In his daily experiences he discerned the guidance and punishment of an unseen hand which, for a high and inscrutable purpose, was leading him out of his past folly. Sometimes the Unknown One delivered him into the hands of demons; at other times he received the grace which saved him from temptations and evil. The idea of persecution permitted for the sake of the chastisement needed by his spirit became paramount. The simultaneous playing of three pianos in the rooms adjoining his, the unexpected presentation of the hotel bill, an inexplicable noise in the room, during which the plaster of the ceiling fell on his head, roused his suspicions. He moved to Hotel Orfila which looked like a monastery. It harboured Roman Catholic students, and an atmosphere of mysticism.
Annoyances, revelations, and delusions of persecution now crowded in upon him. Strange dreams foretold the future, commonplace objects assumed fantastic shape. One day, when looking at the embryo of a sprouting walnut under the microscope, he saw two little white hands folded as if in prayer. Immovable, perfect in form, they were there, the hands of a child or a woman, raised beseechingly towards him. Shortly before the incident he had sinned grievously against his child. Seized by an uncontrollable longing to be reunited to his wife, in spite of the divorce proceedings, he had wished—with a concentrated and occultly sharpened desire—that the child might fall ill, and thus become a link of reunion. There were other mysteries. The coal in his stove burned itself into grotesque shapes, works of some kind of elemental sculptor, which were so realistic that the sparrows, feeding on crumbs by his window, were frightened by the sight of them. His pillow-case, crumpled by the after-dinner nap, showed him one day a head in marble modelled on the lines of Michel-Angelo; another day a mighty Zeus rested on his bed; one night, after a festive evening with friends, he was received by the devil himself in correct middle-age attire, thus competing with Blake who one day, whilst ascending the stairs of his house, saw Satan glaring at him through a window.
From sulphur he turned to iodine as a subject of original experimentation, and then, oblivious of Aristotle's injunctions, to the goldmaker's art. He did not possess "the most precious stone of the philosophers," by which base metals are changed into gold, and he had to be unorthodox—even when practising the alchemistic art. He therefore rejected the alchemical faith that gold alone is free from sulphur, and commenced experiments with solutions of sulphate of iron in support of the theory that gold contains iron and sulphur. He succeeded in making gold—his special gold of art—but it vanished when put to the ordinary chemical test. Signs and guidance from unseen Powers encouraged him to persist in spite of failure. Whilst out for a walk his eyes were riveted by the letters F and S intertwined. At first he thought of his wife's initials, and of her faithful love, but such a commonplace interpretation was quickly dismissed. The letters meant Fer and Soufre—the secret of the generation of gold was thus laid bare before his eyes. Another time two pieces of paper lying at the foot of a monument attracted his attention. One bore the imprint 207, the other 28. What could this be but a reminder of the atomic weights of lead (207) and silicum (28)? Subsequent experiments in which he extracted gold from lead and silicum confirmed the wisdom of the exegesis made. But the spirit of gold is fickle. One day, after repeated failures, when standing naked to the waist as a smith before the fiercely burning furnace, he looked into the crucible, and saw a skull with a pair of glittering eyes. The eyes looked into his soul with a supernatural irony, and the goldmaker was struck by paralysing doubt, by fear of the consequences of his folly.
One day he was forcibly reminded that the fruits of his labour should be consecrated to Wisdom, not Mammon. He had written an article in Le Temps, and drawn public interest to his theory that iodine could be made from benzine. An enterprising agent called on him, and showed him that his idea contained possibilities for a highly successful commercial undertaking, and that a patent might be worth millions of francs. Strindberg repudiated the suggestion, though the agent offered him 100,000 francs if he would go with him to Berlin, and subordinate his experiments to industrial usages. Unpaid bills and the usual want of money caused him to give more serious thought to the offer made. After some time he was willing to meet the agent and a chemist, for the purpose of making a conclusive experiment, and to turn his art into much-needed cash. He collected his retorts and reagents, and arrived at the agent's office on the day appointed. It happened to be Whit-Sunday, and the office, which looked out on a dark and grimy street, was so dirty that the result was one of those mental revolutions to which hyper-æsthetic senses are subject. "Memories of childhood were awakened," he writes. "Whitsuntide, the feast of joy, when the little church was decorated with foliage, tulips, and lilies, when it was opened for the children's first Communion, the girls clad in white like angels ... the organ ... the tolling of the bells...."
A feeling of shame overcame him, he returned home determined not to turn science into a business. He cleared his room of the chemical apparatus, swept and dusted it, and made it beautiful with flowers. A bath and clean clothes added to the feeling of purification, and during a walk in the Montparnasse cemetery gentle thoughts of peace filled his mind. O crux ave spes unica—these words from the graves carried a message of the future. Not love, not gain, not honour for him, but the cross, the only path to wisdom!
This unfitness for practical life, this sudden change of personality, through which the poet or the child within are confronted with unbearable conditions, brings a smile to the lips of the man who is thoroughly "fit." The man of the world does not only keep religion and business in water-tight compartments, he keeps dreams for the night, and poetical recollections for important occasions, such as weddings and funerals. He is not troubled by unexpected visitants from his subconscious self which cause inconsistencies and poetic delirium. He may well deplore the unpracticality of men like Renan who dreamily allow themselves to be exploited by "sharper" brains, whilst they spend years in contemplation of their own complexity. "I am a tissue of contradictions," wrote Renan, "... one of my halves is constantly occupied in demolishing the other, like the fabulous animal of Ctesias who ate his paws without knowing it."[3]
Instead of selling his process of manufacturing iodine, Strindberg returned to the hyperchemical task which he had set himself: to eliminate the barriers between matter, and that which is called spirit. An object worthy indeed of concentrated effort, worthy even in the face of the inevitable failure of seeking to grasp that which to human intelligence is unknowable!
Meanwhile he went "mad." Mad as Tasso and Cellini, Poe and Blake. We cannot dispute the madness, but we may hold that the madness of genius is more valuable to humanity than the sanity of mediocrity.
In Strindberg we can clearly distinguish between cerebral derangements causing auditory hallucinations as well as delusions of persecution, and the super-conscious activity which produced the state of clairpsychism, which is generally classed with insanity. Dr. W. Hirsch has studied Strindberg's disease from the ordinary alienist's point of view, and concluded that he suffered from paranoia simplex chronica—a diagnosis which is empty of meaning when applied to such a mind. Dr. S. Rahmer[4] made Strindberg the subject of a more comprehensive psychopathic study, and defined his case as one of melancholia daemomaniaca. The inadequacy of such diagnoses will be apparent to every serious student of Inferno and Legends—the books which are mostly extracts from the diary in which he recorded his madness—and of plays like To Damascus, Advent, Easier, The Dream Play, and The Great Highway, which give evidence of his lucidity, and of the mysticism which he distilled from mental torture.
There is nothing original in the fact that a man describes his own madness in prose or verse. Such descriptions may even be regarded as a distinct genre of literary activity, perverse and detestable to those who, like Mr. Balfour, want only the "cheerful" note in literature, but of infinite interest to those who place a truthful account of the human soul above one which is pleasing. Nathaniel Lee's poems, Lenan's Traumgewalten, Hoffmann's Kreisler possess a psychological interest which no clamour for literary cradle-songs can remove. Strindberg's self-revelations have a touch of that exultation which, through a dominant curiosity, survives the most complete cheerlessness, horror, and pain—that joy of which Charles Lamb wrote to Coleridge: "Dream not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till you have gone mad," and which made him look back upon his lunacy "with a gloomy kind of envy."