the power of moving him deeply. But he found a
certain want of reality in the characters and the construction of the play. The
nameless captain and his cruel entourage were thought-forms, lacking the
solid dimensions which Zola identified with reality. In a critical
appreciation of Strindberg, published in 1894, Georg Brandes praised The
Father as a tragedy of concentrated energy, magnificent in its composition
and powerful in its effect. "There is something eternal in The Father," he
writes, "an unforgettable psychology of woman, showing typically feminine
weakness and vice." Brandes thinks the symbolism of the final scene, in
which the man of intellect is ruined by woman, inherently true. He adds:
"The strength of the indignation and the hatred which have produced the
drama are impressive. This tragedy is a cry of anguish which clings to one's
memory, which grips and terrifies through the depth of the passionate
suffering that uttered the cry."
Laura may be regarded as the most complete type of Strindberg's Inferno-
women. She has not even the beauté du diable which creates an illusion of
goodness in some of his types. She is the man-eater, the destroyer of all that
is noble, consistent, progressive in man. Strindberg sees a cannibalistic
tendency in woman which makes marriage a feast of horror, and this is a

theme to which he often returns. In The Father the distraught man says to
his child: "You see, I am a cannibal, and I will eat you. Your mother wanted
to eat me, but she could not. I am Saturn who ate his children, because it
had been prophesied that they would eat him. To eat or to be eaten? That is
the question. If I do not eat you, you will eat me, and you have already
showed me your teeth." ...
The callous egotism with which Laura kills her husband is shown by the
following words, with which she assaults him: "Now you have fulfilled
your function as an unfortunately necessary father and bread-winner, you
are not needed any longer, and you must go. You must go, since you have
realised that my intellect is as strong as my will, and since you will not stay
to acknowledge it."
It is perhaps not unnatural that the Captain should throw a lighted lamp at
Laura after listening to this speech. But the speech itself is certainly
unnatural, and would be more in keeping with the sentiments of a female
spider—if that callous insect could formulate her generative philosophy—
than those of a woman. As a self-expository wife Laura severely taxes our
credulity.
Lady Julie[1] is a different type. She is the pretty, neurotic, sensual, useless
woman, blue-blooded and empty-minded, destined to total extinction in the
process of natural selection. Her tragedy is unfolded in a play of one act,
which is the quintessence of Strindberg as a "naturalistic" dramatist. The
scene is laid in the Count's kitchen. The Count's daughter, Lady Julie, is
alone in the house with Jean, the valet, and Christine, the cook. It is St.
John's Eve; the farm hands belonging to the estate are assembled for the
annual midsummer dance. They do not dance in the kitchen, but there is
midsummer madness in the air. Christine is betrothed to Jean who treats the
products of her culinary art with epicurean disdain. He knows his value as a
man and a servant. Jean is an excellent valet, well-made, well-behaved, who
knows when to show self-confidence and when to cringe. Lady Julie has
graced the servants' dance with her presence. She has favoured Jean with
such marked attention that the people have begun to gossip. Alone with him
in the kitchen she encourages him to make love to her. The valet is uneasy;
the man is eager to make himself master of the Count's daughter, but the
servant shrinks from the sacrilege. But Lady Julie taunts him with his

unmanliness, tempts him with her beauty, and the effervescence of her
highly-strung nerves. A strange love-scene follows.
The sound of approaching country-folk forces Jean and Lady Julie to hide
from their prying eyes. They do not wish to be found alone in the kitchen.
Jean's room is near at hand and becomes their refuge, whilst the peasants
make the kitchen the scene of their midsummer merry-making.
When the kitchen is deserted, Lady Julie and Jean reappear. There is an
autumnal chill in the air. For Lady Julie is no longer Lady Julie. The valet is
master. They are both conscious of the monstrous breach of social etiquette
which has been committed. And the grey dawn will not only bring the
shame of day, but the home-coming of the Count.
Jean is chivalrous. He proposes immediate flight to Switzerland or the
Italian lakes. There, he thinks, they can start an hotel—a first-class hotel for
first-class guests. He waxes enthusiastic over the joys of the hotel-owner.
She will be mistress of the house, queen of the accounts, before whom the
guests will humbly lay their gold.
She cannot rise to his enthusiasm. She wants the comfort of love:

Julie. That is all very fine. But, Jean, you must give me courage. Say
that you love me. Come and take me in your arms.
Jean (hesitating). I would like to, but I dare not. Not here in this house.
I love you without doubt. Can you doubt it?
Julie (shyly, with true womanly feeling). You! Say "thou" to me.
Between us there are no longer any barriers. Say "thou."
Jean (troubled). I cannot. There are still barriers between us so long as
we remain in this house. There is the past, there is the Count. I have
never met anyone who compelled such respect from me. I have only to
see his gloves lying on a chair to feel quite small. I have only to hear
his bell, and I start like a shying horse. And when I now look at his
boots, standing there so stiff and stately, it is as if something made my
back bend. (He kicks the boots.) Superstition, prejudice which have
been driven into us from childhood, but which may be as easily
forgotten again. If you will only come into another country, into a
republic, people will cringe before my porter's livery. People shall

cringe, but I shall not cringe. I was not born to cringe, for there is stuff
in me; there is character in me; and if once I grip the lowest branch,
you shall watch me climb. To-day I am a lackey, but next year I am a
proprietor; in ten years I shall be independent, and then I go to
Roumania and get myself an order. I can—mark well I say I can—a
count.
Julie. Fine, fine!
Jean. Ah, in Roumania a man can buy a count's title, and then you will
be a countess—my countess.
Julie. What do I care for what I have cast aside! Say that you love me,
or else—ah, what am I else?
Jean. I will say it a thousand times—later on. But not here. And, above
all, no sentimentality, or all is lost. We must keep cool like sensible
people. (He takes out a cigar, cuts the end, and lights it.) Sit down
there, and I will sit here, and then we can chat as if nothing had
happened.
Julie (in despair). Oh, my God! Have you no feelings?
Jean. I! Why, there is no one more sensitive than I, but I can command
my feelings.
Julie. A short time ago you would have kissed my shoe, and now——
Jean (coldly). Yes, before. But now we have something else to think
about.

They cannot flee without money. Jean suggests that she can steal the
necessary sum in her father's room. He taunts her with her weakness until
she robs her father. They prepare to leave the house. The girl wants to bring
her greenfinch. Infuriated by her sentimentality, Jean snatches the bird from
her and kills it. The man's brutality and meanness are suddenly revealed to
her; her brain reels under the humiliation which she has brought upon
herself. She hurls curses at the head of the impudent domestic. The morning
has come, and Christine enters the kitchen on her way to church. The girl
appeals to her, seeks her sympathy, but Christine's feelings of propriety are
too shocked to allow of any pity for the fallen girl. She leaves them. The
Count returns. They hear him in his room, know that he will discover the

theft. His daughter is half demented with fear, remorse, shame; she is
incapable of deciding what to do. Jean's servant conscience has been
awakened by the arrival of his master. The Count is there to command, Jean
to obey. And when Lady Julie wants him to tell her what to do he hands her
a razor—with the complacency with which he might hand his mistress the
riding-whip. She leaves the kitchen and kills herself.
Such are the outlines of this painful play, the most "successful" of
Strindberg's naturalistic dramas. Again we have a struggle between man and
woman, but this time the opposites of class and blood are added to those of
sex. The healthy egotism, the common instincts of self-preservation in the
valet endow him with a physical stability against which Lady Julie's
emotions break like foam against a rock. She goes, he remains. Like The
Admirable Crichton, Jean knows that there must be masters and servants in
this world of inequality, and, though his passions for once mastered his
conviction, he is soundly submissive to social law and order. In Lady Julie,
Strindberg has sketched the useless, unnatural, pleasure-loving, hysterical
woman of the leisured classes whom he detests.
In the preface to the play he analyses this type of woman. "Lady Julie is a
modern character," he writes, "not as if the half-woman, the man-hater, had
not existed in all times, but because she has now been discovered, has
appeared on the scene, and created a disturbance." In such women he sees a
danger to the race, for, as a rule, they attract degenerate men, and transmit
their own misery to another generation. They sell themselves for "power,
decorations, distinctions, diplomas," and produce beings of undecided sex
to whom life is useless. For such psycho-pathological creatures Strindberg
sees no hope beyond that of elimination through contact with reality (Jean
was "reality" to Lady Julie), or a fatal outburst of long-suppressed sexual
instincts. "The type is tragic," he concludes, "offering the spectacle of a
desperate struggle against nature; tragic as a romantic inheritance which is
now being destroyed by the naturalism which only seeks happiness; and
only strong and good species are compatible with happiness."
Justin McCarthy translated Lady Julie into English, and expressed his
admiration for the unalloyed realism of the piece in an article in The
Fortnightly Review. The mental intensity with which Strindberg visualised
the character of Lady Julie is strangely impressive. There is no extravagant
or jejune theorising; it is drama vehemently conceived and true to its

creator. But the horror which moved Justin McCarthy when reading the
play, and which most readers experience, is a product of Strindberg's
peculiar misogyny which, for the purposes of the play, he coupled with the
ordinary standard of convention and morality. Lady Julie's disgrace is
unpardonable from the point of view of society. She dies in deference to its
verdict. We cannot imagine a drama by Strindberg, in which tragedy is
woven out of the misconduct of a Lord Julius instead of a Lady Julie. A
young "blood," neurotic, suffering from ennui, and seeking temporary
distraction in the company of Jeanne, the valet's daughter, would not have
inspired a naturalistic drama of sex and caste. There is a wealth of material
which can be used to épater le bourgeois in the idea of a well-bred woman's
precipitous "return to nature." The commonplace spectacle of a similar
descent on the part of a well-bred man affords none.
In Comrades we meet the type of woman who surpasses Lady Julie in anti-
social attributes. Laura is something of a female tigress, the mother whose
claws are ready to tear all but the cub; Lady Julie, with her hysteria I and
her caprices is still the womanly woman. But Bertha who is united to her
"comrade" Axel in a marriage of equality is worse than they. She is plain,
mannish, ambitious; a mental parasite who suppresses her womanhood and
simulates her husband's talents. The rival of man, the unsexed, simian-
brained shrew, Strindberg's bête noire.
Comrades is a four-act comedy of marriage. Axel Alberg and his wife are
Swedish painters in Paris. They have each painted a picture which has been
submitted to the Salon. In Act I we find Axel at work in the studio. He is a
good fellow, honest, painstaking, generous. Friends call and discover his
embarrassing position as a married comrade. There is the doctor, mature in
experience and philosophical in outlook, who when Axel asks him if he
does not believe in woman answers: "No, I don't. But I love her." There is
the sensible, matter-of-fact Lieutenant Starck, who will stand no nonsense
from women, and whose happy, normal wife knows that woman's real
happiness is found in subjection unto her husband. They are shocked to hear
of Bertha's tastes and habits. Bertha comes home. She has kept her nude
male model waiting, and her poor husband has had to pay five francs in
consequence of her unpunctuality. This is a small part of the sacrifices he
has made for her artistic career. In the scenes that follow we see Bertha
insisting on keeping the household accounts, though her head cannot

grapple with the simplest problems of addition and subtraction. She has
made false entries, and deliberately deceives Axel as to the manner in which
the funds of the comradeship are expended. She coquettes with Willmer, a
young writer, and receives presents from him. Intent upon securing the
acceptance of her picture, she makes nefarious use of Axel's love for her.

Bertha. Will you be very kind to me? Very?
Axel. I always want to be kind to you, my dear.
Bertha. Do you? Look here, you know Roubey, don't you?
Axel. Yes, I met him in Vienna, and we became good friends.
Bertha. You know that he is a member of the jury?
Axel. Well, what about that?
Bertha. Yes, now you will be angry. I know it.
Axel. If you know it, don't make me angry.
Bertha (caresses him). You won't sacrifice anything for your wife—
nothing.
Axel. Go and beg? No, that I won't do.
Bertha. Not for yourself, for your picture will probably be accepted all
the same, but for your wife?
Axel. Don't ask me.
Bertha. I should really never ask anything of you.
Axel. Yes, things which I can do without sacrificing....
Bertha. Your manly pride.
Axel. Let us leave it at that.
Bertha. But I should sacrifice my womanly pride, if I could help you.
Axel. You have no pride.
Bertha. Axel!
Axel. There, there, forgive me.

Bertha. I am sure you are jealous of me. I am sure you would not like
my picture to be accepted.
Axel. Nothing would delight me more, I assure you, Bertha.
Bertha. Would it also delight you if I were accepted and you were
refused?
Axel. I must feel (laying his hand on his heart). I am sure it would be
an unpleasant feeling—sure. Both because I paint better than you, and
because....
Bertha. Say it straight out,—because I am a woman.
Axel. Yes, also for that reason. It is strange, but I have a feeling as if
you women were intruders, forcing your way in and demanding the
spoils of the battle which we men have fought whilst you sat by the
fireside. Forgive me, Bertha, for saying this, but such thoughts come to
me.
Bertha. You are just like all other men, exactly.
Axel. Like all other men. I hope so.
Bertha. And lately you have assumed such superiority; you used not to
be like that.
Axel. I suppose that is because I am superior. Do something which we
men have not already done.
Bertha. What! What are you saying? Are you not ashamed?

Bertha changes her tone, and plays the humble comrade who is sorely in
need of a little encouragement. Axel rejects her arguments, but eventually
goes to Monsieur Roubey. During Axel's absence a letter arrives containing
the information that his picture has been refused. Bertha guesses its
contents and revels in the luxury of pity and schadenfreude. Axel returns,
after finding Madame Roubey at home, (a meeting cleverly foreseen by
Bertha) with the news that Bertha's picture has already been accepted. He
congratulates Bertha on her success. He is confident that his picture will
also be accepted. She hands him the letter. The scène de rupture is
inevitable.

Axel (lays his hand on his heart and sits down). What ... (controls
himself). This is a blow which I did not expect. This is most
unpleasant.
Bertha. Well, perhaps I can help you now.
Axel. You look as if you enjoyed my defeat, Bertha. Oh, I feel a great
hatred of you stirring within me!
Bertha. I look happy, perhaps, because I have had a success, but when
one is tied to a man who cannot rejoice in one's happiness it is difficult
to feel sorry when he is unhappy.
Axel. I don't know what has happened, but it seems to me that we have
become enemies now. The struggle for a position has come between
us, and we can no longer be friends.
Bertha. Does not your sense of justice tell you that the one who was
most competent won the battle?
Axel. You were not the most competent.
Bertha. But the jury thought so.
Axel. The jury? But you know very well that you cannot paint as well
as I do.
Bertha. Are you sure of that?

The dialogue that follows is a crescendo of the sex-against-sex quarrel. "A
comrade," concludes Axel, "is a more or less loyal competitor, but we are
enemies." Bertha, selfish, mean, inebriated by her triumph, goes out to
celebrate her victory in the company of friends. Axel stays at home to nurse
his sorrow. The curtain descends upon the dejected husband begging his
wife not to come home drunk.
Act II shows us Bertha usurping Axel's place as teacher. She finds fault with
his technique, and snatches the brush out of his hand to show him how to
paint. Her puny mind reels with the desire to humiliate him. Malicious
tongues have whispered that he has painted her picture, that he has good-
humouredly let her reap the honour of his toil. Bertha is casting about for a
means of crushing Axel for ever. To-morrow they will give an evening-
party. Her friend Abel—another of the emancipated, heartless, false,

perverse, masculine women of artistic Bohemia—makes a welcome
suggestion. Why not arrange to have Axel's rejected picture sent home at
the very hour when their friends are assembled in the studio? The idea
fascinates Bertha, but she dare not be responsible. "I should like it to be
done, but I don't want to be concerned in it," she says. "I want to stand
guiltless and to be able to swear that I am innocent." And Abel undertakes
to manage the matter.
The sex-war reaches its climax in Act III. Axel has tom himself free from
the meshes of his decaying love. Now he knows Bertha as she really is. He
has discovered her dishonest book-keeping, her money transactions with
Willmer, her insidious efforts to emasculate his soul—he realises the full
horror of her short hair, and of their union. He has broken his marriage-
vows, and throws down the wedding-ring. He is free. But Bertha's malignity
clings to him:

Bertha. And this, all this noble revenge, simply because you were
inferior to me.
Axel. I was your superior when I painted your picture.
Bertha. When you painted my picture! Say that again and I will strike
you.
Axel. You who despise brute force are always the first to appeal to it.
Strike me if you like.
Bertha (advancing towards him). You think I have not the strength.
Axel (seizing both her wrists and holding them). No, not that. Are you
convinced now that I am also physically the stronger? Bow down, or I
will break you!
Bertha. Dare you strike me?
Axel. Why not? I only know of one reason why I should not.
Bertha. And that is——?
Axel. That you are irresponsible.
Bertha (struggling to free herself). Ah, let me go!

Axel. Not until you have begged my pardon. Down on your knees. (He
forces her down with one hand.) Now look up to me from below. That
is your place, the place you yourself have chosen.
Bertha (gives in). Axel, Axel, I don't know you e any longer. Can this
be you who swore to love me, you who begged to be allowed to
support me?
Axel. Yes, I was strong then and believed I had strength to do it. But
you clipped the hair of my strength while my tired head lay in your
lap. During sleep you stole my best blood, and yet enough remains to
subdue you. Stand up, and let us have done with speeches. There is
business to be talked over. (Bertha gets up, then sits down on the sofa,
weeping.)
Axel. Why are you crying?
Bertha. I don't know. Perhaps because I am weak.
Axel. You see! I was your strength. When I took back what was my
own you had nothing left. You were like a rubber ball which I blew
out; when I threw you down you collapsed.
Bertha (without looking up). I don't know if it is as you say, but since
we quarrelled my strength has left me. Axel, believe me, I have never
felt for you what I now feel.
Axel. Really! What do you feel?
Bertha. I can't say. I don't know if it is love, but....
Axel. What do you mean by love? Is it not a secret longing to eat me
alive once more? You begin to love me. Why not formerly, when I was
good to you? Goodness is stupidity. Let us be wicked. What do you
think?
Bertha. Yes, I would rather have you a little wicked than weak. (Gets
up.) Axel, forgive me, but don't desert me. Love me, oh, love me!

But Axel is not caught again. He consents to allow the party to take place,
as if they were still good comrades, but he is determined to obtain a
divorce. In Act IV we again meet the happy pair, Starck, Willmer, Abel, Dr.
Östermark, the raisonneur of the play, and his divorced wife, Mrs. Hall, a

dubious middle-aged woman whom Bertha imagines to be a victim of man's
brutality and a living argument in favour of the woman's movement. She
and Abel have arranged, not only to punish Axel by confronting him with
his unsuccessful picture, but to disconcert Dr. Östermark by confronting
him with the wife and daughters whom he has not seen for eighteen years.
But Bertha's calculations are faulty, as usual. The picture is carried into the
studio by order of the concierge who has protested against its unexpected
appearance at the door. Axel is annoyed. She wants everybody to see the
picture, to look at it closely. They do, and it turns out to be Bertha's picture.

August Strindberg—Portrait in Oil by Chr. August Strindberg—Portrait in
Krogh, 1893 Oil by Richard Bergh, 1906.

The last scenes of the play show us a shame-faced Bertha recovering from
the fainting-fit which followed upon the sight of the picture. She knows that
Axel has nobly changed the numbers in order to give her a better chance.
She knows that circumstances have combined to unmask her completely.
He is the stronger, and she offers him her love. Relentless in his masculine
strength, Axel shakes her off, turns her out into the street. "You once asked
me to forget that you are a woman," he cries, "well, I have forgotten it." She

reminds him of a man's duty to his wife. Axel hands her some bank-notes.
Bertha departs consoled and Axel goes to meet his mistress. "I want
comrades at the café, but at home I want my wife," he cries, before the final
exit of Bertha.
Comrades has been confounded with the typical comédie rosse. But here, as
in Lady Julie, the collision of character is presented with the intensity which
is possible only when a dramatist treats of a question which to him is vital.
One inadequately described as a "tragedy," the other as a "comedy," there is
in both plays the pessimistic despair of the absolutely sincere anti-feminist.
It raises them high above the facile farce of passion, satiety and change.
Bertha is to Strindberg the New Woman—a creature to be shunned and
exterminated. Nietzsche thought that the "beautiful and dangerous cat,"
which is woman, should never be visited without a whip. Strindberg would
not only bring the whip, but poison to the defeminised monster who wishes
to be the rival of man.
In Comrades the dramatist presents his characters with that ironical smile
which is the condiment of life's bitter draughts. There is a general
consciousness of blague pervading the studio. The doctor who finds the
wife, on whom he once lavished a romantic love, a drunken slattern, her
daughters in a second union in the service of vice, helps the reeling woman
out of the house and expresses his feelings thus: "Oh, Dolce Napoli! Joy of
life, where art thou? Went away as she did. Such was the bride of my
youth!... Oh, Dolce Napoli! I wonder if the cholera-sick fishing harbour is
so sweet, after all! Blague probably. Blague, blague! Brides, love, Naples,
joie de vivre, ancient, modern, liberal, conservative, ideal, real, natural—
blague. Blague all the way."
Creditors is a one-act play in which we meet the erotic woman, the alluring,
treacherous, unmoral creature of instinct and passion, who battens on men's
souls—in short, the vampire. After the blague of Comrades the anguish of
Creditors. There are two men and one woman in the piece. Tekla has been
married to Adolf, a painter, for seven years. Adolf adores her—their love
has been a ceaseless giving on his part. He has merged his personality in
hers, he has laid his art as a sacrifice on the altar of his devotion. He has
thought of her, painted her, modelled her, given her the treasures of his
mind, filled her soul until his own is empty, and now he is weak whilst she
is strong. They are staying at the seaside place, to which they come every

summer. Tekla has been away for a week when the curtain rises on Adolf
engaged in modelling the figure of his wife. He is a nervous wreck, semi-
epileptic, with crutches by his side. He is talking confidentially to Gustaf,
whose acquaintance he has made during Tekla's absence. He does not know
that Gustaf is the husband from whom Tekla was separated before he
married her, does not know that Gustaf is the creditor to whom they are
both in debt. Gustaf induces Adolf to tell the story of his married life, of his
sacrifices, his self-effacement, his reckless giving. He subtly leads Adolf to
realise Tekla's voracious egotism, her falseness, her voluptuousness, plays
upon his jealousy, rouses his suspicions, wrecks his peace of mind. Adolf is
fascinated against his will by the force and coolly analysing mind of Gustaf.
He cannot understand why there is something in Gustaf's manner of
speaking, and in his eye which reminds him of Tekla. Gustaf replies that
Tekla and he may be distant relatives, as are all human beings.
They discuss Tekla's first husband. Adolf has never seen him, but knows
that he is an idiot, for Tekla has written a book in which the ridiculous man
is described. Gustaf shows Adolf that he is treated as the second idiot by
Tekla. He asks why Tekla sent away her child. Adolf hesitates to tell his
friend, then confesses that at the age of three the child showed a likeness to
the first husband which Tekla found unendurable. Gustaf asks Adolf if he
has never felt jealous of the first husband. "Would it not nauseate you to
meet him when out for a walk, when his eyes on your Tekla would say to
you: We instead of I—We?" Adolf admits that the thought has haunted him.
Gustaf draws a picture of the torment caused by the indelible memory of the
third. "But they know that one sees them in the darkness—and then they are
frightened and in their fright the figure of the absent one begins to haunt
them, to assume dimensions, to change until he becomes a nightmare
disturbing their sleep of love, a creditor who knocks at the door, and they
see his black hand between theirs, they hear his grating voice in the silence
of the night which should only be disturbed by their beating pulses. He does
not prevent their union, but he disturbs their happiness. And when they feel
his invisible power of disturbing their happiness, when at last they flee—
but flee in vain from the memory which persecutes them—from the debt
they have left behind, and the judgment which frightens them, they lack the
strength to bear their transgression and find a scapegoat which must be
slaughtered...."

Tortured by the suggestion that Tekla has now been unfaithful to him, which
every sentence spoken by Gustaf drives more deeply into the inflamed
brain, Adolf consents to test Tekla's fidelity by means devised by Gustaf.
When she comes home Adolf is to study her manner, and lead her to reveal
her real self, whilst Gustaf listens in another room. When the husband has
reached the limit of his power of deduction he is to go out, and leave to
Gustaf the rôle of inquisitor. Adolf is to be a secret witness of the second
examination. He can hear all in the adjoining room.
Tekla comes home. She is playful, loving, treats him as her naughty child—
just as Gustaf said she would, if guilty. She has enjoyed herself, and Adolf's
solemn tones of reproach and impending disaster cause a revulsion of
feeling, in which she shows herself as the heartless coquette, the mangeuse
d'hommes, to whom conjugal monotony is insupportably dull. Adolf goads
her vanity by saying that she has reached the age, when admirers are no
longer troublesome. She wishes to assure him of the contrary, warns him,
threatens that in future he will have to play the ridiculous part of the jealous
and deceived husband who, lacking evidence, can only injure himself.
Adolf tells her that her plumes are borrowed, that he has endowed her with
sense, electrified her once empty brain, made her famous by his pictures
and his deification. She concludes that he means to tell her that he has
written her books. The rhythm of the quarrel rises until Adolf in the throes
of an approaching fit, cries: "Be quiet. Leave me. You destroy my brain
with your clumsy pincers—you thrust your claws in my thoughts and tear
them to pieces."
At the sight of Adolf's condition Tekla grows tender. He recovers, and she
makes him beg her forgiveness. After summoning his remaining strength he
leaves her. Gustaf enters the room. There is a touching scene of recognition,
embarrassment and assurances of mutual respect. The virile mind of Gustaf
soothes Tekla's overwrought nerves. She allows him to understand that her
present husband is feeble, backboneless, and unreasonably jealous.
They revive memories. Gustaf observes that she still wears the ear-rings
which he gave her. The magnetism of old associations, old regrets, draws
them together. Gustaf puts his arm round her waist; she resists and
confesses herself afraid of his presence. She does not wish to do any real
wrong to Adolf, for she knows that he loves her. But Gustaf knows more

than she does. He shows her the tom pieces of her photograph, thrown on
the floor by Adolf some time before. He makes her see clearly that Adolf
treats her with contempt. He begs her to liberate herself from Adolf's sick
fancies, and to come back to the man of will. Some scruples, a short
struggle, and she promises to meet him in the evening when Adolf will be
away.
The sound of something falling comes from the adjoining room. Gustaf
assures her that it is nothing—probably a dog that has been locked up. But
Tekla is smitten with sudden understanding. She sees through Gustaf's plot,
knows that her husband has heard everything. The horrible revenge of the
man she betrayed revolts her, yet impresses her by its diabolical
consistency. Gustaf is about to leave her, declaring that the debt has been
paid, when the door is opened, and Adolf appears, deadly pale, a cut across
the cheek, his eyes vacant, and foaming at the mouth. He falls. Tekla throws
herself over the body, from which life is fast ebbing. "Adolf, my beloved
child, say that you are alive, forgive, forgive; Oh, God! he does not hear, he
is dead. Oh, God in Heaven!" And the curtain falls as Gustaf exclaims:
"Really, she loves him too! Poor thing!"
Creditors has added an important psychological factor to Strindberg's usual
duel of sex. Here we have, not only the sinful nature of woman, the
instinctive selfishness, the absence of moral sense, but the operation of a
mysterious law of unity, which assists in the downfall of the woman and the
victory of the stronger man. Tekla, once mother of Gustaf's child, is held to
him by cords of a sympathy which may be called physiological, and which
constitutes nature's irrefrangible banns of marriage.
The thesis has since been fully developed in Paul Hervieu's Le Dédale. Here
the dissonance of divorce and re-marriage resounds through a highly artistic
presentment of the conflict between religion, morality, affection and
"nature." Marianne de Pogis has left Max, her husband, because of his
infidelities. She re-marries and finds in Le Breuil, her second husband, the
virtues which her former husband lacked. Her child by the first marriage
falls ill, and she meets her first husband by its bedside. She remains in his
house to nurse the child, and succumbs to the old love which has never
died. The end is tragic. She cannot go back to Le Breuil. Hervieu cuts short
the agony of three souls by the death of the two men. Le Breuil kills Max
and himself; together they go over the rock into the foaming waters where

human passion is extinguished. Strindberg also summons death as the only
solution of Adolf's martyrdom, but, with characteristic sense of the hideous
interminableness of life's complexities, leaves Tekla and Gustaf to loathe
the tie which they cannot break. Gustaf is the strong man who, knowing
woman, despises her and masters her. Adolf is the woman-worshipper, the
slave who has sold his masculine birthright for worthless favours. He is
killed by disillusionment.
The production of The Father, Lady Julie, and Creditors at the Théâtre
Libre was followed by their performance at the Théâtre de l'Œuvre in Paris,
another experimental theatre which was founded in 1893 by M. Lugné-Poë.
Lady Julie was part of the early repertory of the Freie Bühne, an advanced
playhouse which had been established in Berlin in 1889 to meet the demand
for realism on the stage. The Father and Creditors were performed in
Copenhagen in 1889, and the latter play was soon presented at the Residenz
Theater in Berlin. The Independent Theatre in London, founded by Mr. J.T.
Grein in 1891, introduced Ibsenism to England, and suffered the penalty of
the pioneer. Strindbergism might have wrecked the undertaking before the
work was accomplished. Mr. Grein's services to the British playgoer have
not yet been fully appreciated. He broke one or two windows in the
suffocating theatre of banalities and bon-bon amours. Thanks to his courage
we can now enjoy an increased amount of oxygen. But the West-End stage
still thrives on airlessness. The popular long-run play, in which the
charming actress appears as mannequin for the best costumier, whilst social
inanities are paraded as absorbing problems—with a happy ending—
contracts the lungs of all who in the drama seek a mirror and a criticism of
life. To find modern dramatic art they must perforce go to the sporadic
centres of unconventional and non-commercial performances, or to the
semi-private stages of societies which fight the prevalent stagnation by bold
experimental presentation of new dramatic ideas. Strindberg's plays are
practically unknown in England. The Adelphi Players produced The Father
in July, 1911, and Lady Julie in April, 1912. The Stage Society, which is the
descendant of Mr. Grein's Independent Theatre, has played Creditors. The
Stronger, an atmospheric sketch with two characters, of whom the one
maintains silence, whilst the other uses her tongue, was acted by Madame
Lydia Yavorskaia and Lady Tree in 1909. Of the remainder of the fifty-one
plays by which he has encompassed many "schools" of playwriting,

evolved new dramatic forms, and tested different methods of expression the
British public knows little or nothing.

Naturalism has passed away. The shallow materialism, the false simplicity
of presentation, with which it sought to kill romantic methods of
dramaturgy, proved fatal. They were found to be as unreal as the old-
fashioned conventions of the stage. But there were other qualities in the
movement which have not died, but profoundly influenced the character-
drawing and scenic development of the modern drama. Hauptmann,
Hervieu, Wedekind, Schnitzler, Gorky, Tchekhov have transmuted and
individualised the permanent elements of the early realism. As an exponent
of naturalism Strindberg's personality towered high above the first noisy
purveyors of what M. Jullien named "slices of life"—some distressingly
indigestible. It is true that the fabric of his drama was woven out of the
ever-recurring theme of sexual antagonism. He described it with the
undertone of personal suffering—the suffering of experience and of pity—
with which Tolstoy made his peasants articulate in Powers of Darkness, or
Henry Becque the ill-used women in Les Corbeaux.
But Strindberg's plays are highly "unpleasant," says some defender of the
morality of the stage. True, but they are honestly unpleasant. They differ
from the popular play of amorous escapades and half-uttered indecencies,
as the mountain torrent differs from the garden fountain. They are written
by the impelling force of an idea, whilst the conventional immorality play
exists in the interests of frivolous entertainment. However much we may
disagree with the leitmotif in Strindberg's naturalistic plays, and realise the
limitations of his theses, we cannot ignore them. And do they not, after all,
treat of "love," the obsessing object of dramatic interest from the plaintive
demi-monde of Dumas fils to the man-hunting Ann of Bernard Shaw? From
Sudermann and Pinero to Schnitzler and Capus, through sentimentalism,
conventionalism, and cynicism, the theme persists in absorbing dramatic
imagination. Compared with Schnitzler, the prince of amorists, Strindberg's
milieu is sombre with fateful retribution. Like Strindberg, Schnitzler
dramatises the illusion and disillusionment of love; his lovers and
mistresses are also on the road to knowledge. The ten couples who pass

over the stage in Reigen might be sparks from Strindberg's anvil. But on
closer inspection we find that there has been no fire. Schnitzler's world is
the play-room of the passions, Strindberg's their inferno.
In Lady Julie and Creditors, both one-act plays and each with only three
speaking parts, he created a new dramatic form. He now assailed the old
theatre with the same vigour with which he had attacked old social
institutions. In the preface to Lady Julie he contemptuously writes:
"The theatre has long appeared to me, as art in general, to be a Biblia
Pauperum, a bible in pictures for those who cannot read writing or print,
and the playwright as a lay preacher who disseminates the thoughts of the
period in popular form, so popular that the middle classes, which chiefly fill
the theatres, can understand what it is all about without much mental
exertion. The theatre has therefore always been a board-school for young
people, the half-educated, and women who still possess the primitive
capacity for deceiving themselves, and allowing themselves to be deceived,
i.e. to accept illusion, receive suggestion from the author."
The influence of Edmond de Goncourt, who called the theatre an exhibition
of spouting marionettes and a place for the exercise of educated dogs, can
be traced in this passage. Rudimentary, incomplete processes of thought,
dependent on imagination, are, concluded Strindberg, necessary to
theatrical enjoyment. With the development of reflection, investigation, and
the higher mental attributes, decay of pleasure in theatrical performances
would follow as the shell drops from the ripe fruit. In the theatrical crisis
which raged in Europe at this time (1888), and in the moribund state of
drama in England and Germany he saw evidence of an approaching
extinction of the theatre.
It would, however, be a mistake to invest these views with a greater
seriousness than they contained. As Henry Becque pointed out in his
"Souvenirs," la fin du théâtre has repeatedly been proclaimed by
dissatisfied critics, without causing the slightest impediment in the
ceaseless flow of dramatic production. In the preface to Le Fils Naturel,
Dumas had compared the moralising functions of the stage to those of the
Church. Strindberg replied, twenty years later, by predicting the downfall of
both as vehicles of human progress. Hot-headed attacks on the theatre
precede the evolution of new dramatic forms; they are the outcome of the

modernity which is ever at war with methods which have become classic.
"To save the theatre, the theatre must be destroyed, the actors and actresses
must all die of the plague," is the sweeping verdict of Eleonora Duse,[2] but
there is no disparagement in the reflection that the melancholy prophecies
are often uttered by dramatists who are misunderstood and rejected. In
Anton Tchekhov's The Seagull, published in 1900, the familiar protest is
heard: "To me the theatre of to-day," says the poet Constantine, through
whom the author speaks, "is no more than an antiquated prejudice, a dull
routine." He protests against the trivialities, the commonplace morality, the
repeated dishing up of the same story in a thousand varieties. He wants to
flee, as Maupassant fled from the Eiffel Tower. Each malcontent finds
solution in his own new method of drama. Rousseau's letter to d'Alembert
contains the genuine criticism of the theatre, with which no born dramatist
can sympathise. From the effect of fostering artificial emotions, of
indulging in sham joys and sorrows, there is no escape through
improvement of dramatic form. Whether for good or ill it remains with us.
But there is happily little danger of the rationality, in which Strindberg saw
the doom of the theatre.
The choice of naturalistic subjects was to be a contributing factor in the
process of rationalism. Of the painful impression created by Lady Julie
Strindberg writes:
"When I chose this subject from life, just as it was told to me some years
ago when it stirred me deeply, I found it suitable for a tragedy, for it still
makes a painful impression to see a happily placed individual go to the
wall, and still more to see a family die out. But the time may come when we
shall be sufficiently evolved and enlightened to contemplate with
indifference the coarse, cynical, and heartless drama which life offers, when
we have laid aside the inferior and unreliable registration-machines which
we call feelings, and which will be superfluous and injurious when our
organs of judgment are fully developed....
"The fact that my tragedy makes a sad impression on many is the fault of
the many. When we become strong, as were the first French revolutionaries,
it will make an exclusively pleasant and cheerful impression to see the royal
parks cleared of rotting, superannuated trees which have too long stood in
the way of others with equal right to vegetate their full life-time; it will

make a good impression in the same sense as does the sight of the death of
an incurable.
"The reproach was levelled against my tragedy, The Father, that it was so
sad, as though one wanted merry tragedies. People clamour for the joy of
life, and theatrical managers order farces, as though the joy of life consisted
in being foolish, and in describing people as if they were each and all
afflicted with St. Vitus's Dance or idiocy. I find the joy of life in the
powerful, cruel struggle of life, and my enjoyment in discovering
something, in learning something. Therefore I have chosen an unusual,
though instructive, case, in other words, an exception, but a great exception
which confirms the rule, and which is sure to offend the lovers of the banal.
The simple brain will further be shocked by the fact that my motives behind
the action are not simple, and that there is not one view alone to be taken of
it. An event in life—and this is a comparatively new discovery—is
generally produced by a whole series of more or less deep-seated motives,
but the spectator chooses for the most part the one which is easiest for him
to grasp, or the one most advantageous to the reputation of his judgment.
Take a case of suicide as an example. 'Bad business,' says the bourgeois.
'Unhappy love!' say the women. 'Sickness!' says the disease-ridden man.
'Shattered hopes!' the bankrupt. But it is possible that the motives lay in all
of these causes, or in none, and that the dead man hid the real one by
putting forward another which has thrown a more favourable light on his
memory."
In an essay entitled On Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre, written in
March, 1889, and published in the first volume of a collection of plays and
essays under the title Things Printed and Unprinted, Strindberg proclaims
the regenerating powers of the Naturalistic Theatre in the following words:
"Let us have a theatre, where we can be horrified by the horrible, where we
can laugh at what is laughable, play with playthings; where we can see
everything without being shocked, if that which has hitherto been concealed
behind theological and æsthetical hangings is revealed. Though old,
conventional laws may have to be broken, let us have a free theatre, where
everything is admitted except the talentless, the hypocritical and the stupid."
He distinguishes between true and false naturalism, and deprecates the
commonplace dulness of the subject chosen by Henry Becque in Les

Corbeaux. To Strindberg the choice of such subjects depends on a
soullessness or a lack of temperament, which must bore the spectator
instead of stimulate him. He calls such a dramatic method simple
photography which "includes everything, even the speck of dust upon the
lens of the camera. This is realism," he writes; "a method, latterly exalted to
an art, a little art which cannot see the wood for the trees. This is the false
Naturalism which believed that art consisted merely in sketching a piece of
nature in a natural manner, but it is not the true naturalism which seeks out
those points in life, where the great conflicts occur, which loves to see that
which cannot be seen every day, rejoices in the battle of elemental powers,
whether they be called love or hatred, revolt or sociability; which cares not,
whether a subject be beautiful or ugly, if only it is great."
"I do not know the modes," cried Socrates, "but leave me one which will
imitate the tones and accents of a brave man, enduring danger or distress,
fighting with constancy against fortune." The Naturalism of which
Strindberg was a prophet might have chosen these words as a motto.
Socrates continued: "And also one fitted for the work of peace, for prayer
heard by the gods, for the successful persuasion or exhortation of men, and
generally for the sober enjoyment of ease and prosperity." With this side of
man's natural life young Naturalism had no sympathy. That came with years
of discretion.
The transformation of the diffuse drama in many acts into the concise and
dynamic one-act play with few characters, and the simplification of stage
technique, were the salient points in Strindberg's proclamation of Theatre
Reform. He held that there is generally but one scene, towards which the
playwright mounts on devious paths, and that author and audience alike are
made to endure painful side-shows for the sake of one thing worth seeing. A
man's dramatic talent may outlast his one-act play, but it is taxed to
depletion in the construction of five acts, just as the imaginative patience of
the audience is exhausted by the long intervals.
The Greek art of the one-act play had been revived in the eighteenth century
in the Proverbes Dramatiques of Carmontelle, developed by Musset and
Feuillet, and had finally found a modern interpretation in the style of the
Quart d'Heure of which Entre Frères by Guiche and Lavedan is a typical
example. When writing Lady Julie, Strindberg had in mind the
monographic novels of the brothers de Goncourt. The dialogue in Lady

Julie is interrupted twice. There is singing and a folk-dance. Such
diversions do not leave the spectator time to escape from the suggestion of
the playwright, or to lose the precious illusion. The performance of Lady
Julie lasts an hour and a half, and Strindberg saw no reason why the public
should not be educated to endure one act which lasts the whole evening.
There may be mental diversions, such as are provided by monologue,
pantomime and ballet; but people can listen for hours to sermons and
speeches, and may consequently learn true dramatic concentration.
The scenery should be simple. "With the aid of a table and two chairs the
strongest conflicts which life offers could be presented," he writes of the
genre of the proverbe, "and by that form of art it became possible to
popularise the discoveries of modern psychology." The decorations should
only be suggestive of place and time. An impressionistic representation of a
corner of a room and its furniture—not the whole room—is all that is
needed. Grotesque scene-painting should be abolished together with the
stagey villain who can create no illusion of wickedness. Footlights were an
abomination to Strindberg. M. Ludovic Céller[3] tells us of their humble and
smoky origin in the tallow candles which, for economical reasons, were
placed on the floor to illuminate the darkness of stage and auditorium.
Whatever their origin, they have a power of distorting facial expression
against which Strindberg vehemently protested. His protest has been echoed
by numerous reformers of the theatre. But the footlights remain to disfigure
noses and blacken eyes in accordance with time-honoured custom. With
proper side-lighting and less paint on the faces of the actors Strindberg saw
possibilities for the mimic art, which are hidden under shadows and heavy
layers of powder and rouge. The visible orchestra was another obstacle to
scenic progress; in the shrinking of stage and auditorium to a size
compatible with artistic presentation, he saw another means of
improvement. In the small, simplified theatre, with well-regulated light
effects and actors with natural intonation and gestures, Strindberg found a
chance for the continuance of the theatre. Many of his ideas have been
realised in the Künstler Theater of Munich.
In the preface to Lady Julie he deals with the all-important subject of
characterisation. "As modern characters," he writes, "living in a period of
transition more hurried and hysterical than its immediate predecessor, I
have drawn my characters vacillating, broken, mixtures of old and new....

My souls (characters) are conglomerations of past and present stages of
culture, scraps of books and newspapers, fragments of men and women,
tom shreds of Sunday attire that are now rags, such as go to make up a soul.
And I have thrown in some history of origins in letting the weaker steal and
repeat the words of the stronger, in letting the souls borrow ideas, or so-
called suggestions from one another."
He ridicules the ordinary idea of a strong character. The person "who has
acquired a fixed temperament or accommodated himself to a certain rôle in
life, who in a word has ceased to grow, was supposed to have character;
whilst one who developed, the skilful navigator on the stream of life who
does not sail with close-tied sheets, but who knows when to fall off before
the wind and when to luff again, was deemed deficient in character.... This
bourgeois conception of the fixity of the soul was transferred to the stage,
where all that is bourgeois has ever reigned supreme. Such a character
became synonymous with a gentleman, fixed and ready-made, one who
invariably appeared drunk, jocular, melancholy.... I do not, therefore,
believe in simple theatrical characters. And the summary judgments which
authors pass on human beings, such as: this one is stupid; that one is brutal;
he is jealous; he is mean, etc., should be refuted by naturalists who know
the rich complexity of the soul, and who realise that 'vice has an obverse
which shows a considerable likeness to virtue.'"
The secret of Strindberg's great influence on the theatre of twenty years ago
lay in this very conception of character. His men and women are alive,
moving, changing, growing, shrinking in ceaseless response to the pressure
of existence. He is the dramatist of the perpetuum mobile in the modern
heart, the interpreter of inexhaustible discontent in himself and others. His
personality vibrates in the dialogue, and lifts the idea of the play to the
surface in every consecutive scene, but the artist in him is stronger than the
idealogue. The curtain and the settled problem do not drop together.
Strindberg has answered a question or two, tentatively, in his own manner,
but others crowd in upon him and his audience. The absence of finality is
felt through the tragic endings, through the strong blend of moods, emotions
and desires of his exceptional characters, through the unreasonableness of
his prejudices. In spite of pessimism and cynicism a hope of change is
communicated to the spectator, which penetrates depression and stimulates
the curiosity to live.

Amongst the one-act plays which were written between 1887 and 1897,
Samum, Pariah, The Stronger, Playing with Fire and The Link present the
typical characters of psychic intensity and neuropathic activity. Samum is
the story of the revenge of an Arabian girl and her lover upon a hapless
Frenchman, lieutenant in a Zouave regiment. She kills him, not with a
dagger, for that might involve the punishment of her tribe, but with words.
With the help of "Samum," the hot, suffocating wind of the desert which
blows phantoms into the white man's brain, she thrusts suggestion after
suggestion into his mind. She makes the sick man believe that he has been
bitten by a mad dog; she offers him sand instead of water in the drinking
bowl, and rejoices when he dreads the drink; she invokes hideous pictures
of the defeat of his regiment, the faithlessness of his wife, the death of his
child, before his fevered imagination. She finally makes him stare in a
mirror at the ghastly image of a skull, and tells him that this is his face, that
he is dead. And when the Frenchman, murdered by horror, sinks back dead,
Youssef, her lover, proud of race and proud of the woman's black magic,
hails her as the worthy mother of his child.
Pariah is a dialogue which bears the mark of the master-craftsman in the
dramatic presentation of psychological events. It is a contest of minds
founded on a tale by Ola Hansson. Two middle-aged men, one an
archæologist, the other a somewhat mysterious man of unknown
occupation, who has returned to Sweden from America, have met in the
country. The archæologist is engaged in recovering antique ornaments from
the bowels of the earth. In the room where the two men face each other
there stands a box, containing bracelets and trinkets of gold which he has
found. Herr X., the archæologist, talks of his poverty, of how easily he
might appropriate to his own use some of the gold he has found. Debts
could be paid, and his wife's anxiety allayed by one single bracelet. So
simple and yet impossible to do. Herr Y. listens to the reasons which
prevent Herr X. from becoming a thief though there can be no fear of
detection. Incapable of stealing himself, Herr X. expresses his pity for
others who fall under similar temptation. He suspects that the man by his
side is in need of such pity—his conduct has already betrayed the convict.
By a series of psychologically timed questions Herr X. unmasks Herr Y.,
who, taken by surprise, confesses that he has served a term of imprisonment
for fraud. The wild anger which for a moment surged through the brain of
the criminal has given way to servile admiration of the superior mind. He

kisses the archæologist's hand. All is known, and yet there is no
condescension on the part of the stronger man. Herr Y. tells the story of how
he came to write a false signature; he wishes to persuade Herr X. of his
spiritual innocence, show him that he was the victim of an uncontrollable
impulse which never defiled his real self. Herr X. has fallen into an
introspective mood. Hesitating, half afraid of what he is doing, he confides
to Herr Y. that he has killed a man—a worthless, drunken old servant, and
without intention to inflict deadly injury, it is true, but such is the fact: he is
a murderer. In reply to Herr Y.'s eager questions why he escaped without
punishment, Herr X. gives the reasons, why he believed it to be a greater
wrong to give himself up to justice than to conceal the deed—there were his
parents, his career, his fitness for life. Herr Y. has the scoundrel's alert sense
of opportunity. He begins by pointing out his moral superiority over Herr
X., and ends by trying to extort money. Let Herr X. only put his hand in the
box, and transfer some of its contents to Herr Y., and nothing more will be
said of the crime. Let him refuse to do this, and the whole story will be told
at the nearest police-station. The end of this incisive piece of psychology
shows us Herr Y., driven to flight by the cold-blooded logic of Herr X., who
demonstrates that the would-be accuser is a forger who is "wanted," and
whose dread of the police authorities is a guarantee of his discretion in the
matter.

The Stronger is a contest of temperaments carried out by one voice only.
Two women—the wife and the mistress of one man—have met in a café.
Mademoiselle Y. sits silent, whilst Madame X. talks. But her silence
conveys more than speech. It drives Madame X. to reveal the humiliation
she has suffered, it drives her through jealous and angry recriminations to a
triumphant and vindictive assertion of her superior position as the legal wife
and mother. As an ironical and adroit study of two types of the soul
feminine, and by the skilful handling of the monologue the piece is one of
the best of its genre.
Playing with Fire is a triangular comedy of marriage, in which conjugal
fidelity is saved at the eleventh hour through sudden and truly Strindbergian
disillusionment which makes the friend of husband and wife depart like a

rocket from the house of temptation, whilst the peace of an orderly lunch
descends upon the family. The First Warning is a conjugal squabble, and
one of the weakest dramatic episodes conceived by Strindberg. The
character of the jealous and enslaved husband, who has made six vain
attempts to flee from the devastating charm of his wife, is a diluted
réchauffé of an incident related in The Confession of a Fool, including the
significant moment when the wife is subjugated by the shock of losing her
first front tooth, and the attendant discovery of the vanity of all things of
beauty. The dialogue is unreal, and Strindberg's sketch of the young girl so
unnatural that we may be grateful that the type has not been more
frequently chosen for "naturalistic" treatment.
The Link, a tragedy published in 1897, is a masterly divorce-court scene.
Here Strindberg draws the shame and agony of the broken marriage-tie with
bitter realism, and yet with a delicate touch of that all-human compassion
before which the flowers of satire wither. The Baron and the Baroness have
decided to separate, and proceedings for a deed of separation have been
entered by the husband. There is a link between them which cannot be
broken—the child whom they both love; and for his sake they are
determined not to expose their differences before the hungry eyes of
scandal-mongers. The husband is willing to let the mother have the custody
of the child. But the questions of the judge pierce the veneer of amiability.
Who is the cause of dissension? What has brought them before the Court?
The answers bring accusations and recriminations, a parade of quarrels and
dissensions, angry revelations of infidelity, disgust, espionage, lies, hatred,
and, when the Court exercises its legal power of depriving both parents of
the custody of the child, the torture of vain regret and empty lives. There is
consummate art in the picture of the emotional revolution, through which
husband and wife are forced into self-damning revelations. The minor
characters of the jurymen and court officials are drawn with a calm
observation and quiet humour which form an effective background to its
central tragic figures. Incidentally, the inadequacy of the law to secure
justice for the wronged is shown, and the lawyer in the play has some
affinity with the legal luminaries in M. Brieux's La Robe Rouge. But
Strindberg's judge is a righteous man who chafes under the limitations and
responsibilities of his profession.

August Strindberg—1904 (Photo by August Strindberg—1906 (Photo by
Andersson, Stockholm.) Haminqvist, Stockholm)

Those, whose knowledge of Strindberg's writings is limited to his
naturalistic plays, have judged his powers as a literary artist from an
entirely inadequate point of view. When Justin McCarthy spoke of the real
Strindberg, as revealed in The Father, Lady Julie and Comrades, he
ignored, not only the volumes of essays, stories and novels which preceded
the plays mentioned, but those which were published at the same time.
Strindberg has been described as a man who had no interest to spare for
social problems, or politics, or the great movements of his time—as a
dramatist whose knife was forever delving in the pathological tissue of
passions, and whose eyes saw nothing but the broad and sombre outlines of
inevitable tragedy. Those who know The People of Hemsö (1887), a novel
of the fishermen's life in the Stockholm Archipelago, fresh as the salt breeze
of the sea, bright with sunshine, and the jollity of a man with steady nerves,
who is thoroughly at home in a boat and in a hut, are familiar with another
side of Strindberg. Or the volume of short stories entitled Fisher Folk
(1888), with its sketches of life on the island, broadly humorous, impressive
in its unaffected narrative of the struggles and ambitions of the hardy toilers
among the rocks. The stories bring us in the midst of the island folk: we

know their practical, wind-dried minds where superstition lurks in a corner;
we see their sparse bodies—sometimes fed on herring-heads and potatoes.
We attend the dance which the poor, hunch-backed tailor gives to the young
people as an offering on the altar of joy, and lament with him the
devastation wrought by terpsichorean orgies in his garden. We accompany
Westman, the ungodly pilot who has harpooned a seal from his little boat,
and is dragged out to sea by the cruel monster in spite of pitiful recitals of
the Lord's Prayer, and offers of a pure silver chandelier to the local church.
We are made to participate in the people's life. In both books there is a
wealth of descriptive power, and there is something fundamentally healthy
in the figures of the common people whom he draws, a natural pathos in
their vulgarity, and even in their criminality.
There are some who see exclusively das Dämonische in Strindberg, and
who picture him as perpetually skirting precipices of moral and intellectual
negation, or as a Lucifer who never emerges from consuming tongues of
fire. They have nothing to say of such books as his Sketches of Flowers and
Animals (1888). Here we meet him, a mild and patient gardener, sowing his
salad and spinach, revelling in the reward which his cool cucumbers offer
after having been carefully tended by loving hands. Here he initiates us into
his cult of the flower, his adoration of colour and form in the plant world;
he anticipates Maeterlinck in his sensitive studies of the intelligence of
flowers and the mysteries of seeds. His Fables are stories of birds, insects
and bushes, betraying an intimate knowledge of nature, and sparkling with a
good-humoured satire. In these books there are strokes of brilliant
imagination, there is a womanly tenderness for the lives of plant-children.
In one of his stories[4] he tells us of a tall fir that can feel and suffer, and his
description of the spirit within the tree which sobs under the wood-cutter's
axe, and which some day we shall recognise, reminds us of Fiona Macleod's
Cathal of the Woods. Strindberg's love of Nature had many qualities in
common with Thoreau—there is the same pleasure in cultivating the
cabbage-patch, the same ecstatic contemplation of green life. Thoreau could
find his way in the wood during the night by the touch of his feet.
Strindberg, treading his way through the forest in the dark hours, knows
whether he walks on soil, clubmoss or maidenhair, "through the nerves, of
his large toe."[5]

There is also a practical, homely side of Strindberg, which is generally
ignored, qualities appertaining to the small farmer with a keen eye to
profitable cultivation of the land. Without these qualities he could not have
written Among French Peasants (1889), which is a series of articles on the
life and conditions in agricultural France. They are the product of the mind
of a true son of the soil, equipped with a journalist's power of rapid
generalisation. Strindberg travelled through France, notebook in hand,
stayed amongst the peasants, measured hay and corn, attended weddings
and fairs, annotating the prices of meat and butter, studied the ravages of the
phylloxera and geological formations. The book is crammed with facts and
comparative statistics of town and country, wheat and wine, village
education, libraries, labourers' wages, cheese-making, the best fertilisers,
and other matters of import to rural economy.
He shirked no trouble, avoided no obstacles to equip himself as a writer on
gigantic subjects. His encyclopædic grasp of a many-sided subject is shown
in this book, and in his numerous essays on sociological questions. It carries
with it a certain superficiality, and readiness to theorise from insufficient
data which may necessitate a graceful retraction of opinions, once loudly
proclaimed. But there is ample compensation in the freshness and vigour of
a mind which bears crop after crop without exhausting itself. Such a quickly
grown crop, verdant and luxurious in ideas, is the essay, written in 1884, On
the General Discontent, its Causes and Remedies, in which he inveighs
against the evils of a false Culture, and within the space of a hundred pages
lets Society pass in review before his critical pen in the types of the king,
the bureaucrat, the physician, the teacher, the merchant, the sailor, the
artisan, the manufacturer, the labourer, the servant, the scientist, the author,
the journalist, and the artist, and finally prescribes the pills of self-help,
self-government and limitation of useless luxuries, artfully mixed. There is
much of Rousseau, Tolstoy, Spencer, Mill and de Quesnay in the social
philosophy, with which he wished to build on the ruins, wrought by The
Red Room and The New Kingdom. The ideal peasant—in Tolstoyan garb—
was then Strindberg's hope for humanity.
When he wrote At the Edge of the Sea, in 1890, the horrors of unchecked
democracy had been revealed to him. It is the story of a highly intelligent,
refined and super-sensitive man who is forced to live amongst coarse and
ignorant people, and who is gradually driven to insanity and suicide. This

book is the apex of Strindberg's novelistic art. The scene is again laid on
one of the islands outside Stockholm, the life of the fisherfolk is once more
described. But the tone and the colour are changed. There is the same
brilliancy in the description of scenery, and the psychological imagination is
more lavish than ever, but the mists of Nietzscheanism lie heavily over the
book. The distinction between "slave-morality" and "master-morality" is
emphasised with truly Dionysian pessimism.
The same influence coloured the preface to Lady Julie, and the novel
Tschandala, published in 1889, and led Mr. Edmund Gosse into the error of
describing Strindberg as "the most remarkable creative talent started by the
philosophy of Nietzsche." Strindberg was certainly not "started" by
Nietzsche who was entirely unknown to him until the autumn of 1888,
when George Brandes brought the two writers together. A correspondence
between Nietzsche and Strindberg began in 1889, and continued until
Nietzsche's illness. Nietzsche read Strindberg's novels with interest, and
Strindberg duly acknowledged the influence which Nietzsche exercised
upon him, but protested against the mistaken view expressed by Mr. Gosse
and others, in the following words: "Those who have followed my career as
a writer at its different stages of development know sufficiently well how
early I adopted the so-called Nietzschean standpoint with regard to
conventional morals, and the emancipation of women to give me my due,
and Nietzsche his with clear consciences."
The statement that Strindberg was a Nietzschean pur et simple is as absurd
as the statement that he was a Darwinist or a Methodist. He passed through
the fatalism of Hartmann, the pessimism of Schopenhauer, the naturalism of
Zola, the realism of Turgenev and Dostoevsky. On one occasion he speaks
of Balzac as his master, on another he calls himself a Voltairean. These
influences are but lights on the way. He passes on, and speaks to us with a
new tongue. When charged with inconsistency he might well have
answered with Walt Whitman: "I am large—I contain multitudes."
[1] Fröken Julie, the Swedish name of this play, has been translated into English
as "Miss Juliet" and "Miss Julia." The meaning of the Swedish title and the idea
of the play are more faithfully rendered by the title Lady Julie. In the choice of a
title for his feminine type of aristocratic degeneracy, Strindberg was probably
influenced by Anna Maria Lenngren's Fröken Juliana, a well-known satirical
poem on a similar subject which belongs to classical Swedish literature. Up to
the middle of the nineteenth century the title "Fröken" was exclusively used-
when addressing the unmarried daughters of the hereditary nobility of Sweden.

An unmarried daughter of a Swedish count is a countess, though she is addressed
as "Fröken." Upon marriage with a commoner she may use or drop her title.
[2] Studies in Seven Arts, by Arthur Symons.
[3] "Les décors, les costumes et la mise-en-scène au XVII siècle."
[4] Confused Sensations.
[5] The Confession of a Fool.

CHAPTER VII

SELF-TORMENTOR AND VISIONARY

He restlessness of Genius is a sore trial to Mediocrity. Mediocrity in the
Critic's chair, whose business it is to pass judgment upon the artist and his
work, to affix a label to his back, and to place him on a particular shelf
where the public can find him. The literary artist is expected to have a point
of view which he has reached through certain early influences, to express
himself in a certain form, and, when mature, to be measurable and easily
recognisable in size and colour. If his personality and his writings make the
critic's work easy he will be blessed by his contemporaries, or possibly
condemned. But he will always be understood, and in the understanding
there is solid comfort. You may sneer at the gods of society, you may shake
your fist at law and authority, you may ridicule humanity, but you must, like
Mr. George Bernard Shaw, always say the same thing. Voltaire is always
expected to contemplate the world with a truly Voltairean smile of irony,
Rousseau to cling innocently to Nature, Swift to see humanity only from the
satirist's vantage-point.
The man of genius who, conscious of the limitations of a single point of
view, seeks another, who strides across the hilltops of past thought in rapid
search of a higher one, who hugs philosophies and drops them, holds faiths
and deserts them, is a phenomenon before which the critic feels uneasy. He
calls in the doctor, and together they prepare the last label of madness—red,
like a warning against poison—and hurl it at the extraordinary man when he
happens to pass at a convenient distance. Believing that there is nothing
further to be said, they return to their respective vocations.

From the points of view of Mediocrity and Eugenics Strindberg presented
the typical signs of degeneration, irrespectively of the traits and
characteristics which are inadequately defined as the insanity of genius. He
was a truth-seeker, and, consequently, a fault-finder. He knew peace and
comfort like other men, and brief hours of sunshine, but spiritual discontent
compelled him to be a nomad, a wanderer in many lands. Hence the critic's
failure to classify him as a romanticist or realist, a socialist or individualist,
a pessimist or humorist, a maniac or mystic, or to map out his life into
periods and squares of thought. There was something of the eternal
recurrence in him, an alchemical consciousness of all in all. He leaves
beliefs, parts with influences, conquers new lands through violent crises of
awakening which well-nigh wreck the body, and returns to the first camp,
richer and yet the same. Through soul-sickness and hallucinations, through
delirium and phrenopathic punishments he is led to the super-sanity of
genius. He becomes the visionary of things hidden, the medium of spirits,
the sinner on the road to Damascus, the prophet of divine justice.
Mistakes and bitter experiences prepared the way for the religious crisis of
1894. In 1887 he left Switzerland and France for Bavaria, where he wrote
The Father and The People of Hemsö. He lived in Denmark from the
autumn of 1887 to the summer of 1889. The prosecution of Married had
inspired cautiousness in the hearts of Swedish publishers, and Strindberg
had only with difficulty found a publisher for The Father and Lady Julie.
The plays were promptly attacked by Swedish critics, amongst them
Professor Warburg, author of a history of literature, who thought their
naturalism an unmistakable form of decadence. When Strindberg returned
to his country in 1889 the hostility aroused by Married, and augmented by
lively tales of the author's views on morality took an unexpectedly practical
form. When yachting along the west coast for the purpose of collecting
material for a great work on The Scenery of Sweden, he was actually
refused permission to land in one of the fishing villages.[1] During the two
years which he now spent in Sweden he became embittered by the enmity
of his critics. He isolated himself on one of his beloved islands outside
Stockholm, wrote and painted. In the autumn of 1892 an exhibition of his
pictures was held in Stockholm. It was impressions of the sea which his
brush had chosen—ice, mist, storm—and painted, not only with a tender
feeling for island scenery, but disclosing considerable technical merit and
accuracy of hand. The principal cause of suffering lay in Strindberg's

eroticism, his interminable suspiciousness against his wife which made his
divorce in 1892 a merciful end to a marriage of torment. There is much in
the repulsive pages of The Confession of a Fool which betrays its author's
lack of mental balance; the incessant puling over the woman's wickedness,
and the attendant self-appreciation are not apt to command the reader's
sympathy. The same may be said of the second volume of Married,
published in 1886. There are a carelessness of style, and a bluntness of
accusation against womankind which make the book inartistic. The ad
captandum controversialist has overruled judgment; there is a tone of
personal irritation in the stories which Strindberg tells us were written "in
self-defence" against the attacks, made upon him by feminists. Like John
Knox, when he wrote The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous
Regimen of Women, Strindberg was actuated by a kind of religious fervour.
Like John Knox he detested "this monstriferous empire of women," whilst
his admiration for the dangerous sex repeatedly cast him in chains of
bondage. Like Schopenhauer he mocked all womankind "long of hair and
short of sense," and threw misogyny to the winds before the first pair of
charming eyes or dainty feet.
In the autumn of 1892 we find Strindberg in Germany. The curse of
marriage is no longer upon his head. He lives at Friedrichshagen, near
Berlin, with his friends, the Swedish writer Ola Hansson, and his wife
Laura Marholm who has written an interesting psychological study of
Strindberg. Strindberg has passed through one of those "deaths," in which
he found temporary Nirvana when the battle of thoughts had been too
sanguinary. He has forsaken literature, thrown away the pen as a worthless
tool of a tormented imagination which can scratch but not solve the riddle
of the Sphinx. He has been re-born—a scientist. The exact sciences—
chemistry, physics, astronomy—hold out hopes of complete replies to
questions which the playwright can dress in human shape but not analyse.
Strindberg's friend, Gustaf Uddgren,[2] has described a visit to him at this
time. His study was bare and uninviting. On the floor there lay stacks of
scientific books piled up against the wall. They had been bought with the
first money he had earned in Germany, and none had been wasted on the
luxury of a bookcase. The room contained a large, old easel, not unlike a
brown skeleton; a writing-table from which the usual heaps of manuscript
and notes were conspicuously absent; and, for the comfort of the body, a

few easy chairs and a sofa, arranged so as to give the impression of a
drawing-room. Strindberg did not wish to discuss literary subjects. He was
glad to have left off writing, and looked forward with eager joy to scientific
research. Uddgren tried in vain to induce him to talk about Walt Whitman.
Strindberg preferred to discuss Red Indians with his guest who knew
something of the wild west.
After a few months at Friedrichshagen Strindberg moved to Berlin. He was
in need of change and expansion. In the evenings he was now found in a
little Wein Stube in Unter den Linden which is called "Zum Schwarzen
Ferkel." It had already won fame as the favourite resort of Heine and E.T.A.
Hoffmann. Here he was the centre of a literary and scientific coterie. Guitar
in hand, amidst sympathetic friends, he became Dionysos, the singer of glad
tidings, of wine-born joy. He improvised songs, and the nights were made
short with wit and sparkling discussions. The Polish writer, Stanislav
Przybyszewski, became much attached to Strindberg who found in him
whirling depths of imaginative thought which attracted him, and made him
seek his society on the principle of similia similibus curantur. Amongst
other friends of the coterie were Holger Drachmann, Gunnar Heiberg, Adolf
Paul, and Edvard Munch. "Zum Schwarzen Ferkel" is impregnated with the
Strindbergian spirit. The landlord proudly shows the visitor the portraits
which Strindberg gave him, and the picture by Strindberg, entitled Die
Welle, which hangs on the wall.
The plunge into the "exact" physical sciences, from which he had expected
so much, proved disappointing. The boundaries of experimental research
were soon reached by his penetrative imagination. He had a passion for
facts, but he could not, like the typical man of science, content himself with
systematised classification of things observable. His speculative writings
are studded with allusions to scientific theories, and show an extensive
knowledge of the history of chemistry and botany, of the facts of astronomy,
geology, and zoology. He garnered the fruits of nineteenth-century science
with the pleasure of the true dilettante, and having tasted them, declared
them insipid. The imaginative processes of his mind continued where those
of others stop; he passed from the visible to the occult, from rigid induction
to extravagant fancy. Beyond the uttermost limits of science he came to see
another world, in which chemistry became alchemy, astronomy astrology,
physics the servant of magic, and the form of man the tool of mighty forces.

He became a student of magnetism, hypnotism, telepathy, spiritism, of the
secret knowledge which has persisted throughout the ages as the pearl
within the oyster.
Whilst literary Berlin was acclaiming Strindberg as the naturalistic
playwright, his mind was centred on the hyperchemical speculations which
later on found expression in his Antibarbarus I or the Psychology of
Sulphur or All is in All, and in Sylva Sylvarum. Whilst wings of imagination
were lifting him to new planes of thought, there was a sudden jerk on the
chain which bound him to earth. He fell in love. The ideal woman had again
appeared, now in the person of Fräulein Frida Uhl, a young Austrian girl,
daughter of Hofrath Friedrich Uhl, in Vienna. They became engaged, and
art-loving Berlin was one day surprised to see Strindberg escorting his
fiancee to the National Gallery. He was attired in the fashionable apparel of
the Berlin dandy. A check suit of a large pattern, a short yellow overcoat, a
garish tie, a grotesque walking-stick, and an immaculate silk hat which,
according to the account given by Gustaf Uddgren, retained its place with
difficulty on the leonine mane, gave him an appearance of unwonted
worldliness. They were married in April, 1893, and spent the honeymoon at
Gravesend. An injunction had meanwhile been granted against the German
edition of The Confession of a Fool, and Strindberg returned to Berlin in
order to appear before the Court in the action which followed. The
prosecution failed. Strindberg and his wife spent the winter at her father's
country place at Armstädten, on the Danube, where he returned to his
esoteric studies, and wrote his Antibarbarus. In August, 1894, Strindberg
went to Paris. His wife had accompanied him, and left their child in Austria.
The tie was now irksome to him; les hautes études and not woman had
again become the mistress of his soul. In November he sent his wife back to
her parents.
"It was with a feeling of wild joy," he writes, "that I returned from Gare du
Nord, where I had left my dear little wife who was going to our child who
had fallen ill in a distant country. The sacrifice of my heart was thus made
complete." Their last words, "When do we meet again?—Soon," were
deceptive; an intuition truly told him that they had parted for ever. He had
placed human affection on the altar of truth-seeking, thus practising the
motto with which Inferno opens:

Courbe la tête, fier Sicambre!
Adore ce que tu as brûlé,
Brûle ce que tu as adoré!
At the Café de la Régence he sat down at the table where he used to sit with
his wife, "the beautiful wardress of my prison who spied on my soul day
and night, guessed my secret thoughts, watched the course of my ideas,
jealously observed my spirit's striving towards the unknown." He felt free, a
sense of mental expansion, of liberated power, a call to reach the arcanum
of human knowledge.
In Paris he was now the playwright of the day. The success of Lady Julie
and Creditors was followed by a brilliant performance of The Father at
Théâtre de l'Œuvre in December. All Paris talked of his originality and of
his misogyny which provided a piquant sensation, and a subject for
interesting gossip in literary and dramatic circles. He was interviewed and
photographed—he was the cher maître of the theatrical manager who
expected from him a sensible appreciation of his possibilities for further
triumphs on the stage. In Berlin he was the literary lion of the moment. His
plays and novels lay in the booksellers' windows in attractive German dress,
his portrait was exhibited, his personality was discussed. He was saluted as
a leader of a new movement. But he turned his back on all this. Another self
was shed; a voice within whispered the old burning "Beyond this"—drove
him across the borderland of sanity, and into the chaos of unhuman desires.
He left the café, and returned to his rooms in Quartier Latin. From their
hiding-place in his trunk he took six crucibles made of fine porcelain,
bought with money which he "had stolen from himself," made up a fierce
fire in the stove, and pulled down the blinds for the night's experiment. His
theory regarding the composition of sulphur which had met with such
merciless ridicule was now to be put to the final test. A packet of pure
sulphur and a pair of tongs completed the equipment of the laboratory. The
sulphur burnt with infernal flames, and towards the morning he was able to
demonstrate that it contained carbon. He believed that he had solved the
great problem, overthrown orthodox chemistry, and gained scientific
immortality. He had not noticed that the intense heat had burnt his hands,
and caused the skin to fall off in flakes, but the pain of undressing in the
morning made him conscious of the injury. The joy in the pursuit of the
problems which haunted him was, however, greater than the pain, and the

experiments were continued night after night. He had proved the existence
of carbon in sulphur, now he had to show that it contained hydrogen and
oxygen. The burns on his hands became filled with fragments of coke, they
were bleeding, and caused him great pain, but he persisted in the work. He
avoided his friends, and sought absolute loneliness. Meanwhile he wrote
love-letters to his wife, relating to her the wonderful discoveries which he
had made. She replied by warnings against such futile and foolish
occupations, in which she saw nothing but waste of money. Irritated by her
want of sympathy, Strindberg sent her a letter of farewell to wife and child,
in which he led her to understand that a love affair had absorbed all his
thoughts. She replied by instituting proceedings for divorce.
The charge which he had made against himself was not true, and he was
soon the prey of remorse. His injured pride had led him to write a letter
which he describes as shameful and unpardonable, and in the loneliness
which followed he saw himself as a suicide and assassinator. On Christmas
Eve the vision of his deserted wife and child by the Christmas tree caused
him to flee from the company which he had sought, and visit café after café,
where he failed to find comfort in the usual glass of absinthe. During the
night the feeling of being persecuted by an unknown power, bent on
preventing his great task, overcame him. He slept badly, and was repeatedly
awakened by a cold current of air sweeping across his face. Poverty, his
persistent enemy, did hot leave him in peace. He lacked the necessary
means to pay for rent and regular meals. His hands were black and swollen
through neglect, and symptoms of blood-poisoning in the arms set in. The
news of his helplessness and misery spread amongst his countrymen in
Paris. He was sought out by a persistent countrywoman who raised a sum of
money amongst the Swedes in Paris, and Strindberg was brought to the
Hospital of Saint Louis, his cup of humiliation filled to overflowing.
At the hospital he felt imprisoned amongst ghosts, punished by having to
live in the midst of people with the faces of the dead and dying, the wrecks
of humanity who offended his sense of beauty by appearing without a nose
or an eye, with a split lip or a mortifying cheek. Amongst these derelicts
Strindberg watched the gentle ministrations of the old sœur de charité. She
was kind to him, allowed him little privileges, called him her boy, and he
responded by calling her "my mother." "How blissful," he writes, "to say
this word mother which had not passed my lips for thirty years. The old

woman who belongs to the Order of Saint Augustine, and who wears the
costume of the dead because she has never taken part in life, is gentle as
self-sacrifice, and teaches us to smile at our pains, as if they were pleasures,
for she knows how beneficial suffering can be. Not a reproachful word, no
expostulations or sermons." "This nun has played a part in my life," he
adds, and, when writing down his Inferno experiences three years later, he
sends her thoughts of gratitude for having shown him the path of the cross.
During the months which he spent in the hospital his chemical speculations
continued to absorb his interest. He submitted his insufficiently burnt
sulphur to an independent analysis which confirmed his demonstration that
it contained carbon. The chemist at the hospital encouraged his researches,
and Strindberg laid the results before the public in an article which appeared
in Le Temps, and brought him requests for further articles on his theories.
He left the hospital in February, and spent two months in chemical work
during which he became a student at the Sorbonne, and used the analytical
laboratory. At the conclusion of his experiments he was satisfied that
sulphur is a ternary combination consisting of carbon, oxygen, and
hydrogen.
A superstitious faith in signs and warnings had meanwhile developed. A
mysterious meaning in the names of the streets and places which he passed
made itself known to him—rue Beaurepaire, rue Dieu, Porte Saint-Martin—
a gorgeous signboard above a dyeing business, displaying his own initials
on a white silver cloud surmounted by a rainbow, became a good omen of
the future. The chemist Orfila revealed himself as a kind patron saint to
whom he was strangely led, first by finding his chemical treatise in a
bookseller's shop, then by discovering his grave in the course of a morning
walk in the Montparnasse cemetery, and finally by being attracted to Hotel
Orfila—the monasterial guest-house from which women were excluded.
In his daily experiences he discerned the guidance and punishment of an
unseen hand which, for a high and inscrutable purpose, was leading him out
of his past folly. Sometimes the Unknown One delivered him into the hands
of demons; at other times he received the grace which saved him from
temptations and evil. The idea of persecution permitted for the sake of the
chastisement needed by his spirit became paramount. The simultaneous
playing of three pianos in the rooms adjoining his, the unexpected
presentation of the hotel bill, an inexplicable noise in the room, during

which the plaster of the ceiling fell on his head, roused his suspicions. He
moved to Hotel Orfila which looked like a monastery. It harboured Roman
Catholic students, and an atmosphere of mysticism.
Annoyances, revelations, and delusions of persecution now crowded in
upon him. Strange dreams foretold the future, commonplace objects
assumed fantastic shape. One day, when looking at the embryo of a
sprouting walnut under the microscope, he saw two little white hands
folded as if in prayer. Immovable, perfect in form, they were there, the
hands of a child or a woman, raised beseechingly towards him. Shortly
before the incident he had sinned grievously against his child. Seized by an
uncontrollable longing to be reunited to his wife, in spite of the divorce
proceedings, he had wished—with a concentrated and occultly sharpened
desire—that the child might fall ill, and thus become a link of reunion.
There were other mysteries. The coal in his stove burned itself into
grotesque shapes, works of some kind of elemental sculptor, which were so
realistic that the sparrows, feeding on crumbs by his window, were
frightened by the sight of them. His pillow-case, crumpled by the after-
dinner nap, showed him one day a head in marble modelled on the lines of
Michel-Angelo; another day a mighty Zeus rested on his bed; one night,
after a festive evening with friends, he was received by the devil himself in
correct middle-age attire, thus competing with Blake who one day, whilst
ascending the stairs of his house, saw Satan glaring at him through a
window.
From sulphur he turned to iodine as a subject of original experimentation,
and then, oblivious of Aristotle's injunctions, to the goldmaker's art. He did
not possess "the most precious stone of the philosophers," by which base
metals are changed into gold, and he had to be unorthodox—even when
practising the alchemistic art. He therefore rejected the alchemical faith that
gold alone is free from sulphur, and commenced experiments with solutions
of sulphate of iron in support of the theory that gold contains iron and
sulphur. He succeeded in making gold—his special gold of art—but it
vanished when put to the ordinary chemical test. Signs and guidance from
unseen Powers encouraged him to persist in spite of failure. Whilst out for a
walk his eyes were riveted by the letters F and S intertwined. At first he
thought of his wife's initials, and of her faithful love, but such a
commonplace interpretation was quickly dismissed. The letters meant Fer

and Soufre—the secret of the generation of gold was thus laid bare before
his eyes. Another time two pieces of paper lying at the foot of a monument
attracted his attention. One bore the imprint 207, the other 28. What could
this be but a reminder of the atomic weights of lead (207) and silicum (28)?
Subsequent experiments in which he extracted gold from lead and silicum
confirmed the wisdom of the exegesis made. But the spirit of gold is fickle.
One day, after repeated failures, when standing naked to the waist as a
smith before the fiercely burning furnace, he looked into the crucible, and
saw a skull with a pair of glittering eyes. The eyes looked into his soul with
a supernatural irony, and the goldmaker was struck by paralysing doubt, by
fear of the consequences of his folly.
One day he was forcibly reminded that the fruits of his labour should be
consecrated to Wisdom, not Mammon. He had written an article in Le
Temps, and drawn public interest to his theory that iodine could be made
from benzine. An enterprising agent called on him, and showed him that his
idea contained possibilities for a highly successful commercial undertaking,
and that a patent might be worth millions of francs. Strindberg repudiated
the suggestion, though the agent offered him 100,000 francs if he would go
with him to Berlin, and subordinate his experiments to industrial usages.
Unpaid bills and the usual want of money caused him to give more serious
thought to the offer made. After some time he was willing to meet the agent
and a chemist, for the purpose of making a conclusive experiment, and to
turn his art into much-needed cash. He collected his retorts and reagents,
and arrived at the agent's office on the day appointed. It happened to be
Whit-Sunday, and the office, which looked out on a dark and grimy street,
was so dirty that the result was one of those mental revolutions to which
hyper-æsthetic senses are subject. "Memories of childhood were
awakened," he writes. "Whitsuntide, the feast of joy, when the little church
was decorated with foliage, tulips, and lilies, when it was opened for the
children's first Communion, the girls clad in white like angels ... the organ
... the tolling of the bells...."
A feeling of shame overcame him, he returned home determined not to turn
science into a business. He cleared his room of the chemical apparatus,
swept and dusted it, and made it beautiful with flowers. A bath and clean
clothes added to the feeling of purification, and during a walk in the
Montparnasse cemetery gentle thoughts of peace filled his mind. O crux ave

spes unica—these words from the graves carried a message of the future.
Not love, not gain, not honour for him, but the cross, the only path to
wisdom!
This unfitness for practical life, this sudden change of personality, through
which the poet or the child within are confronted with unbearable
conditions, brings a smile to the lips of the man who is thoroughly "fit." The
man of the world does not only keep religion and business in water-tight
compartments, he keeps dreams for the night, and poetical recollections for
important occasions, such as weddings and funerals. He is not troubled by
unexpected visitants from his subconscious self which cause inconsistencies
and poetic delirium. He may well deplore the unpracticality of men like
Renan who dreamily allow themselves to be exploited by "sharper" brains,
whilst they spend years in contemplation of their own complexity. "I am a
tissue of contradictions," wrote Renan, "... one of my halves is constantly
occupied in demolishing the other, like the fabulous animal of Ctesias who
ate his paws without knowing it."[3]
Instead of selling his process of manufacturing iodine, Strindberg returned
to the hyperchemical task which he had set himself: to eliminate the barriers
between matter, and that which is called spirit. An object worthy indeed of
concentrated effort, worthy even in the face of the inevitable failure of
seeking to grasp that which to human intelligence is unknowable!
Meanwhile he went "mad." Mad as Tasso and Cellini, Poe and Blake. We
cannot dispute the madness, but we may hold that the madness of genius is
more valuable to humanity than the sanity of mediocrity.
In Strindberg we can clearly distinguish between cerebral derangements
causing auditory hallucinations as well as delusions of persecution, and the
super-conscious activity which produced the state of clairpsychism, which
is generally classed with insanity. Dr. W. Hirsch has studied Strindberg's
disease from the ordinary alienist's point of view, and concluded that he
suffered from paranoia simplex chronica—a diagnosis which is empty of
meaning when applied to such a mind. Dr. S. Rahmer[4] made Strindberg
the subject of a more comprehensive psychopathic study, and defined his
case as one of melancholia daemomaniaca. The inadequacy of such
diagnoses will be apparent to every serious student of Inferno and Legends
—the books which are mostly extracts from the diary in which he recorded

his madness—and of plays like To Damascus, Advent, Easier, The Dream
Play, and The Great Highway, which give evidence of his lucidity, and of
the mysticism which he distilled from mental torture.
There is nothing original in the fact that a man describes his own madness
in prose or verse. Such descriptions may even be regarded as a distinct
genre of literary activity, perverse and detestable to those who, like Mr.
Balfour, want only the "cheerful" note in literature, but of infinite interest to
those who place a truthful account of the human soul above one which is
pleasing. Nathaniel Lee's poems, Lenan's Traumgewalten, Hoffmann's
Kreisler possess a psychological interest which no clamour for literary
cradle-songs can remove. Strindberg's self-revelations have a touch of that
exultation which, through a dominant curiosity, survives the most complete
cheerlessness, horror, and pain—that joy of which Charles Lamb wrote to
Coleridge: "Dream not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and
wildness of fancy till you have gone mad," and which made him look back
upon his lunacy "with a gloomy kind of envy."

August Strindberg—1906 August Strindberg—1907. Photo's:
A. Malmström, Stockholm.

Comparisons between Rousseau's Confessions, Dialogues, and Rêveries,
and Strindberg's Inferno readily suggest themselves. Both writers reveal, by
their minute analysis of sick thoughts, the consciousness of a lunacy which
is a necessary experience on the road to spiritual health, and, therefore,
shameless. There is much similarity in the stories of persistent attacks by
invisible enemies, of plots, and persecutions, in the egocentric deductions
from natural phenomena and the events of the world. But there is also a
great difference. Rousseau manages to keep a watchful eye on the
preservation of friendly relations with the world throughout his aberrations,
whilst Strindberg recklessly defies its judgment.
Strindberg's persecutional mania developed rapidly during the spring and
summer of 1896. Every object, every incident was charged with a sinister
meaning. He became obsessed with the idea that his former friend,
Przybyszewski, whom he writes of as Popoffsky, intended to murder him.
The reason for this suspicion lay in Strindberg's former intimacy with the
woman who afterwards became Przybyszewski's wife. One day his ear
caught the strains of Schumann's Aufschwung, played by an unseen
musician in an adjoining house. He became strangely agitated. The pianist

who played Aufschwung in such a manner could only be Przybyszewski,
and the music must be a prelude to the revenge which he was about to
inflict on Strindberg. With the horror of his impending fate mingled remorse
and self-accusation. "My friend, the Russian," he writes, "my disciple who
called me father because he had learnt everything from me, my famulus
who looked upon me as master, and kissed my hands because his life began
where mine ended. It is he who has come from Vienna to Paris in order to
kill me...." The reflection that he had not borne the Pole's efforts to injure
him meekly, but retaliated, at first invested the thought of death with a
sacrificial grandeur. But when Aufschwung was played every day between
four and five fear of death increased. He felt a fierce hatred of the man who
thus hunted him down. He sought confirmation of his suspicions by
questioning the coterie of artists which met at Mme. Charlotte's crêmerie in
rue de la Grande Chaumière. The answers seemed to him evasive, and
Strindberg withdrew from the circle of friends, convinced that there was a
widespread plot against him. The Norwegian artist, Edvard Munch, was at
this time painting Strindberg's portrait, and was alternately trusted by him,
and suspected as an accomplice in the crime contemplated.
His inflammable fancy saw warnings of danger everywhere. A large dane,
lying outside Munch's house, was a sign that he must not enter it, and he
returned, thanking the powers which had protected him. Another time he
turned away from the house after seeing a child sitting outside the door with
a card in its hand which happened to be a ten of spades. In the Luxembourg
Gardens two dry twigs, broken by the storm, lay in such a manner as to
form the Greek letters P and Y—the first and the last letters of the dreaded
name. He implored, the help of Providence, and recited the Psalms of David
against his enemies.
The terror of being delivered into the hands of his persecutors was
temporarily dispelled by a sense of divine protection, of nearness to the
Lord. On March 29th Balzac's Seraphita had fallen into his hands, by
chance apparently, but really, he thought, through heavenly guidance. The
day was the anniversary of Swedenborg's death, and the coincidence
became a token of a spiritual bond between him and the great Swedish seer
which outlasted his disease, and remained a source of illumination until his
death sixteen years later. Orfila and Swedenborg now spoke to him in his
hours of hope; he conversed with them as Blake conversed with Dante,

Virgil, and Moses. The Old Testament shed strength upon him. He found
comfort in the Book of Job, for Satan had obtained leave to tempt him, as
Job was tempted. There were moments when he felt drawn away from life
by a heavenly nostalgia, sustained by a realisation of spiritual worth which,
at other times, increased his sense of guilt by adding the sin of pride to the
many others for which he atoned. Of such moments he writes: "I despise the
earth, this impure and unworthy world, humanity and the works of
humanity. I see in myself the righteous man to whom the Almighty has sent
trials, and whom the purgatory of earthly life shall make worthy of
approaching deliverance."
His customary chair at the Brasserie des Lilas was engaged one evening,
when he came to seek oblivion in the glass of green absinthe. On another
occasion the glass was mysteriously upset, and on a third a chimney above
him caught fire, and sent two large pieces of soot into his glass. In these and
similar incidents he recognised a guiding hand, tribulations arranged for the
purpose of breaking him of a dangerous habit. One is reminded of
Rousseau's belief that unfavourable winds had been prepared, as a special
trial, for his journey.
Short intervals of spiritual calm did not allay Strindberg's fear of
Przybyszewski. Though substantially unfounded, and, though he was in
possession of incontrovertible evidence that the Pole was not in Paris, the
fear increased until he was mastered by terror. Hotel Orfila was no longer a
retreat of peace. Women were admitted—a circumstance which in itself was
calculated to disturb his nerves—and with them followed a host of troubles.
A mysterious stranger had taken the room adjoining his, and seemed to
imitate all Strindberg's movements. Strindberg sat writing at his table, so
apparently did the stranger. When Strindberg rose and pushed back his
chair, the stranger did likewise. When Strindberg went to bed, the stranger
also went to bed. The unseen enemy was there dose to him, watching every
movement, waiting for an opportunity to slay him by infernally subtle
means. Outside the hotel there were signs of danger. One day he felt Quai
Voltaire and Place des Tuileries shake under his feet. Another day a sudden
feeling of lameness proved to him that he was being poisoned, and that the
Pole had contrived to send gas through the wall. He thought of giving
information to the police, but the possibility that he might be imprisoned as
a lunatic restrained him. He could no longer work or sleep. There were

whispering voices around him; the shadow of a woman on the wall outside
his window suggested the fearful revenge of his feminist protagonists. One
night he felt an electric current passing through his body. The stranger and
his accomplices were evidently doing their murderous work in a thoroughly
scientific manner. With the thought, "They are killing me. I will not be
killed," he rose from the bed, found the proprietor, and obtained another
room for the night. This happened to be under the one tenanted by the
terrible stranger, and Strindberg's suspicions were confirmed by hearing a
heavy object being dropped into a bag, and securely locked up. Evidently
an electric machine, he thought. On the following day he packed up his
belongings, and hurriedly left Hotel Orfila.
His suspicions fell on friends and foes alike. One day, after a sitting, Munch
received a post card from Strindberg which put an end to further visits:
"When last you came to see me you looked like a murderer, or the
accomplice of a murderer. I only want to inform you that the Pettenkofer
gas-oven in the room next to mine is unusable, and therefore unsuitable for
the purpose. Sg."[5]
Side by side with the mania of which the message to Munch is typical,
Strindberg retained a sanity during this time which Uddgren had occasion to
observe. He went to see Strindberg at Hotel Orfila, and saw the traces of the
torture through which he had passed in his haggard, ashen face. Uddgren
had heard that Strindberg's insanity was on the point of breaking out, but in
the course of a long talk with him he could find no signs of brain-softening.
The mania, the eccentricities, the flashing imagination, the instinct for self-
martyrisation were there intensified, but not the incoherency which he had
observed in other literary friends who were victims of insanity. It is also
remarkable that throughout Strindberg's period of lunacy his writings were
accepted and printed.
After the flight from Hotel Orfila he hid himself in an hotel in rue de la
Clef. All went well for some time. Feeling that he was at a safe distance
from his persecutors, he abandoned his incognito, and sent his address to
Hotel Orfila. There was an immediate recurrence of the attacks. An old
man, with "grey and wicked eyes like a bear," carried empty cases, pieces
of tin, and other mysterious objects into the room adjoining his. In the room
overhead a noise of hammering and dragging began which suggested the

installation of an infernal machine. The noisy preparations were followed
by the sound of a revolving wheel, suggestive of preparations for his
execution. "I am sentenced to death," he thought; but by whom? By the
pietists, catholics, jesuits, theosophists? Was he condemned as a sorcerer or
as a black magician? Or was it by the police? Was he suspected of being an
anarchist? In the manners of the landlady and the servant he read suspicion
and contempt. The struggle seemed hopeless. Preparing to die at the hands
of his enemies, he arranged his papers, wrote necessary letters, and said a
solemn farewell to Nature as represented by the Jardin des Plantes.
"Farewell," he cried, "stones, plants, flowers, trees, butterflies, birds,
snakes, all created by God's good hand." Resigned and at peace with Fate
he re-entered his hotel, but his anguish returned at the sight of the change
which had been made in the room adjoining his. On the mantelpiece lay
sheets of metal isolated from each other by pieces of wood, and on the top
of each pile a book or a photographic album had been placed, so as to give
an innocent look to what could be nothing but accumulators, infernal
machines. Two workmen on the roof of a neighbouring house were
handling some objects, and pointing to his window—the chain of evidence
was complete.
At night he made the last toilet of the condemned, took a bath, shaved, and
attired himself in a manner worthy of a solemn parting from the body and
its miseries. Waiting for the end, he reflected that he could harbour no fear
of hell in another world—he had passed through a thousand hells in this
life. Anguish endowed him with a burning desire to quit the vanities and
deceptive pleasures of the world. "Born with a heavenly nostalgia," he
writes, "as a child I cried over the uncleanliness of existence; amongst
relatives and in society I felt a stranger, far away from the land of my home.
Ever since my childhood I have sought my God, and found the devil. I
carried the cross of Christ in my youth, and I have denied a God who is
content to rule over slaves who love those who whip them."
After a few hours' sleep he was awakened by the sensation of being lifted
out of bed by a pump, sucking his heart. He had scarcely put his feet on the
floor before he felt an electric douche fall upon his neck, and press him to
the ground. He rose, snatched his clothes, and rushed out into the garden. A
light cough from the room, wherein dwelt his enemy, was answered by a
cough from the other room. The conspirators were clearly signalling to each

other. To return to the room of horror was out of question. He dragged an
arm-chair into the garden, and finally went to sleep under the star-lit sky,
soothed by the presence of the flowers. On the following morning he fled to
friends in Dieppe, cursing his unknown enemies. His friends were horrified
at his appearance, and when his kind hostess led him to a looking-glass he
saw in his own face, not only the traces of suffering and neglect, but an
expression which filled him with shame and detestation of himself. "If I had
then read Swedenborg," he writes, "the imprint left by the evil spirit would
have explained to me my mental state and the events of the last weeks."
Despite the efforts of his sympathetic friends to convince him that the house
was free from dangers of any kind, the night brought new terrors. Sitting at
a table, and waiting for the sinister moment when the clock should strike
two, Strindberg was determined bravely to face the worst. Uncovering his
chest, he challenged the unknown persecutors to strike him. The response
was the sensation of an electric current directed against his heart, gradually
increasing in strength until he could resist it no longer. As if struck by a clap
of thunder, he felt his body filled by a fluid which was suffocating him, and
drawing out his heart.
He rushed downstairs where another bed had been made up for him in case
of need. He lay down, and tried to collect his thoughts. Could this be
electricity? No, for he had used the compass as indicator, and the result had
been negative. Whilst pondering on the mysterious force, another discharge
of "electricity" struck him with the strength of a cyclone, and lifted him out
of bed. He tried in vain to escape. His own graphic description of what
followed shows the agony through which he passed. "I hide behind walls, I
lie down by the thresholds, and in front of the stoves. Everywhere,
everywhere the furies seek me out. My soul's anguish overpowers me. The
panic terror of everything and nothing gets hold of me, and I flee from room
to room, and end my flight on the balcony, where I remain crouching." At
dawn he went into his friend's studio, where he lay down on a rug. Even
here he was disturbed, but now by rats, and, fearing that he might be a
victim of delirium, he fled to the hall, where the door-mat became his
resting-place. He hurriedly left Dieppe for the south of Sweden, and sought
refuge in the house of his friend, Dr. Eliasson, in Ystad.
Strindberg had rightly surmised that his friends in Dieppe were convinced
of his insanity. His conduct during the first days of his stay in Ystad caused

his medical friend to treat him with the firmness and authority necessary
towards one who is mentally irresponsible. The result was that Strindberg
suspected that the doctor intended to imprison him in a lunatic asylum, and
to appropriate his secret of gold-making. The month which he spent at the
doctor's house was devoted to a cold-water cure which did not assuage his
misery. The shape and material of the bed in which he had to sleep
suggested electrical devices of evil, the nightly assault by the vampire
which sucked his heart was repeated, and brought him out of bed in terror
of death; he heard voices, saw signs, feared he was being poisoned by
hemlock, hashish, digitalis, or daturine. One night he heard the doctor
handle a very heavy object and wind up a spring, and through the wall
which separated them he felt the approach of the electric current. It reached
his heart. Seizing his clothes he fled through the window into the street, and
to the house of another physician who succeeded in calming him, and—so
he believed—in intimidating his treacherous friend, and thus saved
Strindberg's life.
These delusions of horror were suspended by a letter from his wife which
breathed love and pity, and in which she invited him to come to Austria and
see his little daughter. The thought of the child, of holding her in his arms,
of begging her to forgive him, of making her happy by a father's tenderness,
brought about a spiritual metamorphosis. He left Sweden, and arrived at his
mother-in-law's country house on the Danube in September, 1896. During
the months which he spent there he did not meet his wife-a separation
which he bore with equanimity, in consequence of "an indefinable lack of
harmony in our temperaments"—but he saw the child daily.
"Every man, if he is sincere, may tread again for himself the road to
Damascus-a journey which must vary for each individual soul," wrote
Victor Hugo. Here, in the presence of the child, Strindberg was brought face
to face with his own sinfulness. He had set out to persecute, but the light
from heaven had prostrated him and struck him with blindness. Before the
scales could fall from his eyes his penance must be made complete. He had
left an infant of six weeks. The little girl of two and a half years, who now
met him, scrutinised his soul with eyes full of serious inquiry, and then
allowed her father to clasp her to his breast. "This is Dr. Faust's resurrection
to earthly life, but sweeter and purer," he writes. "I cannot cease carrying
the little one in my arms, and feeling her little heart beat against mine. To

love a child is for a man to become woman; it is to lay aside the manly, to
experience the sexless love of the dwellers in heaven, as Swedenborg called
it." But an incident soon occurred which disturbed his peace. At supper he
gently touched the child's hand in order to help her. She cried out, and,
drawing back her hand with a look full of horror, said, "He hurts me."
Another evening he was humiliated by the mysterious conduct of the child.
Pointing at an invisible person behind Strindberg's chair, she began to cry
with fear, and said, "The sweep is standing there." Her grandmother who
believed in clairvoyance in children made the sign of the cross over the
child's head, and-a painful silence fell upon the company.
Whilst he accepted these trials as punitive messages and warnings, his
scarified soul became receptive to Roman Catholic influences. His wife's
mother and aunt were Catholics; his child had been brought up in that faith.
He had seen human souls sanctified by a catholic mysticism which bore
humility and fortitude. The symbols, the certainty, the rich imagery of the
Catholic Church had appealed to him, when the poverty of philosophical
speculation had made him despair of human intelligence. He had bought a
rosary in Paris because it was beautiful, and because "the evil ones were
afraid of the cross." One day an image of the Madonna, carried through the
streets of Paris on a cart following a hearse, had strangely attracted him.
Like Tasso's vision of the Virgin in the midst of his feverish torment by
noises and tinkling bells, Strindberg's gaze on the image of all-merciful
motherhood brought comfort. At first attracted to Catholic prayers, and to
the ideal of the monastic life by the instinct which makes the man in pain
seek an anodyne, he was gradually led to a deeper understanding of esoteric
Christianity. Swedenborg continued to reveal the mysteries of symbols and
correspondences to him; in the scenery around the Austrian village he
found, not only an exact replica of a Swedenborgian hell, but the original of
a landscape which had precipitated itself in the zinc bath used in his gold-
making experiments in Paris.

August Strindberg—1902
August Strindberg—1908—In his
home in Stockholm. Photo by A.
Blomberg, Stockholm

Strindberg's early blasphemies and atheism were the fruits of an inverted
religiosity which left him no peace. His devotional mood could find no
bridge of union with his scientific mood. The search for knowledge and the
search for God led to different goals. Whilst his brain struggled for breadth,
his heart cried for the narrow depth of dogma and creed. His researches into
occultism and the philosophy of religions, his acquaintance with theosophy
did not reconcile his religion with his science. The sense of sin, of having
sought unlawful knowledge haunted him in his studies of black magic and
Satanism, and in the exercise of the occult powers of which he was
conscious. Though Strindberg had not read Huysmans' Là-Bas and En
Route when he wrote Inferno, there is a strong resemblance between the
books and the religious evolution of the authors.
Strindberg accepted the doctrine of reincarnation as a Christian tenet, and
the corollary of a Karmic law which compels us to suffer for sins
committed before birth, but he resisted what he believed to be the central
teaching of theosophy, i.e. the necessity for killing personality. A

theosophical friend sent him Madame Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine which
Strindberg criticised severely, though he knew that his outspokenness would
deprive him of a friend and a benefactor. He declined to join a "sect" which
denied a personal God, the only one who could satisfy his religious needs.
He declared Madame Blavatsky's masterpiece to be "detestable through the
conscious and unconscious deceptions, through the stories of the existence
of Mahatmas," interesting through the quotations from little-known authors,
condemnable, above all, as the work of "a gynander who has desired to
outdo man, and who pretends to have overthrown science, religion,
philosophy, and to have placed a priestess of Isis on the altar of the
crucified One."
In spite of this denunciation, Strindberg had absorbed many theosophical
ideas, and his later writings are not altogether free from the influence of the
despised "gynander" and the theories of occult science which she
expounded.
During the time spent in Austria Strindberg slowly recovered his mental
balance, whilst his visionary powers and spiritual clairvoyance were in
process of development. He stayed with his wife's mother and aunt, two
pious and gentle old women, who treated his soul-sickness with Christian
forbearance and healing sympathy. He was still subject to "astral" attacks,
to "electric" discharges, to nightmares and ghostly visitations. Unacquainted
with the higher aspects of psychical research and modern theories of
psychological phenomena, he was as yet unable to bring about order in the
unruly house of his mind. Whether we use spiritualistic language and call
him a medium, or that of psychology and label the messages which reached
him "teleological automatism," there can be no doubt that the keynote of his
soul's gloom and glory was a hyper-sensitiveness which made him a
lightning-conductor for the psychic currents of his time. We may turn away
with disdain from the pitiful picture of Strindberg at his writing table,
warding off the imaginary attacks of elementals, incubi, lamiæ, by thrusts in
the air with a dalmatian dagger, and we may smile at the childish
superstition with which he accepted the oracular guidance of the cock on
the top of Notre Dame, or the direction chosen by a ladybird visiting his
manuscript. But that there were within him cryptopsychic gifts of telepathy,
clair-audience, and divination, a somnambulistic consciousness of a reality

other than that which is cognisable to the senses, no student of psychic
forces can doubt.
In December, 1896, Strindberg returned to Sweden. Swedenborg's Arcana
Cœlestia, which he now read, dissipated his fears of persecution by showing
him that all the horrors through which he had passed, were recognised by
Swedenborg as incidental to the purgation of soul which is the highest
object of life. Strindberg found that, before receiving his momentous
revelations, Swedenborg had passed through nightly tortures resembling his
own. By informing him of the real nature of the horrors Swedenborg
liberated him from the electricians, the black magicians, the destroyers, the
jealous gold-makers, and the fear of madness. "He has shown me the only
path to salvation: to seek out the demons in their dens within myself, and to
kill them ... through repentance."
Inferno was composed in Lund, the little University town in the south of
Sweden, between May 3rd and June 25th, 1897. Legends, which is but a
rifacimento of the struggle to slay the "demons in their dens," was begun in
Lund, and finished in Paris in October, 1897. In March, 1898, Strindberg
went back to Lund, free from haunting obsessions of evil, master of his
madness, enriched by religious experiences which produced an exuberant
rise of new ideas. He had crossed the Rubicon. Henceforth he shared in that
direct vision which makes paralysing doubt impossible, and which is the
prerogative of God's fools all over the world. To the end of life his mind
retained intellectual disquiet; there remained in him a strain of the wild
man, an over-balance of curiosity which set up eternal enmity between him
and convention. The Swedish critic, Oscar Levertin, succinctly summed up
Strindberg in the Italian proverb: All soul, all gall, all fire. But after 1898
there is a calm light which the unruly flames cannot hide. His spiritual
wrestlings continue through the zenith of his literary production, but they
leave him stronger.
A comparison between his views on the "nature of man" in 1884 and in
1910 is interesting. In an essay on The Joy of Life, written in 1884, he
greatly offended the Swedish Mrs. Grundy by the following passage: "After
long centuries of the voluntary or involuntary lie, of artificialising custom
and speech, a general craving for brutality is sometimes awakened, a
delirious desire to throw off one's clothes and walk about naked, to reveal
the indecent, to approach the repulsive, to be a happy and joyous animal."

In an article on Religion, written in 1910, and published in Speeches to the
Swedish Nation, he wrote: "I apply my biblical Christianity to my own
personal and inner use, so as to curb my somewhat riotous nature, rendered
riotous by the veterinary philosophy and animal doctrine (Darwinism) in
which I was brought up. The fact that I practise, as far as I can, the
Christian doctrines should not, I maintain, give people reason to complain.
For it is only through religion, or the hope for something better, and the
realisation of the inner meaning of life as a time of probation, a school,
possibly a house of correction, that we can bear life's burden with sufficient
resignation. In the understanding of the relative insignificance of external
conditions of life, compared with the possession of hope and faith, one
finds that moral courage to renounce everything—which the ungodly lack
—to suffer everything for the sake of a mission, to speak out when others
remain silent."
In the same "speech" he says: "Since 1896 I call myself a Christian (see
Inferno). I am not a Catholic, and have never been one, but during seven
years' life in Catholic countries and in intimate relationship with Catholics I
discovered that there was no difference between Catholicism and
Protestantism, or merely an outward one, and that the schism which took
place once was purely political, or was only concerned with theological
points which in reality have nothing to do with religion. This was the cause
of my tolerance towards Catholics which found a special expression in my
Gustavus Adolphus, and gave rise to the fable about my being a Catholic. I
am entered on the parish register as a Protestant, and shall remain one, but I
am probably not orthodox, nor am I a pietist, but rather a Swedenborgian."
At the time when Inferno was written Strindberg was, however, more
completely under the spell of Rome than he acknowledges in his later
writings. He contemplated retreat in a Belgian monastery, and in Inferno he
tells us that, when he read Sar Peladan's Comment on devient Mage,
"Catholicism held its solemn and triumphant entry into my life." He found
many points of contact between Swedenborg's mystical philosophy and that
of the Catholic Church. The profound influence on modern thought
exercised by Swedenborg, and which is clearly discernible in the writings of
Goethe, Emerson, Balzac, Tennyson, Mrs. Browning, Ruskin, Coventry
Patmore, and Carlyle, is evidence of the spiritual catholicity of the great
Swedish mystic. Superficial criticism is apt to dismiss Swedenborg as a

deluded ghost-seer, whose psychical derangements are responsible for a
farrago of communications on heaven and hell, prodigiously wearisome in
details and lacking the saving grace of humour. Such criticism is made by
those who know nothing of the intellectual versatility, and the scientific
achievements of Swedenborg. His writings on anatomy, physiology,
geology, and metallurgy alone would have entitled him to a distinguished
place among the pioneers of science. Swedenborg studied mechanics,
engineering, mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, and music, and took a
keen interest in handicrafts.
There is a striking resemblance between Swedenborg and Strindberg in this
versatility of mood and thought. It is emphasised by many minor traits of
character and taste, such as the great love for children and flowers which
both evinced. Separated by more than a century and a half, Strindberg found
himself the spiritual descendant of Swedenborg. To him he dedicates his
first Blue Book (1907) in the following words: "To Emanuel Swedenborg,
Teacher and Leader, this book is dedicated by the Disciple." The Blue
Books deal with every thinkable subject—religious, philosophical, scientific
—in an aphoristic and combative manner which is pervaded by a curious
mixture of pride and humility. Here speaks the High Priest of Knowledge,
here quivers the helpless embryo of the humanity which is to come. In these
motley pages the Teacher and the Disciple talk of telepathy, chemistry,
astronomy, meteorology, spectral analysis, atoms and crystals, the
psychology of plants, the secrets of birds, the formation of clouds,
Darwinism, radium, woman, the secrets of chess, the secrets and magic of
numbers, the Mesopotamian language, hieroglyphics, Hebraic research,
symbolism, clairvoyance, and a hundred other subjects. In the preface to
The Bondswoman's Son Strindberg speaks of his Blue Book as the synthesis
of his life. The Disciple is worthy of the Master; to the Swedenborgian and
eighteenth-century conception of the natural world and the spiritual world
Strindberg has added the craving for a synthetic interpretation of facts,
which was characteristic of the nineteenth century, and which found its
foremost representatives in Spencer and Comte. In his sense of truth, in his
work for the correlation of knowledge, in his readiness to forsake pleasant
beliefs for unpleasant facts, Strindberg realised Swedenborg's description of
a certain phase of angelic life: "To grow old in heaven is to grow young."

The renewal of intellectual youth, with its baffling polymathy and
selfcontradictions, led Strindberg to question the composition of his own
soul. In the preface to The Bondswoman's Son he confesses that he has
sometimes wondered if he has incarnated different personalities.
Dissociated fields of consciousness may be a psychopathic phenomenon, or
indicative of an advanced state of psychic evolution. The problem has been
approached from many points of view. The mystery of personality
metamorphosis, of primary and secondary individualities, contained within
the frame of one human body, is now a recognised subject of inquiry in the
domain of abnormal psychology. Cases of multiple personality in which
there is an absolute division between the "entities," and in which the
memories do not intermingle, have been carefully studied and classified.
The ease with which Strindberg apostatised, the mutually destructive
theories which he advanced at different periods of life, the power with
which he could objectify his past selves, and repeatedly paint "the face of
what was once myself," point to a multiplicity of consciousness which,
though not rare in genius, was especially active in him. In the preface to
The Author, written in 1909, Strindberg says of himself as the writer of the
book twenty years earlier: "The personality of the author is just as much a
stranger to me as to the reader—and just as unsympathetic."
There is undoubtedly a gulf between the personality responsible for the
preface to Lady Julie with its crude materialism, and the sensitised
consciousness of the man who pours out his soul in the Blue Books and in
Alone. Nietzscheanism was but a cloak, with which Strindberg covered the
cor laceratum, which always suffered acutely through the misfortunes of
others. The cloak did not fit him. In Alone, the dulcet autobiographical
finale to the agitato of Inferno, we find him in self-imposed and vicarious
suffering for the sins of a neighbouring grocer who has failed in business
through incompetence and dishonesty. "I went through all his agony," he
writes; "thought of his wife, of the approaching quarter-day, of the rent, of
the cheques." Strindberg now lived in open enmity with the theories of the
survival of the fittest and natural selection; his conception of the evolution
idea led him to repudiate the current belief in the descent of man as a
glorification of brute-nature, and to cry: "What a shame to have paid
homage to the Ape-King, the seducer of my youth!"

To the natural capacity for suffering was added that imposed on him
through the development of his psychic powers. He did not only live the
lives of others "telepathically"; his sensibility became so exteriorised as to
receive impressions at a great distance. Thus he used to feel, when one of
his plays was being performed for the first time in some part of Europe,
though he had received no information in regard to the performance. In
1907 he told Uddgren that, after going to bed at ten in the evening, he was
sometimes awakened by the sound of loud applause which caused him to sit
up in bed, wondering if he was at a theatre. Such a telepathic ovation was
invariably followed by the news of some dramatic success. In the first Blue
Book, "the Disciple" relates the following: "In a company I interrupted
myself with a smile in the middle of an animated conversation. 'What are
you smiling at?' somebody asked. 'The southern express pulled up at the
Central Station just now,' was the reply. Another time something similar
happened, and I said: 'The curtain has now fallen on the last act in
Helsingfors, and I heard the applause after my first night.' I perceive the talk
of the people in restaurants after the performance as ringing in the ears. I
can hear this all the way from Germany when I have a first performance,
though I have no previous knowledge of being played."
He records the psychic rapport which sexual union establishes between him,
and the woman he loves. When she is absent, and thinks kindly of him, he
perceives the fragrance of incense or jessamine; when she is travelling he
knows if she is on a steamer or in a train. He can distinguish the throbbing
of the propeller from the thumping of the buffers on the railway carriage.
The most remarkable passage in the Blue Book is perhaps the following
summary of his clairpsychism:
"I feel at a distance when somebody touches my fate, when enemies
threaten my personal existence, but also when people speak kindly of me or
wish me well; I feel in the street if I meet friend or enemy; I have
participated in the suffering caused by an operation on a person towards
whom I feel comparatively indifferent; I have twice gone through the death
agony of others with attendant physical and mental suffering; the last time I
passed through three diseases in six hours, and rose well when the absent
one had been liberated through death. This makes life painful, but rich and
interesting."
[1] Bøken on Strindberg af Gustaf Uddgren.

[2] En Ny Bok on Strindberg.
[3] Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse.
[4] Grenzfragen der Literatur und Medizin, Munich, 1907.
[5] En Ny Bok om Strindberg af Gustaf Uddgren.

CHAPTER VIII

THE THEATRE OF LIFE

Strindberg's fiftieth birthday was celebrated quietly in Lund in 1899. A
general feeling of distrust and bewilderment was prevalent amongst his
countrymen. At the age of fifty he had returned to Sweden, apparently
healthy in mind and body, in the prime of life, charged with a literary
vitality which confounded current theories of his insanity. He had calmly
and unostentatiously resumed his task of writing drama. The haunted,
feverish expression had left his countenance; he had made himself a new
visage, upon which were stamped self-mastery and tranquillity of mind.
And, yet, he had recently published Inferno and Legends, and laid bare his
soul's misery and delirium in throbbing pages, over which the reviewers had
poured acrid contempt. He had written To Damascus in a gust of mediæval
repentance, and uncovered himself in the transports of asceticism. With a
sigh of relief his enemies had laid aside their opposition to his indiscretions
and revelations, his materialism and transcendentalism, his socialism and
individualism. They felt that there was no need to take a lunatic seriously.
His friends had waited patiently for the "dancing star" which they knew
would arise out of the chaos.

August Strindberg—Bust by K.I. Eldh August Strindberg—Portrait by Carl
(Bought by the Swedish State. In the Larsson, 1899. (In the National
National Museum, Stockholm) Museum, Stockholm)

The Saga of the Folkungs, Gustavus Vasa and Eric XIV appeared in 1899,
and showed that the author of Master Olof had returned to the art with
which, twenty-seven years earlier, he had given his country its greatest
historical play. With the precision of the somnambulist who takes up the
thread of mental events, regardless of the time that has passed, Strindberg
resumed the story of Master Olof where he had left off. In Gustavus Vasa
we again meet Olof, the renegade, but he is now—as befits his character—a
secondary person, duly subservient to the Power of the Time, King
Gustavus Vasa. With Gustavus Vasa and Eric XIV Strindberg attained to
mastery of a dramatic art, in which he stands unsurpassed. The art of
writing the psychological drama of history is his, and his alone. No other
dramaturge of modern times has approached him in clarity of historical
vision, or in imaginative reconstruction of living characters which are at
once true to their time and to all times.
No period of Swedish history lends itself better to dramatic treatment than
that dominated by the first of the Vasas, Gustavus Erikson, the chosen king
of the people, the incarnation of will, of a wholly masculine personality.

The king's struggle to quell the rebellious spirit of the freemen of
Dalecarlia, the vast inland county north of Stockholm, to whom he owes his
throne and his power, is the subject of the play. The wrath of the king
pervades the first act with an atmospheric suggestion of fateful horror
which is the antithesis of melodramatic art, and shows Strindberg's power
of restraint and concentration in the unfoldment of tragedy. The king has
marched to Dalecarlia in order to punish the stiff-necked peasants who
think that they can make and unmake kings with impunity. When the
curtain rises upon the assembled leaders of the peasants the king is not seen,
but his presence is felt. Master Olof has arrived as the emissary of the
sovereign; solemn messengers bid the veterans of the soil to remain seated
until they are called to appear before the king. There is a sense of
suppressed fear in the room; the quiet, slow-thinking men, dad in white
sheep-skin coats, suspect something, but cannot grasp the unthinkable
audacity of the king's plans. One by one they are called out, but no one
returns. Then a messenger from the king brings in three blood-stained
sheep-skin coats, and throws them on the table. This is the king's warning to
those who remain, and who are permitted to live.
In the five acts of this play Strindberg lets us see the human qualities of
Gustavus Vasa; the dramatist draws a living soul, not a marionette; a man,
hot-tempered, hard, strong, with a vein of irresoluteness running through
the granite of his will, a man whose strength is blended with the weakness
of the child within that never grows up. We see in him the inconsistency of
all flesh: the mighty reformer of the Roman Catholic Church who upholds
evangelical Lutheranism and yet clings to catholic habits; the brutal tyrant
who has a way of his own of enforcing obedience by bringing his little steel
hammer in ominous contact with obstinate heads, and who yet remains the
kind, fatherly friend of his people. The patriarch who has identified himself
with his country before the Lord, who has stood forth as a prophet of
patriotism, and who is forced by growing self-knowledge to separate the
personal from the impersonal, is at last humiliated by the goodness of
others. Threatened by rebels who march towards Stockholm from the south,
outwitted by his treacherous allies in Lübeck, the old king trembles at the
news that the sturdy men of Dalecarlia are on their way to Stockholm. The
retribution for his harsh deeds of suppression is upon him, and he bows his
head before the chastisement of God. But the men of Dalecarlia are made of
stuff which outlasts a few fallen heads. They have come in their thousands

to help their king and their country to put the common enemy to flight.
Engelbrecht, their leader—jolly, true and a little tipsy—bursts into the
king's palace, and proudly offers him the arms and the devotion of the men
in sheep-skin coats, true representatives of the Swedish spirit.
Eric, the king's dissolute and epileptic son, heir to the throne, is in every
way a contrast to his father: he is the chronic weakling who oscillates
between unholy desire and self-disgust, the born pariah in the realm of the
mind, whether he be clad in purple or in rags. Of such, we think, the
Kingdom of Heaven is not made. Yet Strindberg shows us Eric's glimpse of
heaven. In the fourth act Eric and his boon companion and evil counsellor,
Göran Persson, bent on the pleasures of the tavern, meet Karin, the
flowergirl. She asks Eric to buy her wreath of flowers:

Prince Eric (looks fixedly at the girl). Who—is—that?
Göran Persson. A flowergirl.
Prince Eric. No—it—is—something else—do you see?
Göran Persson. What am I supposed to see?
Prince Eric. You ought to see what I see, but you can't.

The girl kneels before the prince. He takes the wreath from her hands,
places it on her head, and asks her to rise. "Rise, my child," he says, "you
must not kneel before me, but I shall kneel before you. I do not want to ask
your name, for I know you, though I have never seen you, or heard anything
about you." He begs her to ask a favour of him. She asks him to buy her
flowers. Eric takes a ring off his finger, and gives it to the girl. She dare not
wear it, and returns it. She leaves them, and Eric asks Göran if he has not
seen the marvellous apparition, heard the wonderful voice. Göran has heard
nothing but the voice of a common lass, a little cheeky.

Prince Eric. Hold your tongue, Göran, I love her.
Göran Persson. She is not the first one.
Prince Eric. Yes, the first one, the only one.
Göran Persson. Well, seduce her then.

Prince Eric (draws his sword). Take care, or by God——
Göran Persson. Is he going to prick me now again?
Prince Eric. I do not know what has happened, but from this moment I
detest you; I cannot live in the same town as you; you pollute me with
your eyes, your whole being stinks. Therefore I leave you, and never
want to see you before my face again. I leave you as if an angel had
come to fetch me from the dwellings of the wicked; I detest the past, as
I detest you and myself. (Follows Karin.)

Though Strindberg shows an understanding of love's miracles—with which
he is not generally credited—he makes no attempt to endow the first
meeting between Eric and the peasant girl who became the mother of his
children, and finally his queen, with a greater transfiguring power than it
possessed. Here, as in all his historical dramas, he writes with the sense of
the importance of the infinitely small, with the knowledge that "characters"
and events arise out of the mind's contact with things that seem insignificant
to the superficial observer. The wooden rigidity which the ordinary
historian gives to the figures of the past, is the result of the incapacity to
visualise the daily, the commonplace, in lives lived long ago. Strindberg's
psychological conception of characters of the past is based on an almost
microscopical power of seeing details. His own hypersensitive emotional
memory initiated him into the manner, in which history is made by mood
and temper, aches and pains—as well as by deliberate purpose of will and
political programmes. Whether it be true or not that the Revocation of the
Edict of Nantes was due to the toothache of Louis XIV, and that history was
thus made by the ill-timed activity of molar nerves, psychological research
into the origin of great events on the world's stage would reveal causes
which the historian does not deign to consider.
Eric XIV, the drama of the reign of the mad son of the sane King Gustavus,
is a masterpiece of life-like presentation. Searching comparisons between
the arts of Strindberg and Shakespeare are otiose. But in the dramatic
treatment of lunacy the author of Eric XIV may well be compared with the
author of Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth. The dramatic verisimilitude of
Strindberg's lunatics is made perfect through an experiential familiarity with
the nethermost adventures of the mind, which Shakespeare lacked. In Eric
XIV the monomania of persecution, the fitful délires de grandeur, the half-

conscious cruelty are drawn with a spontaneous realism which is
heightened by a terrible psychological accuracy of analysis. Strindberg has
drawn almost as many mad and half-mad folk as Shakespeare. He can
describe every form of mental derangement, and has not forgotten the soul
obsessed by God and, therefore, detached from the world. In The Saga of
the Folkungs the Voice of the Unseen speaks through an obsessed woman
who sees the souls of people, and is able to reveal the hidden treachery of
those who surround King Magnus. "One must be mad," says a barber in this
play, "to have the courage to reveal all secrets at once." In Easter, the most
mystical of Strindberg's plays, he draws an exquisite character of a young
girl who is "mad," whose soul is pure and lovely, and who sees and hears
things that happen far away. To her, also, all secrets are open; she can see
the stars during the daytime, and, though her head is "soft," her spirit dwells
in the realms of pure beauty. There is a fool in To Damascus; there is the
frenzy of despair in The Father. The novels Remorse, At the Edge of the Sea
and The Gothic Rooms present a gallery of psycho-pathological types.
Strindberg's novelistic treatment of lunacy has a natural profuseness of
imagination, not unlike that of E.T.A. Hoffmann and Dostoevsky. It
therefore bears little resemblance to the more artificial composition,
typified by Paul Hervieu's L'Inconnu or Guy de Maupassant's Le Horla.
The scenes in Eric XIV are constructed with a finished workmanship, and
an economy of events which make it one of Strindberg's most playable
pieces. Consumed by jealous hatred of his brother, Johan, Eric keeps him a
prisoner; a prey of malignant suspicion against everybody, Eric commits
atrocious murders and endures frantic remorse. At last, Eric's excesses can
no longer be endured by the people. He is imprisoned, and Johan becomes
king. In Eric XIV the psychological dissection of character does not hinder
the dramatic movement of the play; the playwright combines brilliant
impressionism with due subservience to the laws of the theatre. In The Saga
of the Folkungs he has allowed the psychological treatment to usurp the
domain of drama. The play deals with a period in Swedish history when two
brother kings occupied the throne. Here, too, we have sombre tragedy.
There is no lack of dramatic elements, for the horrors of plague, hanging,
flagellants and execution are shown upon the stage. But Strindberg has
psychologised his characters so intensely that the flesh has, as it were,
fallen away from their souls, and with that the obscurity of motives and

objects which creates the deception upon which human action is built, and
which is essential to drama. The effect of the play on the spectator is the
intense, yet real, terror of a nightmare, from which we vainly struggle to
awaken. The over-balance of psychological analysis mars some of the later
historical dramas. It makes some of the transcendental plays and the
chamber plays mere dramatic dialogues, pictures of minds in conflict; it
gives us the Shadow Theatre of the Soul, and leads Strindberg to bold
defiance of the rules of dramaturgy—including those laid down by himself.
The cycle of the Vasa plays—Master Olof, Gustavus Vasa and Eric XIV—
bears the mark of the consummate craftsman. Their strength is the strength
of reality, their beauty a perfect proportion of dramatic construction. A row
of historical plays followed: Gustavus Adolphus (1900); Engelbrecht
(1901); Charles XII (1901); Gustavus III (1903); Queen Christina (1903);
The Nightingale of Wittenberg (1903); The Last Knight (1908); The
National Director (1909); The Earl of Bjälbo (1909). Of these, Gustavus
Adolphus with its breadth of battlefield panorama; Charles XII with its
narrow searchlight on the declining figure of the lion-hearted, but beaten
king; Queen Christina with its flamboyant sketch of the clever and
capricious daughter of Gustavus Adolphus, are eminently playable.
Gustavus III has pointed dialogue, cameo-like pictures of word-fencing; it
faithfully paints the decadent time when Sweden was steeped in the sterile
scepticism of France; it portrays the reaction which led to the assassination
of the King of Masquerades, but the play is not woven with the dramaturgic
skill of the former dramas. The Last Knight is an historical jugglery with
ideas in five acts which strains the dramatic form beyond its measure of
elasticity.

It would require a separate volume to deal adequately with Strindberg's
historical writings. It is not only his dramas which bear testimony to the
originality of his historical conception, but a number of treatises, essays,
and stories, such as Studies in the History of Culture, The Swedish People,
Swedish Destinies and Adventures, Historical Miniatures, and The
Conscious Will in the History of the World. His independent historical
researches unearthed documents and accumulated evidence with a

painstaking thoroughness which should have endowed him with a special
"authority." But he has been derided and abused because of his lack of a
truly professorial treatment of historical characters. His powers of
visualisation and interpretation have given offence to historical specialists.
He has been accused of distorting the calm faces of royal personages, of
encumbering his pictures of the past with ugly and unnecessary details. He
has been condemned because there is a twentieth-century atmosphere about
his characters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But we may well
ask: Has any historical chronicler or dramatist ever given a faithful
representation of the past except through the medium of his own
personality, his own time? There are anachronisms in Hamlet; so there are
in Eric XIV. In a wider sense, all historical writings are anachronistic. In
that sense Strindberg's history is less burdened with errors than that of most
writers. The offence which Strindberg committed—if it be an offence—is
that he saw and threw upon the canvas the lasting psychological features
which persist through the vicissitudes of time, through the altered
conditions of morality, custom, and nationality. He saw the eternally human
beneath the masks of canonised and apotheosised individuals.
Gustavus Adolphus, Strindberg's drama of the fair hero-king of Sweden
who played an illustrious part in the Thirty Years' War, and who landed with
twenty thousand men in Pomerania in 1630 as friend and protector of
oppressed Protestants in Germany, has all the elements of a powerful
historical play. It has been severely criticised in Sweden and in Germany.
Strindberg has himself explained that the Swedes objected to his portrait of
Gustavus Adolphus because he had made him too small, and the Germans
objected because he had made the conquering hero too great. Strindberg did
not hesitate to show the blemishes on the historical idol of Sweden: the
weakness, the impetuousness, the spells of fear, the carelessness, the moral
elasticity which characterised Gustavus Adolphus. Nor did he hesitate to
show the horrors and self-deception of war, the blackguardly deeds which
are glorified by militarism, or the petty quarrels between Catholics,
Lutherans, and Calvinists which prolonged the strife. The king is
represented as being brought—by the force of events—to see the
unworthiness of the cause which he espouses, and for which he finally dies.
This was an unpardonable offence against the sacro-sanctity of tradition,
and the fact that Strindberg's Gustavus Adolphus lost none of his heroic
qualities by being stripped of pseudo-angelic ones did not temper the wind

of the general condemnation. The famous generals of the Swedish army,
Horn, Banér, Tott, Brahe, Torstensson, Stenbock, have been shorn of none
of their glory.
In Charles XII Strindberg repeats the offence committed in Gustavus
Adolphus. With irreverent and destructive hands Charles XII broke the
greatness of Sweden,[1] builded by Gustavus Adolphus, and Strindberg
mercilessly analyses the foolhardy mind of Charles XII, through which his
campaigns and his country were foredoomed to disaster.
The attacks made upon Strindberg by those who cling to stereotyped
methods of historical judgment have but served to show the importance of
the method which he inaugurated. It will undoubtedly guide the historian of
the future. The average historian moulds his material to the conventional
view; he has no place for the shapes of originality which, but for his
cramped pages, would stand forth lifelike and real. Mr. William Archer tells
us that the historical dramatist must not flagrantly defy or disappoint
popular knowledge or prejudice. But popular knowledge can take no
account of the deeper psychological traits which it is the business of the
historical dramatist to discover. Mr. Archer holds that the dramatist must not
run counter to "generally accepted tradition." "New truth, in history," he
adds, "must be established either by new documents, or by a careful and
detailed reinterpretation of old documents; but the stage is not the place
either for the production of documents or for historical exegesis."[2] Those
who thus separate the known past from the revivifying influence of
imaginative art seek to impose the academic view of history upon the
artistic conscience. That conscience is never free from impressions of the
accumulated experience of the past. Every play which depicts yesterday's
customs, manners, costumes, conflicts of thought and morality is
"historical," and artistic exegesis alone can make real to us that which is
absent from school treatises, statistics and blue-books.
The series of plays which have been designated as symbolical,
transcendental, mystical and mad—according to the mental outlook of the
reader—bring us nearest to the real Strindberg, to the essential in his
imaginative art which, though illusive and often completely submerged, yet
stands forth as the structure of his life. To this series belong To Damascus, I
and II (1898), Advent (1899), The Dance of Death, I and II (1901), Easter
(1901), The Crown Bride (1902), Swanwhite (1902), The Dream Play

(1902), The Great Highway (1909). In these plays we have the eternal
questions of the human mind, the joys of illusion, the sorrows of
knowledge, the fruits of sin and hatred, the rise through pain and suffering,
the soul's battle with relentless fate, the awful mystery of existence, and the
ultimate hope of something better to come, cast into the weird and haunting
shapes of the people of Strindberg's inner world; the souls that are at once
real and unreal, mad and sane, acting in the solid world of matter, and held
in shadowy bondage by the mists of dreamland. Here we meet them all, the
souls that have gone by, that are here around us, that are yet to come. They
meet us with tears and smiles, with lies and truth, with virtue and vice,
pathetic and repulsive, lovable and loathsome—humanity.

Strindberg in his library in the "Blue Tower," 1911. His Last
Home in Stockholm

Strindberg suggests the soul's corruption and the soul's ineffable sweetness
with the same impassioned power of creation. In Swanwhite, the charming
fairy play in which the influence of Maeterlinck is discernible, the budding
love between a fairy-like princess and a chivalrous prince is described with
a delicacy which brings the reader into a land of romance and roses, of
stainless purity and spring-like innocence. In Advent we are brought into the
house of wickedness, of cruel, designing, ancient wickedness. The old judge

and his wife are steeped in every variety of human treachery and vileness.
They die, and we follow them into the darkness of hell, where the seven
deadly sins have grouped themselves around the throne of the monarch.
Through the pain of being made to see themselves as they really are, they
cry out for light. In both pieces the "supernatural" plays the most important
part; the wicked stepmother in Swanwhite exhales a breath of evil before
which the rose fades, and the dove falls dead; the ill-treated children in
Advent are comforted by a mysterious playmate, clad in white, who brings
light into the dark cellar in which they have been imprisoned. The story in
The Crown Bride of a peasant girl, who kills her child, is told with an
exalted simplicity, and given a setting of the old fairy-faith of Dalecarlia
which peoples the rivers with nature-spirits and the forests with trolls. Here,
as in the other fairy plays, things are endowed with souls, and the fierce
hatred between the two old peasant families is reflected by every object that
surrounds them. Unknown forces are all the time engaged in a mystic
underplay which is the real action of the piece.
The law of karma—the chain of cause and effect—runs through all these
plays, and binds together the psychological sequence where the dramatic
construction fails. In Easter Strindberg has drawn the anguish of a little
bourgeois family, labouring under the misfortunes following upon the
father's defalcations. He is in prison, and Elis, his son, a schoolmaster, who
is meticulously honest, is weighed down by shame, and tormented by the
fear that the man to whom the father is heavily indebted, will exercise his
right and seize the furniture. The family look upon this man, Lindkvist, as
an ogre, and when they learn that he has come to live in the same town they
are in constant fear that he will ruin them. Throughout the three acts of this
very playable piece Strindberg gives a highly finished and concentrated
picture of those multiple and long-lived sufferings of the innocent, which
follow in the wake of transgressions committed by the guilty. But he makes
Lindkvist an arbiter of fate, a messenger of hope who shows that good as
well as evil is minutely recorded in the great Book of Events. For long ago
when Elis' father was a young man, and before he placed himself within the
meshes of the law, he did Lindkvist a kindness. That kindness has never
been forgotten; it lay like a seed of life in Lindkvist's soul, and, as it grew, it
made him a generous man. And thus Lindkvist forgives and forgets, and the
spirit of Easter is resurrected in the hearts of the family. Eleonora, the pure
and tender-spirited girl who went mad on the day when her father was sent

to prison, is wrongfully suspected of having stolen a daffodil plant in the
shop of the adjoining florist. The symbolism of the piece is made complete
by the strange play of the shadow of paternal crime on the guiltless child. In
her mad innocence of the world's ways Eleonora has taken the flowerpot
and left a shilling and her name on the counter, but the coin and the name
are not seen by the agitated shopkeeper who is anxious to brand the
suspected culprit. The "theft" is at last satisfactorily explained. Eleonora
speaks with the wisdom of many lives when she says: "I was born old ... I
knew everything already when I was born, and when I learnt something I
only recollected. When I was four years old I knew men's ...
thoughtlessness and foolishness, and therefore people were unkind to me."
The force of suggestion, the primary importance of thought form the
keynote of several of Strindberg's plays. In Eric XIV he lets Göran Persson
say to Eric: "King and friend, you so often use the word hate that at last you
imagine yourself to be the enemy of humanity. Don't use it! The word is the
first realisation of the creative force, and you throw a spell over yourself by
this incantation. Say 'love' a little oftener, and you will imagine yourself
loved." There are Crimes and Crimes, a play in four acts which has been a
great theatrical success, is built around the subtle force of evil thought.
Maurice, a dramatist of the Bohemian world in Paris, who is about to
receive the laurels of fame deserts his mistress and his child to follow a
woman bent on pleasure only; in the elation of their passion they wish death
to Maurice's child and destruction to all obstacles in their way. The child
dies mysteriously in the morning, and through a combination of malign
circumstances Maurice is accused of being the murderer. He is innocent, but
he has sinned in thought, and when, at the end of the fourth act, he is
mercifully extracted from the vortex, into which he has brought himself, the
Abbé says to him: "You were not innocent, for we are also responsible for
our thoughts, words, desires, and you murdered in thought when your evil
will wished for the death of your child."
There are Crimes and Crimes does full justice to Strindberg as an
accomplished stage craftsman; in The Dance of Death we have, perhaps, the
most sharply chiselled dramatic form of all his later plays. It is a symphony
of married hatred and misery in which the orchestration is perfect. The
dialogue is at once natural and calculated; the silent play of the piece even
more intensely suggestive than the spoken words. We get glimpses of the

dramatic art of bygone days: that of Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; we
are mercilessly ground in the mill of a ghastly nineteenth-century problem
play. The figure of the Captain of the Fortress, the untruthful, scheming old
rascal who has attained to a diabolical mastery in the art of making others
unhappy and uncomfortable, is drawn with a supreme irony which makes it
unique in vital drama. Amongst Strindberg's realistic plays it has another
distinction: it represents his only stage-creation of a vampire-like husband.
The wife is naturally not far behind him. Death stands behind the central
figures of the play, the dancing death of Holbein and Saint-Saëns. The
strains of his tune drown the jarring notes of conflict, and bring the voice of
hope to the Captain's lips: "Wipe out, and pass on!"
The trilogy To Damascus, with its autobiographical wanderings on the
crooked paths of experience, is perhaps the strangest literary play ever
written. It contains the elements of the old miracle and morality plays, the
soul's battle with itself and with the Devil, its final renouncement of the
world and entry into the new Life. "The Stranger" meets "The Lady";
together they journey from station to station on the road of suffering and
disillusionment. They part in hatred, and meet again in the vicissitudes of
love. They separate finally as The Stranger attains to peace, religious peace,
in the monastery of dead passions on the top of the hill. The stages that He
between the beginning and the end of the journey are described in scenes
which are both possible and impossible. The Beggar, The Doctor, The
Sister, The Mother, The Old Man, The Confessor, The Abbess, The Fool,
The Shadows, and The Children all take their assigned parts as separate
individuals. And yet they seem to be one and the same, fragments of a
multiple personality. All things and all thoughts come back in this play like
the top spun by a skilful player of diabolo. The Stranger climbs a mountain,
and arrogantly threatens the Lord of the skies with a cross which he has
snatched from a Calvary. He falls, and is found in raving delirium by the
kind Samaritans of the Convent who bring him to their hospital. He regains
consciousness, and finds himself seated at a table in the Refectory in
company with the shades of all whom he has injured, or with whose fate his
own is bound up. The scene is one of the deepest religious realism. It has a
touch of that crushing and unreasonable sense of guilt which often
accompanies the return to physical life of one who has been to the very
gates of death. The curse of Deuteronomy is read by The Confessor, and
every word brands the memory of The Stranger with the seal of The Law.

Of this consciousness of guilt The Stranger says: "There are moments when
I feel as if I carried within me all the sin and sorrow and uncleanliness and
shame of the world; there are moments when I believe that the wicked act,
crime itself, is an imposed punishment."
The world gives a banquet in honour of The Stranger, who has succeeded in
making gold. But the banquet is so arranged as to show the envy and hatred
and treachery which lie behind the festive speeches, the fickleness of public
approval. In the portrait gallery of the monastery The Stranger is shown the
real selves of great men who have been honoured for their consistency,
whilst they have been bundles of inconsistencies—Napoleon, Luther,
Voltaire, Goethe, Bismarck. The yearning for the peace that passeth all
understanding is well expressed when The Stranger, bruised and tired,
weary of searching and self-disgust, sees the white monastery on the hill
and cries:
"Anything so white I never before beheld on this dirty earth, except in my
dreams; yes, this is my youth's dream of a house wherein dwell peace and
purity. I greet thee, white house.... Now, I am at home."
It is as if the heat of imagination, which produced some of Strindberg's
great books, were too great to permit him to leave a subject, when,
artistically, it is finished. After Inferno he wrote Legends which was but a
faint echo. The theme of To Damascus is weakly repeated in The Great
Highway, a drama in verse and prose which also deals with the soul's
fearful struggle and disillusionment. To Damascus contains some shallow
thoughts and some banalities of expression, but it is a powerful creation,
magnificently conceived. In The Great Highway the mysticism falls flat, the
play does not grip by any poetic power; it is an olla podrida of its author's
philosophy of life which sometimes is not even lukewarm. But it does
contain some gems of lyrical beauty, and one or two passages in which
Strindberg reaches his own heights.
The Dream Play is a new conception and a new art. In a memorandum to
the play Strindberg writes: "In this Dream Play, as in the previous one To
Damascus, the author has sought to imitate the disconnected, but apparently
logical form of the dream. Anything may happen; everything is possible and
probable. Time and space do not exist;, on an insignificant background of
reality imagination spins threads and weaves new patterns: a mixture of

memories, experiences, free fancies, absurdities and improvisations. The
characters split, double, multiply, evaporate, solidify, diffuse, clarify. But
one consciousness reigns above them all—that of the dreamer; it knows no
secrets, no incongruities, no scruples, no law."
The texture of To Damascus is solid compared with that of The Dream Play.
The story of the descent of the Daughter of Indra into matter, of human life
as typified by The Glazier, The Officer, The Lawyer, The Bill-poster and
The Poet, is told without any dramatic sequence, such as is required by the
theatre of to-day. It is a play written for a stage not yet built, to be
performed by some diaphanous visitants from the astral world. Strindberg
calls The Dream Play a Buddhistic and proto-Christian drama. It is more
than that: it is pre-cosmic.
The paradoxical versatility of a man who holds all the keys of successful
drama in his hands, and yet sacrifices the theatre to the transcendentalism of
his ideas, is not easily explained. Strindberg told Dr. John Landquist, now
editor of the posthumous edition of his collected works, that he really found
it difficult to write modern plays, and that he loved pomp and circumstance
in drama.[3] That love is displayed in the sumptuous repast introduced into
the second part of To Damascus, at once coarsely barbaric and
uncomfortably ethereal, a strange combination of the Banquet of Life and
the Swedish hors-d'œuvre table. And yet, this is the man who wrote the
Chamber Plays: Storm, The Burned Lot, The Pelican, The Black Glove and
The Spook Sonata (1907), in which the figures move, physical, yet free
from the three dimensions, impersonated ideas, brain-spectres who walk the
boards with unsteady feet. This is the man who wrote the preface to Lady
Julie, who sought the realisation of his theatrical ideal in the one-act play
with two or three characters, and who later came to write Gustavus
Adolphus with fifty-four characters, Midsummer with thirty-two characters;
who created twenty-four characters for Gustavus Vasa, and twenty for Eric
XIV and The Saga of the Folkungs respectively, and whose dramatic
lavishness necessitated a succession of five-act dramas. It seems strange
that the author of saga plays, like The Journey of Lucky Peter, and The Keys
of Heaven, with its parodied Sancho Panzaisms, should have composed The
Dance of Death; that the conscience-stricken visions of To Damascus
should be followed by The Slippers of Abu Casem. This ingenious "toy for

children" Strindberg dedicated to his youngest daughter, the little Anne-
Marie, on her sixth birthday.
The two great Norwegian dramatists presented an orderly development in
the choice of dramatic form, which makes the study of their art an exercise
in the logic of temperament. The natural romanticism of Ibsen's early plays
passed into the classical art of Ghosts. The intellectual modernism of the
later Ibsen was the ripeness anticipated by every shrewd observer of the
course of his mind. The art of Ibsen is complex, yet simple. Born out of the
depths of his love of truth and his love of beauty, it arose, well-formed,
palpable, a thing for all the world to see and hear, an indictment of the
gigantic social fraud to which all must ultimately listen. It is essentially
exoteric. So is the art of the rival and minor playwright, Björnson, who has
given the world its most perfect dramatised sermons. Strindberg's art is
incalculable, subtle, the caprice of a spirit that cannot exhaust itself: esoteric
because it is ever rooted in the unconscious. His plays may be read and seen
by the many, but at present they will be understood only by the few.
In versatility of dramatic form Hauptmann stands nearest Strindberg. He
has almost as many strings to his harp as the Swede—he has written
naturalistic plays and fairy drama, social plays and mystical drama, farce,
comedy, romance and realism. Both dramatists are impelled by pity for
human suffering, but the pity that guides Hauptmann, and which is typified
by The Weavers, is an elemental, earthbound pity, concerned with food and
poverty, lack of shelter and work. Strindberg's pity is transcendentalised; it
hovers round the greater mysteries of existence itself, seeks to extract the
human spirit from the curse of illusions. Hence the absence of finality in his
writings. No book gives the impression of being quite finished; they all
transmit the ache for a new point of view. Whilst Maeterlinck has evolved a
philosophy of spiritualised tranquillity, and administers a soothing narcotic
for the Soul Rampant in the twilight of his charmed castles, Strindberg
walks on, acutely conscious of the thorns upon which he treads. Whilst
Björnson, satisfied, proclaims his ideal of physical purity, and throws down
A Gauntlet at vice, Strindberg is haunted by the ideal of the human soul's
unattainable purity from dross. Whilst Bernard Shaw cuts the world's
perplexities with a joke, a flashing paradoxical joke, Strindberg raises his
bands in threatening condemnation at the God-head Himself. In Villiers de
l'Isle-Adam's Elën, Samuel says to Goetze: "Science will not suffice.

Sooner or later you will end by coming to your knees." Goetze: "Before
what?" Samuel: "Before the Darkness." Strindberg was brought to his knees
by the Darkness, but he rose with the dawn that followed.
During the thirteen years that passed between the quiet celebration of
Strindberg's fiftieth birthday, and the national festivities with which the
Swedish people acclaimed him on January 22nd, 1912, his countrymen
were gradually made aware of his greatness. Men of all parties fearlessly
proclaimed his genius over the open grave, though some would never have
ventured to do so if they had not felt quite sure that he could not prepare
any further shocks of surprise.
It is impossible to present a study of the experiences which caused the
corrosive bitterness in Strindberg's attacks on everything and everybody,
without reference to the unjust and Pharisaical criticism to which he had to
submit. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that it was difficult to live
with Strindberg. The Swedes had to live with him, and the household of
those who set themselves up to guard the propriety and integrity of literary
art was day by day threatened by his revolutionary ideas, his personal
attacks on spotless individuals, his coarse-grained descriptions of
indescribable things. We must therefore extend sympathy to his detractors
as well as to him. There is, besides, a reversionary power in the mere
passage of time which calls for special tolerance. The reviewers of the
Athenæum and Blackwood's Magazine, who suggested that Ruskin's
Modern Painters had emanated from Bedlam, are more entitled to our
sympathy than the object of their criticism.
The Swedes have a peculiar fear of praising that which is their own. They
labour under a feeling that such praise is egotistical, blustering and
discourteous to others. In Swedish peasant homes the housewife does
honour to her guests by loud depreciation of the contents of her house and
its offerings, no matter how well-appointed the home may be. The trait
persists in the judgment of cultured people on national qualities, art and
literature. It is certainly graceful, and makes the Swede an excellent
companion, a polite and generous appreciator of the talents of others. But it
is inimical to the toleration of a forceful and self-confident personality
within one's own family or nation, and favourable to the mediocritisation of
boisterous originality. If Strindberg had been an Italian or a Spaniard he

would in all probability have been the recipient of the Nobel Prize during
his life-time, in addition to posthumous honours.

Strindberg in his study, 1911.

The Strindberg Theatre in Stockholm.

In the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy (of Literature), the late
Dr. C.D. af Wirsén, Strindberg had a persistent enemy. Wirsén acted as
Secretary to the Academy from 1884 to his death in 1912, and exercised
considerable influence over the selection of recipients of the Nobel Prize in
literature which is awarded by the Swedish Academy. To Wirsén who wrote
idyllic and elegiac poetry, and who held everything that is old in reverence,
Strindberg was incomprehensible. By his attacks on Strindberg, and also by

his derisive criticism of another free-thinking Swedish writer, Ellen Key,[4]
Wirsén shows a close resemblance to the type of foolish biographer for
which Mr. A.C. Benson has found an admirable name: the eagle-eating
monkey. There is a pseudo-aristocracy of mind which receives not truth in
its house, unless she be arrayed in garments of classical cut, and has not
journeyed along the highways of humankind. Wirsén looked upon
Strindberg as a parvenu of intelligence, just as certain academicians
regarded Spencer as a parvenu of science. Wirsén's diligent criticisms of
Strindberg range over twenty years,[5] and may in some measure explain
Strindberg's delusions of persecution. In 1882 Wirsén gave qualified praise
to Master Olof, and took the opportunity of reminding his readers that The
Red Room was pervaded by "evil but empty wit." His virtuous indignation
over "the blasphemous effusions" and "ridiculous vanity" of Strindberg's
autobiography was sustained by the discovery that it contained much
boastfulness, but no solid thought, and he searched in vain for any proof
that the unlucky author was—what he might have been—a noble, though
eccentric personality. He received The Father with feelings of pity for he
could see nothing in it, but the impotence of a diseased imagination and a
mixture of coarseness and paradoxicality. When Comrades was published
Wirsén expressed his astonishment that such a play had found a publisher.
He dismissed The Stronger, as giving "no evidence of strength in the
composition. Anything weaker has seldom been put together." He could
find no artistic merit in At the Edge of the Sea. In 1897 he condemned The
Link and Playing with Fire by declaring that both were equally "unpleasant
and painful." He naturally found Strindberg's verses bad, and shuddered
over their invectives of hatred and revenge. When Inferno was published he
derived comfort from announcing that Strindberg's intellect "has now gone
to pieces," but recorded mournfully that the pen that wrote Legends was as
evil as ever. Wirsén did not believe in Strindberg's delusions; he claimed to
see through them: they were nothing but coquetry with the public,
sensational advertisement. To Damascus was to him "a horrid and
depressing work—excessively loathsome." The most unjust of all Wirsén's
accusations against Strindberg is, perhaps, that of dulness. The
autopsychological quest for truth in Strindberg's writings bored Wirsén, and
he thought others must be bored too. Between the chastisements Wirsén
exhibited a truly Christian forbearance, and graced a corner of his literary
column by beseeching Strindberg and his followers to return to the path of

goodness. He assured the sinners that their return to sounder ideas and purer
production would be met with a warm welcome and undisguised joy in
spite of the past.
But the prodigal son of Swedish literature did not return to the house of the
Academy. He had been well castigated for his brilliant satire on that
somnolent institution in The New Kingdom, but he continued to mock "the
Gods of Time" until the end of his days. In 1910 he took the Academy to
task for its admiration of Baron Klinkowström, a poetaster, whose puerile
and pompous verses were free from any menace to the existing order of
things.
It is true that Wirsén did not represent the whole of literary criticism in
Sweden. It is also true that Strindberg always had a small circle of faithful
followers who admired him, believed in him—and copied him. But during
the many years when Strindberg was absent from Sweden a new school of
literature was formed which was equally out of touch with his early realism
and his late mysticism. Oscar Levertin, Werner von Heidenstam, Gustaf af
Geijerstam and Selma Lagerlöf are the most prominent names of modern
Swedish literature. Geijerstam's Erik Grane is an offshoot of early
Strindbergism, and Heidenstam's brilliant stories of the soldiers of Charles
XII, Karolinerna, are not without traces of the influence of Strindberg's
Swedish Destinies and Adventures. But Strindberg was always too sceptical
to stake his fortune on any particular breed of Pegasus. In his last two
"terrible" novels, The Gothic Rooms (1904) and Black Flags (1907), he
again delivered himself of violent and personal attacks upon society in
general and the priests of literature and art in particular, thereby widening
the gulf that lay between him and them.
The many attacks made upon Strindberg in Sweden had one practical effect
which caused him bitter disappointment. Theatrical managers fought shy of
his plays. Fourteen years passed between the successful production of The
Father in Paris and its performance in Stockholm. Lady Julie had to wait
eighteen years before she was allowed to appear in Stockholm. In 1906 the
play had a run of several weeks at "Folkteatern," in Stockholm, a playhouse
for the working classes, where the aristocratic lady's downfall was
appreciated in a crude, but wholehearted manner.

Whilst the theatrical managers of Sweden were hesitating as to the
expediency of allowing Strindberg to overshadow the stage, Herr
Lauthenburg gave popular performances at the "Residenz Theater" in Berlin
of Creditors, Playing with Fire and Facing Death. Together with
Hauptmann and Ibsen, Strindberg now won theatrical triumphs all over
Germany.
The indifference shown in Sweden towards the performance of Strindberg's
plays led him to plan a Strindberg-Theatre to be run on lines similar to those
of the Théâtre Maeterlinck. After many difficulties the plan was at last
realised in the autumn of 1907, when The Intimate Theatre began its stormy
career with The Pelican, The Burned Lot, Storm, and the Hoffmanesque and
elliptic Spook Sonata. These plays were promptly attacked by critics who
made little attempt to understand them.
The efforts made in certain quarters to silence Strindberg could not suppress
the rising wave of admiration. When once the public had been brought in
touch with him, the anathema of the powerful literary coterie was useless.
In 1901 Herr Albert Ranft had courageously staged Gustavus Vasa and Eric
XIV at "Svenska Teatern" in Stockholm. They became theatrical successes.
"Dramatiska Teatern" followed suit with Charles XII, Easter and There are
Crimes and Crimes. A young Norwegian actress, Harriet Bosse, played the
part of Eleonora in Easter with so much charm that she fascinated both
audience and author. She became a favourite actress and—Strindberg's third
wife. Several of Strindberg's great historical plays were performed before
the opening of his own Intimate Theatre. Though the change in public
opinion was making itself felt, Strindberg could not but resent the tardy
recognition of his works.
He was out of touch with the literary men of his own country. To them he
appeared as an outlander, and yet he was, withal, so intensely Swedish. He
sought in vain to denationalise himself. He was not Swedish with the
passionate, reverential love with which Dostoevsky was Russian. Strindberg
was Swedish in spite of his efforts to the contrary; his country was in his
blood and bones. When Herr A. Babillotte,[6] a German writer, says of
Strindberg: "He is without roots ... though a Swede, he is certainly not
Swedish," he shows scant understanding of one of the mainsprings in
Strindberg's character and production. The statement is on a par with his
contemptuous dismissal of Strindberg's historical dramas.[7] These plays

drew nourishment from his love of his country, and derived actuality from
his identity with Sweden. His heart hankered after Sweden, and drove him
home when pride would have kept him away. In one of his first poems,
entitled In Paris, he sang wittily of his incorrigible heart's longing for
Sweden, despite the allurements of Montmartre. He felt lonely in
Switzerland because he had not spoken to a countryman for three months.
The difficulty in tracing Strindberg's literary ancestry in Sweden is
responsible for attempts to find his roots elsewhere. Thus Laura Marholm
elaborates a fantastic theory, according to which the mixture of genius and
nomadic barbarism in Strindberg is to be explained by his "Mongolian
blood." The union of mystic melancholy and exuberant sensuousness in
Strindberg caused close, but futile comparisons to be made between him
and E.J. Stagnelius, a Swedish poet of the romantic school who died in
1823. But a greater number of points of contact could be established
between Strindberg and the "wizard" of Swedish literature, K.J.L. Almqvist,
who lived in open revolt against authority and convention of all kinds, and
whose prolific writings showed a remarkable versatility of mind. Almqvist
was a realist and symbolist who loved to throw out paradoxical bons-mots
on current morals with a generous hand. "Two things are white," he said, "...
innocence and arsenic." The amoral note of his writings and the general
bizarrerie of his metaphors may show a certain likeness to Strindberg, but it
vanishes upon closer comparison. Almqvist was not a dramatist.
Though without direct literary parentage in Sweden, Strindberg is the most
typical representative of his country's temperament and spiritual struggles.
His genius is indigenous in spite of its universality. His is the race-
consciousness which is enriched by contact with other races, but which
never loses its distinct quality.
He writes an idiomatic Swedish which, in a sense, is not reproducible in
another language. His sentences, whether in the dialogue of a drama, or in
the story of a novel, are wrought with a nervous force which is
untranslatable. His phrases seem to be innervated, warm-blooded entities,
and support the theory that the sentence preceded the word in the evolution
of speech. He is often ungrammatical; each sentence is a living whole
which cannot be divided. Analyse him with syntax and dictionary, and you
will find "mistakes" and startling neology. The meaning will sometimes be
obscure. But read him as you would listen to a piece of music with your ear

to the harmonics, and you will find a consummate artist in words. Laura
Marholm says that the sound of Strindberg is like bell metal in Swedish,
whilst it resembles tin in German. There is much truth in the statement.
Even the vigorous and cogent translations into German by Herr Emil
Schering cannot retain the soul and magic of Strindberg's style. Translated
from German into English he is unrecognisable. The difficulty of fusing his
meaning and style in a new form is also apparent in the direct translations
into English which have been made. Some of his plays have been
sympathetically done into English by Herr Edwin Björkman. Mr. Björkman
quotes from an article in The Drama, in which the belief is expressed that
Strindberg's prose will be rendered better in "American" than in English.
Mr. Björkman's translations are certainly American rather than English. The
question whether this is an advantage to the style and beauty of the
translation is a matter of taste which it would be invidious to discuss.
Strindberg never strove to build up a style, like Stevenson who "played the
sedulous ape" to Lamb, Wordsworth and Baudelaire. He knew nothing of
the terrible torture of style which made Flaubert's literary labours a
martyrdom. Ideas haunted Strindberg as they haunted Jules de Goncourt,
but he never experienced the slavery to literary form in which the
Goncourts lived. He did not live in order to write; he wrote in order to live.
In an article of reminiscences by Madame Hélène Welinder,[8] who spent
the summer of 1884 with Strindberg and his family at Chexbres in
Switzerland, there is a vivid account of Strindberg's manner of writing. He
wrote with feverish restlessness, and tried to overcome sleeplessness with
large doses of bromide. She asked him if rest would not be better than
bromide. Strindberg put his hand to his forehead as if in pain, and replied
with a tone of despair: "I cannot rest, however much I should like to. I must
write for bread in order to maintain wife and children, and, even apart from
this, I cannot stop. Whether I travel by train, or do anything else, my brain
works incessantly, it grinds and grinds like a mill, and I cannot make it stop.
I get no peace before I see my thoughts on paper, and then something new
begins immediately, and there is the same misery. I write and write, and do
not even read through what I have written."
This rapidity of composition was probably to some extent responsible for
the frequent repetitions of the same word within a short paragraph, the
careless tautology of ideas, situations and episodes in his books. Many

instances of such episode-repetition could be given. Thus Comrades and
Charles XII contain similar phrases about the woman clipping the man's
hair of strength, whilst his head rests in her lap. The Dream Play has several
scenes which are "the doubles" of those related in Fairhaven and
Foulstrand. A certain event connected with the tearing up of The Swiss
Family Robinson serves the author's psychological purposes both in To
Damascus and in The Dream Play. In The Father Laura secretly abstracts
the contents of her husband's letter-bag, and in To Damascus "The Lady" is
guilty of the same offence. Both in Fairhaven and Foulstrand and in To
Damascus the woman promises not to read a certain book by the man which
deals with his first marriage. She breaks the promise, and the disastrous
effect is related with emphasis in both books. In The Dance of Death the
remorseless Captain calmly refers to his attempt to drown his wife by
pushing her into the water; the incident is more fully worked out in
Fairhaven and Foulstrand, and is the theme of a story in Fisher Folk. Such
repetitions cannot be attributed to poverty of imagination; they are the
outcome of a too retentive emotional memory and an insistent need of
expression, immediate expression.
It is curious to note that in spite of the richness and purity of his Swedish, in
which the living tongue of the people is heard as never heretofore, there is
not infrequently an admixture of foreign words and expressions. That his
early verse-play In Rome should contain rhymes on "jouissance" and
"connaissance," coupled with Swedish words, and that some of his early
poems were adorned in the same manner is not surprising. But when Göran
Persson in Eric XIV lightly throws out a hybrid drawing-room phrase: "Tant
mieux for my enemies!" a jarring note is introduced which is difficult to
explain in a dialogue, otherwise so carefully balanced. The habit of using
root-words from many languages, to which he gave Swedish shape, grew
upon Strindberg in later years. In the plays his characters suddenly begin to
spout Latin and Greek, like the philosophic beggar in To Damascus and the
sergeant-major in Gustavus Adolphus. Such dramatic exercises in the
classics may have had a good and sufficient reason. The use of words of
foreign extraction was no doubt fostered by his familiarity with the
literature of many countries, and by the limitations of each language. To this
may be added his growing interest in philological research. A short time
before his death he was keenly at work on the etymology of Finnish,
Hebrew and Greek.

Uddgren's account of Strindberg's manner of working in 1907 shows that
the fever had not left him. "When I have finished my work for the day,"
Strindberg said, "I always note on a piece of paper what I shall begin with
the next day. The whole long afternoon and evening I collect material for
next day's work. During my morning walk my thoughts are further
condensed, and when I return from my wanderings I am charged like an
electric machine. I put on a dry vest, for after my walk I am always very
hot, and then I sit down at my writing-table. As soon as I have paper and
pen ready it bursts out. The words literally tumble over me, and the pen
works under high pressure in order to get everything down on paper. When
I have written for a while I have a feeling that I am floating in space. Then
it is as if a higher will than my own made the pen glide over the paper,
guide it to write down words which seem to me entirely inspired."
The same ecstasy of writing is shown in Alone, where he says of his life at
the writing-table: "I live, and I live the manifold lives of all the human
beings I describe, happy with those who are happy, evil with the evil ones,
good with the good; I creep out of my own personality, and speak out of the
mouths of children, of women, of old men; I am king and beggar, I have
worldly power, I am the tyrant and the most despised of all, the oppressed
hater of the tyrant; I hold all opinions and profess all religions; I live in all
times and have myself ceased to be. This is a state which brings
indescribable happiness." These words remind us of Flaubert who felt "in
the space of a minute a million thoughts, images and combinations of all
kinds, throwing themselves into my brain at once as it were the lighted
squibs of fire-works,"[9] and recall the plastic and yearning girl-soul of
Marie Bashkirtseff who, when walking in Rome, exclaimed: "I want to be
Cæsar, Augustus, Marcus Aurelius, Caracalla, the Devil, the Pope," and
who adds: "I love to weep, I love to be in despair. I love to be grieved and
sad ... and I love life in spite of everything."
Amiel, remembering a night when he lay stretched full length on the sandy
shore of the North Sea, cries: "Will they ever return to me, those grandiose,
immortal, cosmogonic dreams, in which one seems to carry the world in
one's breast, to touch the stars, to possess the infinite?"[10] Amiel dreamt,
Strindberg created; Amiel found literary exultation in dreamy contemplation
of the universe, Strindberg in the spiral revolutions of humanity.

But sometimes the joy of literary creation gave way to profound self-
disgust. "What an occupation," he writes in The Quarantine Master's Tales,
[11]
"to sit and flay one's fellow-humans, offer the skins for sale, and expect
people to buy them. It is like the famished hunter who cuts off his dog's tail,
eats the meat himself, and gives the bones to the dog, the dog's own bones.
To go about spying out people's secrets, exposing the birthmark of one's
best friend, using one's wife as a vivisection rabbit, storming like a Croat,
cutting down, violating, burning and selling. The devil take it all."

Harriet Bosse, Strindberg's third Anne-Marie Bosse-Strindberg,
wife as Biskra in Samum 1902. Strindberg's only child in his third
marriage. Born 1902.

Strindberg's style expands to fit his wild excursions into the world of ideas
and his eccentricities of conception, such as the story of when he tried to
catch dead "souls" with a bottle containing sugar of lead, on the
Montparnasse cemetery,[12] or that of the madman's microscopical studies
of the genesis of humanity in At the Edge of the Sea. His expressions and
metaphors often bear the imprint of overwrought feeling, as when he speaks
of the "blood-poisoning cares of the household," or when the impression
produced by a visit to parents-in-law is that "of a serpent's hole into which

Satan had enticed him." When he describes poor people asleep at night in a
railway carriage, as presenting the appearance of corpses on a battlefield
and scattered human limbs, we cannot but congratulate ourselves on the
dulness of our imagination.
Strindberg's "wildness" has been falsely attributed to the influence of
alcohol. His use of absinthe, and his habit of heaping all sins upon himself
—including that of drunkenness—account for the fable that he was
incapable of writing without the aid of alcoholic excesses. He cannot even
be placed in the long list of literary and artistic "drunkards "—including the
names of Bums, Byron, Charles Lamb, Addison, Musset, Hoffmann, Poe
and Baudelaire—to whom alcohol was a means of attaining to inspiration.
Strindberg did not seek cortical excitation. He sought oblivion. In The Great
Highway, "The Hunter" says to "The Wanderer" (Strindberg): "Mr.
Incognito, why do you drink so much?" The Wanderer: "Because I am
always lying on the operating-table, and have to chloroform myself."
He was not a man who suffered from chronic congestion of the head in
consequence of indifference to all hygienic laws. Ever since the early days
when he used to throw himself headlong into the open sea from a rock, he
was devoted to cold-water ablutions. His morning exercise, which
sometimes was taken so vehemently as to tire him out completely, was part
of the routine of daily life. In his home-life he was of methodical, orderly
habits; he detested alike uncleanliness and untidiness—in fact, precisely the
opposite of what some people have imagined him to be.
The roots of his "wildness" cannot be found in the fumes of alcohol. There
was a strain of the publicist and the agitator in Strindberg which found but
an insufficient outlet. His craving for social reform was not satisfied by
corresponding activity. He suffered from too much happening within him,
and too little without. His stored-up energy caused a series of eruptions.
Strindberg was an orator afflicted with dumbness. His faults of style are
those of the typical orator. The splendour and vigour of his phrasing often
hide blunders of logic and hasty conclusions. If Strindberg had met
audiences face to face, like Björnson, and been in actual touch with the
people, his tongue would have lost its sting. Björnson's pulpit manner
would have fitted Strindberg badly, but it would have protected him against
himself.

But Strindberg could not be a public speaker. Though he was essentially a
"Confessor" on paper of the race of St. Augustine and Chateaubriand, he
dreaded the personal jostling and exhibition which are inseparable from
political life. Loneliness was necessary to him. The emanations, opinions
and habits of others were apt to oppress him, if brought too closely within
his own circle. In Paris he fled from his friendship with Jonas Lie; in
Inferno he shows this dread of paying the taxes of friendship. He felt the
identity of other people pressing on him in much the same way as Keats
did. In company he did not like to be contradicted. Though a genial and
generous host, he could turn friends out of his house if they proved
themselves possessed of too great pugnacity of argument. "I have never
hated human beings, rather the reverse," he says, "but ever since I was born
I fear them."
This fear of an alien invasion of the soul, of losing himself in another, made
him flee again and again from the prison-house of love. In all his books the
attraction between man and woman is a duel between love and hatred.
Sexual love is never spiritualised; it drags man into the illusions of Maya, it
robs him of strength of purpose, of intellectual freedom. Hence Strindberg's
men are ever struggling to get out of the clutches of woman. When the ties
are too strong to be broken, when passion obscures reason, hatred is born.
Anatole France calls himself "a philosophical monk." The monk is always
by Strindberg's side, pointing out the degradation of carnal love, urging him
to seek liberation at all costs. But he is not yet ready. He wants to go, and he
wants to stay. And all his couples, autobiographical and purely imaginative,
bum in the fires of love-hatred. "I love her," he writes in Inferno, "and she
loves me, and we hate each other with a wild hatred, born of love, which is
intensified by the great distance." In Fairhaven and Foulstrand the lover
says: "At bottom we hate each other, because we love each other. We are
afraid of losing our personalities through the assimilating power of love,
and therefore we must break away sometimes so as to feel that I am not
you...."
After some time love always becomes irksome to Strindberg. He longs for
male companionship. He experiences a sense of relief when he is free from
the woman, from the consciousness of always being watched. His voice
resumes its manly tones, his chest expands. This trait subsists in his stories;
it makes marital happiness impossible.

He can describe the marriage of souls with exquisite delicacy, the first hours
of newborn tenderness, the maiden's innocence, the youth's wonder at the
miracle which is taking place within his heart, the chaste abandonment of
reserve before the unifying power of love. But when once love has
descended from Heaven to Earth, Strindberg does not leave the lovers in
peace. From earth's paradise they are driven to hell; they must hate each
other, torment each other, devour each other's substance with the cruelty of
vampires. Even the first kiss is fraught with untold dangers. In Midsummer
—a sunny play emphasising the worth of man and the dignity of work,
remarkably free from distressing problems—this pathological trait is
introduced. Julius, a healthy young gardener, kisses Louise, his sweetheart,
on the mouth, and the demoniacal depths of human nature are immediately
revealed to both. Julius begins to understand the meaning of hatred, and
gives utterance to startling thoughts. Louise no longer recognises his voice.
"Why did you kiss me?" says Julius, "we ought never to have done that."
"What happened?" says Louise. "I have just read in a book," answers Julius,
"that when two innocent bodies, carbon and nitrogen, unite a dreadful
poison is formed. The poison has been born on our lips, and hatred has been
born out of our innocent love."
Shakespeare married a shrew. She served as an excellent model for his
portraits of angry women. Led by a malignant fate Strindberg married three
women who had interests outside the home. He loved the ideal of the
womanly woman, the mother who lives for home and children. He came to
detest the intellectual woman; she was to him the man-woman, a danger to
the race, the enemy of man who steals his qualities because she is bent on
his destruction.
In The Confession of a Fool his love for his first wife suffers at an early
stage through the necessary introduction of business into the divorce
arrangements. "Where is the charm of a woman who is always worn out
with contention, whose conversation bristles with legal terms?" he asks
plaintively. In Fairhaven and Foulstrand the second story of the Quarantine
Master shows the same sad development: "... But this evening he found her
ugly, carelessly dressed, with ink on her fingers, and her conversation was
so business-like that she appeared to him in a detestable light." "A lady," he
says in one of his essays on the art of the theatre, "must never be snappish

or grumpy, even if her part is one of opposition. A lady should always be
graceful, even in moments of anger."
Already as a youth he found it difficult to talk sense to girls. He denied that
friendship could exist between the two sexes. The presence of emancipated
and "free" women was sufficient completely to disorganise his work and
temper. He told Uddgren that he did not feel happy in Switzerland, because
he found women enjoying the same freedom as men in marriage. "I
experienced a sense of peace when I came to Bavaria where the men are the
rulers in marriage, and the women are obedient and faithful. The mere fact
of returning to these old-fashioned, patriarchal conditions was sufficient to
restore my literary powers which, during the last time in Switzerland, had
been in abeyance."
In an essay entitled Woman-Hatred and Woman-Worship, published in
1897, Strindberg wrote: "As I have the reputation of being a woman-hater,
and people amuse themselves by calling me one, I am forced to ask myself
if I really am one. On looking back at my past life I discover that, ever since
I became man, I have always lived in regular relations with women, and
that their presence has aroused pleasant feelings in me, in so far as they
have remained women towards me. But when they have behaved as the
rivals of man, neglected their beauty and lost their charm, I have detested
them by dint of a natural and sound instinct, for in them I sensed something
of man, and an element of my own sex which I detest from the bottom of
my heart.... Consequently, as I have been married twice and had five
children, it is not very likely that I should be a woman-hater."
"The most beautiful thing I know," says The Stranger to The Lady in To
Damascus, "is a woman bent over her needlework or her child." And The
Lady crochets. The good women in his plays are all fitted for "the most
beautiful thing": Gunlöd in The Outlaw, Margaretha in The Secret of the
Guild, Karin in Eric XIV.
The following passage throws light, not only on Strindberg's attitude
towards women, but on the attitude of women towards him: "To return to
woman was to me to come back to nature, and in a corner of my soul I
made myself unconscious, instinctive, a child, and thus renewed my power
to think, act and fight.... I have always worshipped women, these
enchanting, criminal minxes whose worst crimes are not registered in

criminal statistics. But I have had sufficiently bad—or good—taste to tell
them the troth, and they have revenged themselves by calling me woman-
hater. Just think, if these priestesses of revenge knew how many successes
with the fair sex their revenge has brought me! Inquisitiveness, the original
sin of Eve, drew the little ingénues to the monster, and the monster put no
obstacles in the way for even the most inquisitive to satisfy their curiosity ...
many thanks, my charming enemies."
It is little wonder that a man so constituted should be appalled at the
prospect of the New Woman with her independence, her clubs, her
cigarettes, her politics, her sport. Monsieur Casimir Dudevant, the husband
of George Sand, who was "just an ordinary man" was at first puzzled by his
wife's extraordinary qualities, and then came to the conclusion that she was
"idiotic." Poor Monsieur Dudevant! He was the forerunner of a long row of
perplexed husbands, injured in their sense of the fitness of things.
Strindberg merely made himself a spokesman for what the majority of
masculine men feel in regard to intellectual women, even though they may
not be capable of expressing it. Since he abandoned his early championship
of woman's suffrage, he came to utter much bad and ill-tempered abuse of
woman. Some of the things which he said of "lazy, stingy and cowardly
woman," of her mental and physical inferiority to man, might well be
included in Flaubert's Dossier de la Sottise Humaine. His arguments in
favour of the theory that woman is an intermediary biological form, whose
development has been arrested somewhere between man and youth, are
interesting but unconvincing. The evidence he offers in support of his views
on the general incapacity of woman—an incapacity which ranges from the
handling of musical instruments to making coffee—bears the imprint of
petulance rather than research. Sometimes there is a cross and quarrelsome
tone in these utterances which reflects personal irritation, something of
Alfred de Musset's words in Nuit d'Octobre:
Honte à toi, qui la première
M'a appris la trahison...!
But, after all, there is not much difference between the reasons against
woman's political emancipation put forward by Strindberg, and those to
which Mrs. Humphry Ward clings. And there is a close affinity between the
psychological and physiological arguments against woman's suffrage,
advanced in leading articles in The Times, and those on which Strindberg

based his objections to giving women greater freedom. The dread of the
subjection of man, of a general feminisation of the world, and its effects on
social life and politics, is the common ground of opposition.[13]
Some people have found an appropriate analogy in the fact that Strindberg
"hated," not only women, but dogs. The hatred of dogs pervades his books,
and has a note of the same bitter unreasonableness as his strictures on
women. His first wife had a King Charles, "a blear-eyed little monster,"
which apparently received more loving attention than her husband. She
even "prayed for dogs, fowls and rabbits," whilst, presumably, she did not
pray for him. This was intolerable, and henceforth the dog became
Strindberg's symbol of the worthless recipients of the good things of this
world, of sneaking cupboard-love and uncleanliness. He has surpassed the
Bible in contemptuous references to the dog.
From this hatred the rest of the animal world was exempt. He cautions the
angler against inflicting unnecessary suffering on the worm. He feeds the
birds on his window-sill and the bear in the Zoo. He tells a story of a certain
island where all the people were abominable drunkards, and where the only
eyes which could still reflect intelligence and the blue sky were those of
animals. He is not in sympathy with the aimless destruction of life. "Why
must one always have a gun when one sees an innocent creature in the
forest?" he asks, and adds: "There are other occasions in life when a gun
would be of better use." In The Crown Bride the life of an ant is spared, and
the mystic "White Child" proclaims the love that is greatest of all, "love for
every living thing, great and small."
Strindberg's life in Stockholm during the last years of his great dramatic
production flowed in a calm stream, the surface of which showed no signs
of the storms within. He lived the life of a literary hermit, wrapped up in his
studies and his art. He took his morning walks when the greater part of
Stockholm was still asleep, and received only a few privileged friends in his
home. Solitude had become his best friend. In the morning he made his own
coffee, and partook of a light repast before going out. As a rule he lived
frugally, and his little home was arranged with the greatest simplicity.
"When I get out of bed the morning after a sober evening and a restful
night, life itself is a distinct enjoyment. It is like rising from the dead," he
says in Alone.

Poverty, the faithful companion of his youth, dung to him to the end. Even
during the last years he was often in monetary difficulties; in his attacks
upon the powers of the day he had no thought of what the morrow would
bring to him. He had again and again to pay the penalty of speaking
unpopular truths. And when money came his way he did not love it well
enough to make it stay with him. He gave with a lavish, careless hand, with
a heart ever warm and bleeding for those who had less than he. When, on
his last birthday, a purse containing 50,000 kronor had been presented to
him, as a token of the people's love and admiration, he gave away large
sums to the cause of peace, to the poor. When, at last, a great publisher
bought the rights of all his published works in Sweden for some £11,000,
the affluence came too late—for him.
In 1901 he married Harriet Bosse who had been the sympathetic interpreter
on the stage of the women in some of his plays. The marriage was amicably
dissolved in 1904. During his third marriage he wrote The Dance of Death
and Swanwhite, and published a volume of poems, in which his lyrical
powers were perfected through greater sensitiveness and restraint. Among
these poems there is one, strange and beautiful, spiritual and earthly, in
which he sings of the glory of the form of woman—the theme of artists and
lovers since the beginning of time—but here treated in a new manner. In her
he sees the motion of stars and planets, the lines of sphere, parabola and
ellipse. He sees the infinite possibilities of the Cosmic procession, of the
creative, ever-moving force, the highest and the lowest, in the symbol of the
eternally feminine.
The "music of the spheres" has been captured in this little poem. It is
strange how often one is constrained to use musical metaphors in describing
Strindberg's style. There is always music in his language. He was conscious
of this himself, for in his last plays he always chose music to fit the mood of
his dramatic movement. Thus the spiritual peace of Easter, the change from
fear of fate to certainty of God's presence, is accompanied by Haydn's
Sieben Worte des Erlösers, the sinful thoughts of Maurice and Henriette in
There are Crimes and Crimes are followed by the finale of Beethoven's
Sonata in D minor. The Dream Play is interluded with Bach's Toccata con
Fuga; the Dance of Death is trodden to the tune of the "Entry of the
Boyars."

Over his piano there hung a death-mask of Beethoven. The final movement
of the "Moonlight Sonata" was to him the highest interpretation of
humanity's yearning for deliverance. Music brought him peace. It gave him
strength when words failed—even during the last days when he sat at his
piano, improvising variations on the Death hymn of the Titanic. Strindberg's
old friend Tor Aulin, the well-known Swedish composer, received a
characteristic message from Strindberg's deathbed: "A last farewell from
Saul to David."

Strindberg's Funeral, May 19th, 1912. Trades-
Unions and Undergraduates in Procession.

The little Anne-Marie Bosse-Strindberg, his daughter in the last marriage,
was very dear to his heart. He had found her gifted with something of the
second sight which was his own, and his great tenderness for children found
response in her. Amongst his three children by the first marriage his
daughter Greta, married to Dr. Henry von Philp in Stockholm, understood

him best. She was an actress, and took the part of Kerstin in The Crown
Bride during the national festivities in his honour in January, 1912. Happily
he did not live to mourn over the tragic fate that overtook her. She was
killed in a terrible railway accident which took place a few weeks after her
father's death.
The illness which was to end his life had long been battling with his
wonderful vitality. He caught cold during the Christmas of 1911, when he
went to pay a visit to his daughter Greta. Pneumonia supervened and laid
him low for some time. He regained strength and once again put on his
warrior's armour. Of this illness he gave an account in Berliner Tageblatt of
February 4th, 1912. After describing an etymological challenge which he
had sent to three Finnish friends he writes:
"The challenge had hardly been accepted before I fell ill; I first noticed it on
the morning of Christmas Day, when I was so tired, so tired, that I would
neither get up, nor drink my coffee. I had no pains, but experienced a great
calm and an indifference towards the outer world, and felt as if I had at last
found peace. Usually I get up punctually at seven, take a walk, and hurry
home, driven by an irresistible longing for work. Now this restlessness had
left me; I felt my life-work was completed. I had said all I wished to say,
and my unprinted manuscripts were put away in perfect order in boxes."
But the recovery was apparent only. The real trouble was cancer of the
stomach. An operation was performed, but could not check the advance of
the disease.
On January 22nd, 1912, the whole Swedish nation celebrated his sixty-third
birthday. It was nearly too late. The breath of death was already upon him
as he stood on his balcony, waving his hand to the torchlight procession
which passed his house, bending his head before the deafening cheers
which rose from the multitudes, from whose lips the cry for August
Strindberg rose in tones of jubilant hero-worship. As he stood there, raised
above the bands and banners of the festive acclamation, it may be that the
memories of past mistakes, past humiliation, and past struggle for goodness,
rose within that mighty brow, and kept pace with the steps of the marching
crowd below. For he knew, as few have known, the comedy and the tragedy
of life.

That night the theatres of Stockholm vied with each other in performing his
plays. Laurel-wreathed busts and portraits of Strindberg were on view in the
foyers and restaurants. The night came with public festivities in his honour,
music and speeches of approbation.
But the dramatist remained at home in his Blue Tower with a few friends.
The applause of the public touched his heart, but did not deceive him. He
knew that the curtain was about to fall on his part in the perpetual
performance in the Theatre of Life, and that new scenes were to follow, to
be hissed and applauded until Time puts its last figure upon the stage.
[1] In 1658 the kingdom of Sweden included the whole of the present Sweden
and Finland, and in addition Esthonia, Livonia, part of Ingermanland,
Pomerania, Wismar, Bremen and Verden.
[2] Play-Making. A Manual of Craftsmanship, by William Archer.
[3] Idun, May, 1912.
[4] Ellen Key's Lifsåskådning och Verksamhet som Författarinna. En
undersökning af C.D. af Wirsén.
[5] Kritiker, af C.D. af Wirsén.
[6] August Strindberg. Das Hohe Lied seines Lebens, von Arthur Babillotte.
[7] "Ich halte Strindberg's historische Dramen für das Schwächste was er je
geschrieben."
[8] Ord och Bild, No. IX, 1912.
[9] Correspondence.
[10] Amiel's Journal.
[11] Fairhaven and Foulstrand.
[12] Fables and Other Stories.
[13] The reader is referred to the following leading articles: Insurgent Hysteria
(March 16th, 1912), The Subjection of Man (July 31st, 1912), and Militant
Suffragism (September 24th, 1912).

LIST OF STRINDBERG'S CHIEF WRITINGS

A uniform edition of Strindberg's collected works is in course of publication
by Messrs. Albert Bonnier of Stockholm, who are the owners of the
copyright of Strindberg's writings. The following list includes some

unpublished works which will now be issued for the first time by Messrs.
Bonnier.
In a preface to The Author, one of the autobiographical volumes, Strindberg
gave a chronological list of his most important works, and added
explanatory remarks. The appended notes embody some of Strindberg's
views on his own writings:
The Freethinker (1) 1869
Hermione (1) 1869
In Rome (1) 1870
The Outlaw (1) 1871
Master Olof (1) 1872
The Year 'Forty-Eight' (1) 1881
"In Rome," "The Outlaw," and "Hermione" are classified by Strindberg as
"studies."
From Fjärdingen and Svartbäcken (2) 1877
The Red Room (3) 1879
From the Sea (2) 1880
Here and There (2) 1880
Old Stockholm 1880
(1) Plays.
(2) Stories.
(3) Novels.

He and She....
(To be published for the first time in the posthumous edition of Strindberg's
Collected Works.)
The Secret of the Guild (1) 1880
Sir Bengt's Wife (1) 1882
The Journey of Lucky Peter (1) 1883
Studies in the History of Culture (4) 1881
1881-
The Swedish People (4)
1882
The New Kingdom (5) 1882

1883-
Swedish Destinies and Adventures (Two Volumes) (6)
1892
(4) History.
(5) Satyrical Sketches.
(6) Stories in Historical Setting.

Strindberg defines "The New Kingdom" as a criticism of "The Changeably
Permanent."
Poems in Verse and Prose (7) 1883
Somnambulistic Nights after Wakeful Days (7) 1884
(7) Poems.

Miscellanea (Likt och Olikt) — Essays: Society under Review.
From Italy 1884
1884-
Married (Two Volumes) (2)
1886
Strindberg points out that the first volume of "Married" is a defence and
glorification of marriage, of home, mother, and child, and that the second
part is a criticism.
The Impoundage Journey
An account of the prosecution following upon the publication of "Married."
It will now be issued in book-form.
Real Utopias (2) 1885
Described by Strindberg as positive suggestions in the spirit of Saint-
Simonism. REMORSE—"The Peace Story"—is included in this collection.

The Bondswoman's Son (8)
Fermentation Time (8) 1886-
In the Red Room (8) 1887
The Author (8)
The People of Hemsö (3) 1887
Fisher folk (3) 1888
(8) Autobiography.

These novels represent the author's emancipation from the bondage of
"problems"; Strindberg points out that they are simply descriptions of
country life and scenery.
Sketches of Flowers and Animals 1888
The Father (1) 1887
Lady Julie (1) 1888
Comrades (1) 1888
Creditors (1) 1890
Pariah (1) 1890
Samum (1) 1890
The Stronger (1) 1890
Facing Death (1) 1893
The First Warning (1) 1893
Debit and Credit (1) 1893
Mother-Love (1) 1893
Playing with Fire (1) 1897
The Link (1) 1897
Among French Peasants 1889
Tschandala (2) 1889
The Island of Bliss (2) 1890
At the Edge of the Sea (3) 1890
Strindberg remarks that "At the Edge of the Sea" was influenced by
Nietzsche, but "the individual succumbs in the struggle for absolute
individualism."
1890-
Things Printed and Unprinted (Two Volumes) (9)
1897

(9) Essays.

The Associations of France and Sweden up to the Present Time 1891
(To be published for the first time in Swedish.)
1890-
Fables
1897
The Keys of Heaven (1) 1892
Strindberg's remark: "Darkness, sorrow, despair, absolute scepticism."
The Confession of a Fool (10) 1893
(10) Autobiographical Novel.

(A German edition was published in 1893; a French edition in 1894; it will
now be published in Swedish.)
Jardin des plantes (9)
1892-
Antibarbarus (9)
1898
Types and Prototypes (9)
Inferno (8) 1897
Legends (8) 1898
To Damascus I and II (1) 1898
To Damascus III (1) 1904
Advent. (1) 1899
"The great crisis at fifty," remarks Strindberg, "revolutions in my mental
life, wanderings in the desert, devastation, Hells and Heavens of
Swedenborg. Not influenced by Huysmans' "En Route," still less by
Peladan, who was then unknown to the author ... but based on personal
experiences."
There are Crimes and Crimes (1) 1899
The Saga of the Folkungs (1) 1899
Gustavus Vasa (1) 1899
Eric XIV (1) 1899
Gustavus Adolphus (1) 1900
"Light after darkness," writes Strindberg. "New production, with Faith,
Hope, and Charity regained--and absolute certainty."

Midsummer (1) 1901
Easter — "The school of suffering." (1) 1901
The Dance of Death. I and II (1) 1901
Engelbrecht (1) 1901
Charles XII (1) 1901
The Crown Bride (1) 1902
Swanwhite (1) 1902
The Dream Play (1) 1902
Christina (1) 1903
Gustavus III (1) 1903
The Nightingale in Wittenberg (1) 1903
Fairhaven and Foulstrand (2) (Partly autobiographical.) 1902
Sagas 1903
Alone (11) 1903
The Gothic Rooms (3) 1904
Word-Play and Handicraft (7)
The Conscious Will in the History of the World (12)
A Free Norway[*]
(* To be published for the first time.)
(11) Mediative Autobiography.
(12) Historical.

Historical Miniatures (2, historical) 1905
New Swedish Adventures (2, historical) 1906
Black Flags (3) 1907
A Blue Book. I, II, III—The Synthetic Philosophy of Strindberg's 1907-
Life. 1908
Storm (13) 1907
The Burned Lot (13) 1907
The Spook Sonata (13) 1907
The Pelican (13) 1907
The Black Glove (13) 1909
The Festival of the Finished Building. (2) 1907

The Scapegoat (2) 1907
The Last Knight (1) 1908
The Slippers of Abu Casem (1) 1908
The Earl of Bjälbo (1) 1909
The National Director (1) 1909
The Great Highway (1) 1909
(13) Chamber Plays.

"The Great Highway" is a "farewell to life and a self-declaration."
1908-
Hamlet (14)
1909
Julius Cæsar (14)
Memorandum to the Members of the Intimate Theatre. (14)
Macbeth and Other Plays by Shakespeare (14)
An Open Letter to the Intimate Theatre (14)
(14) Dramaturgy.

The Origins of our Mother Tongue (15) 1910
Biblical Proper Names (15) 1910
Roots of World-Languages (15) 1910
Speeches to the Swedish Nation 1910
The State of the People 1910
Religious Renaissance 1910
China and Japan[1] 1911
(15) Philology.

Dr. John Landquist, the editor of the posthumous edition of Strindberg's
collected works, has kindly placed the following note on Strindberg's
manuscripts at our disposal:
"The MSS., most of which are still in existence, are written with the utmost
care in Strindberg's clear and energetic hand, and are often beautifully
ornamented. They reflect the neatness and order with which the author
surrounded himself, and also the love with which he carried out his work.
When writing mediæval drama, Strindberg illuminated his MSS. like a
mediæval handwritten manuscript with artistically designed and coloured
initial letters, and with miniatures painted by himself--the whole

harmonising with the period and surroundings in which the action takes
place. On other pages there is interspersed in the writing itself such
ornamentation as would correspond to the time and atmosphere of the
written work. As a rule he used hand-made Lessebo-paper, and generally
made very few alterations. He hardly ever copied out his MSS. In later
years he seldom corrected anything when once it had been written down.
He did not like to read through his own works after having completed
them."
(1) Plays. (2) Stories. (3) Novels. (4) History. (5) Satyrical Sketches. (6) Stories in Historical Setting.
(7) Poems. (8) Autobiography (9) Essays. (10) Autobiographical Novel. (11) Meditative
Autobiography. (12) Historical. (13) Chamber Plays. (14) Dramaturgy. (15) Philology.
[1] All correspondence relating to the authorisation of translations of Strindberg's
works and the rights of performing his plays in England and America should be
addressed to Herr Albert Bonnier, of Stockholm. He is now the sole
representative of Strindberg's literary executors.

INDEX

A

Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 119
Addison, 338
Adelphi Players, The, 204
Admirable Crichton, The, 181
Advent, 304, 305, 306
Æschylus, 310
Ahasuerus, 16
Albericus, 89
Alembert, d', 209
Almqvist, K. J. L., 328, 329
Alone, 19, 284, 285, 335, 350
Amiel, Journal of, 336
Antibarbarus I, or the Psychology of Sulphur,
or All is in All, 241, 242

Antoine, Monsieur André, 171
Aphrodite Pandemos, 128
Archer, Mr. William, Play-Making. A Manual of Craftsmanship by, 303
Aristotle, 251
Athenæum, 320
Augier, 170
Augustine, St. 340
Augustus, 336
Aulin, Tor, 352
Author, The, 19, 122, 133, 134, 152, 284
Autobiography, 56, 86, 98, 169

B

Babillotte, Herr Arthur, August Strindberg.
Das Hohe Lied seines Lebens by, 327, 328
Bach, 352
Balfour, A.J. 256
Balzac, 159, 232;
Seraphita by, 260, 281
Bashkirtseff, Marie, 336
Baudelaire, 331, 338
Becque, Henry, Les Corbeaux by, 205, 212; Souvenirs by, 208
Beethoven, Sonata in D minor by, 352;
Moonlight Sonata by, 352
Benson, Mr. A.C., 321
Berliner Tageblatt, 353, 354
Bismarck, 313
Björkman, Herr Edwin, 330
Björnson, Björnstjerne,
Mary Stuart by, 67, 75, 123, 152;
The King by, 153, 154, 317;
A Gauntlet by, 318, 339
Black Flags, 325
Black Glove, The, 316
Blackwood's Magazine, 320

Blake, 251, 255, 260
Blavatsky, Madame, The Secret Doctrine by, 274, 275
Blotsven, 79
Blue Bird, The, 144
Blue Book, A, 282, 284, 286, 287
Boccaccio, 159
Bok om Strindberg, En, af Holger Drachmann, Knut Hamsun,
Justin Huntly McCarthy, Björnstjerne Björnson, Jonas Lie,
Georg Brandes, etc., 123, 152
Bondswoman's Son, The, 18, 19, 282, 283
Bonnier, Herr Albert, 123, 161, 162
Book of Job, The, 260
Bosse, Harriet, 327, 351
Brandes, Georg, 123, 174, 175, 231
Brieux, Monsieur, La Robe Rouge by, 225
Browning, Mrs., 281
Buckle, 97
Burned Lot, The, 316, 326
Burns, Robert, 121, 338
Byron, Manfred by, 58, 338

C

Capus, 206
Caracalla, 336
Carlyle, 281
Carmontelle, Proverbes Dramatiques by, 214
Céller, Monsieur Ludovic, Les décors, les costumes
et la mise-en-scène au XVII siècle by, 215
Cellini, Benvenuto, 255
Charles XII, 299, 302, 303, 326, 332
Chateaubriand, 61, 340
Chemistry, 244, 245, 248, 251, 252, 253
Clairpsychism, 256, 276, 278, 285, 286, 287
Coleridge, 257
Collected Works of August Strindberg, The, 13, 123

Comédie rosse, 193
Comrades, 122, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192,
193, 194, 195, 225, 322, 332
Comte, 283
Confession of a Fool, The, 22, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126,
127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 223, 228, 237, 242, 343
Confused Sensations, 228
Conscious Will in the History of the World, The, 300
Corot, 96
Creditors, 172, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203,
204, 206, 244, 326
Crimes and Crimes, There are, 309, 310, 326, 352

Criticism, Literary, 77, 78, 84, 139, 148, 150, 233, 234, 235,
236, 319, 320, 321, 322, 323, 324, 325
Crown Bride, The, 304, 306, 349, 353

D

Dagens Nyheter, 115
Damascus, To, 256, 288, 297, 304, 311, 312, 313, 314, 315, 316,
323, 332, 334, 345
Dance of Death, The, 304, 310, 311, 316, 333, 351, 352
Dante, 83;
the Commedia by, 89, 260
De Quincey, 151
Dickens, 47, 140
Different Weapons, 151
Dostoevsky, 232, 297, 327
Drachmann, Holger, 123, 240
Drama, The, 330
Drama, Naturalistic, 170, 171
"Dramatiska Teatern," 323
Dream Play, The, 256, 304, 314, 315, 332, 352
Dryden, 113
Dudevant, Monsieur Casimir, 346

Dumas fils, Alexandre, 170, 206;
Le Fils Naturel by, 208
Dumas père, Alexandre, 47, 170
Duse, Eleonora, 208

E

Earl of Bjälbo, The, 299
Easter, 256, 296, 304, 306, 307,
308, 326, 327, 352
Edge of the Sea, At the, 230, 231, 297, 323, 337
Eliasson, Dr., 269
Emerson, 281
Encyclopædia Britannica, 143
Engelbrecht, 299
Eric XIV, 289, 295, 296, 297, 298, 301, 308, 309, 316,
326, 333
Essen, Siri von, 122;
divorce of, 130;
becomes an actress, 130;
marries August Strindberg, 132;
divorce of, from Strindberg, 237
Euripides, 310

F

Fables, 227, 228, 337
Fabre, Emile, L'Argent by, 172
Facing Death, 326
Fairhaven and Foulstrand, 332, 333, 336, 337, 341, 343
Father, The, 22, 122, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 202, 203,
204, 210, 225, 235, 244, 297, 322, 325, 332
Fermentation Time, 19, 53, 69, 86, 87
Feuillet, 214
First Warning, The, 223

Fisher Folk, 226, 227, 333
Fjärdingen and Svartbäcken, From, 135, 136
Flaubert, 331;
Correspondance of, 336;
Dossier de la Sottise Humaine by, 347
"Folkteatern," 325
France, Anatole, 341
Freethinker, The, 78, 79
"Freie Bühne," 202
French Peasants, Among, 228, 229

G

Geijerstam, Gustaf af, Erik Grane by, 324
General Discontent, its Causes and Remedies, On the, 229, 230
Geographical Society, The Imperial Russian, 119
Gissing, George, New Grub Street by, 141
Goethe, Faust by, 61, 62, 83
Goetz von Berlichingen by, 102, 281, 313
Goncourt, the brothers de, Sœur Philomène by, 172, 214, 331
Goncourt, Edmond de, 207
Goncourt, Jules de, 331
Gorki, Maxim, 17, 204
Gosse, Mr. Edmund, 231
Gothic Rooms, The, 297, 325
Great Highway, The, 256, 304, 313, 314, 338
Grein, Mr. J.T., 203, 204
Guiche, Entre Frères by, 214
Gustavus Adolphus, 280, 299, 301, 302, 316, 334
Gustavus III, 299
Gustavus Vasa, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294, 298, 316, 326

H

Hamsun, Knut, 123

Hansson, Ola, 220, 238
Hartmann, 232
Hauptmann, 204, 317;
The Weavers by, 318; 326
Haydn, Sieben Worte des Erlösers by, 352
Heiberg, Gunnar, 240
Heidenstam, Werner von, 324;
Karolinerna by, 325
Heine, 239
Henry VII, 89
Hervieu, Paul, Le Dédale by, 201, 204;
L'Inconnu by, 297
Hirsch, Dr. W., 256
Historical Miniatures, 300
Hoffmann, E.T.A., 239
Kreisler by, 257, 297, 338
Holbein, 310
Homer, 90
Horace, 90, 113
Hospital of Saint Louis, 247
Hugo, Victor, 271
Huysmans, Là-Bas by, 274;
En Route by, 274
Höffding, 93

I

Ibsen, 13;
Brand by, 75, 166, 170;
Ghosts by, 172, 317;
Rosmersholm by, 172, 203, 326

Independent Theatre, The, 203, 204
Inferno, 15, 19, 243, 248, 256, 257, 274, 277, 279, 280, 285,
288, 313, 323, 340, 341
Internationalism, 155

Intimate Theatre, The, 326, 327

J

Journey of Lucky Peter, The, 143, 144, 146, 316
Joy of Life, The, 278
Julius Cæsar, 336
Jullien, Monsieur, 205

K

Keats, 340
Key, Ellen, 321
Keys of Heaven, The, 316
Kierkegaard, Sören, Enten-Eller by, 79
Knox, John, The First Blast of the Trumpet against
the Monstrous Regiment of Women by, 237
"Künstler Theater," 216

L

La Bruyère, 98
Lady Julie, 172, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184,
193, 202, 204, 206, 209, 210, 211, 214, 216, 217, 218, 225,
231, 236, 244, 284, 316, 325
Lagerlöf, Selma, 324
Lamb, Charles, 257, 331, 338
Landquist, Dr. John, Article in Idun by, 315
Last Knight, The, 299
Latini, Brunetto, 89
Lauthenburg, Herr, 326
Lavedan, Entire Frères by, 214
Lee, Nathaniel, 257
Legends, 256, 277, 288, 313, 323

Lenan, Traumgewalten by, 257
Lenngren, Anna Maria, Fröken Juliana by, 176
Lessing, 61
Levertin, Oscar, 278, 324
Library of Stockholm, The Royal, 118
Lie, Jonas, 123, 340
Link, The, 122, 219, 224, 225, 323
Loke's Blasphemies, 151
Louis XIV, 295
Lucanus, 90
Lugné-Poë, Monsieur, 202
Lundin, Claes, 146
Luther, 313

M

Macaulay, 70
McCarthy, Justin Huntly, 123;
article in The Fortnightly Review by, 183, 225
Macleod, Fiona, Cathal of the Woods by, 228
Maeterlinck, 227, 305, 316
Marcus Aurelius, 336
Marholm, Laura, 238, 328, 330
Married, 123, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164,
165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 235, 236, 237
Master Olof, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 136, 142, 289, 298, 322
Maupassant, Guy de, 159, 209;
Le Horla by, 297
Michel-Angelo, 251
Midsummer, 316, 342, 343
Mill, John Stuart, 230
Modern Drama and the Modern Theatre, On, 211, 212
Moses, 260
Multiple personalities, 283, 284
Munch, Edvard, 240, 259, 263
Murray, Grenville, Les Hommes du Second Empire by, 149

Musset, Alfred de, 214, 338;
Nuit d'Octobre by, 347

N

Napoleon, 313
National Director, The, 299
Naturalism, 170, 204, 205, 212, 213
New Kingdom, The, 148, 149, 157, 230, 324
Newman, 51
Nietzsche, 13, 194, 231, 232, 284
Nightingale of Wittenberg, The, 299
Nobel Prize, The, 321
Nordau, Max, 149

O

Oehlenschläger, 79, 82
Old Stockholm, 146, 147
Orfila, 248, 260
Outlaw, The, 81, 84, 85, 86, 345
Ovid, 90

P

Pariah, 219, 220, 221, 222
Paris, In, 328
Patmore, Coventry, 281
Paul, Adolf, 240
Peace movement, The, 155, 156
Peladan, Sar, Comment on devient Mage by, 280
Pelican, The, 316, 326
People of Hemsö, The, 226, 227, 235
Personne, John, Strindberg-Literature and Immorality

amongst Schoolboys by, 165
Peter Pan, 144
Philp, Greta Strindberg von, 353
Pinero, Sir Arthur, 206
Playing with Fire, 219, 223, 323, 326
Poe, 255, 338
Poems in Verse and Prose, 150, 151
Przybyszewski, Stanislav, 240, 258, 259, 260, 262

Q

Quarantine Master's Tales, The, 336, 337, 343, 344
Queen Christina, 299
Quesnay, de, 230

R

Rahmer, Dr. S., Article in Grenzfragen der Literatur
und Medizin by, 256
Ranft, Herr Albert, 326
Realism, 170, 183, 212
Real Utopias, 168
Red Room, In the, 19, 110, 111, 112, 113
Red Room, The, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 147, 148,
157, 230, 322
Reformation, the Protestant, 99, 291
Religion, 279
Remorse, 156, 297
Renan, Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse by, 255
"Residenz Theater," 203, 326
Reward of Virtue, The, 157
Rodin, Le Penseur by, 16
Rome, In, 74, 76, 77, 78, 333
Rosen, George von, Erik XIV and Karin Månsdotter by, 95
Rousseau, 19, 154, 209, 230, 234;

Confessions by, 257;
Dialogues by, 257;
Rêveries by, 257, 260
"Rune," the formation of the, 73
Ruskin, 281;
Modern Painters by, 320

S

Saga of the Folkungs, The, 289, 296, 297, 298, 316
Saint-Saëns, 310
Samum, 219, 220
Sand, George, 61, 346
Sardou, 170
Scenery of Sweden, The, 236
Schering, Herr Emil, 330
Schiller, Die Räuber by, 58, 63;
On the Theatre as an Institution for Moral Education by, 62
Schnitzler, 204;
Reigen by, 206
Schopenhauer, 232, 237, 238
Schumann, Aufschwung by, 258, 259
"Schwarzen Ferkel, Zum," 239, 240
Scott, Sir Walter, 47
Scribe, 170
Secret of the Guild, The, 142, 345
Shakespeare, 47, 82, 83, 101;
Hamlet by, 106, 295, 301;
Lear by, 295;
Macbeth by, 295, 296, 343
Shaw, George Bernard, 206, 233, 234, 318
Sinology, 118
Sir Bengt's Wife, 144, 145, 146
Sketches of Flowers and Animals, 227
Slippers of Abu Casem, The, 316
Socialism, 167, 169, 229, 230

Socrates, 213
Sophocles, 82, 310
Sorbonne, La, 248
Speeches to the Swedish Nation, 279
Spencer, 106, 230, 283
Spook Sonata, The, 316, 326
Stage Society, The, 204
Stagnelius, E.J., 328
Stevenson, R.L., 331
Stockholm's Skärgård, 30, 83, 99, 226
Storm, 315, 326
Street riots in Stockholm, 66, 67, 126
Strindberg, Anne-Marie Bosse-, 316, 353
Strindberg, August,
death of, 11;
scientific studies of, 12, 37, 60, 83, 238, 239, 240, 241,
244, 245;
diary of, 14;
faith in the Bible, 14;
love of the early morning, 15;
funeral of, 16;
birth of, 20;
parents of, 20;
ancestry of, 20;
poverty of, 21, 75, 83, 107, 117, 350;
views of, on the family as an institution, 22, 23;
misogyny of; 22, 124, 125, 171, 184, 194, 244, 344, 345;
attacks upon women, 23, 75, 76, 175, 237, 347;
early home of, 24, 29;
early religious doubts of, 25, 32, 33;
early school-days of, 27, 28;
love of nature, 29, 30, 31, 32, 53, 227, 228, 265;
independence of, at school 33, 34;
death of the mother of, 35, 36, 37;
interest of, in music, 38, 53, 352;
constructs machines, 39, 40;
as "gymnasist," 41;

becomes a pietist, 42, 43, 44, 45;
as private tutor, 46, 47, 48;
influence of literature on, 47;
becomes a freethinker, 47;
preaches a sermon, 49;
passes the "student—examen," 50;
enters the University of Upsala, 51;
criticism of academical routine, 51, 52, 53;
becomes a schoolmaster, 54;
studies social conditions, 54, 55, 103, 154, 155, 228, 229, 230;
sympathy of, with the people, 56, 64, 65;
contempt of current morals, 56, 120;
takes up the study of medicine, 59;
comes under the influence of art, 60;
decides to become an actor, 62;
makes his début at the Dramatic Theatre, 67;
tries to commit suicide, 69, 80, 129;
composes his first play, 69;
first attempts to write verse, 71;
first plays refused, 71, 72;
returns to the University, 73;
first performance of a play by, 76;
burns the MSS. of Blotsven, 80;
passes his Latin examination, 81;
presents his æsthetic thesis. 81;
performance of a Viking play by, 84;
King Charles XV sends for, 85;
as a painter, 90, 96, 103, 236, 240;
becomes a journalist, 92;
as an art critic, 95;
lack of self-confidence of, 107;
edits an insurance paper, 108;
financial crash, 109;
obtains a post as telegraph clerk, 114;
resumes journalistic work, 115;
becomes parliamentary reporter and dramatic critic, 116;
is nominated assistant librarian, 118;

class-consciousness of, 126, 127;
first marriage of, 132;
views of, on the sacredness of parenthood, 133, 134;
increasing literary activity of, 135;
first great dramatic success, 142, 143;
on the tragedy of fatherhood, 146, 175;
historical point of view of, 147, 148;
criticises poetry as a form of literary expression, 151;
leaves Sweden, 152;
is prosecuted for blasphemy, 157;
is cheered by the people in Stockholm, 162, 163, 164;
attacks of Conservative press 163;
is found "not guilty," 164;
is denounced by feminists, 165;
advocates rights of women and marriage reform, 167;
views of, on spiritual functions of motherhood, 168;
begins a series of naturalistic plays, 171;
on the educational value of the theatre, 206, 207;
views of, on theatre reform, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218;
obtains divorce from his first wife, 237;
second marriage of, 242;
becomes an alchemist, 251;
madness of, develops, 255;
persecutional mania of, becomes acute, 265;
prepares to die, 266;
fears detention in an asylum, 269;
love of, for his child, 271, 272;
is influenced by Roman Catholicism, 272, 280;
religious feeling of, 273, 279;
attitude of, towards theosophy, 274, 275;
recovery of, 275;
psychic development of, 276;
fiftieth birthday of, 288;
resumes the writing of drama, 288;
as an historical psychologist, 289, 301;
criticism of, as an historian, 301, 302, 303;
national celebration of, 319, 353, 354, 355;

tautology in the writings of, 332, 333;
philological studies of, 334;
attitude towards animals of, 348, 349;
third marriage of, 351;
last illness of, 353, 354;
Stronger, The, 204, 219, 222, 223, 322
Studies in the History of Culture, 300
Sudermann, 206
Sue, Eugène, Le Juif Errant by, 47
"Svenska Teatern," 326
Swanwhite, 304, 305, 306, 351
Swedenborg, Emanuel, 260, 267, 272, 273, 277, 280, 281, 282, 283
Swedish Academy, The, 321, 324
Swedish Destinies and Adventures, 150, 300, 325
Swedish People, The, 148, 300
Swift, Dean, 234
Sylva Sylvarum, 241
Symons, Arthur, Studies in Seven Arts by, 208

T

Tasso, 255, 273
Tchekhov, Anton, 204; The Seagull by, 208

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