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.

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.

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).