Compared with the black pessimism of this work (relieved though it may be at times by a ray of tender sentiment or deep paternal feeling), the grimmest stories of Wedekind are benignly jovial and the most scabrous tales of De Maupassant but innocently sportive. Neither smile, nor even leer, ever breaks the set visage of this stern irony, which seems indistinguishable from life itself. There are no artificial climaxes or ostentatious flourishes of style to prick the senses of the reader. Described in a language of the most brutal phlegm and the most forceful simplicity, the facts of reality do their own unaided work. Each story is no mere dexterously elaborated incident, but a condensed life. How powerful, for instance, is such a story as Asra, the history of the pious youth afflicted with anæmia by reason of his own continence, and dying two years after his marriage with that superabundantly healthy ethical worker who subsequently married twice again, had eight children, and wrote articles on over-population and immorality. And how genuinely awful is Autumn, that frigid anti-climax of a stale and re-hashed honeymoon:
"And she sang, 'What is the name of the land in which my darling dwells?' But, alas, the voice was thin and sharp. It was at times like a shriek from the depths of the soul that fears that the noon is passed, and that the evening is approaching. When the song was over, she did not at first dare to turn round, as though she was expecting that he would come to her and say something. But he did not come; and there was silence in the room. When at last she turned round on her chair, he sat on the sofa and cried. She wanted to get up, take his head in her hands, and kiss him as before; but she remained seated, motionless, with her gaze turned to the floor....
"They drank coffee, and spoke about the coolness of the summer weather, and where they would spend the summer next year. But the conversation began to dry up; and they repeated themselves. At last he said, after a long, undisguised yawn, 'I'm going to bed now.' 'So will I,' she said, and got up, 'but I will go first and have a look on the balcony.'
"When she came back, she remained standing and listening at the door of the bedroom. All was quiet inside, and the boots were outside the door. She knocked, but there was no answer. Then she opened the door, and went in. He slept! He slept!"
Though, moreover, the characters in Marriage are more normal and average than in any other of Strindberg's works, the author airs again and again his pet sexual grievances. Corinna, in particular, and The Duel, are savage attacks respectively on the ethical amazon and the womanly woman who makes her very womanliness an engine of tyranny, while the Breadwinner narrates how an apparently quite impeccable husband and father, writing himself to death to support his family, was driven to suicide by the naggings and exactions of a querulous and discontented wife.
Marriage was succeeded by the Utopian Swiss Tales; but the strenuous economic struggles to which Strindberg was now subjected forced him to discard as insipid the vague compromise of free-thought and to drink the bracing tonic of a Nietzschean and self-reliant atheism. "God, Heaven, and Eternity had to be thrown overboard if the ship was to be kept afloat; and it had to be kept afloat because I was not alone ... I became an atheist as a matter of duty and necessity."
Yet it is interesting to observe that, taking the solution of the World-Riddle as a matter of acute personal importance, he studies the whole history of mankind to satisfy himself that he is right in his conclusion, and that the element of superstition is still so strong that when his child is ill he prays, atheist that he is, with all the fervour of a Christian Scientist. To the period of his atheism are to be ascribed, with the exception of Black Flags, his most powerful, most drastic work, his two packed volumes of one-act plays, the autobiographic Confession of a Fool, and the Nietzschean novel, The Open Sea.
Note also that his matrimonial misery and his divorce from his first wife had given an additional poison to a sting which was always morbidly eager to inject its venom.
The plays of Strindberg belong to the naturalistic school of problem-play which was in full vogue during the period of their composition. Technically their originality lies in the intensity of their concentration. Though many of them are one-acters and they nearly all observe the unity of place, they resemble less the ordinary curtain-raiser than the one solitary act round which the ordinary modern play is usually written. Each play is nothing but climax. Though in some cases they are nearly as long as ordinary drama, it is rare that they have any subsidiary characters. Even the protagonists are too occupied with the urgencies of their own immediate crises, and with exposing the nakedness of their own souls, to have time for either the artificial jewels of the Pinerovian epigram or the flying rockets of the Shavian dialectic. The problem is stuck too deep into their lives to require any artificial flourishing. Observe, too, that nearly every play is a variation on one theme, the mutual hate, fear, and war of a malevolent humanity. Their very love but sharpens their enmity, and they draw blood with nearly every word.
The three-act play, The Father, ventilates the author's chronic grievance of the ruin of the man by the woman. The plot is cruel in its simplicity. The husband, though in a state of acute nervous disorder, is not certifiable. The wife, anxious for a freer life, smuggles a doctor into the house, plays adroitly on the man's pet mania that he is not the father of his own daughter, forges in his handwriting a letter branded with insanity, goads him into throwing a burning lamp at her, and with the aid of his old nurse gets him by a ruse into a strait-jacket, in which he succumbs to a stroke. Yet with all its concentrated sensationalism, and work though it may be of a constitutional maniac of persecution, the play is too deep, too sincere, too fundamentally convincing to be ever near that line which separates the realm of tragedy from the pandemonium of melodrama. With what ghastly irony does the daughter innocently prick the sensitive sore in her father's brain:
[Rittmeister sits huddled up on the settee.
BERTHA. Do you know what you've done? Do you know you've thrown the lamp at Mamma?
RITTMEISTER. Have I?
BERTHA. Yes, you have. Just think if she'd been hurt?
RITTMEISTER. What would that have mattered?
BERTHA. You are not my father if you can talk like that.
RITTMEISTER (gets up). What do you say? Am I not your father? How do you know that? Who told you so? And who is your father, then? Who?