Voices of to-morrow: critical studies of the new spirit in literature

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Contents

1 His Life

2 His Work

3 His Spirit

II His Work

TURNING from the man to what he achieved, we meet first of all with evidence of a startling and almost limitless manysidedness. Since the days of Goethe the world has not known a creative mind so catholic in its interests, or a pen so adaptable to every literary form. He touched every field of human thought — astronomy, mineralogy, chemistry, botany, zoology, biology, psychology, sociology, economy, history, philology, philosophy, ethics, esthetics — and rarely without notable results. To the field more particularly his own he contributed with almost equal success as poet, novelist, essayist and playwright.

Nor was his passion to embrace all life within a single consciousness restricted to a single mode of expression — by means of 41 the written word. I have already mentioned his noteworthy excursions into painting, twice revealed to his astonished countrymen by interesting exhibitions (and by the fact that in the little Parisian cremerie which has been reproduced with photographic exactness in "There Are Crimes and Crimes," his paintings were much treasured but his writings wholly unknown). He was also a musician of fine discernment, and some of the music that figures so largely in his plays was arranged, or even composed, by himself. And during the final years of his life, while staking all he had on a theatrical experiment for the exclusive production of his own plays, he showed himself a stage director of great ability and daring ingenuity.

As a writer he impresses us not only by the variety but also by the amount of his production. The definite Swedish edition of his collected works will contain from fifty to sixty volumes — or something like six million words. If somebody tried to read them aloud, giving to the task eight hours a day, it would take him more than two years to finish those volumes. But even such figures as these fail to bring home the full extent of his achievement. A classified summary of his works, some of which are only now being published for the first time, will go farther in this direction. This is what such a list has to offer us:

Fifty-six plays, varying in length from a single scene like "The Stronger" to the mighty trilogy named "Toward Damascus ;" nineteen volumes of novels and stories; eleven volumes of autobiographical fiction; three volumes of verse; sixteen volumes of historical and scientific writings; seventeen collections of essays, criticism, notes, etc.

Much supercilious and some warranted criticism has been evoked by his ventures outside his own domain as a poet in the wider meaning of the term: as a writer of creative, imaginative literature. Final judgment must lie with the future, of course, and the audacity of all his thinking, whether em-

U VOICES OF TO-MORROW

bodied in artistic or non-artistic form, will tend still further to make that future a distant one. For the present this much may be safely asserted : that his mind never dealt with any line of human knowledge without uncovering new and startling vistas.

As a historian he compelled imitation even where he failed to win approval. His greatest work of this kind, "The Swedish People in War and Peace," was, in spite of admitted shortcomings, distinctly pathbreaking both in character and effect. To-day this work is, next to the Bible, the one most read among the Swedes in the United States. As a keen-eyed and tenderly sympathetic observer of nature and of all life subordinate to that of man, he has not often been excelled. His more pretentious efforts at scientific thinking and writing were undoubtedly marred by the venturesomeness of a mind accustomed to rely equally on intuition and on intellect for its conclusions. But even here some of his more daring suggestions have already been overtaken by the more slowly advancing forces of organized knowledge. Thus, to mention only one instance, the charming little essay called "The Intellect of Animals and Plants" may have seemed purely fantastic at the time of its publication in 1888. To-day it stands recognized as a definite herald of ideas since then scientifically formulated by men like Sir Francis Darwin. And at the same time one may well ask whether it did not furnish Maeterlinck with suggestions for his "The Intelligence of the Flowers," which it closely foreshadows.

Regarding Strindberg primarily as an imaginatively creative writer, we find his career as such falling into three sharply defined periods. The first of these lasted from 1868 to 1885 ; the second, from 1886 to 1894 ; the third, from 1897 to his death. Between the second and the third periods occurred that interregnum of absolute unproductivity, of which I have already spoken and to which I shall again refer.

For purposes of convenience, rather than with any claim at positive definition, those periods may be designated as: 1) the romantic ; 2 ) the naturalistic ; 3 ) the symbolistic. Of course, a tendency to naturalistic presentation of external facts characterized his work almost from the start, and it continued to assert itself even in the most mystical products of his final period. He was always a realist in the finest sense of that term — one insisting that art must cling closely to life as actually lived and stand firmly on this ground even when reaching most daringly into still unconquered realms of being. But on the other hand, there was always a touch of mysticism, of yearning idealism, of instinctive out-reaching for the life still to come, even in such characteristic works of the middle period as "The Father" and "Creditors." It represented a strain of feeling and thought nearly inseparable from the Scandinavian temperament.

Of the first period, beginning with his initial gropings in the world of poetry, and coming to an end, in 1885, with the completion of the four short stories published collectively as "Real Utopias," I have dared to speak as romantic chiefly because sentiment still holds almost equal sway with logic in the work belonging to it. Strindberg has generally been described as a pupil of Zola. As a fact, he was not familiar with the work of the great French novelist when he established his own style and outlook in "The Red Room." As a boy and young man, he read whatever the world-literature had to offer him of lasting value. Goethe, Schiller and the Dane Oehlenschlager were among his earliest ideals. A little later he studied Dante and Shakespeare— in their native tongues — and against both he reacted rather unsympathetically. The main reason was that he found them established as idols which one had to worship at the penalty of being declared lacking in taste and knowledge. He said in one of his autobiographical novels that, as he had found it much less dangerous to attack Christ than

Shakespeare, he had chosen the latter to prove his critical fearlessness. Toward the end of his life he published a series of comments on the principal Shakespeare dramas which proved him at once a discriminating student and an ardent lover of England's Bard.

But his chief artistic forbears were Hugo, Dickens, the brothers de Goncourt, and Mark Twain. To the Englishman and the two Frenchmen he confessed his indebtedness repeatedly, and he maintained with his usual strenuousness that Dickens must be counted among those who had done most to bring modern poetry back to real life. The influence exercised on him by the great American humorist remained long unrecognized, but of late it has been pointed out by several Swedish critics. And it is also recalled that one of his first literary efforts took the form of a series of translations including some of Mark Twain's most characteristic work. The stimulus which his ever susceptible fancy received from still another American writer did not become revealed until a few months after his death. Then the Swedish poet and novelist Ola Hansson published a number of letters divulging the fact that Strindberg had been eagerly reading some of Edgar Allan Poe's tales just before he produced such plays as "Creditors," "Pariah," and "Simoom," and the novels "Chandalah" and "At the Edge of the Sea." Of the inspiration which, at a much later time, he drew from Maeterlinck and other mystical writers, I shall speak further on.

The transition from the first to the second period caused no interruption in his creative activity. Evidence that some kind of border line was crossed about 1885 must be drawn from within the works then produced. But the moment we compare the preface of the first part of "Marriage," dating from 1884, with that of the second part, written in 1886, we perceive that something of moment must have happened in the meantime. Of course, the real events took place in

Strindberg's own mind. But the principal external facts connected with those inner changes were the confiscation of the first part of "Marriage" and the beginnings of his marital unhappiness.

We know now, through the recentlypublished reminiscences of an unbiased and clear-eyed friend (Helene Welinder: Strindberg in Switzerland: Ord och Bild, Stockholm, September, 1912), that when, during the summer of 1884, Strindberg and Siri von Essen celebrated their seventh wedding anniversary, they were still conscious of a deep happiness in their common life. And we know also from the same source that shortly afterwards the wife's growing impatience with a merely domestic career began to break into open flame, while the husband seemed to regard the very idea of her reappearance on the stage with a scorn and a disgust that he had not evidenced during the first years of their marriage. It was this growing tension between two opposed wills that nursed the subsequent estrangement of their spirits, until a burning love turned into burning hatred.

His altered attitude toward womanhood is the first thing that makes itself felt in the second of the two prefaces already referred to. But back of it we suspect the presence of changes reaching much farther down into the writer's conception of life. The man who wrote the first part of "Marriage" and "Real Utopias" was, on the whole, well content w T ith his world. The author of the second part of "Marriage" and of "The Father" strikes us, on the other hand, as a man doubting the very possibility of happiness as a human state.

I deem it highly regrettable that for many years hardly any works by Strindberg except those dating from his middle period became known in the English-speaking countries. For in many respects I cannot but think that period abnormal — representing a deviation from his true line of development. During those years between 1885 and 1894, the nature of Strindberg, which was no whit less capable of love and faith than of hatred and doubt, became sadlywarped. All the world lay wrapt in grey mist. Woman, once angelic, turned into a devil incarnate. Life was seen as war to the hilt — and love was the worst form this war could assume.

To me it seems quite logical that this period, and no other, should see Strindberg turn from his former social outlook to a temporary acceptance of Nietzsche's ultraindividualistic superman theories. It is the works from this period that have brought him the name of a misogynist and the reputation of being too grim and gloomy for races which are essentially wholesome and optimistic in their tendencies. Yet the same period gave the world a series of exquisite pictures from life among the peasant-fishermen on those islands between Stockholm and "the edge of the sea" where Strindberg had previously sought and won the inspiration for his "Master Olof."

Then came the long pause already mentioned. All artistic production was stopped. Scientific speculation took its place, following more and more erratic channels, until it ended in a spell of religious brooding of distinctly morbid type. It was at this time rumor made a Catholic of him. "Lutheranism has been seized by such a panic that Catholics are seen everywhere," Strindberg wrote ten years later in explanation of that rumor. The truth of it was that, guided by Balzac, Swedenborg, Maeterlinck, and the French mystic writer signing himself "Sar" Peladan, he turned from the materialistic creed which had failed to serve his soul as a sheet anchor in the hour of supreme upheaval. When the crisis was over, he stood forth not as a confessor of this or that creed, but as a member of the mystic brotherhood whose mission it is to remind man of the omnipresence of the unknowable. A pessimist he remained even after the dawn of his new faith had set his soul singing once more, but sadness and resignation took the place of bitterness and defiance as the fundamental notes of his soul's melody.

Some of the works included in the appended chronological list stand out beyond the rest either as epoch-making in the author's own career, or as marking a distinct advance on the part of the human spirit in its long struggle to substitute conscious for unconscious growth — and of these alone I shall be able to speak here.

The play "Master Olof" was at first named "The Renegade,' , and under this title I hope it will become known to the English-speaking world. To Strindberg himself it was largely what "The Pretenders" was to Ibsen — at once a questioning and a formulation of his own genius. The greater modernity of the Swedish work is shown by the fact that its principal hero, who is one of three central figures, fails equally to reach a triumph like that of King Hdkon, the man divinely commissioned, and to suffer a disaster like that of the self-doubting Earl

Skule. Instead he lives on to complete his work — in compromise. To win his way, or rather a way for his mission, he has to sacrifice a part of his vision — and so he is denounced as a renegade by him who sees too far ahead and will sacrifice nothing. This is life, of course; and thus Strindberg may be said to have, for all time, given the true sj^mbolization of the everlasting struggle between the genius and the mass on one side, and between true and false genius on the other.

"The Red Room" is a satirical novel, embodying the conflict between bohemianism and philistinism at Stockholm in the seventies, and written in a vein that shows a rare combination of youthful vigor and merciless satire. But it gives also, as almost all of Strindberg's novels, a detailed study of social conditions in Sweden at that time. Hardly a phase of national existence is unrepresented, and each one of them is sketched in such manner that we also get an idea of the directional tendencies expressed through it. Strindberg's faculty for drawing lifelike pictures not only of individuals but of vast social groups and organisms is among the most striking of his gifts. And to the future historian his novels and autobiographical writings should prove exceedingly valuable.

In the three volumes of short stories named "Swedish Events and Adventures," he made the past of his country a reality no less vital than the one confronting us to-day. The genre was by no means new, but none before Strindberg had raised it to quite such perfection. After him similar effects have been achieved with even greater success by Anatole France among others.

The first part of "Marriage" contains a dozen specimens of modern marital unions, presented in a far from unfriendly light. In the preface Strindberg laid out a programme concerning woman's position which vies in radicalism with that for which the women themselves are now fighting all over the world. Not only would he grant them the suffrage, but he insisted that normal social growth necessitated their having it. But in the second volume of stories issued under the same title, he made a frank attack on two principles generally accepted as essential to woman's complete emancipation, namely the right to hold property, and the right to work at anything for which they can qualify themselves. If their tendency be disregarded, the stories in both volumes will be found to possess high artistic value.

"The Father" was Strindberg's supreme effort to symbolize the life and death struggle between man and woman for such immortality as may be offered them by the child. The picture of that struggle is splendid but unfair. Man, as man, is given rational insight, while to woman is granted little more than low cunning. And as conscience is allied with reason, the victory falls to its unconscionable opponent. It may seem paradoxical to express a regret that the sex problem should enter at all into this play — a play designed wholly to exhaust that very problem. But there is a psychological side to the work that has nothing whatever to do with sex, and this side would hold our interest just as firmly if the conflict were raging between two men. The corrosive power of suggestion is here shown with diabolical skill. It is a duel of souls, with words for weapons, and by a seed of doubt sown in the right way at the right moment, one of those souls is shattered and scattered as fatally as a warship when its magazine explodes.

"Miss Julia," perhaps the most widely known of Strindberg's works, was a frank experiment in new form. Not only are the stage arrangements unconventional, but intermissions have been dispensed with. Naturalism never came nearer to a conquest of the stage, and some of the innovations embodied in this drama are likely to form part of our future dramatic tradition. Again the plot seems to offer us nothing but a sex duel, with the man for winner. But back of Miss

Julia and her valet-lover stand two contending strata of humanity — the so-called upper and lower classes. What Strindberg shows us is how a continued process of selective breeding may lead to over-refinement and a weakening of the vital instincts. The racial strain which has reached such a point can find salvation only in mixture with some strain less far removed from the general source of life. If class prejudices or other inhibitive tendencies prevent such a mixture, then the weakened strain will be sloughed off by the race, so that place will be made for other strains with unimpaired vitality and still dormant powers of refinement.

With the novel named "At the Edge of the Sea," Strindberg tried to place himself unreservedly on Nietzschean ground by picturing a superman of to-day and the fate such a man would be likely to suffer at the hands of ordinary humanity. In the course of this attempt, he gave a summary of man's mental development from primal days to the present moment that I count among the most significant and most brilliant pieces of writing contained in modern literature. The principal importance of this novel, however, lies in the fact that Strindberg's merciless logic automatically demolished the glamor of the Nietzschean dream creature. And so this Swedish superman wins in the end nothing but a splendid grave. And his doom is pronounced not by the hostile cunning of the mass, but by his own vain presumption. He fails just as every one must fail who sets out to make others good without their own cooperation. Read in the right way, this novel teaches that supermanhood must be founded on a good deal more of genuine humility than ordinary manhood ever contains.

It was during that middle period of embittered defiance that Strindberg first conceived the idea of a series of autobiographical novels, in which he would adhere closely to his own actual experience while the shock of such self-revelation was to be softened by a change of all proper names. The first volume of this series, issued in 1886 under the title of "The Bondwoman's Son," gives a picture of child life that is full of startling revelations and exquisite interpretations. Strindberg himself has said somewhere that all fiction must be autobiographical in order to obtain full documentary validity. Even if we hold this assertion too sweeping, we must at least grant him to have proved that the most intimate personal experience may be turned into legitimate fiction.

While at all times, to use his own expression, Strindberg "had three strings to his lyre," he appeared during the third period primarily as a dramatist, and it was as such that he preferred to be considered. There is hardly one play from his final period that would not warrant special notice on 'some account or another. In the eyes of his countrymen, his dramatic presentations of Swedish history have tended to take precedence. And on their account some have dared to call him the Shakespeare of Sweden. But the historical plays of Strindberg are widely different in mettle from that displayed in the "histories" of Shakespeare. No matter how much we find to admire in the latter, they must be held melodramatic in form and rhetorical in expression. They are, in a word, artificial in their portrayal of the past. What Strindberg strove to do — and succeeded in doing, I think — was to reconstruct the everyday aspect of by-gone days. In order to bring the true inwardness as well as lifelike appearance of those days within the ken of our own, he put on the stage not imagined creatures of supernatural size, but plain-speaking men and women of our own kind. But back of these men and women we catch lurid glimpses of big social forces at work. In other words, his works are symbolical in the very best sense of this much misused term — symbolical in the same manner as man's own thinking — and for that reason I believe the day must come when even dramas so intensely national in their subject and spirit as "Gustavus Vasa," "Gustavus Adolphus" and "Charles XII"

will be played and heard in the English-speaking countries.

But for the present his main dramatic contributions to universal literature during this final period must be sought among the plays of modern life, and particularly among those that derived from a frankly acknowledged Maeterlinckian impetus. It was the early Maeterlinck of the puppet plays that set Strindberg once more seeking for a new form. The immediate result of this search was the fairy play "Swanwhite," a very charming but not convincingly original production. Had he stopped there, the charge of imitation sometimes heard might have had some warrant. But to speak of the author of "The Dream Play" or "Toward Damascus" as the imitator of anybody becomes palpably ridiculous the moment you read these works. In both — but especially in the former — he strove to reproduce the kaleidoscopic flexibility and whimsical logic of the dream. And in this way he succeeded as perhaps no one before him to press all life into the narrow confines of a play.

At one time he described "The Dream Play" as a "Buddhistic and proto-Christian drama." Thereby he indicated its underlying philosophy of enlightened resignation and of almost Tolstoyan passivity in the face of violence and injustice and wrong. But we must not be misled by this effort of the matured poet to grasp and vitalize an ideal foreign to his own temperament. "I am a soldier," says The Hunter in "The Great Highway," speaking as the alter ego of the author; "I am always fighting — fighting to preserve my personal independence." To me the most potent element in "The Dream Play," the one most likely to germinate and survive not only as art but as philosophy, is its tolerant acceptance of every human aspect as an integral part of life. Its main shortcoming lies in a tendency to consider all such aspects as established for all future. Viewing life statically, however, and not kinetically — from the realist's viewpoint rather than from the idealist's — it will prove difficult to find an artistic symbolization of it more subtle or more convincing than that given us in "The Dream Play."

Although the trilogy "Toward Damascus" is autobiographical in source as well as purpose — a sort of gigantic private reckoning worked out by one deeming himself too seriously tried by life — its appeal is nevertheless universal. We may forget the fate of him who projected those mighty dramatic cloud-shapes, and read out of them nothing but a masterly record of the stumbling progress made by a human soul in its search for harmonious correlation of its own conflicting elements — its desires and aspirations, its selfish and unselfish tendencies. In the third part we find Father Melchior calling out to the Strindbergian protagonist, here named The Stranger: "You began life by affirming everything; you continued it by denying everything. End it now with a coordination. Therefore, cease to be exelusive! Say not 'either — or,' but say instead 'both — and!' " Here we have Strindberg's onward march through forty years of thinking and working outlined in a couple of sentences — and we cannot fail to recognize its identity with the general course of human progress, which runs from blind belief through arrogant denial to a reasoned balancing of faith and doubt.

Close as the trilogy must have stood to what was Strindberg's innermost self, there is a professedly objective work that seems to have come still closer, though in a different manner — a work where Strindberg's artistic aloofness makes us almost forget that, in spite of it, he was still dealing with his own spiritual experiences, and with nothing else. This work, the double play named "The Dance of Death," I am often inclined to count the crowning climax of his production, the work in which his always remarkable art reached its highest potency of perfection. It is as closely knit as a

Greek drama or a play by Ibsen at his best. Only three characters figure in the first part, and five in the second. There are only two settings — one for each part. The dialogue has rarely, if ever, been surpassed for combined incisiveness and verisimilitude. Incident leads to incident with a fatality that vainly tries to mask its logic behind the leering face of chance. Some of the scenes are among the most tensely dramatic that may be found in modern literature, and yet the total impression is just what the author seems to have aimed at : a sense of the hopeless monotony underlying life's superficial disturbances.

A piece of most delicate, and yet most deep-reaching symbolism (outwardly expressed by the round form of the room in which the action takes place) lies in the circular movement of the first part, whereby everything becomes reduced once more to the state of the opening scene. All the tumult of living is brought back to a pitiful striving at self-assertion on the part of the individual. Yet the suggestion is always present, that in all his seemingly futile striving the individual takes the place of a puppet in the hands of some higher power, working for great aims that he cannot perceive. Life and hell are rendered almost synonymous, but the Swedenborgian idea of hell as a state of mind is not for a moment left out of sight. The one possible agent of escape is the Hogarthian fiddler, always hovering on the horizon like a storm cloud before which all cower in panic. But when he comes at last and brings the dance to a close, he is seen to bring with him pardon and peace, mercy and harmony. One of the figures in the play, Curt, might be called the superman of Strindberg's final period: a touching incarnation of the struggle between reasoned humility and instinctive pride that was always raging in the author's own breast. But the most striking figure of all is that of The Captain, the embodiment of ruthless self-concern, to whom nevertheless is given the pronouncement of

Strindberg's ultimate philosophical creed: "Wipe out and pass on!"

Few works produced by Strindberg brought him harsher criticism in his native country than the two novels "The Gothic Rooms" and "Black Flags," which served him as vent pipes for a gathering wrath. During the last decade of his life the relationship between himself and certain contemporary writers approaching close to him in rank was always more or less strained, until, a few years before his death, it led to an outburst of bitter polemics known in Swedish literary history as the "Strindberg feud." To some extent the fault was his own. Largely, however, it lay with his rivals, who all too often let personal prejudice and jealousy dictate judgments that should have been concerned with nothing but actual merit. Whether it be ever wise for the injured in such cases to protest in person is a question not easy to decide. And in making his protests, Strindberg frequently shot over the mark, or even went so far as to make capital out of the private lives of his supposed or real enemies. But with every allowance made for the doubtful aspects of the two works mentioned above, there remains in them a residuum of merit and of broad appeal that will probably insure them approval from a time that shall have forgotten the personal accusations now read between their lines. Even at his worst, Strindberg was one of the great. And though he might be cruelly unjust to rivals or enemies, he rarely failed in his exact observation of the generation to which he belonged. If that generation was sick of soul or loose of living, the blame can hardly be laid on the man who merely discovered and proclaimed the sickness and the sin.

Of "Inferno," his most original effort at autobiographical fiction, I have already spoken. In 1903 he wrote another volume in the same series, "Alone," which might be called the antithesis of his previous record of wandering through a self-made hell. It is a piece of pure poetry — the autumnal reverie of a man who, at last, has made his peace with the world and paid the price for it. And in this volume Strindberg's marvellous power of word-painting stands revealed in all its glory.