August Strindberg—1908—In his home in Stockholm. Photo by A. Blomberg, Stockholm
Strindberg's early blasphemies and atheism were the fruits of an inverted religiosity which left him no peace. His devotional mood could find no bridge of union with his scientific mood. The search for knowledge and the search for God led to different goals. Whilst his brain struggled for breadth, his heart cried for the narrow depth of dogma and creed. His researches into occultism and the philosophy of religions, his acquaintance with theosophy did not reconcile his religion with his science. The sense of sin, of having sought unlawful knowledge haunted him in his studies of black magic and Satanism, and in the exercise of the occult powers of which he was conscious. Though Strindberg had not read Huysmans' Là-Bas and En Route when he wrote Inferno, there is a strong resemblance between the books and the religious evolution of the authors.
Strindberg accepted the doctrine of reincarnation as a Christian tenet, and the corollary of a Karmic law which compels us to suffer for sins committed before birth, but he resisted what he believed to be the central teaching of theosophy, i.e. the necessity for killing personality. A theosophical friend sent him Madame Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine which Strindberg criticised severely, though he knew that his outspokenness would deprive him of a friend and a benefactor. He declined to join a "sect" which denied a personal God, the only one who could satisfy his religious needs. He declared Madame Blavatsky's masterpiece to be "detestable through the conscious and unconscious deceptions, through the stories of the existence of Mahatmas," interesting through the quotations from little-known authors, condemnable, above all, as the work of "a gynander who has desired to outdo man, and who pretends to have overthrown science, religion, philosophy, and to have placed a priestess of Isis on the altar of the crucified One."
In spite of this denunciation, Strindberg had absorbed many theosophical ideas, and his later writings are not altogether free from the influence of the despised "gynander" and the theories of occult science which she expounded.
During the time spent in Austria Strindberg slowly recovered his mental balance, whilst his visionary powers and spiritual clairvoyance were in process of development. He stayed with his wife's mother and aunt, two pious and gentle old women, who treated his soul-sickness with Christian forbearance and healing sympathy. He was still subject to "astral" attacks, to "electric" discharges, to nightmares and ghostly visitations. Unacquainted with the higher aspects of psychical research and modern theories of psychological phenomena, he was as yet unable to bring about order in the unruly house of his mind. Whether we use spiritualistic language and call him a medium, or that of psychology and label the messages which reached him "teleological automatism," there can be no doubt that the keynote of his soul's gloom and glory was a hyper-sensitiveness which made him a lightning-conductor for the psychic currents of his time. We may turn away with disdain from the pitiful picture of Strindberg at his writing table, warding off the imaginary attacks of elementals, incubi, lamiæ, by thrusts in the air with a dalmatian dagger, and we may smile at the childish superstition with which he accepted the oracular guidance of the cock on the top of Notre Dame, or the direction chosen by a ladybird visiting his manuscript. But that there were within him cryptopsychic gifts of telepathy, clair-audience, and divination, a somnambulistic consciousness of a reality other than that which is cognisable to the senses, no student of psychic forces can doubt.
In December, 1896, Strindberg returned to Sweden. Swedenborg's Arcana Cœlestia, which he now read, dissipated his fears of persecution by showing him that all the horrors through which he had passed, were recognised by Swedenborg as incidental to the purgation of soul which is the highest object of life. Strindberg found that, before receiving his momentous revelations, Swedenborg had passed through nightly tortures resembling his own. By informing him of the real nature of the horrors Swedenborg liberated him from the electricians, the black magicians, the destroyers, the jealous gold-makers, and the fear of madness. "He has shown me the only path to salvation: to seek out the demons in their dens within myself, and to kill them ... through repentance."
Inferno was composed in Lund, the little University town in the south of Sweden, between May 3rd and June 25th, 1897. Legends, which is but a rifacimento of the struggle to slay the "demons in their dens," was begun in Lund, and finished in Paris in October, 1897. In March, 1898, Strindberg went back to Lund, free from haunting obsessions of evil, master of his madness, enriched by religious experiences which produced an exuberant rise of new ideas. He had crossed the Rubicon. Henceforth he shared in that direct vision which makes paralysing doubt impossible, and which is the prerogative of God's fools all over the world. To the end of life his mind retained intellectual disquiet; there remained in him a strain of the wild man, an over-balance of curiosity which set up eternal enmity between him and convention. The Swedish critic, Oscar Levertin, succinctly summed up Strindberg in the Italian proverb: All soul, all gall, all fire. But after 1898 there is a calm light which the unruly flames cannot hide. His spiritual wrestlings continue through the zenith of his literary production, but they leave him stronger.
A comparison between his views on the "nature of man" in 1884 and in 1910 is interesting. In an essay on The Joy of Life, written in 1884, he greatly offended the Swedish Mrs. Grundy by the following passage: "After long centuries of the voluntary or involuntary lie, of artificialising custom and speech, a general craving for brutality is sometimes awakened, a delirious desire to throw off one's clothes and walk about naked, to reveal the indecent, to approach the repulsive, to be a happy and joyous animal." In an article on Religion, written in 1910, and published in Speeches to the Swedish Nation, he wrote: "I apply my biblical Christianity to my own personal and inner use, so as to curb my somewhat riotous nature, rendered riotous by the veterinary philosophy and animal doctrine (Darwinism) in which I was brought up. The fact that I practise, as far as I can, the Christian doctrines should not, I maintain, give people reason to complain. For it is only through religion, or the hope for something better, and the realisation of the inner meaning of life as a time of probation, a school, possibly a house of correction, that we can bear life's burden with sufficient resignation. In the understanding of the relative insignificance of external conditions of life, compared with the possession of hope and faith, one finds that moral courage to renounce everything—which the ungodly lack—to suffer everything for the sake of a mission, to speak out when others remain silent."