REVOLT***


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AUGUST STRINDBERG

THE SPIRIT OF REVOLT

Studies and Impressions

by

L. LIND-AF-HAGEBY







New York
D. Appleton and Company
MCMXIII




CONTENTS

        INTRODUCTION. THE RIDDLE
    I.  THE STRUGGLE WITH ENVIRONMENT
   II.  THE STRUGGLE FOR SELF-EXPRESSION
  III.  "FERMENTATION TIME"
   IV.  THE DRAMA OF THE HERETIC
    V.  MARRIED AND BLASPHEMOUS.
   VI.  THE ARTIST.
  VII.  SELF-TORMENTOR AND VISIONARY.
 VIII.  The Theatre of Life

STRINDBERG'S CHIEF WRITINGS

INDEX

[Illustration: August Strindberg--Bust by Carl Eldh.]




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  August Strindberg. From a Bust by Carl Eldh.... Frontispiece
  Strindberg's Parents
  August Strindberg (1862 and 1870)
  August Strindberg. From Statue by Carl Eldh
  August Strindberg (1884)
  August Strindberg (1884 and 1897)
  August Strindberg. From Bust by Max Levi, 1893
  August Strindberg. From Bust by Agnes Kjellberg Frumerie, 1896
  August Strindberg. From Portrait in Oil by Chr. Krogh, 1893
  August Strindberg. From Portrait in Oil by Richard Bergh, 1906
  August Strindberg (1904 and 1906)
  August Strindberg (1906 and 1907)
  August Strindberg (1902). In His Home in Stockholm (1908)
  August Strindberg. From Bust by K.I. Eldh. Bought by the Swedish
     State. In the National Museum, Stockholm
  August Strindberg. From Portrait by Carl Larsson, 1899. In the
     National Museum, Stockholm
  Strindberg in His Library in the Blue Tower. His Last Home
  Strindberg in His Study (1911)
  The Strindberg-Theatre in Stockholm
  Harriet Bosse. Strindberg's third Wife as Biskra in Samum, 1902.
  Anne-Marie Bosse-Strindberg. Strindberg's only child by his third
     marriage
  Strindberg's Funeral (May 19th, 1913)
  Trades-Unions and Undergraduates in Procession




AUGUST STRINDBERG

THE SPIRIT OF REVOLT


INTRODUCTION

THE RIDDLE


There have been few dispassionate attempts to discern August
Strindberg's place in contemporary literature. His writings and his
personality defied ordinary criticism.

He took upon himself the role of destroyer, he mocked men's religion
and men's morality, he ridiculed propriety and poured bitter scorn on
the social order. There was something cometic in the swiftness and
intensity with which he appeared, disturbing the well-ordered orbits of
traditions and conventions. The erratic course of his voyage through
humanity caused alarm. No sooner had people congratulated themselves
that his terrific lust for destruction had passed by their favourite
systems and their cherished ideals, than his ruthless force was upon
them, exposing ugliness and scattering treasures.

He passed on, making enemies, breaking idols, desecrating temples. He
sowed reality and he reaped hatred.

His titanic spirit worked through a brain charged with explosive
mentality. He poured out dramas, novels, stories, with a versatility
and an accumulating energy which in themselves were offensive to the
mediocre and to those who sought to place him within literary shackles.
He discoursed on history, science and statecraft with the calm
assurance of omniscience.

He wrote books which were decidedly and unblushingly "immoral." He
compelled attention by blasphemous outbursts which filled the religious
with righteous indignation and sighs for the _auto-da-fe_. He dissected
the human heart, laid bare its meanness, its uncleanliness; made men
and women turn on each other with sudden understanding and loathing,
and walked away smiling at the evil he had wrought. He turned on
himself with savage hatred, and in books, bearing the mark of the
flagellant and reflecting the agony of a soul in torment, he pointed to
his sins and his stripes.

"He is very evil," said some; "let us put him in prison."

"He is mad," said others; "let us have him declared a lunatic."

"He is most improper," said the majority; "let us ignore him
altogether."

When public opinion was quite sure that Strindberg was evil, mad, and
improper, when he stood convicted out of his own mouth of anti-social
and satanic designs, he stayed the verdict by his own magic. He
wrote more and more, and there came from his pen artistic creations
endowed with virtues which could not have risen in a mind submerged in
vice; pictures of scenery which bespoke a delicate and spiritualised
nature-worship. His mind held a garden of flowers as well as a pile of
putrescence.

On May 14th, 1912, the stillness of death descended on the battlefield
which was Strindberg's life. The literary historian who justly passes
the suspended verdict must hold peculiar and special qualifications.
For the winds of literary taste and fashion cannot touch the giant of
expression. Condemnation by temporary systems of morality and creed
did not alter his course in life and will not disturb him in death.
He was--himself; and he worked ceaselessly at the task of finding
more of himself. Strindberg the atheist, Strindberg the scientist,
Strindberg the spiritualist, Strindberg the mystic, Strindberg the
sensualist, and Strindberg the ascetic, took equally important parts in
his theatre of life. The critic met him day by day in different attire
and pose, incarnations of the elusive self which was stage-manager of
this extraordinary performance. A soul in conflict with itself, good
and evil, fair and foul; sparkling with life and tense with passion
to create, he could not give us peace or contentment. Like Jacob, he
wrestled with God, though not for a night only, but throughout life,
and he fought with the desperation of one who knows that upon the issue
of the struggle depends, not his own blessing, but the liberation of
countless prisoners.

An epitome of humanity, a fragment of the world's eternal and real
drama of birth and death, he cannot be fully understood save by those
who share his cosmic consciousness.

He studied chemistry, astronomy, botany, physics, geology, entomology,
medicine, philology and political economy with a voracity which made
him ridiculous in the eyes of the specialists who are satisfied with a
few well-established formulae. For him there were no barriers between
specialised departments of human knowledge--all sciences were thrown
into the melting-pot, in which he was preparing the new brew which
would slake the thirst of parched souls. A solipsist who assimilated,
rejected and transmuted the patiently accumulated theories of morals
as the supreme duty of existence, he scorned the slaves of ethical
communism.

The iconoclasm of Ibsen was fired by the realisation of the duties
of the wise prophet amongst his foolish people. The hypocrisies
and foibles of the little souls were the objects of the thundering
chastisement of his trumpet. The white heat of Nietzsche's forge for
the making of Superman was engendered by contempt for the feeble and
sickly. The misanthropy which breathed poison out of Strindberg's
writings, which showed souls and things in hideous nakedness, and
painted sores and disease with horrible realism, was the darkness which
he held high so as to call forth the cry for tight.

The collected works of Strindberg, which will shortly be published in a
new edition, consist of some 115 plays, novels, collections of stories,
essays and poems. Amongst these some seem absolutely antithetical.
It is the constant changeability, the self-contradictions, which made
Strindberg so incomprehensible to his contemporaries. The measure of
his life-force was so liberal that he could afford to continue where
others stop. He shed his skins like the snake and altered his colour
like the chameleon, because he was the personification of perpetual
movement and change. Thus he was endowed with ever-recurring youth;
the decay of the old was immediately followed by birth of the new.
The diary, in which, during the last fourteen years, he recorded
his visions and supernatural experiences, will not be given to the
world for many years to come. Though it depicts the last phase of his
spiritual evolution, the postponement of publication is no doubt wise.
Meanwhile, those who have poured curses on Strindberg's blatant atheism
have been perplexed by his last words.

When death was drawing near, he took the Bible--which always lay on the
table by his bed--held it up and said in a clear voice:

"Everything personal is now obliterated. I have settled with life. My
account has been rendered. This alone is right."

He expressed a last wish that the Bible and a little crucifix which
he used to wear should be placed on his breast after death, and that
he should be buried early in the morning, and not amongst the rich. He
desired to be laid to rest alone on the top of a hill under the firs.

This love of the early morning was part of his craving for more light.
For many years he used to take a solitary morning walk. At seven
o'clock he emerged from his "blue tower" in Stockholm and walked
briskly through the streets and squares of his native town. At nine he
was back at his writing-table--of late years a recluse for the rest of
the day, absorbed in his work.

"Ever since my youth," he writes in _Inferno_, "I devote my morning
walk to meditations which are preparations for my daily work. Nobody
may then accompany me, not even my wife. In the morning my mind enjoys
a balance and an expansion which approach ecstasy; I do not walk, I
fly; I do not feel that I have a body; all sadness evaporates and I
am entirely soul. This is for me the hour of inner concentration, of
prayer, my divine service."

I have often seen Strindberg in the streets of Stockholm. He walked
with his high forehead painfully contracted, the eyes searching and
concentrated, and an expression of haughty bitterness upon his face.
A solitary, suggesting to the passer-by Rodin's _Penseur_ in motion
and the futile wanderings of Ahasuerus; he seemed wrapped in his own
misery, held aloof by suffering and contempt.

One day I met him with a companion. He was holding a little girl by
the hand and talking to her. The child looked up in his face and
Strindberg's expression was changed. Love for the child, respect for
the questions and joys of childhood shone out of the face of the hater.
He was not obsessed by the ugliness of things or the cruelty of human
deception. His face was aglow with the early enthusiasm which, though
slain a thousand times, rises again at the bidding of the Self that
knows the answer to the riddle.

In the early morning of Sunday, May 19th, August Strindberg's body was
laid to rest. It was a glorious spring day with sunshine and blue sky.
Some sixty thousand people were astir to do homage to the memory of one
whom they knew to have been intrinsically true and tragically great.
Royalty, Riksdag, universities, capital and labour, statesmen, writers
and artists assembled to say a united farewell to the man of mystery
who, by his intense sincerity and the exuberance of genius, had at last
melted hatred, and ascended the steps from shame to glory.

In a message after Strindberg's death, Maxim Gorki likened him to
Danko, the hero of the old Danube legend, who, in order to help
humanity out of the darkness of problems, tore his heart out of his
breast, lit it and holding it high, led the way. The masses who mock
and praise so easily, who crucify and raise idols with the same haste,
seldom recognise their real friends. Strindberg patiently burnt his
heart for the illumination of the people, and on the day when his body
was laid low in the soil the flame of his self-immolation was seen pure
and inextinguishable.




CHAPTER I

THE STRUGGLE WITH ENVIRONMENT


Strindberg's childhood and youth, as described by himself in his
autobiographical novel _The Bondswoman's Son_, present psychological
features of exceptional interest. The circumstances of his early
home-life and their effect upon the unfolding forces of his genius
cannot be ignored by anyone who attempts to explain the varied strata
of his artistic production.

His insistent and torturous need for exact self-analysis, coupled with
an equally compelling need to tell the truth, made all his writings
strongly subjective. His autobiography--"the story of a soul's
evolution"--is an intimate revelation of his power to dissect his past
selves, to record minute incidents and to extract reflexes from the
bundle of emotions and thoughts which go to make up character. Nothing
is lost, nothing is too insignificant for careful examination in the
microscope under which he places every cell of himself. The confessions
of Rousseau and Tolstoy have not the nakedness of Strindberg's truth
about himself. Though he never loses sympathy with himself, he scorns
excuses and exposes his sins and his follies with ruthless exactitude.
There is a strange combination of the coolly analysing psychologist
and the passionate flagellant in the descriptions which range from the
struggles of childhood, through the Inferno-period of 1896, to the calm
of _Alone_, and the final visions of light.

The autobiographical novel in four volumes which was published under
the titles _The Bondswoman's Son, Fermentation Time, In the Red Room_
and _The Author_, was written at the age of thirty-seven, and, though
the impressions of childhood are recorded with deep insight into
the child's mind, we cannot forget that they were written down and
interpreted by the man who had behind him years of tumultuous and
bitter struggle for self-expression, and before whom the banquet of
life seemed reduced to dead-sea fruit. In the preface to the fifth
edition of _The Bondswoman's Son_, he tells us that when writing the
volume he believed he stood before death, "for I was tired, saw no
longer any object in life, considered myself superfluous, thrown away."

       *       *       *       *       *

Johan August Strindberg was born in Stockholm on January 22nd, 1849.
His father, whom in disparagement of his parentage he often calls
"the grocer," was a merchant and shipping agent who had married a
servant-girl, the mother of his three children. The father was a man
of education and natural refinement who passed through many economical
vicissitudes, culminating in bankruptcy at the time of August's birth.
August was born a short time after the union between the parents had
been legalised by the ceremony of marriage, and he was not welcome.
His father bore his troubles with manly fortitude and resignation
and cherished the ideals of the upper classes, whilst the mother
was essentially of the people and remained so. He claimed a distant
ancestral connection with the nobility of Sweden, his family having
descended from the son of a peasant who was born in 1710 at Strinne
in Angermanland, and who married a girl of noble birth. The discord
resulting from the difference between his father and mother gave August
his first impression of that class struggle which I throughout life
held him in the bondage of a haunting problem, and which stimulated the
development of his mordantly critical faculties.

Poverty, with its attendant cares and anxieties, reigned in the house
by Klara churchyard, where, from a flat on the third floor, August
began to survey life's difficulties. He tells us that he recollects
fear and hunger as his first sensations. He was afraid of darkness, of
being beaten, of offending people, of falling down, of knocking against
things, of being in the way, of the fists of his brothers, of father's
and mother's chastisements.

It was not easy to avoid being in people's way, for the parents with
seven children and two servants lived in three rooms. The furniture
consisted mostly of cradles and beds; children slept on ironing boards
and chairs. Baptisms and funerals alternated. The mother developed
phthisis after the birth of her twelfth child.

She was contented with her life, he tells us, for she had risen in the
social scale and improved her own and her family's position. The father
was less satisfied with his fate, for he had descended and sacrificed
himself. He was tired, sad, severe and serious, but not hard.

Strindberg's recollections of his early impressions of the relations
between his father and mother show the inception of the views on women
and marriage which earned for him the title of woman-hater, and which
found their most provocative expression in _The Father_ and _The
Confession of a Fool_.

"This is the father's thankless position in the family," he writes; "to
be everybody's breadwinner, everybody's enemy." He concluded that his
mother did not overwork herself, though his account of the daily life
in the family does not support that view.

As a little boy August was as weak as other little boys. He adored
his mother. He was shy, acutely sensitive, morbidly self-conscious