Behind this powerful forehead all the ideas that have moved the second half of this century have fermented, but only one thing original and new has taken shape, and that is the sombre instinct of sex hatred. Strindberg’s one act has been to drag out this enmity from beneath the threshold of consciousness, where it had hitherto lain, to lend it speech and clothe it with an artistic form. He grasps hold of woman like an impetuous bourgeois, and treats her like a captured savage. Strindberg is like an instrument on which the age has played her shrillest tunes, but the strings have retained no recollection of them. As a young man he was a sincere Pietist; later on he became a pessimistic Altruist, then a Socialist and Utilitarian; he has experienced social contrasts and class warfare as few have done, and has reproduced them as none of his contemporaries have ever done. He has writhed beneath the ineradicable consciousness of belonging to a lower class, and his daily habits and sole ambition were fixed on asserting himself as a member of the upper class. He was reckless, unruly, but he does not seem to have had any of that proud confidence in his own greatness which is the birthright of great personalities, who look upon themselves as the beginning and the starting point, and to whom the idea never occurs of fatiguing themselves in the race after that which is theirs by right. Strindberg is a genuine son of this plebeian age, for it needed a Nietzsche endowed with volcanic power to enable him to rise above himself and to proclaim himself a super-man.
His self-psychology is full of contradictions, and it requires the reader’s critical attention to disentangle the undercurrent of personal confessions from the artistic super-structure. It is very interesting to watch how the absence of spontaneous affection changes to a painful yearning for tenderness; when, for example, as a child, he has the feeling of being dependent on his busy mother, a common woman who did not bestow much love on him. It is still more interesting to watch how, on the occasions when he fell in love, he seems always to have had a reason. There is his first love-affair as a boy of fifteen, when the object of his affections is a thirty-year-old girl, who is excitable and hysterical. She is engaged to be married, and forms a centre of attraction; young men and old men admire and rave about her, amongst others his father, and it is an immense gratification to be able to draw her away from them.
Already a feeling of repugnance—so often described by him in his later works as though it were the usual accompaniment of love—pervades their amorous tête-à-têtes, when she evinces her motherly superiority and completely captivates him; it is always the same manœuvring that he describes in his later women. But when writing from memory he can never depict them ludicrously and repulsively enough, cannot sufficiently indulge in expressions of antipathy and repugnance with regard to them, and this same characteristic is very apparent in his last book, called A Fool’s Confession. Here also a former love and destined bride is described as an utterly worthless being, just as the noble lady whom he married was afterwards unmasked as an abyss of iniquity. The same is the case with the newly-married wife of the super-man in By the Open Sea. It is an abiding feature of Strindberg’s works to separate with a shudder of disgust or in a paroxysm of anger and hatred after having tasted love. It is a characteristic feature of the Slav, and may possibly be a heritage from the savage blood of the Mongolians. We find it invariably, although not so strongly expressed, in Tolstoy’s otherwise pleasing descriptions. There are only two possible ways of accounting for it in Strindberg’s literary productions; it must be due either to the author’s temperament, or else to his experience of women.
For a long time I accepted the latter explanation, but after having learned to know him, and having often read his entire creative works, I am compelled to think that it would be too shallow an interpretation.
This rage against woman is connected with his indignation at every bond, every pressure, every circumstance and relationship that threatens to become permanent. Everywhere we find the same longing to escape, to leave no mark behind, to isolate himself, to hide. Everywhere in his studies, his interests, his opinions, the same sudden change, the same hatred of his broken fetters, and every intellectual and spiritual stage of development that is past appears to him like a broken fetter. In all Strindberg’s writings we trace the struggle for the possession of his ever-changing ego; we continually observe an exaggerated self-consciousness, making vain and angry attempts to attain to his real self, reproving the whole of modern science for the sake of justifying and explaining the non-existence of a central point, a unity of the ego which is the missing centre of gravity in the unknown. Everything in him is temperament, nothing the result of coherent thought; he hates coherence as derogatory to himself, he is determined to be incomprehensible, understood by none, and he introduces a dummy as a sort of pattern man, like the unhappy “Father,” or like Axel, in The Comrades, who withdraws his own pictures from the Salon in order that his wife may exhibit hers—which he himself has painted; like the second man in The Creditors, who submits to being sucked to death by a female vampire; like the “Fool,” in The Fool’s Confession, who worships another man’s wife as though she were a pure Madonna. When he sees the steamer passing by, on which she is travelling to visit some relations, he goes further and further into the sea, magnetically drawn towards the ship in which she is, and afterwards becomes her husband only to discover by degrees incredible details of iniquity in her. But he does not part from her, he does not experience that unconquerable feeling of positive aversion after which parting is no longer an act of the will, but an almost unconscious proceeding. Who is there who is not acquainted with all these traits in Russian literature? Turgenev has already described the weak man who is held captive by a brutal and licentious woman, the man who is passive and allows himself to be ruined by her, while all the while he looks on as a spectator might, and despises himself.
Despises himself! Here we find the difference, and perhaps also, if I may say so, the psychological quicksand in Strindberg’s works. I take for granted that we are all agreed that the great Russian writers are honest psychologists. I would certainly make an exception of some of Dostoievsky’s writings, some things he has concealed, and one could point out certain places where he has substituted a false trait and purloined an experience upon which the plot was built. But the earlier works of Turgenev, Garschin, Tolstoy, were never false either in themselves or with regard to their public. And when the men in them allowed themselves to be loved by a woman who claimed for herself “the man’s prerogative,” they saw clearly what they were doing and despised themselves for it.
Not so Strindberg’s man. He cries out beneath the iron-soled slipper, but none the less he holds himself in high esteem; he esteems himself all the more highly for his forbearance with the daring she-devil who derides him on account of it; in this matter he possesses a higher degree of development, and before all else, he is incredibly moral. Strindberg’s man is—especially in the stories where he manifests his hatred of women—moral to a degree such as in the New Testament is only expected of a Bishop, of whom it is said he must be the husband of one wife, and elsewhere only by Björnson and Young Men’s Christian Associations. Strindberg’s man is always strictly monogamous, because monogamy denotes a higher stage of development; his woman, on the other hand, is always polygamous, because woman and polygamy represent a lower stage of development. This monogamous man is devoted to the polygamous woman, the worse she is, the more devoted he becomes, and the more she treats him with contempt, the more tightly his fetters bind him to her. There is something in this that resembles a trait in the character of the “maid-servant’s son,” of whom it is related in the autobiography that “he was quite indifferent to the fresh, red-cheeked girls whom he met at the dancing lesson, while on the contrary, the highly anæmic and hysterical girls, with the pale, waxlike complexions and black lines under their preternaturally bright eyes, had an irresistible attraction for him.” ...
II
I should like to take Strindberg’s women one by one and examine them in connection with his personality and temperament, as it originally was, and as it became when accentuated by friction with his social surroundings and influenced by the atmosphere of the age in which he lived. His women are a set of dismal, mischievous, heartless creatures, only fascinating so long as the man is young and easily duped; afterwards, when he develops into the great mind who sees through the small mind and mimics it, they become ever more and more shrewish, less attractive, more perverse, till at last the day comes when the man with the great mind has grown sufficiently old and wise not to allow himself to be led by the nose any longer, and the woman, whose name is baseness, is finally dismissed.