Chapter 10
The mirror that Strindberg held up to Nature was a cracked one. It was cracked in a double sense--it was crazy. It gave back broken images of a world which it made look like the chaos of a lunatic dream. Miss Lind-af-Hageby, in her popular biography of Strindberg, is too intent upon saying what can be said in his defence to make a serious attempt to analyse the secret of genius which is implicit in those "115 plays, novels, collections of stories, essays, and poems" which will be gathered into the complete edition of his works shortly to be published in Sweden. The biography will supply the need of that part of the public which has no time to read Strindberg, but has plenty of time to read about him. It will give them a capably potted Strindberg, and will tell them quietly and briefly much that he himself has told violently and at length in _The Son of a Servant, The Confession of a Fool_, and, indeed, in nearly everything he wrote. On the other hand, Miss Lind's book has little value as an interpretation. She does not do much to clear up the reasons which have made the writings of this mad Swede matter of interest in every civilized country in the world. She does, indeed, quote the remark of Gorki, who, at the time of Strindberg's death, compared him to the ancient Danubian hero, Danko, "who, in order to help humanity out of the darkness of problems, tore his heart out of his breast, lit it, and holding it high, led the way." "Strindberg," Miss Lind declares, "patiently burnt his heart for the illumination of the people, and on the day when his body was laid low in the soil, the flame of his self-immolation was seen, pure and inextinguishable." This will not do. "Patiently" is impossible; so is "pure and inextinguishable." Strindberg was at once a man of genius (and therefore noble) and a creature of doom (and therefore to be pitied). But to sum him up as a spontaneous martyr in the greatest of great causes is to do injustice to language and to the lives of the saints and heroes. He was a martyr, of course, in the sense in which we call a man a martyr to toothache. He suffered; but most of his sufferings were due, not to tenderness of soul, but to tenderness of nerves.
Other artists lay hold upon life through an exceptional sensibility. Strindberg laid hold on life through an exceptional excitability--even an exceptional irritability. In his plays, novels, and essays alike, he is a specialist in the jars of existence. He magnified even the smallest worries until they assumed mountainous proportions. He was the kind of man who, if something went wrong with the kitchen boiler, felt that the Devil and all his angels had been loosed upon him, as upon the righteous Job, with at least the connivance of Heaven. He seems to have regarded the unsatisfactoriness of a servant as a scarcely less tremendous evil than the infidelity of a wife. If you wish to see into twhat follies of exaggeration Strindberg's want of the sense of proportion led him, you cannot do better than turn to those pages in _Zones of the Spirit_ (as the English translation of his _Blue Book_ is called), in which he tells us about his domestic troubles at the time of the rehearsals of _The Dream Play._
My servant left me; my domestic arrangements were upset; within forty days I had six changes of servants--one worse than the other. At last I had to serve myself, lay the table, and light the stove. I ate black broken victuals out of a basket. In short, I had to taste the whole bitterness of life without knowing why.
Much as one may sympathize with a victim of the servant difficulty, one cannot but regard the last sentence as, in the vulgar phrase, rather a tall order. But it becomes taller still before Strindberg has done with it.
Then came the dress-rehearsal of _The Dream Play._ This drama I wrote seven years ago, after a period of forty days' suffering which were among the worst which I had ever undergone. And now again exactly forty days of fasting and pain had passed. There seemed, therefore, to be a secret legislature which promulgates clearly defined sentences. I thought of the forty days of the Flood, the forty years of wandering in the desert, the forty days' fast kept by Moses, Elijah, and Christ.
There you have Strindberg's secret. His work is, for the most part, simply the dramatization of the conflict between man and the irritations of life. The chief of these is, of course, woman. But the lesser irritations never disappear from sight for long. His obsession by them is very noticeable in _The Dream Play_ itself--in that scene, for instance, in which the Lawyer and the daughter of Indra having married, the Lawyer begins to complain of the untidiness of their home, and the Daughter to complain of the dirt:
THE DAUGHTER. This is worse than I dreamed!
THE LAWYER. We are not the worst off by far. There is still food in the pot.
THE DAUGHTER. But what sort of food?
THE LAWYER. Cabbage is cheap, nourishing, and good to eat.
THE DAUGHTER. For those who like cabbage--to me it is repulsive.
THE LAWYER. Why didn't you say so?
THE DAUGHTER. Because I loved you. I wanted to sacrifice my own taste.
THE LAWYER. Then I must sacrifice my taste for cabbage to you--for sacrifices must be mutual.
THE DAUGHTER. What are we to eat then? Fish? But you hate fish?
THE LAWYER. And it is expensive.
THE DAUGHTER. This is worse than I thought it!
THE LAWYER _(kindly)._ Yes, you see how hard it is.
And the symbolic representation of married life in terms of fish and cabbage is taken up again a little later:--
THE DAUGHTER. I fear I shall begin to hate you after this!
THE LAWYER. Woe to us, then! But let us forestall hatred. I promise never again to speak of any untidiness--although it is torture to me!
THE DAUGHTER. And I shall eat cabbage, though it means agony to me.
THE LAWYER. A life of common suffering, then! One's pleasure the other one's pain.
One feels that, however true to nature the drift of this may be, it is little more than bacilli of truth seen as immense through a microscope. The agonies and tortures arising from eating cabbage and such things may, no doubt, have tragic consequences enough, but somehow the men whom these things put on the rack refuse to come to life in the imagination on the same tragic plane where Prometheus lies on his crag and Oedipus strikes out his eyes that they may no longer look upon his shame. Strindberg is too anxious to make tragedy out of discomforts instead of out of sorrows. When he is denouncing woman as a creature who loves above all things to deceive her husband, his supreme way of expressing his abhorrence is to declare: "If she can trick him into eating horse-flesh without noticing it, she is happy." Here, and in a score of similar passages, we can see how physical were the demons that endlessly consumed Strindberg's peace of mind.
His attitude to women, as we find it expressed in _The Confession of a Fool, The Dance of Death_, and all through his work, is that of a man overwhelmed with the physical. He raves now with lust, now with disgust--two aspects of the same mood. He turns from love to hatred with a change of front as swift as a drunkard's. He is the Mad Mullah of all the sex-antagonism that has ever troubled men since they began to think of woman as a temptress. He was the most enthusiastic modern exponent of the point-of-view of that Adam who explained: "The woman tempted me." Strindberg deliberately wrote those words on his banner and held them aloft to his generation as the summary of an eternal gospel. Miss Lind-af-Hageby tells us that, at one period of his life, he was sufficiently free from the physical obsessions of sex to preach the equality of men and women and even to herald the coming of woman suffrage. But his abiding view of woman was that of the plain man of the nineteenth century. He must either be praising her as a ministering angel or denouncing her as a ministering devil--preferably the latter. It would be nonsense, however, to pretend that Strindberg did not see at least one class of women clearly and truly. The accuracy with which he portrays woman the parasite, the man-eater, the siren, is quite terrible. No writer of his day was so shudderingly conscious of every gesture, movement, and intonation with which the spider-woman sets out to lure the mate she is going to devour. It may be that he prophesies against the sins of women rather than subtly analyses and describes them as a better artist would have done. _The Confessions of a Fool_ is less a revelation of the soul of his first wife than an attack on her. But we must, in fairness to Strindberg, remember that in his violences against women he merely gives us a new rendering of an indictment that goes back to the beginning of history. The world to him was a long lane of oglings, down which man must fly in terror with his eyes shut and his ears covered. His foolishness as a prophet consists, not in his suspicions of woman regarded as an animal, but in his frothing at the mouth at the idea that she should claim to be treated as something higher than an animal. None the less, he denied to the end that he was a woman-hater. His denial, however, was grimly unflattering:--
I have said that the child is a little criminal, incapable of self-guidance, but I love children all the same. I have said that woman is--what she is, but I have always loved some woman, and been a father. Whoever, therefore, calls me a woman-hater is a blockhead, a liar, or a noodle. Or all three together.
Sex, of course, was the greatest cross Strindberg had to bear. But there were hundreds of other little changing crosses, from persecution mania to poverty, which supplanted each other from day to day on his back. He suffered continually both from the way he was made and from the way the world was made. His novels and plays are a literature of suffering. He reveals himself there as a man pursued by furies, a man without rest. He flies to a thousand distractions and hiding-places--drink and lust and piano-playing, Chinese and chemistry, painting and acting, alchemy and poison, and religion. Some of these, no doubt, he honestly turns to for a living. But in his rush from one thing to another he shows the restlessness of a man goaded to madness. Not that his life is to be regarded as entirely miserable. He obviously gets a good deal of pleasure even out of his acutest pain. "I find the joy of life in its violent and cruel struggles," he tells us in the preface to _Miss Julia_, "and my pleasure lies in knowing something and learning something." He is always consumed with the greed of knowledge--a phase of his greed of domination. It is this that enables him to turn his inferno into a purgatory.
In his later period, indeed, he is optimist enough to believe that the sufferings of life cleanse and ennoble. By tortuous ways of sin he at last achieves the simple faith of a Christian. He originally revolted from this faith more through irritation than from principle. One feels that, with happier nerves and a happier environment, he might easily have passed his boyhood as the model pupil in the Sunday-school. It is significant that we find him in _The Confession of a Fool_ reciting Longfellow's _Excelsior_ to the first and worst of his wives. Strindberg may have been possessed of a devil; he undoubtedly liked to play the part of a devil; but at heart he was constantly returning to the Longfellow sentiment, though, of course, his hungry intellectual curiosity was something that Longfellow never knew. In his volume of fables, _In Midsummer Days_, we see how essentially good and simple were his ideas when he could rid himself of sex mania and persecution mania. Probably his love of children always kept him more or less in chains to virtue. Ultimately he yielded himself a victim, not to the furies, but to the still more remorseless pursuit of the Hound of Heaven. On his death-bed, Miss Lind tells us, he held up the Bible and said: "This alone is right." Through his works, however, he serves virtue best, not by directly praising it, but by his eagerly earnest account of the madness of the seven deadly sins, as well as of the seventy-seven deadly irritations. He has not the originality of fancy or imagination to paint virtue well. His genius was the genius of frank and destructive criticism. His work is a jumble of ideas and an autobiography of raw nerves rather than a revelation of the emotions of men and women. His great claim on our attention, however, is that his autobiography is true as far as the power of truth was in him. His pilgrim's progress through madness to salvation is neither a pretty nor a sensational lie. It is a genuine document. That is why, badly constructed though his plays and novels are, some of them have a fair chance of being read a hundred years hence. As a writer of personal literature, he was one of the bold and original men of his time.
XIV
"THE PRINCE OF FRENCH POETS"
It is difficult nowadays to conceive that, within half a century of his death, Ronsard's fame suffered so dark an eclipse that no new edition of his works was called for between 1629 and 1857. When he died, he was, as M. Jusserand reminds us, the most illustrious man of letters in Europe. He seemed, too, to have all those gifts of charm--charm of mood and music--which make immortality certain. And yet, in the rule-of-thumb ages that were to follow, he sank into such disesteem in his own country that Boileau had not a good word for him, and Voltaire roundly said of him that he "spoiled the language." Later, we have Arnauld asserting that France had only done herself dishonour by her enthusiasm for "the wretched poetry of Ronsard." Fénelon, as M. Jusserand tells us, discusses Ronsard as a linguist, and ignores him as a poet.
It was the romantic; revival of the nineteenth century that placed Ronsard on a throne again. Even to-day, however, there are pessimistic Frenchmen who doubt whether their country has ever produced a great poet. Mr. Bennet has told us of one who, on being asked who was the greatest of French poets, replied: "Victor Hugo, hélas!" And in the days when Hugo was still but a youth the doubt must have been still more painful. So keenly was the want of a national poet felt that, if one could not have been discovered, the French would have had to invent him. It was necessary for the enthusiastic young romanticists to possess a great indigenous figure to stand beside those imported idols --Shakespeare, Byron, Goethe, and Dante. Sainte-Beuve, who brought out a Ronsard anthology with a critical essay in 1828, showed them where to look. After that, it was as though French literature had begun with Ronsard. He was the "ideal ancestor." He was, as it were, a re-discovered fatherland. But his praise since then has been no mere task of patriotism. It has been a deep enthusiasm for literature. "You cannot imagine," wrote Flaubert, in 1852, "what a poet Ronsard is. What a poet! What a poet! What wings!... This morning, at half-past twelve, I read a poem aloud which almost upset my nerves, it gave me so much pleasure." That may be taken as the characteristic French view of Ronsard. It may be an exaggerated view. It may be fading to some extent before modern influences. But it is unlikely that Ronsard's reputation in his own country will ever again be other than that of a great poet.
At the same time, it is not easy, on literary grounds, to acquiesce in all the praises that have been heaped upon him. One would imagine from Flaubert's exclamations that Ronsard had a range like Shelley's, whereas, in fact, he was more comparable with the English cavalier poets. He had the cavalier poet's gift of making love seem a profession rather than a passion. He was always very much a gentleman, both in his moods and his philosophy. A great deal of his best poetry is merely a variation on _carpe diem._ On the other hand, though he never went very deep or very high, he did express real sentiments and emotions in poetry. Few poets have sung the regret for youth more sincerely and more beautifully, and, with Ronsard, regret for the lost wonder of his own youth was perhaps the acutest emotion he ever knew. He was himself, in his early years, one of those glorious youths who have the genius of charm and comeliness, of grace and strength and the arts. He excelled at football as in lute-playing. He danced, fenced, and rode better than the best; and, with his noble countenance, his strong limbs, his fair beard, and his "eyes full of gentle gravity," he must have been the picture of the perfect courtier and soldier. Above all, we are told, his conversation was delightful. He had "the gift of pleasing." When he went to Scotland in 1537 with Madeleine, the King's daughter, to attend as page her tragic marriage with James V, James was so attracted by him that he did not allow him to leave the country for two years. With every gift of popularity and success, with the world apparently already at his feet, Ronsard was suddenly struck down by an illness that crippled his whole life. He became deaf, or half-deaf. His body was tortured with arthritis and recurrent attacks of gout. His career as a courtier lay in ruins before him.
Possibly, had it not been so, his genius as a poet would have spent itself in mere politeness. The loss of his physical splendour and the death of more than one of his companions, however, filled him with an extreme sense of the transitoriness of the beauty of the world--of youth and fame and flowers--and turned him both to serious epicureanism and to serious writing. By the year 1550 he was leading the young men of France in a great literary renaissance--a reaction against the lifeless jingle of ballades and punning rhymes. Like du Bellay, he asked himself and his contemporaries: "Are we, then, less than the Greeks and Romans?" And he set out to lay the foundations in France of a literature as individual in its genius as the ancient classics. M. Jusserand, in a most interesting chapter, relates the story of the battles over form and language which were fought by French men of letters in the days of La Pléiade. In an age of awakenings, of conquests, of philosophies, of discussions on everything under the sun, the literature of tricksters was ultimately bound to give way before the bold originality and the sincerities of the new school. But Ronsard had to endure a whole parliament of mockery before the day of victory.
Of his life, apart from his work in literature, there is little to tell. For a man who lived in France in days when Protestantism and Catholicism were murderously at one another's throats, he had a peculiarly uneventful career. This, too, though he threw himself earnestly into the battle against the heretics. He had begun by sympathizing with Protestantism, because it promised much-needed reforms in the Church; but the sympathy was short-lived. In 1553, though a layman, he was himself filling various ecclesiastical offices. He drew the salaries of several priories during his life, more lowly paid priests apparently doing the work. Though an earnest Catholic, however, Ronsard was never faithless to friends who took the other side. He published his kindly feelings towards Odet de Coligny, the Admiral's cardinal brother, for instance, who had adopted Protestantism and married, and, though he could write bloodily enough against his sectarian enemies, the cry for tolerance, for pity, for peace, seems continually to force itself to his lips amid the wars of the time. M. Jusserand lays great stress on the plain-spokenness of Ronsard. He praises especially the courage with which the poet often spoke out his mind to kings and churchmen, though no man could write odes fuller of exaggerated adulation when they were wanted. He sometimes counselled kings, we are told, "in a tone that, after all our revolutions, no writer would dare to employ to-day." Perhaps M. Jusserand over-estimates the boldness with which his hero could remind kings that they, like common mortals, were made of mud. He has done so, I imagine, largely in order to clear him from the charge of being a flatterer. It is interesting to be reminded, by the way, that one of his essays in flattery was an edition of his works dedicated, by order of Catherine de Medicis, to Elizabeth of England, whom he compared to all the incomparables, adding a eulogy of "Mylord Robert Du-Dlé comte de l'Encestre" as the ornament of the English, the wonder of the world. Elizabeth was delighted, and gave the poet a diamond for his pretty book.
But Ronsard does not live in literature mainly as a flatterer. Nor is he remembered as a keeper of the conscience of princes, or as a religious controversialist. If nothing but his love-poems had survived, we should have almost all his work that is of literary importance. He fell in love in the grand manner three times, and from these three passions most of his good poetry flowed. First there was Cassandre, the beautiful girl of Florentine extraction, whom he saw singing to her lute, when he was only twenty-two, and loved to distraction. She married another and became the star of Ronsard's song. She was the irruptive heroine of that witty and delightful sonnet on the _Iliad:--_
Je veux lire en trois jours l'Iliade d'Homère, Et pour ce, Corydon, ferme bien l'huis sur moi; Si rien me vient troubler, je t'assure ma foi, Tu sentiras combien pesante est ma colère.
Je ne veux seulement que notre chambrière Vienne faire mon lit, ton compagnon ni toi; Je veux trois jours entiers demeurer à recoi, Pour folâtrer après une semaine entière.
Mais, si quelqu'un venait de la part de Cassandre, Ouvre-lui tôt la porte, et ne le fais attendre, Soudain entre en ma chambre et me viens accoutrer.
Je veux tant seulement à lui seul me montrer; Au reste, si un dieu voulait pour moi descendre Du ciel, ferme la porte et ne le laisse entrer.
Nine years after Cassandre came Marie, the fifteen-year-old daughter of an Angevin villager, nut-brown, smiling, and with cheeks the colour of a May rose. She died young, but not before she had made Ronsard suffer by coquetting with another lover. What is more important still, not before she had inspired him to write that sonnet which has about it so much of the charm of the morning:--
Mignonne, levez-vous, vous êtes paresseuse, Ja la gaie alouette au ciel a fredonné, Et ja le rossignol doucement jargonné, Dessus l'épine assis, sa complainte amoureuse.
Sus! debout allons voir l'herbelette perleuse, Et votre beau rosier de boutons couronné, Et vos oeillets aimés auxquels aviez donné Hier au soir de l'eau d'une main si soigneuse.
Harsoir en vous couchant vous jurâtes vos yeux D'être plus tôt que moi ce matin éveillée: Mais le dormir de l'aube, aux filles gracieux,
Vous tient d'un doux sommeil encor les yeux silléee. Ça, ça, que je les baise, et votre beau tetin, Cent fois, pour vous apprendre à vous lever matin.
Ronsard was old and grey--at least, he was old before his time and grey--when he met Hélène de Sorgères, maid of honour to the Queen, and began the third of his grand passions. He lived all the life of a young lover over again. They went to dances together, Hélène in a mask. Hélène gave her poet a crown of myrtle and laurel. They had childish quarrels and swore eternal fidelity. It was for her that Ronsard made the most exquisite of his sonnets: _Quand vous serez bien vieille_-a sonnet of which Mr. Yeats has written a magical version in English.