Prophets of Dissent Part 2

A like contrast between dejection and resilience would be brought to light by a comparison of the twelve lyric poems, _Douze Chansons_, (1897), with the _Serres Chaudes_. The mood is still greatly subdued; the new poetry is by no means free from sadness and a strain of resignation. But the half-stifled despair that cries out from the older book returns no dissonant echo in the new.

Even his dramatic technique comes under the sway of Maeterlinck's altered view of the world. The far freer use of exciting and eventful action testifies to increased elasticity and force. This is a marked feature of _Soeur Beatrice_ ("Sister Beatrice"), (1900), a miracle play founded on the old story about the recreant nun who, broken from sin and misery, returns to the cloister and finds that during the many years of her absence her part and person have been carried out by the Holy Virgin herself.

Equally, the three other dramas of this epoch--_Aglavaine et Selysette_, _Monna Vanna_, and _Joyzelle_--are highly available for scenic enactment. Of the three, _Monna Vanna_, (1902), in particular is conspicuous for a wholly unexpected apt.i.tude of characterization, and for the unsurpa.s.sed intensity of its situations, which in this isolated case are not cast in a single mood as in the other plays, but are individually distinct and full of dramatic progress, whereas everywhere else the action moves rather sluggishly.

"Monna Vanna" is one of the most brilliantly actable plays of modern times, despite its improbability. A certain incongruity between the realistic and the romantic aspects in the behavior of the princ.i.p.als is saved from offensiveness by a disposition on the part of the spectator to refer it, unhistorically, to the provenience of the story. But as a matter of fact the actors are not fifteenth century Renaissance men and women at all, but mystics, modern mystics at that, both in their reasoning and their morality. It is under a cryptical soul-compulsion that Giovanna goes forth to the unknown condottiere prepared to lay down her honor for the salvation of her people, and that her husband at last conquers his repugnance to her going. Prinzivalle, Guido, Marco, are mystics even to a higher degree than Vanna.

The poignant actualism of "Monna Vanna" lies, however, in the author's frank sympathy with a distinctively modern zest for freedom. The situation between husband and wife is reminiscent of "A Doll's House" in the greedily possessive quality of Guido's affection, with which quality his tyrannous unbelief in Prinzivalle's magnanimity fully accords. But Maeterlinck here goes a step beyond Ibsen. In her married life with Guido, Vanna was meekly contented, "at least as happy as one can be when one has renounced the vague and extravagant dreams which seem beyond human life." When the crisis arrives she realizes that "it is never too late for one who has found a love that can fill a life." Her final rebellion is sanctioned by the author, who unmistakably endorses the venerable Marco's profession of faith that life is always in the right.

"Joyzelle," (1903), inferior to "Monna Vanna" dramaturgically, and in form the most distinctly fantastic of all Maeterlinck's productions, is still farther removed from the fatalistic atmosphere. This play sounds, as the author himself has stated, "the triumph of will and love over destiny or fatality," as against the converse lesson of _Monna Vanna_.

The idea is symbolically expressed in the temptations of Lanceor and in the liberation of Joyzelle and her lover from the power of Merlin and his familiar, Arielle, who impersonates the secret forces of the heart.

_Aglavaine et Selysette_, _Monna Vanna_, and _Joyzelle_ mark by still another sign the advent of a new phase in Maeterlinck's evolution; namely, by the characterization of the heroines. Previously, the women in his plays were hardly individualized and none of them can be said to possess a physiognomy strictly her own. Maeterlinck had returned with great partiality again and again to the same type of woman: languid and listless, without stamina and strength, yet at the same time full of deep feeling, and capable of unending devotion--pathetic incorporeal figures feeling their way along without the light of self-consciousness, like some pre-raphaelite species of somnambulists. In the new plays, on the contrary, women of a courageous and venturesome spirit and with a self-possessive a.s.surance are portrayed by preference and with unmistakable approval.

As the technique in the more recent creations of Maeterlinck, so the diction, too, accommodates itself to altered tendencies. Whereas formerly the colloquy was abrupt and fragmentary, it is now couched in cadenced, flowing language, which, nevertheless, preserves the old-time simplicity. The poet himself has criticized his former dialogue. He said it made those figures seem like deaf people walking in their sleep, whom somebody is endeavoring to arouse from a heavy dream.

For the limited purpose of this sketch it is not needful to enter into a detailed discussion of Maeterlinck's latest productions, since such lines as they add to his philosophical and artistic physiognomy have been traced beforehand. His literary output for the last dozen years or so is embodied in six or seven volumes: about two years to a book seems to be his normal ratio of achievement, the same as was so regularly observed by Henrik Ibsen, and one that seems rather suitable for an author whose reserve, dictated by a profound artistic and moral conscience, like his actual performance, calls for admiration and grat.i.tude. During the war he has written, or at least published, very little. It is fairly safe to a.s.sume that the emotional experience of this harrowing period will control his future philosophy as its most potent factor; equally safe is it to predict, on the strength of his published utterances, that his comprehensive humanity, that has been put to such a severe test, will pa.s.s unscathed through the ordeal.

Of the last group of Maeterlinck's works only two are dramas, namely, "The Blue Bird," (1909), and "Mary Magdalene," (1910). The baffling symbolism of "The Blue Bird" has not stood in the way of a tremendous international stage success; the fact is due much less to the simple line of thought that runs through the puzzle than to the exuberant fancy that gave rise to it and its splendid scenical elaboration. Probably Mr.

Henry Rose is right, in his helpful a.n.a.lysis of "The Blue Bird," in venturing the a.s.sertion that "by those who are familiar with Swedenborg's teaching 'The Blue Bird' must be recognized as to a very large extent written on lines which are in accordance with what is known as the Science of Correspondences--a very important part of Swedenborg's teachings." But the understanding of this symbolism in its fullness offers very great difficulties. That a definite and consistent meaning underlies all its features will be rather felt than comprehended by the great majority who surely cannot be expected to go to the trouble first of familiarizing themselves with Maeterlinck's alleged code of symbols and then of applying it meticulously to the interpretation of his plays.

"Mary Magdalene," judged from the dramatic point of view, is a quite impressive tragedy, yet a full and sufficient treatment of the very suggestive scriptural legend it is not. The converted courtezan is characterized too abstractly. Instead of presenting herself as a woman consumed with blazing sensuality but in whom the erotic fire is trans.m.u.ted into religious pa.s.sion, she affects us like an enacted commentary upon such a most extraordinary experience.

Finally, there are several volumes of essays, to some of which reference has already been made.(9) _Le Temple Enseveli_ ("The Buried Temple"), (1902), consists of six disquisitions, all dealing with metaphysical subjects: Justice, The Evolution of Mystery, The Reign of Matter, The Past, Chance, The Future. _Le Double Jardin_ ("The Double Garden"), (1904), is much more miscellaneous in its makeup. These are its heterogeneous subjects: The Death of a Little Dog, Monte Carlo, A Ride in a Motor Car, Dueling, The Angry Temper of the Bees, Universal Suffrage, The Modern Drama, The Sources of Spring, Death and the Crown (a discussion upon the fatal illness of Edward VII), a View of Rome, Field Flowers, Chrysanthemums, Old-fas.h.i.+oned Flowers, Sincerity, The Portrait of Woman, and Olive Branches (a survey of certain now, alas, obsolete ethical movements of that day). _L'Intelligence des Fleurs_ (in the translation it is named "Life and Flowers," in an enlarged issue "The Measure of the Hours," both 1907), takes up, besides the theme of the general caption, the manufacture of perfumes, the various instruments for measuring time, the psychology of accident, social duty, war, prize-fighting, and "King Lear." In 1912, three essays on Emerson, Novalis, and Ruysbroeck appeared collectively, in English, under the t.i.tle "On Emerson and Other Essays." These originally prefaced certain works of those writers translated by Maeterlinck in his earlier years.

(9) Considerable liberty has been taken by Maeterlinck in the grouping and naming of his essay upon their republication in the several collections. The confusion caused thereby is greatly increased by the deviation of some of the translated editions from the original volumes as to the sequence of articles, the individual and collective t.i.tles, and even the contents themselves.

Maeterlinck's most recent publications are _La Mort_ (published in English in a considerably extended collection under the t.i.tle "Our Eternity"), (1913), "The Unknown Guest," (1914), and _Les Debris de la Guerre_ ("The Wrack of the Storm"), (1916).(10) The two first named, having for their central subject Death and the great concomitant problem of the life beyond, show that the author has become greatly interested in psychical research; he even goes so far as to affirm his belief in precognition. In these essays, Theosophy and Spiritism and kindred occult theories are carefully a.n.a.lyzed, yet ingenious as are the author's speculations, they leave anything like a solution of the perplexing riddles far afield. On the whole he inclines to a telepathic explanation of the psychical phenomena, yet thinks they may be due to the strivings of the cosmic intelligence after fresh outlets, and believes that a careful and persistent investigation of these phenomena may open up hitherto undreamt of realms of reality. In general, we find him on many points less a.s.sertive than he was in the beginning and inclined to a general retrenchment of the dogmatic element in his philosophic att.i.tude. A significant pa.s.sage in "The Buried Treasure"

teaches us not to deplore the loss of fixed beliefs. "One should never look back with regret to those hours when a great belief abandons us. A faith that becomes extinct, a means that fails, a dominant idea that no longer dominates us because we think it is our turn to dominate it--these things prove that we are living, that we are progressing, that we are using up a great many things because we are not standing still."

Of the gloomy fatalism of his literary beginnings hardly a trace is to be found in the Maeterlinck of to-day. His war-book, "The Wrack of the Storm," breathes a calm optimism in the face of untold disaster. The will of man is put above the power of fate. "Is it possible that fatality--by which I mean what perhaps for a moment was the unacknowledged desire of the planet--shall not regain the upper hand? At the stage which man has reached, I hope and believe so.... Everything seems to tell us that man is approaching the day whereon, seizing the most glorious opportunity that has ever presented itself since he acquired a consciousness, he will at last learn that he is able, when he pleases, to control his whole fate in this world."(11) His faith in humanity is built on the heroic virtues displayed in this war. "To-day, not only do we know that these virtues exist: we have taught the world that they are always triumphant, that nothing is lost while faith is left, while honor is intact, while love continues, while the soul does not surrender." ... Death itself is now threatened with extinction by our heroic race: "The more it exercises its ravages, the more it increases the intensity of that which it cannot touch; the more it pursues its phantom victories, the better does it prove to us that man will end by conquering death."

(10) "The Light Beyond" (1917) is not a new work at all, but merely a combination of parts from "Our Eternity" and "The Wrack of the Storm."

(11) "The Wrack of the Storm," p. 144 f.

In the concluding chapter of "Our Eternity," the romantic modification of Maeterlinck's mysticism is made patent in his confession regarding the problem of Knowledge: "I have added nothing to what was already known. I have simply tried to separate what may be true from that which is a.s.suredly not true.... Perhaps through our quest for that undiscoverable Truth we shall have accustomed our eyes to pierce the terror of the last hour by looking it full in the face.... We need have no hope that any one will utter on this earth the word that shall put an end to our uncertainties. It is very probable, on the contrary, that no one in this world, nor perhaps in the next, will discover the great secret of the universe. And ... it is most fortunate that it should be so. We have not only to resign ourselves to living in the incomprehensible, but to rejoice that we cannot get out of it. If there were no more insoluble questions ... infinity would not be infinite; and then we should have forever to curse the fate that placed us in a universe proportionate to our intelligence. The unknown and the unknowable are necessary and will perhaps always be necessary to our happiness. In any case, I would not wish my worst enemy, were his understanding a thousandfold loftier and a thousandfold mightier than mine, to be condemned eternally to inhabit a world of which he had surprised an essential secret...."(12)

(12) Quoted from the excellent translation by A. T. de Mattos.

So the final word of Maeterlinck's philosophy, after a lifetime of ardent search, clears up none of the tantalizing secrets of our existence. And yet somehow it bears a message that is full of consolation. The value of human life lies in the perpetual movement towards a receding goal. Whoever can identify himself with such a philosophy and accept its great practical lesson, that we shall never reach Knowledge but acquire wisdom in the pursuit, should be able to envisage the veiled countenance of Truth without despair, and even to face with some courage the eternal problem of our being, its reason and its destination.

II

THE ECCENTRICITY OF AUGUST STRINDBERG

One cannot speak of August Strindberg with much _gusto_. The most broadminded critic will find himself under necessity to disapprove of him as a man and to condemn so many features of his production that almost one might question his fitness as a subject of literary discussion. Nevertheless, his importance is beyond dispute and quite above the consideration of personal like or dislike, whether we view him in his creative capacity,--as an intellectual and ethical spokesman of his time,--or in his human character,--as a typical case of certain mental and moral maladies which somehow during his time were more or less epidemic throughout the lettered world. We have it on excellent authority that at his debut in the literary theatre he made the stage quake with the elemental power of his personality. Gigantic rebels like Ibsen, Bjoernson, Nietzsche, and Tolstoy, we are told, dwindled to normal proportions beside his t.i.tanic stature. He aimed to conquer and convert the whole world by his fanatical protest against the rotten civilization of his time. The attempt proved an utter failure. He never could grow into a world-figure, because he lacked the courage as well as the cosmopolitan adaptability needed for intellectual expatriation.

Hence, in great contrast to Ibsen, he remained to Europe at large the uncouth Scandinavian, while in the eyes of Scandinavia he was specifically the Swede; and his country-men, even though they acknowledged him their premier poet, treated him, because of his eccentricity, as a national gazing-stock rather than as a genuine national a.s.set. Yet for all that, he ranks as the foremost writer of his country and one of the representative men of the age. His poetic genius is admitted by practically all the critics, while the greatest among them, George Brandes, p.r.o.nounces him in addition an unsurpa.s.sed master in the command of his mother tongue. But his position as a writer is by no means limited to his own little country. For his works have been translated into all civilized languages, and if the circulation of literary products is a safe indication of their influence, then several of Strindberg's books at least must be credited with having done something toward shaping the thought of our time upon some of its leading issues. In any case, the large and durable interest shown his productions marks Strindberg as a literary phenomenon of sufficient consequence to deserve some study.

Readers of Strindberg who seek to discover the reason why criticism should have devoted so much attention to an author regarded almost universally with strong disapproval and aversion, will find that reason most probably in the extreme subjectiveness that dominates everything he has written; personal confession, novels, stories, and plays alike share this equality, and even in his historical dramas the figures, despite the minute accuracy of their delineation, are moved by the author's pa.s.sion, not their own. Rarely, if ever, has a writer of eminence demonstrated a similar incapacity to reproduce the thoughts and feelings of other people. It has been rightly declared that all his leading characters are merely the outward projections of his own sentiments and ideas,--that at bottom he, August Strindberg, is the sole protagonist in all his dramaturgy and fiction.

Strindberg was a man with an omnivorous intellectual curiosity, and he commanded a vast store of knowledge in the fields of history, science, and languages. His "History of the Swedish People" is recognized by competent judges as a very brilliant and scholarly performance. Before he was launched in his literary career, and while still obscurely employed as minor a.s.sistant at a library, he earned distinction as a student of the Chinese language, and one product of his research work in that field was even deemed worthy of being read before the _Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres_. In Geology, Chemistry, Botany, he was equally productive. But the taint of eccentricity in his mental fibre prevented his imposing scientific accomplishments from maintaining him in a state of intellectual equilibrium. He laid as much store by things of which he had a mere smattering as by those on which he was an authority, and his resultant unsteadiness caused him to oscillate between opposite scientific enthusiasms even as his self-contradictory personal character involved him in abrupt changes of position, and made him jump from one extreme of behavior to the other.

Strindberg first attracted public notice by the appearance in 1879 of a novel named "The Red Room." Its effect upon a country characterized by so keen an observer as George Brandes as perhaps the most conservative in Europe resembled the excitement caused by Schiller's "The Robbers"

almost precisely one hundred years before. It stirred up enough dust to change, though not to cleanse, the musty atmosphere of Philistia. For here was instantly recognized the challenge of a radical spirit uprisen in full and ruthless rebellion against each and every time-hallowed usage and tradition. The recollection of that hot-spur agitator bent with every particle of his strength to rouse the world up from its lethargy by his stentorian "J'accuse" and to pa.s.s sentence upon it by sheer tremendous vociferation, is almost entirely obliterated to-day by the remembrance of quite another Strindberg:--the erstwhile stormy idealist changed into a leering cynic; a repulsive embodiment of negation, a grimacing Mephistopheles who denies life and light or anything that he cannot comprehend, and to whom the face of the earth appears forever covered with darkness and filth and death and corruption. Indeed this final depictment of August Strindberg, whether or no it be accurately true to life, is a terrible example of what life can make of a man, or a man of his life, if he is neither light enough to be borne by the current of his time, nor strong enough to set his face against the tide and breast it.

The question is, naturally, was Strindberg sincere in the fanatical insurgency of his earlier period, or was his att.i.tude 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 ma.s.ses 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 unsurpa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+ft 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 pa.s.sion, 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 t.i.tles 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 anguis.h.!.+ 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 circ.u.mstances. 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 pa.s.s 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 owners.h.i.+p 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," subt.i.tled "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 regime 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 G.o.din's _Phalanstere_. 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.

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 const.i.tutionally, an anti-feminist. In "The Red Room" he preaches equality of the s.e.xes 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 cooperative comrades.h.i.+p. 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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 n.o.bler 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 s.e.xes, 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 fas.h.i.+on of dealing with the issue by the advocacy of extremes. But by force of his supervening personal grievance against the s.e.x, 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 s.e.xes: 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 cla.s.sically drawn up in "The Father," one of the strangest and at the same time most powerful tragedies of Strindberg.

The princ.i.p.als of the plot stand for the typical character difference between the s.e.xes 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 coa.r.s.e-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 cla.s.sing 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 a.n.a.lyses ever made of the vicious side of feminine character, obtained by specializing, as it were, on the more particularly feminine traits of human depravity.

a.s.suredly 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 pa.s.s 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 p.r.o.nounced that there is only one kind."