SELF-TORMENTOR AND VISIONARY
He restlessness of Genius is a sore trial to Mediocrity. Mediocrity in the Critic's chair, whose business it is to pass judgment upon the artist and his work, to affix a label to his back, and to place him on a particular shelf where the public can find him. The literary artist is expected to have a point of view which he has reached through certain early influences, to express himself in a certain form, and, when mature, to be measurable and easily recognisable in size and colour. If his personality and his writings make the critic's work easy he will be blessed by his contemporaries, or possibly condemned. But he will always be understood, and in the understanding there is solid comfort. You may sneer at the gods of society, you may shake your fist at law and authority, you may ridicule humanity, but you must, like Mr. George Bernard Shaw, always say the same thing. Voltaire is always expected to contemplate the world with a truly Voltairean smile of irony, Rousseau to cling innocently to Nature, Swift to see humanity only from the satirist's vantage-point.
The man of genius who, conscious of the limitations of a single point of view, seeks another, who strides across the hilltops of past thought in rapid search of a higher one, who hugs philosophies and drops them, holds faiths and deserts them, is a phenomenon before which the critic feels uneasy. He calls in the doctor, and together they prepare the last label of madness—red, like a warning against poison—and hurl it at the extraordinary man when he happens to pass at a convenient distance. Believing that there is nothing further to be said, they return to their respective vocations.
From the points of view of Mediocrity and Eugenics Strindberg presented the typical signs of degeneration, irrespectively of the traits and characteristics which are inadequately defined as the insanity of genius. He was a truth-seeker, and, consequently, a fault-finder. He knew peace and comfort like other men, and brief hours of sunshine, but spiritual discontent compelled him to be a nomad, a wanderer in many lands. Hence the critic's failure to classify him as a romanticist or realist, a socialist or individualist, a pessimist or humorist, a maniac or mystic, or to map out his life into periods and squares of thought. There was something of the eternal recurrence in him, an alchemical consciousness of all in all. He leaves beliefs, parts with influences, conquers new lands through violent crises of awakening which well-nigh wreck the body, and returns to the first camp, richer and yet the same. Through soul-sickness and hallucinations, through delirium and phrenopathic punishments he is led to the super-sanity of genius. He becomes the visionary of things hidden, the medium of spirits, the sinner on the road to Damascus, the prophet of divine justice.
Mistakes and bitter experiences prepared the way for the religious crisis of 1894. In 1887 he left Switzerland and France for Bavaria, where he wrote The Father and The People of Hemsö. He lived in Denmark from the autumn of 1887 to the summer of 1889. The prosecution of Married had inspired cautiousness in the hearts of Swedish publishers, and Strindberg had only with difficulty found a publisher for The Father and Lady Julie. The plays were promptly attacked by Swedish critics, amongst them Professor Warburg, author of a history of literature, who thought their naturalism an unmistakable form of decadence. When Strindberg returned to his country in 1889 the hostility aroused by Married, and augmented by lively tales of the author's views on morality took an unexpectedly practical form. When yachting along the west coast for the purpose of collecting material for a great work on The Scenery of Sweden, he was actually refused permission to land in one of the fishing villages.[1] During the two years which he now spent in Sweden he became embittered by the enmity of his critics. He isolated himself on one of his beloved islands outside Stockholm, wrote and painted. In the autumn of 1892 an exhibition of his pictures was held in Stockholm. It was impressions of the sea which his brush had chosen—ice, mist, storm—and painted, not only with a tender feeling for island scenery, but disclosing considerable technical merit and accuracy of hand. The principal cause of suffering lay in Strindberg's eroticism, his interminable suspiciousness against his wife which made his divorce in 1892 a merciful end to a marriage of torment. There is much in the repulsive pages of The Confession of a Fool which betrays its author's lack of mental balance; the incessant puling over the woman's wickedness, and the attendant self-appreciation are not apt to command the reader's sympathy. The same may be said of the second volume of Married, published in 1886. There are a carelessness of style, and a bluntness of accusation against womankind which make the book inartistic. The ad captandum controversialist has overruled judgment; there is a tone of personal irritation in the stories which Strindberg tells us were written "in self-defence" against the attacks, made upon him by feminists. Like John Knox, when he wrote The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regimen of Women, Strindberg was actuated by a kind of religious fervour. Like John Knox he detested "this monstriferous empire of women," whilst his admiration for the dangerous sex repeatedly cast him in chains of bondage. Like Schopenhauer he mocked all womankind "long of hair and short of sense," and threw misogyny to the winds before the first pair of charming eyes or dainty feet.
In the autumn of 1892 we find Strindberg in Germany. The curse of marriage is no longer upon his head. He lives at Friedrichshagen, near Berlin, with his friends, the Swedish writer Ola Hansson, and his wife Laura Marholm who has written an interesting psychological study of Strindberg. Strindberg has passed through one of those "deaths," in which he found temporary Nirvana when the battle of thoughts had been too sanguinary. He has forsaken literature, thrown away the pen as a worthless tool of a tormented imagination which can scratch but not solve the riddle of the Sphinx. He has been re-born—a scientist. The exact sciences—chemistry, physics, astronomy—hold out hopes of complete replies to questions which the playwright can dress in human shape but not analyse.
Strindberg's friend, Gustaf Uddgren,[2] has described a visit to him at this time. His study was bare and uninviting. On the floor there lay stacks of scientific books piled up against the wall. They had been bought with the first money he had earned in Germany, and none had been wasted on the luxury of a bookcase. The room contained a large, old easel, not unlike a brown skeleton; a writing-table from which the usual heaps of manuscript and notes were conspicuously absent; and, for the comfort of the body, a few easy chairs and a sofa, arranged so as to give the impression of a drawing-room. Strindberg did not wish to discuss literary subjects. He was glad to have left off writing, and looked forward with eager joy to scientific research. Uddgren tried in vain to induce him to talk about Walt Whitman. Strindberg preferred to discuss Red Indians with his guest who knew something of the wild west.
After a few months at Friedrichshagen Strindberg moved to Berlin. He was in need of change and expansion. In the evenings he was now found in a little Wein Stube in Unter den Linden which is called "Zum Schwarzen Ferkel." It had already won fame as the favourite resort of Heine and E.T.A. Hoffmann. Here he was the centre of a literary and scientific coterie. Guitar in hand, amidst sympathetic friends, he became Dionysos, the singer of glad tidings, of wine-born joy. He improvised songs, and the nights were made short with wit and sparkling discussions. The Polish writer, Stanislav Przybyszewski, became much attached to Strindberg who found in him whirling depths of imaginative thought which attracted him, and made him seek his society on the principle of similia similibus curantur. Amongst other friends of the coterie were Holger Drachmann, Gunnar Heiberg, Adolf Paul, and Edvard Munch. "Zum Schwarzen Ferkel" is impregnated with the Strindbergian spirit. The landlord proudly shows the visitor the portraits which Strindberg gave him, and the picture by Strindberg, entitled Die Welle, which hangs on the wall.
The plunge into the "exact" physical sciences, from which he had expected so much, proved disappointing. The boundaries of experimental research were soon reached by his penetrative imagination. He had a passion for facts, but he could not, like the typical man of science, content himself with systematised classification of things observable. His speculative writings are studded with allusions to scientific theories, and show an extensive knowledge of the history of chemistry and botany, of the facts of astronomy, geology, and zoology. He garnered the fruits of nineteenth-century science with the pleasure of the true dilettante, and having tasted them, declared them insipid. The imaginative processes of his mind continued where those of others stop; he passed from the visible to the occult, from rigid induction to extravagant fancy. Beyond the uttermost limits of science he came to see another world, in which chemistry became alchemy, astronomy astrology, physics the servant of magic, and the form of man the tool of mighty forces. He became a student of magnetism, hypnotism, telepathy, spiritism, of the secret knowledge which has persisted throughout the ages as the pearl within the oyster.