Part 5

The question is, naturally, was Strindberg sincere in the fanatical insurgency of his earlier period, or was his attitude merely a theatrical pose and his social enthusiasm a ranting declamation? In either case, there opens up this other question: Have we reason to doubt the sincerity of the mental changes that were yet to follow,--the genuineness of his pessimism, occultism, and, in the final stage, of his religious conversion? His unexampled hardihood in reversing his opinions and going dead against his convictions could be illustrated in nearly every sphere of thought. At one time a glowing admirer of Rousseau and loudly professing his gospel of nature, he forsook this allegiance, and chose as his new idol Rousseau's very antipode, Voltaire. For many years he was a democrat of the purest water, identified himself with the proletarian cause, and acted as the fiery champion of the poor labor-driven masses against their oppressors; but one fine day, no matter whether it came about directly through his contact with Nietzsche or otherwise, he repudiated socialism, scornfully denouncing it as a tattered remnant of his cast-off Christianity, and arrayed himself on the side of the elect, or self-elect, against the "common herd," the "much-too-many." License for the best to govern the rest, became temporarily his battle-cry; and his political ideal suggested nothing less completely absurd than a republic presided over by an oligarchy of autocrats. His unsurpassed reputation as an anti-feminist would hardly prepare us to find his earlier works fairly aglow with sympathy for the woman cause. He held at one time, as did Tolstoy, that art and poetry have a detrimental effect upon the natural character; for which reason the peasant is a more normal being than the lettered man. Especially was he set against the drama, on the ground that it throws the public mind into confusion by its failure to differentiate sharply between the author's own opinions and those of the characters. Literature, he held, should pattern itself after a serious newspaper: it should seek to influence, not entertain. Not only did he drop this pedantic restriction of literature in the end, but in his own practice he had always defied it, because, despite his fierce campaign against art, he could not overcome the force of his artistic impulses. And so in other provinces of thought, too, he reversed his judgment with a temerity and swiftness that greatly offended the feelings and perplexed the intelligence of his followers for the time being and justified the question whether Strindberg had any principles at all. In politics he was by quick turns Anarchist and Socialist, Radical and Conservative, Republican and Aristocrat, Communist and Egoist; in religion, Pietist, Protestant, Deist, Atheist, Occultist, and Roman Catholic. And yet unquestionably he was honest. To blame him merely because he changed his views, and be it never so radically, would be blaming a man for exercising his right to develop. In any man of influence, an unalterable permanency of opinion would be even more objectionable than a frequent shift of his point of view. In recent times the presumable length of a person's intellectual usefulness has been a live subject of discussion which has resulted in some legislation of very questionable wisdom, for instance the setting of an arbitrary age limit for the active service of high-grade teachers. In actual experience men are too old to teach, or through any other function to move the minds of younger people in a forward direction, whenever they have lost the ability to change their own mind. Yet at all events, an eminent author's right of self-reversal must not be exercised at random; he should refrain from the propagation of new opinions that have not ripened within himself. Which is the same as saying that he should stick to his old opinions until he finds himself inwardly compelled to abandon them. But as a matter of fact, a man like Strindberg, propelled by an unbridled imagination, alert with romantic tendencies, nervously overstrung, kept constantly under a strain by his morbidly sensitive temperament,--and whose brain is consequently a seething chaos of conflicting ideas, is never put to the necessity of changing his mind; his mind keeps changing itself.

It must be as difficult for the literary historian to do Strindberg full justice as it was for the great eccentric himself; when in taking stock, as it were, of his mental equipment, during one of his protracted periods of despondency, he summed himself up in the following picturesque simile: "A monstrous conglomeration, changing its forms according to the observer's point of view and possessing no more reality than the rainbow that is visible to the eyes and yet does not exist." His evolution may be tracked, however, in the detailed autobiography in which he undertook, by a rigorous application of Hippolyte Taine's well-known theory and method, to account for his temperamental peculiarities on the basis of heredity and the milieu and to describe the gradual transformation of his character through education and the external pressure of contemporary intellectual movements. This remarkable work is like a picture book of ideals undermined, hollowed, and shattered; a perverse compound of cynicism and passion, it is unspeakably loathsome to the sense of beauty and yet, in the last artistic reckoning, not without great beauty of its own. It divides the story of Strindberg's life into these consecutive parts: The Son of the Servant; The Author; The Evolution of a Soul; The Confession of a Fool; Inferno; Legends; The Rupture; Alone. The very titles signalize the brutal frankness, or, shall we say, terrible sincerity of a tale that rummages without piety among the most sacred privacies, and drags forth from intimate nooks and corners sorrow and squalor and shame enough to have wrecked a dozen average existences. There is no mistaking or evading the challenge hurled by this story: See me as I am, stripped of conventional lies and pretensions! Look upon my naked soul, covered with scars and open sores. Behold me in my spasms of love and hate, now in demoniacal transports, now prostrate with anguish! And if you want to know how I came to be what I am, consider my ancestry, my bringing up, my social environment, and be sure also to pocket your own due share of the blame for my destruction!--Certainly Strindberg's autobiography is not to be recommended as a graduation gift for convent-bred young ladies, or as a soothing diversion for convalescents, but if accepted in a proper sense, it will be found absorbing, informative, and even helpful.

Strindberg never forgave his father for having married below his station. He felt that the good blood of the Strindbergs,--respectable merchants and ministers and country gentlemen,--was worsened by the proletarian strain imported into it through a working girl named Eleonore Ulrike Norling, the mother of August Strindberg and his eleven brothers and sisters. During August's childhood the family lived in extremely straitened circumstances. When a dozen people live cooped up in three rooms, some of them are more than likely to have the joy of youth crushed out of them and crowded from the premises. Here was the first evil that darkened Strindberg's life: he simply was cheated out of his childhood.

School was no happier place for him than home. His inordinate pride, only sharpened by the consciousness of his parents' poverty which bordered on pauperism, threw him into a state of perpetual rebellion against comrades and teachers. And all this time his inner life was tossed hither and thither by a general intellectual and emotional restlessness due to an insatiable craving for knowledge. At fifteen years of age he had reached a full conviction on the irredeemable evilness of life; and concluded, in a moment of religious exaltation, to dedicate his own earthly existence to the vicarious expiation of universal sin through the mortification of the flesh. Then, of a sudden, he became a voracious reader of rationalistic literature, and turned atheist with almost inconceivable dispatch, but soon was forced back by remorse into the pietistic frame of mind,--only to pass through another reaction immediately after. At this time he claims that earthly life is a punishment or a probation; but that it lies in man's power to make it endurable by freeing himself from the social restraints. He has become a convert to the fantastic doctrine of Jean Jacques Rousseau, that man is good by nature but has been depraved by civilization. Now in his earliest twenties, he embraces communism with all its implications,--free love, state parenthood, public ownership of utilities, equal division of the fruits of labor, and so forth,--as the sole and sure means of salvation for humanity.

In the "Swiss Stories," subtitled "Utopias in Reality,"(13) Strindberg demonstrated to his own satisfaction the smooth and practical workings of that doctrine. It was difficult for him to understand why the major part of the world seemed so hesitant about adopting so tempting and equitable a scheme of living. Yet, for his own person, too, he soon disavowed socialism, because under a socialistic régime the individual would be liable to have his ideas put into uniform, and the remotest threat of interference with his freedom of thought was something this fanatical apostle of liberty could not brook.

(13) The stories deal among other things with the harmonious communal life in Godin's _Phalanstère_. Strindberg wrote two descriptions of it, one before, the other after visiting the colony.

In the preface to the "Utopias," he had referred to himself as "a convinced socialist, like all sensible people"; whereas now he writes: "Idealism and Socialism are two maladies born of laziness." Having thus scientifically diagnosed the disease and prescribed the one true specific for it, namely--how simple!--the total abolition of the industries, he resumes the preaching of Rousseauism in its simon-pure form, orders every man to be his maid-of-all-work and jack-of-all-trades, puts the world on a vegetarian diet, and then wonders why the socialists denounce and revile him as a turncoat and an apostate.

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The biography throws an especially vivid light on Strindberg's relation to one of the most important factors of socialism, to wit, the question of woman's rights. His position on this issue is merely a phase of that extreme and practically isolated position in regard to woman in general that has more than any other single element determined the feeling of the public towards him and by consequence fixed his place in contemporary literature. That this should be so is hardly unfair, because no other element has entered so deeply into the structure and fibre of his thought and feeling.

Strindberg, as has been stated, was not from the outset, or perchance constitutionally, an anti-feminist. In "The Red Room" he preaches equality of the sexes even in marriage. The thesis of the book is that man and woman are not antagonistic phenomena of life, rather they are modifications of the same phenomenon, made for mutual completion; hence, they can only fulfill their natural destiny through close coöperative comradeship. But there were two facts that prevented Strindberg from proceeding farther along this line of thought. One was his incorrigible propensity to contradiction, the other his excessive subjectiveness which kept him busy building up theories on the basis of personal experience. The prodigious feminist movement launched in Scandinavia by Ibsen and Bjoernson was very repugnant to him, because he felt, not without some just reason, that the movement was for a great many people little more than a fad. So long as art and literature are influenced by fashion, so long there will be and should be revolts against the vogue. Moreover, Strindberg felt that the movement was being carried too far. He was prepared to accompany Ibsen some distance on the way of reform, but refused to subscribe to his verdict that the whole blame for our crying social maladjustments rests with the unwillingness of men to allot any rights whatsoever to women.

Strindberg's play, "Sir Bengt's Wife," printed in 1882, but of much earlier origin, is interpreted by Brandes as a symbolical portrayal of feminine life in Scandinavia during the author's early manhood. The leading feminine figure, a creature wholly incapable of understanding or appreciating the nobler traits in man, is nevertheless treated with sympathy, on the whole. She is represented,--like Selma Bratsberg in Ibsen's "The League of Youth," and Nora Helmer, in "A Doll's House,"--as the typical and normal victim of a partial and unfair training. Her faults of judgment and errors of temper are due to the fact so forcefully descanted upon by Selma, that women are not permitted to share the interests and anxieties of their husbands. We are expressly informed by Strindberg that this drama was intended, in the first place, as an attack upon the romantic proclivities of feminine education; in the second, as an illustration of the power of love to subdue the will; in the third, as a defense of the thesis that woman's love is of a higher quality than man's; and lastly, as a vindication of the right of woman to be her own master. Again, in "Married" he answers the query, Shall women vote? distinctly in the affirmative, although here the fixed idea about the congenital discordance between the sexes, and the identification of love with a struggle for supremacy, has already seized hold of him.

To repeat, there was at first nothing absolutely preposterous about Strindberg's position in regard to the woman movement. On the contrary, his view might have been endorsed as a not altogether unwholesome corrective for the ruling fashion of dealing with the issue by the advocacy of extremes. But by force of his supervening personal grievance against the sex, Strindberg's anti-feminism became in the long run the fixed pole about which gravitated his entire system of social and ethical thought. His campaign against feminism, which otherwise could have served a good purpose by curbing wild militancy, was defeated by its own exaggerations. Granting that feminists had gone too far in the denunciation of male brutality and despotism, Strindberg went still farther in the opposite direction, when he deliberately set out to lay bare the character of woman by dissecting some of her most diabolical incarnations. As has already been said, he was utterly incapable of objective thinking, and under the sting of his miseries in love and marriage, dislike of woman turned into hatred and hatred into frenzy. Henceforth, the entire spectacle of life presented itself to his distorted vision as a perpetual state of war between the sexes: on the one side he saw the male, strong of mind and heart, but in the generosity of strength guileless and over-trustful; on the other side, the female, weak of body and intellect, but shrewd enough to exploit her frailness by linking iniquity to impotence and contriving by her treacherous cunning to enslave her natural superior:--it is the story of Samson and Delilah made universal in its application. Love is shown up as the trap in which man is caught to be shorn of his power. The case against woman is classically drawn up in "The Father," one of the strangest and at the same time most powerful tragedies of Strindberg. The principals of the plot stand for the typical character difference between the sexes as Strindberg sees it; the man being kind-hearted, good-natured, and aspiring, whereas the woman, setting an example for all his succeeding portraits of women, is cunning, though unintelligent and coarse-grained, soulless, yet insanely ambitious and covetous of power. In glaring contrast to the situation made so familiar by Ibsen, we here see the man struggling away from the clutches of a woman who declares frankly that she has never looked at a man without feeling conscious of her superiority over him. In this play the man, a person of ideals and real ability, who is none other than Strindberg himself in one of his matrimonial predicaments, fails to extricate himself from the snare, and ends--both literally and figuratively--by being put into the straitjacket.

Without classing Strindberg as one of the great world dramatists, it would be narrow-minded, after experiencing the gripping effect of some of his plays, to deny them due recognition, for indeed they would be remarkable for their perspicacity and penetration, even if they were devoid of any value besides. They contain the keenest analyses ever made of the vicious side of feminine character, obtained by specializing, as it were, on the more particularly feminine traits of human depravity. Assuredly the procedure is onesided, but the delineation of a single side of life is beyond peradventure a legitimate artistic enterprise as long as it is not palmed upon us as an accurate and complete picture. Unfortunately, Strindberg's abnormal vision falsifies the things he looks at, and, being steeped in his insuperable prejudice, his pictures of life, in spite of the partial veracity they possess, never rise above the level of caricatures.

He was incompetent to pass judgment upon an individual woman separately; to him all women were alike, and that means, all unmitigatedly bad! To the objection raised by one of the characters in "The Father": "Oh, there are so many kinds of women," the author's mouthpiece makes this clinching answer: "Modern investigation has pronounced that there is only one kind."

The autobiography of Strindberg is largely inspired by his unreasoning hatred of women; the result, in the main, of his three unfortunate ventures into the uncongenial field of matrimony. In its first part, the account of his life is not without some traces of healthy humor, but as the story progresses, his entire philosophy of life becomes more and more aberrant under the increasing pressure of that obsession. He gets beside himself at the mere mention of anything feminine, and blindly hits away, let his bludgeon land where it will; logic, common sense, and common decency go to the floor before his vehement and brutal assault. Every woman is a born liar and traitor. Her sole aim in life is to thrive parasitically upon the revenue of her favors. Since marriage and prostitution cannot provide a living for all, the oversupply now clamor for admission to the work-mart; but they are incompetent and lazy, and inveterate shirkers of responsibility. With triumphant malice he points to the perfidious readiness of woman to perform her tasks by proxy, that is, to delegate them to hired substitutes: her children are tended and taught by governesses and teachers; her garments are made by dressmakers and seamstresses; the duties of her household she unloads on servants,--and from selfish considerations of vanity, comfort, and love of pleasure, she withdraws even from the primary maternal obligation and lets her young be nourished at the breast of a stranger. Strindberg in his rage never stops to think that the deputies in these cases,--cooks and housemaids and nurses and so forth,--themselves belong to the female sex, by which fact the impeachment is in large part invalidated.

The play bearing the satirical title "Comrades" makes a special application of the theory about the pre-established antagonism of the sexes. In a situation similar to that in "The Father," husband and wife are shown in a yet sharper antithesis of character: a man of sterling character and ability foiled by a woman in all respects his inferior, yet imperiously determined to dominate him. At first she seems to succeed in her ambition, and in the same measure as she assumes a more and more mannish demeanor, the husband's behavior grows more and more effeminate. But the contest leads to results opposite to those in "The Father." Here, the man, once he is brought to a full realization of his plight, arouses himself from his apathy, reasserts his manhood, and, in the ensuing fight for supremacy, routs the usurper and comes into his own. The steps by which he passes through revolt from subjection to self-liberation, are cleverly signaled by his outward transformation, as he abandons the womanish style of dressing imposed on him by his wife's whim and indignantly flings into a corner the feminine costume which she would make him wear at the ball.

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Leaving aside, then, all question as to their artistic value, Strindberg's dramas are deserving of attention as experiments in a fairly unexplored field of analytic psychology. They are the first literary creations of any great importance begotten by such bitter hatred of woman. The anti-feminism of Strindberg's predecessors, not excepting that arch-misogynist, Arthur Schopenhauer himself, sprang from contempt, not from abhorrence and abject fear. In Strindberg, misogyny turns into downright gynophobia. To him, woman is not an object of disdain, but the cruel and merciless persecutor of man. In order to disclose the most dangerous traits of the feminine soul, Strindberg dissects it by a method that corresponds closely to Ibsen's astonishing demonstration of masculine viciousness. The wide-spread dislike for Strindberg's dramas is due, in equal parts, to the detestableness of his male characters, and to the optimistic disbelief of the general public in the reality of womanhood as he represents it. Strindberg's portraiture of the sex appears as a monstrous slander, principally because no other painter has ever placed the model into the same disadvantageous light, and the authenticity of his pictures is rendered suspicious by their abnormal family resemblance. He was obsessed with the petrifying vision of a uniform cruel selfishness staring out of every woman's face: countess, courtezan, or kitchen maid, all are cast in the same gorgon mold.

Strindberg's aversion towards women was probably kindled into action, as has already been intimated, by his disgust at the sudden irruption of woman worship into literature; but, as has also been made clear, only the disillusionments and grievances of his private experience hardened that aversion into implacable hatred. At first he simply declined to ally himself with the feminist cult, because the women he knew seemed unworthy of being worshipped,--little vain dolls, frivolous coquettes, and pedants given to domestic tyranny, of such the bulk was made up. Under the maddening spur of his personal misfortunes, his feeling passed from weariness to detestation, from detestation to a bitter mixture of fear and furious hate. He conceived it as his supreme mission and central purpose in life to unmask the demon with the angel's face, to tear the drapings from the idol and expose to view the hideous ogress that feeds on the souls of men. Woman, in Strindberg's works, is a bogy, constructed out of the vilest ingredients that enter into the composition of human nature, with a kind of convulsive life infused by a remnant of great artistic power. And this grewsome fabric of a diseased imagination, like Frankenstein's monster, wreaks vengeance on its maker. His own mordant desire for her is the lash that drives him irresistibly to his destruction.