As long as you are under his immediate influence, everything seems possible, even probable. While recognising the truth of the principal traits, you forget the numerous errors that are never absent, the superabundance of evil qualities which he never omits to pile upon his enemies—woman and the lower orders—with both of whom he once felt himself related, and by whom he now feels himself pursued.
The second reason of his immense influence is that he is such a perfect son of this torn, restless, over-stimulated age, this age with its combination of decadence and barbarism. His writings are full of the plebeian snobbishness, the moralising hypocrisy, the perverse instincts of the sons of the present day, while at the same time they contain the direct opposite: the superhuman effort to rise above himself, to attain beyond good and evil, the unbaptised, grandiose sensuousness, the indignation against feminism and the cult of woman. His is the cry of an indignant nature in a corrupt civilisation. His is the duplicate personality of to-day, cankered and yet healthy, at once the whited sepulchre of the dead past and the vessel of the future. He reflects his secret sufferings, his half-conscious untruthfulness, his conscious boasting, the god and the beast in him.
Yet all combined could not have made his name a torch which will burn long and be held for that which it is not—one of the eternal stars.
It was a twofold influence that helped to create the red flame which proceeds from him: his language, in the first place, which only produces its true effect in the original. German gives it quite a different character, harsh and barren. But in Swedish it is like the sea that breaks upon the shore and thunders from afar, like the trumpet that brays its battle signal through the night, like the short hollow beat of fortune: “I am there, I am there!”
There are northern writers who can be rendered in German, taught new nuances, enriched with new words and new rhythm, and in whom the symphonies of the German language may be heard to advantage. But if any one tries to translate Strindberg the result is disappointing; in Swedish the sound is like bell metal, in German it resembles tin.
Materialism is the second influence which makes Strindberg a giant of his age. He has the materialist’s philosophy of life, the materialist’s ideal, the materialist’s cult of the intellect, and the materialist’s interpretation of the sexes. However deep the problem, his interpretation is always flat. In his descriptions everything is clear, sharp and rectangular; he is like an inquisitor who only enquires into that which lies above the threshold of consciousness, and only sees the growth on the rough, hard surface. The rich fruitful soil in the unseen, where everything that exists must grow organically like the seed in mother earth, is as good as undiscovered by the great and noble mind of the materialist.
As a materialist he does not acknowledge the mystic element—which is love—in the relations between man and woman; but the union, without love, of two persons of culture leads in course of time to degeneration, and this degeneration he has always very consistently described.