The feminists joined the schoolmasters in bitter denunciation of Strindberg, though, as yet, there was none of the radical opposition to every phase of woman's emancipation which developed with deepening experience of conjugal misery. The first volume of Married was, it is true, written as a protest against the "sickly" deification of the liberty of woman underlying the Nora-Cult. In opposing Ibsen, whom Strindberg calls "the famous Norwegian blue-stocking," he had carried out what to him was a sacred duty. But the preface to Married contained views on the rights of women which, but for the general commotion, would have preserved the writer from the charge of uncompromising enmity towards the souls of women. After analysing the cause of unhappy marriages in some epigrammatic pages, he slaughters the "romantic monstrosity" which is Ibsen's Nora, and presents his scheme for the future regeneration of woman under the title Woman's Rights.
The first of these is the right to have the same educational advantages as man. There is to be wholesale educational reform from which class and sex differences are to be eliminated; "unnecessary" learning is to be abolished and the substitute is to be found in a universal citizen's examination—a degree of social competency requiring the arts of reading, writing, arithmetic and elementary knowledge of the laws of one's country, with appreciation of the duties and rights of citizenship. To this curriculum one living foreign language will be added, but there will not be time for much more, for "the future will require every citizen to earn his living by manual labour in accordance with the law of nature." The regeneration of woman and the reform of marriage are thus—according to August Strindberg of 1884—inseparably bound up with socialistic hopes of equality.
In co-education he sees the remedy for the insipid gallantry and sex mystification which are responsible for so many pangs of disillusionment after marriage. He wishes the theoretical equality of the sexes to be enforced in the relations between brothers and sisters. A girl should not expect a boy to give up his seat to her, and a brother should not count upon his sisters for the restoration of missing buttons and other creature comforts. And, last but not least, he proclaims Votes for Women as the prerogative of the enlightened woman of the future! We may, therefore, claim indulgence for the woman-hater's life-long growl of discontent against the feminine sex, for, underlying all his dislike of the present, there was a radiant vision of the future. There are propositions in this preface which should satisfy even the most consistent advocates of votes for women. "Woman shall be eligible for election to every occupation," writes Strindberg; in marriage she is to retain her own name and not, as now, be a feminine appendix ignominiously tacked on to the man; she is to be master of her own body, and of the choice of motherhood. Of the spiritual functions of motherhood he writes:
"Is anyone wiser or more fit to rule than an old mother who, through motherhood and the household, has learnt to reign and to administer?" Through the influence of the mother, he continues, "customs and laws will be softened, for no one has learnt forgivingness as a mother, no one knows as she does how patient, how indulgent one must be with erring human children."
Whilst the waves of the Strindberg storm were beating against the breakwater of Swedish society, the author of paradoxes was working out his own matrimonial fate in Geneva and Paris. His dreams of a better future took form in Real Utopias, published in 1885, a collection of stories in which the socialistic and utilitarian solution of heart-rending problems is presented in a novelistic form which shows Strindberg at his best. The style is instinct with a tender pity for human suffering; there is a keen sense of character, and a wealth of exuberant descriptive warmth which are in sharp contrast with the meagre and stunted sociology to which they have been made subservient. They show the addition of a new string to his lyre, a tone of southern richness which accentuates the superiority of the artist in Strindberg to the social philosopher.
At the age of thirty-seven he gathers the riches of his experiences—external and internal—sits down to draw up an account with life and writes his Autobiography: The first three volumes deal with the period 1849-79, and were published during 1886. During the same year the second part of Married appeared—in many respects the antithesis of the first. After a prolonged plunge into the depths of subjectivity, Strindberg rose endowed with a new creative force. He had spoken that which was within him, and through the process of self-renewal which followed he attained his highest powers as artist.
[1] The first Swedish edition will shortly appear amongst the collected works of Strindberg which are being issued by Messrs. Albert Bonnier.
[2] En bok om Strindberg, af Holger Drachmann, Knut Hamsun, Justin Huntly McCarthy, Björnstjerne Björnson, Jonas Lie, Georg Brandes, etc. (Karlstad, 1894).
[3] The Confession of a Fool. English translation by Ellie Schleussner.
[4] The name of this play has been wrongly translated into English. It is generally written of as The Journal of Lucky Peter, a mistake which even appears in the Encyclopædia Britannica.