[AUGUST STRINDBERG]
"I seek God and find the Devil."
"My hate is boundless as the wastes, burning as the sun, and stronger than my love."
The above quotations give some idea of that black pessimism which is, at any rate, the most patent characteristic of Strindberg. Yet neither quotation, motto, nor catch-word can do justice to the multifarious life and character of this man. For Strindberg, more than any other European author of our age, has boxed the whole compass of our modernity with its tumults, its aspirations, its perversities; its glaring searchlights of science, its pallid flames of mysticism, and its needle ever pointing to the two opposite though connected poles of sex. He is in turns the most rabid of atheists, the most devout of Catholics, the most esoteric of occultists; now the most Utopian of Socialists, now the most uncompromising of individualists. Running the gauntlet of three unhappy and dissolved marriages, he has become the European specialist in conjugal infelicity, to say nothing of being credited with innumerable conquests, which he himself would doubtless have designated as captures. His novels, his autobiographies, and his equally subjective dramas all exhale the most sulphurous hate against the distorted anomaly of the new woman, yet he is an Orpheus who, scorning the prosaic joys of some normal and uninteresting Eurydice, surrenders himself with almost pathological gusto to be torn to pieces by the monstrous mænads of modernity. The paroxysms of his hate alternate with moods of the most sentimental idealism, and the harsh impetus of his onslaught is only equalled by the, at times, abject meekness of his romantic devotion.
Before, consequently, we embark on some slight survey of Strindberg's life and of the more characteristic of his numerous works, let us endeavour to lay hold of the clues of one or two primary features which will serve as a guide in the, at first sight, extremely tangled labyrinth of his psychology.
Now the dominant emotion in Strindberg's temperament is fear. It is this fear which, at times assuming the dimensions of paranoia or systematised delusion and persecution mania, largely supplies the explanation to his whole attitude towards Man, Woman, and God. He possessed also a vehemently explosive egoism and a gigantic intellect, at times dominating his fear and functioning with the most powerful precision, but as often as not interpreting the whole external world in the terms of some preconceived subjective emotion. Add also a morbidly hypertrophied sexual sensibility, together with a distinct strain of genuine idealism, and one may perhaps be able to envisage with some accuracy the cardinal points of our author's brain.