Ibsen, the cunning contriver of sinewy, vital dramas, swift in action, with all extraneous flesh lopped away like the muscular figure of a Greek athlete, this Ibsen of overarching poetic power, is a man disdainful of our praise or our blame, knowing, with the subtle prevision of genius, that one day the world will go to him for the consolations of his austere art.
[II]
AUGUST STRINDBERG
To search for God and to find the Devil! that is what happened to me.—STRINDBERG'S Inferno.
A critic is a man who expects miracles. So it has become the general practice to ignore a poet in his totality and seek only for isolated traits. And then the trouble we take to search for what a man is not: the lack of humour in Shelley, the lack of spirituality in Byron, the lack of sanity in Nietzsche, the lack of melody in Richard Strauss! The case of Johann August Strindberg has also proved tempting to critical head-hunters. Long before we read his books we knew of his neurasthenia, and after his reputation as a many-sided man of genius had been established in Europe his matrimonial affairs were employed as an Exhibit A to divorce him from public and critical favour. And yet this poet, romancer, and novelist, who has created such a profusion of types as to be called "The Shakespeare of Sweden," this more than countryman of Swedenborg in his powers of intense vision, this seer and chemist, possesses such a robust, tangible personality that the world is hardly to be censured for being curious about the man before studying his works.
His stock stems from the very soil of Sweden. In the seventeenth century his ancestors were living in the little village of Strinne. Tremendous in physique and intermingled with clerical strains, Strindberg inherits both his big frame and sensitive conscience from his mixed forebears. His is the sanguine scepticism like that of Renan, Anatole France, Barrès, Bernard Shaw, as René Schickele has suggested. A simple pagan he is not; nor would his particular case have been so complicated. His lyric pessimism and his gift of distilling his bitter experiences into a tale or a play are to-day merged in the broad currents of his historical dramas and socialistic novels. Even his misogyny has become ameliorated,—those episodes in which are crystallized the petty misery of a married couple,—unpaid debts, unloved children, the bailiff knocking at the back door!—let us believe that they, too, were but a phase of his development. Played in Germany and France,—Zola hailed his play, Married, as remarkable, and its author as a confrère,—popular in Russia, recognized though not without many years of unjust probation, Strindberg may be said to have achieved what he set out to do,—"to search for God and find the devil," and once more to find his God.
Herr Emil Schering, the devoted German translator of Strindberg, related to me this anecdote. On the writing-desk of Ibsen there stands, or stood, a photograph of Strindberg the Swede, once Ibsen's foe. To a visitor's surprise, Ibsen, after gazing in silence for some time at the picture, said, "There is one who will be greater than I."
Whether this story be true or not Strindberg is a man of genius, a crazy one at times, fascinating as a writer and interesting as a psychiatric study. And he answers to the chief test of the dramatist—he is a prime creator of character. Edmund Gosse pronounced him to be "certainly the most remarkable creative talent started by the philosophy of Nietzsche"; and in speaking of his novel, Inferno, he says that it "is a record of wretchedness and superstition and squalor, told by a maniac who is a positive Lucifer of the intellect.... in France not only has he a large following, but he exercises a positive influence." Yet this erratic man has planned technical revolutions for the dramatic stage—on the mechanical as well as the spiritual side—that are as startling as were Richard Wagner's in the music drama. It is not necessary here to describe his scheme for presenting his long historical dramas without a change of front scene.
Strindberg is a man with an abnormal emotional temperament which he has often allowed to master his judgment. If he had been a composer, while his symphonies would have undoubtedly provoked abuse, they would not have scandalized moralists—such is the peculiar vagueness of that art in the domain of articulate thought. Some day the tone-symbols of music will become a part of our consciousness, and then we may confidently expect arrests, prosecutions, transportations, perhaps executions. Luckily for the bold and imaginative thinkers, music remains the only art, the last sanctuary wherein originality may reveal itself in the face of fools and not pierce their mental opacity.