On the Seaboard: A Novel of the Baltic Islands

by August Strindberg

But when he had isolated himself completely, so that the chambermaid was only permitted to clean the room and bring in food, while he locked himself up in the attic room, all the memories from the summer commenced to haunt him. He remembered now without wishing it, every word that had been said. And now the appearance of the preacher in the mist on the islet appeared as something that had been planned. The words which he had uttered concerning his father and his circumstances compared with those of Miss Mary, that she knew who he was, now took root, grew and became big. There must exist some secret in his life, which everybody knew except himself. And soon he saw in the appearance of the preacher that of a planned spying, sustained by someone who wished to persecute him. He did not believe this in calmer moments, for he knew very well that the mania of persecution was the first symptom of that infirmity, which accompanies isolation. Human beings formed a great electrical battery of many elements, and when an element is isolated, it loses its power. The induction coil of copper wire was lame at the same moment the soft iron rod was taken out, and he was on the way to be lame, since his iron rod had become tempered steel.

Yes, but that was not that sickly mania of persecution, which comes from bodily infirmity, for he had in fact been persecuted, opposed from the very moment, that he in the school bespoke that he would be a power, a former of a species, that would be able to break from its kindred and like the differentiating herb beget for itself a name of its own, perhaps the name of a new genus. He had been persecuted, instinctively from below by inferiors and above by the mediocre, which latter sat as gauges and determined the standard, by which greatness should be judged. He had been hated and picked at as the yellow high-bred bird of the Canary islands, when it had flown out of its cage and come among green-finches out in the forest, where its too splendid attire provoked the wild birds.

But nature, in which he had sought company before, now became dead to him, for the intermediary, the human being, was wanting. The sea, which he had worshiped and which he sought as the only grandeur in his paltry country with its petty, trivial summer cottage landscapes seemed to him to become narrow, as his ego swelled. This blue, turpentine-green, gray circle enclosed him as a prison yard, and the uniformity of the little landscape brought the same pain, as prison cells might cause, by their want of variety. To travel away from the whole he could not, for he sat with his roots In the earth, in his little impressions, his diet, and he could not be removed with the root. It was the Norseman's tragic, which uttered itself in longing for the south.

It was then that he commenced to think out a plan for connecting the country, the island country,—for that it had a connection by Lapland did not change the case—with the mainland. First there should be a six hours' lightning train to Helsingborg and communication with a steam ferry boat across the sound making the capital of Denmark the center of the North. Ice free harbors on Djuro and Nynas with ice breakers should keep commerce and navigation alive the whole year round; the northern winter sleep would thereby be retrenched, and the national character, unsteadiness, which is said to be owing to that six months interruption of all activity, should change nature. The Russian commerce to England should go through Stockholm and Gothenborg, and the old scheme of Charles XI and Charles XII, to get the Persia and India trade over Russia and Sweden would be realized.

Sweden should become a country for tourists, and foreigners would be allured to her. He would change Stockholm to a seaport by closing the lake Mälar at the North Bridge and the Sluice, and give it another outlet through a system of canals leading to the cove of Trosa. Thereby the salt water would come up to Stockholm, which would change the atmosphere conditions and consequently the inhabitants.

But he remembered the time when Sweden, still belonging to the great, universal Christian church, stood in direct communication with Rome and thereby was of some account to Europe. He would, if it was shown that religion could not be abandoned by the multitude, again introduce this our forefathers' faith, which we with fire and sword had been urged to abjure, and whose martyrs, Hans Brask, Olaus and Johannes Magnus, Nils Dacke, and Ture Jonsson have become so shamefully soiled in history. And Catholicism, the Roman legacy, the first promulgator of the idea of Europeism had conquered all Europe. Bismarck had fallen in the combat of culture, gone to Canossa and selected the Pope for an arbitrator, as he had commenced to believe in arbitrations without steel cannons. Denmark had built Catholic cathedrals, and the young Danes had already lent their pens to the cause. The germanization of the North like that of North Germany was only a relapse into barbarism after the Hun battles of 1870 the consequences of which have become manifest in persecution against Latin, and in French hate, which is uttered in wars of extermination against French literature, in North Germany family politics and Lutheran inquisition with prisons for heretics and a general lowering of the level of intelligence.

Lutherism, that was the foe! Teutonic culture; bourgeois religion in black pants, sectaristic narrowness, particularism, sundering, intrenchment and spiritual death!

No, Europe should be one again, and the peoples' way be over Rome, the way of intelligence over Paris!

The Swedish peasant should again feel himself as cosmopolitan and leave his position in the under class, again get that glimpse of the culture of beauty which the church formerly offered in pictures and tunes; his divine service should be a true hymn in the Roman language, composed by poets, and not compounded by hymn book makers and of which he should understand exactly as little, as would awaken his highest ideas about that which he nevertheless would not comprehend. His high mass should be performed by real ministers, who devoted their life to religion and the care of souls, and not to agriculture, dairy business, whist playing and office work; and then the peasant's wife would get a guardian of her soul, to whom she at confession could intrust her sorrows instead of running into the kitchen of the parsonage and gossiping about it to the servants.

And with the re-installment of Latin every Upsala student's dissertation could be read as of old by the learned of Europe and every Swedish investigator feel himself a member of the great universal corporation of the intelligence under the pontificate in Paris.