We Women and Our Authors

by Laura Marholm

August Strindberg is one of the most wonderful and perfect examples of a type which, in our vacillating age, frequently rises to the surface and endeavours to make its mark everywhere; a type full of aggressiveness and impatience, seldom made after a pattern and frequently full of imperfections, but with touches of real genius as well as barren wastes, full of lapses, but full of promises for the future. It is a mixed type. The strange combinations in his character, the seeming contradictions and the flaws in his education make it a very difficult study for the average person. It would require a genius, one to whom the many hostile elements appear microscopically enlarged. The mixture of races, that inseparable ingredient in human physiology, is as yet an unexplored region of investigation. The question is one with which Strindberg has been greatly troubled, and he has contributed abundant material for its solution.

He has done more. The great literature that he has created is more priceless as raw material to the psychologist than as a work of art. In all his writings Strindberg occupies the reader’s mind in a twofold manner: first, with the psychological results to which he individually attains; secondly, with the psychological results to which the reader malgré lui attains, and which often contradict the others on matters of chief importance. Whoever studies Strindberg finds himself in the presence of a double mirror; in the one he sees the world reflected in Strindberg’s mind, and in the other as an antidote, he sees the mind of Strindberg presenting its own solution in the moment of its birth and reflecting its psychology in the reader’s soul.

Strindberg’s collected works are really only biographical contributions towards the solution of the riddle of his ego. He has never ceased to speculate on the mystery of his own being, and this speculation has always vented itself in indignant storming against outward enemies. What does he mean by his angry guesses at the riddle of the woman sphinx? You have but to turn this sphinx round and it is no longer a woman. It is the man sphinx—the riddle that is himself.

No writings have ever been of a more personal character than those of Strindberg. But perhaps no writings have ever issued from an ego that was less complete. I should like to express it as follows: In a mixed type like Strindberg’s no unity has as yet been able to form itself beneath the threshold of consciousness, for there the instincts of different races and epochs rush helter skelter. All that he has written fell as an instantaneous reflection on his soul, and was thrown back in an impressionist picture. In Strindberg’s works we find no transitions, no coherence. And since he has always presented himself as a riddle to the passing crowd, it is quite fair to regard the riddle as common property, which any one may seek to solve if he is not afraid to do so.

I

I have often met Strindberg and have received the most contradictory impressions concerning him. But in one way he was always the same, and that was in his outward manner. He demanded respect, and he invariably treated himself with the greatest respect. There was always something subdued and severe about him as though he were keeping guard over an invisible and holy relic, against which neither he nor others might sin; his voice, when he spoke, was low and imperious, and his threatening gaze was always ready to quell any signs of feminine flippancy, although he would have been very unwilling to be deprived of it altogether.

That was Strindberg as he appeared to the multitude. But for those who knew him better, there was another Strindberg, not more sociable and affable than the first, but one who was certainly not pompous, who was a thorough Swede, a boon companion whose good hours fell at the first cock-crowing, a humourist with an indistinct smile who played at chess with life, and cared less about the results of the game than for its subtle tactics, a man of great foresight, unreliable, impulsive, a man whose intellect impressed you and who wished to be impressive, and who in addition to this possessed the cunning of a boy.

The keynote, which was the solution to the nature of this contradictory and purposely mysterious being, was a suspicion that knew no bounds; suspicion for its own sake, suspicion as a principle, as the prerogative of a superior intellect, a suspicion against every one and everything which ended by becoming a suspicion of himself.

Strindberg has Finnish-Lapp blood in his veins. He comes of a poverty-stricken middle-class family which was undergoing a period of great pecuniary distress at the time of his birth. His father had known better times, but through his union with a servant-girl he had dropped out of the social circle to which he belonged. Three children were born before marriage, the author soon after the wedding. The mother was always ailing, and she died of consumption after the birth of her twelfth child. While the boy was growing up, the father and mother, with seven children and two servants, inhabited three rooms. The furniture consisted chiefly of beds and cradles. Children lay on ironing-boards and chairs, children lay in cradles and beds. Baptism, funeral! Baptism, funeral! Sometimes two baptisms one after the other without a funeral. The father was only seen at meals; his name was used to frighten the children, and “Papa shall hear of it,” was equivalent to a whipping.