August Strindberg was born in 1849, the son of a mésalliance between a shipping agent and a servant girl. The circumstances of his childhood tended to magnify that morbid sense of fear which, according to our most eminent psychologists, is always innate and never altogether acquired. The two parents, the seven children, and the two servants lived in two rooms, and the family always appeared to him like "a prison in which two prisoners watched each other, a place where children were tortured and maids brawled." His mother died when he was thirteen, to be succeeded by the inevitable stepmother. His school life also was unhappy, but his description of it, though no doubt perfectly consistent with actual hardship, exhibits at the same time the reactions of a morbid sensibility to the hard facts of external life. "Life was a penitentiary for crimes which one had committed before one was born, so that the child always went about with a bad conscience."
Note also, at the same time, the presence of the combative aggressive element in the boy who would lose nearly every game of chess by the inconsidered vehemence of his attack, or would break open chests of drawers in the fury of his desire to obtain their contents. And observe the early manifestations of that fundamental emotion which was to obtain throughout his life alternative outlets in the two parallel channels of religion and sex. Thus, like Byron, he experienced a violent passion for a girl before the age of puberty. So far, again, as religion was concerned, he had a great horror of darkness and the unknown, and his deity would appear to have been a god rather of fear than of love. And though Scandinavians as a race take Christianity far more seriously than the inhabitants of any other European country, he would appear to have possessed, even for a Scandinavian, the religious temperament to an unusual degree. Thus, he said his prayers on his way to school, and evinced a precocious desire to become a priest. But the religious element became dormant amid the chequered vicissitudes which signalised his youth and his adolescence. He started to study medicine at the University of Upsala, but his lack of funds broke into his college career and compelled him to earn his own living. He is by turns telegraph clerk, editor of an insurance paper (for which purpose he specially learns the higher mathematics), tutor in the family of a rich Jewish physician, actor in the Karl Moor of Schiller's Robbers, journalist on a daily paper (where the drastic offensiveness of his criticisms made his position on the staff intolerable), and librarian in the Royal Library of Stockholm (when he specially learns Chinese for the purpose of compiling a catalogue). His struggles were bitter and continued, and the acuteness of his privations manifests itself in a deep consciousness of class hatred against the prosperous and not infrequently dishonest philistinism of the day.
Note, also, the occurrence of combined religious and persecution mania in the crises of his illness and despondency. For at such times he takes the Devil himself as seriously as the Deity, believes in an "Evil God to whom the Creator had handed over the world," and "has the consciousness of being personally persecuted by personal powers of evil." These emotional outbursts are all the more interesting because intellectually he had become the most fanatical of freethinkers, had read with profit Buckle's History of Civilisation in England, and was a fervent disciple of the new naturalism. During this period he had already begun to write dramas, none of which, however, have any substantial significance with the possible exception of the historical drama Meister Olof, which was unsuccessfully performed in 1877-8, and into which the already misogynous author had introduced the character of the prostitute, "in order to show that the difference between her and the ordinary woman is not so enormously great."
In 1879, however, Strindberg achieved a succès de scandale with his novel The Red Room. The satire of this book (written, it will be remembered, during his freethought years), may, no doubt, be the milk of Christian charity when compared with the concentrated vitriol of the Black Flags of his Catholic period, and the various scenes and pictures may, no doubt, strike the critic as episodic and lacking in systematic cohesion, yet the work has some claim to recognition by reason of the vivid force of its description of contemporaneous life. The naïvely idealistic hero, the shady actress passing from seduction to seduction with all the facility of the experienced ingénue, the respectable director of the shoddy insurance company, the insidious Jewish financial broker, the cynical journalist, the grim but benevolent doctor, are all portrayed in a style which at once shines and chills with all the brightness of the coldest steel. Viewed psychologically, the book is significant as exhibiting the Socialistic fury of an embittered man "whose class-hatred lay in his blood and in his nerves," and who revenges himself on the system which had conspired against him, by exposing with sinister precision its most repulsive truths.
The cynicism of The Red Room was succeeded by the Utopian romanticism of the dramas, Das Geheimniss der Gilde, Frau Margit, Gluckspeter. The change in mood is probably to be ascribed to the vogue of The Red Room, and to the initial success of his alliance with his first wife, Siri von Essen, the actress, whom he had married in 1878, and who was subsequently to enjoy the ambiguous blessing of being officially immortalised in The Confession of a Fool.
This mood, in its turn, was soon replaced by a concentrated and fanatical misogynism which was to dominate practically every book which Strindberg was subsequently to write. The fundamental cause was, no doubt, the morbidly irritable and suspicious nature of the man himself. Strindberg's whole attitude towards woman, however, is only fully understood by some appreciation of the New Woman Movement, which under the auspices of Ellen Key flourished vigorously in Sweden in the "eighties." Like, for instance, our own Suffragette agitation, or indeed, any popular craze, however intrinsically meritorious, this movement, which was, above all, a crusade for sexual equality, was attended by wild and perverse extravagances. Not merely the genuinely masculine woman, but every little doll of a woman in every little doll's house, became obsessed with the imperative necessity of the emancipation of her own body and the self-development of her own soul. A holy war of the sexes was proclaimed, and the sacred shibboleth of the New Thought, the New Ethics, and the New Love was soon in the mouth of every woman possessed of the true feminine esprit de corps. And with the praiseworthy object of adjusting the balance of nature, and of arriving so far as possible at the ideal harmony of an almost perfect equation, in some cases even the little boys would be brought up as girls, while, conversely, the little girls would be educated as boys.
But the misogynism of Strindberg was something far more than a merely intellectual appreciation of the Anti-Feminist standpoint. Even making allowance for the considerable impetus doubtless given to his attack by reason of his personal matrimonial complications, the cause lay far more deeply ingrained in his own constitution. For the arrogation by the female of equal rights to the male would of itself tend to provoke the violent apprehensiveness of a man always morbidly alarmed at the slightest suggestion of any interference with his own personal rights, and always scenting a grievance with all the superhuman flair of the true maniac of persecution. Strindberg's hatred of woman is thus to a large extent the hatred self-begotten of fear out of its own spirit, and without the superfluous aid of a concrete reality. If, too, we identify Strindberg himself with some of his men characters (e.g. Kurt in The Death Dance, Axel in Playing with Fire, or the narrator of The Confession of a Fool), who render to the objects of their passion acts of the most abject servility, and who kiss the feet of women almost as frequently as their lips, we would hazard the suggestion that he himself (who owns to having found in his reverence for woman a substitute for his reverence for God) would in certain moods welcome with morbid alacrity this new feminine domination, while his reaction from this inverted attitude would but lash his misogynism to even more hysterical paroxysms.
These considerations may perhaps explain why in so many of his works the Strindberg woman and the Strindberg man are so highly specialised. The typical Strindberg woman is a fiend with the physique of a Madonna and the soul of a vampire, who sucks dry the life-blood of her heroic victim. The typical Strindberg man is a Samson shorn of his strength, writhing in the toils of some Delilah, protesting vociferously, and yet taking a morbid delight in his own bondage. English readers will remember the not altogether unanalogous case of John Tanner, that converse Don Juan of Mr. Shaw, who, with all his fanfaronnade of masculine independence, is, as he has from the beginning feared, anticipated and desired, successfully hunted down by his sly and dashing Donna Juana.
After the publication of The Red Room, Strindberg visited both Switzerland and Paris, where he was invited to meet Björnsen, entered into relations with the Théätre Libre of M. Antoine, had one or two of his plays produced, and meditated an unfortunately written satire on the French capital. In 1883 he produced Swedish Destinies, a volume of essays on contemporary problems, whose romantic masquerade would seem to have effectively concealed its underlying satire.
The most significant work, however, which he published at this period was the volume of twelve (subsequently expanded to twenty) short stories, entitled Marriage. These tales all treat of the various phases, economic, social, psychological, and physiological, of the sexual problem, which he observed either in his own life or in the couples whom he saw in a Swiss pension. The characteristic of this work is its extraordinary seriousness. For to Strindberg the sexual problem provides neither the excuse for the philosophic flippancy of the cynic, nor for the priggish modernity of the ethical or intellectual snob, but is the one obsessing reality of actual life.