As we have already hinted, an additional bitterness had been introduced into Strindberg's misogynism by the unhappiness of his own first marriage, which was dissolved in 1889. It is this marriage which Strindberg celebrates in that phenomenal piece of official sexual autobiography, The Confession of a Fool, which has successfully scandalised the whole Continent of Europe. In comparison with this book the New Machiavelli is but the tamest Sunday-school reading, and the romantic confessions of Mr. George Moore the merest healthy pranks of robustious youth. This work throughout has the real spontaneity of the genuine diary rather than the studied frankness of the elaborate literary artificer. The young librarian is in Stockholm. A young lady makes advances to him. "She has an adventurous appearance, hovering between the artist, the blue-stocking, the daughter of the house, the fille de joie, the new woman, and the coquette." She presses her suit, looks at him in an unambiguous manner, and "he only owes his virtue to her extraordinary ugliness." He is introduced to her friends, the Baron and Baroness X. He becomes the ami de famille. But the demon of sex is at work, and simply through keeping step with her in walking he will experience a unification of their whole nervous systems. Honourable man that he is, he runs away from danger, starts for Paris in a steamship, and is seen off amid the combined tears of the married pair. The ship sails. His nerves break down; and in an hysterical paroxysm he insists on being disembarked, is attended by a priest and doctor at a small hotel, and returns post-haste to Stockholm. The Baroness runs away to a watering-place. But matters only progress with even greater rapidity on her return. The Baron is largely occupied with a cousin; and an official declaration takes place between the wife and the lover. With ultra-modern honesty they immediately apprise the husband, who while giving them the widest margin within which to exercise their platonic affections, yet reposes implicit trust in their combined honour. A financial crash, however, disposes of the Baron; and the gentleman is landed with his lady. There ensue all the joys and agonies of a ten-years' union. The couple are linked in the burning bonds of a mutual love and a mutual hate. The author has to sacrifice his own well-being and career to push forward his wife in her amateurish efforts in journalism and acting. From that time "legal prostitution enters into the marriage...." She belongs to the public, she makes up and dresses for the public, and she consequently becomes "a prostitute who will finally send in her bill for such and such services."
The moods alternate with the regularity of a pendulum. If at one moment "the nest of love has become transformed into a dog-kennel," and the author is morbidly jealous of nearly every man and every woman with whom his wife has the slightest acquaintance, strikes his wife, and endeavours to drown her; it is only subsequently, in the last stages of servile uxoriousness, to idolise her again as a martyr and as a saint. Six times does he leave her (expending on one occasion in debauchery the proceeds of his pawned wedding-ring), and six times does he return, only to draw up at last this monstrous dossier of his conjugal life: "The story is at an end, my beloved one; I have revenged myself; the account is squared."
Not altogether inexplicably, Strindberg has been much attacked on the score of this book. He has been charged with wickedly defaming an innocent and deserving woman. Yet even though the book be objectively false, it is subjectively true. It is impossible to doubt its prodigious sincerity, even though this merely be the implicit sincerity of persecution mania. Every single nuance of the emotions of a man who honestly thinks that he is being unscrupulously exploited is faithfully described. The book may shock by its vehement coldness, its abnormal callousness, its matter-of-fact explicitness; yet from the literary standpoint, its entire absence of affectation, the drastic ease of its simplicity, the swift naturalness of its diction, cannot fail to convince. It stands out from the whole of European literature as the superlative masterpiece of suspicious love and monstrous morbid hate.
In the great novel, By the Open Sea (1890), Strindberg's Nietzschean mood achieves its grand zenith. The hero, Axel Borg (whom we may already remember from The Red Room), "instead of, like the weak Christians, embracing a God outside himself, took what he could seize with his own hands and in his own self, and sought to make his own personality into a complete type of humanity." Borg, who combines with the ideals of the superman the hyper-sensitiveness of the neurotic, lives the single life as an inspector of fishery in a little village on the Swedish coast, where the sea "frightens not like the forest with its dark mystery, but brings quietude like an open great big true eye." He is pursued and caught by an over-sexed young woman, realises her worthlessness, and sails out to commit suicide.
"Out toward the new Star of Christmas, ran his voyage, out over the Sea, the All-Mother, from whose bosom the first spark of life was kindled, the inexhaustible source of fertility and love, life's origin and life's foe."
This book, with its splendid nature-descriptions, the tragic dignity of its hero, and the azure swiftness of its limpid style, is one of Strindberg's most impressive feats. Yet even here the author's characteristic traits can be distinctly traced. The noble male is ruined by a despicable woman; while here, too, the cosmic mysticism of the professed atheist (whose mood can perhaps be best expressed by the worn cliché of "being in tune with the infinite"), reveals only too clearly the emotional bias of a fundamentally religious temperament.
This temperament was soon to manifest itself in the most tragic form. Jaded with literature, and unhappy again in his second marriage with the Austrian authoress, Frida Uhl, in 1893, Strindberg embarked on the study of chemistry, took rooms in the Latin quarter, attended the Sorbonne laboratories, and imagined that he had revolutionised science by the discovery of a new element in sulphur. He had by now attained the, to him, crucial period of the late "forties," and the chronic excesses of his emotionalism now assumed a religious form, to the accompaniment of the most acute mania of persecution.
His experiences in these years, 1895-8, are described in the Inferno and the Legends, works which the mystic and the psychologist can read with equal if heterogeneous edification. In these books, which are based on Strindberg's diaries during the actual time, the aberrations of a disorganised brain are set out with the most unconscious literary art. His delusions became systematised with all the ingenuity of the paranoiac. Every casual suggestion thrown up by his memory, or the events and associations of every-day life, every bit of science that he had ever studied or of mysticism that he had ever felt, are all utilised to build the infernal scheme of his mania. He is "the innocent sacrifice of an unjust persecution," the prey of unknown powers, the conducting-point of electrical streams from unknown agencies. He asks for a miracle and sees in the heavens the ten commandments and the name of Jehovah. His friend Popoffski (in point of fact, the Polish-German novelist Przybeszewski) has come to Paris; it is with the sole object of killing him by poison. His usual seat at his usual café is occupied; he is the victim of a universal conspiracy. Eventually the hells of his torment burn themselves out in an abject ecstasy of atonement, in Catholicism, Swedenborgianism, and the bastard hybrid of a scientific occultism.
From this time the religious obsession sits upon most, if not all, of his subsequent work. To this mood are due the officially religious dramas To Damascus, Midsummer, the extremely weak Advent and Easter, his new-found theory of The Conscious Will in the World-History, his historical dramas (where the characters, particularly Luther, were too subjectively conceived to be historically convincing), and his Dream-Play (where telephones, lawyers, theatres, enchanted woods, Indra's daughter, military officers, married couples, casinos, poets, and ballet-dancers all combine to weave the filmy phantasmagoria of a Buddhistic reality). We may also mention in this connection the Blue Books, the official synthesis of his life (a series of miniature essays on such apparently heterogeneous subjects as, inter alia, Troy, Christ, electro-chemistry, botany, surds, Assyriology, optics, geology, Hammurabi, astrology, morphium, Swedenborgianism, spermatozoic analysis, mystic numbers, Kipling, and Jehovah).