The Project Gutenberg eBook, August Strindberg, the Spirit of Revolt, by L. (Lizzy) Lind-af-Hageby

AUGUST STRINDBERG

THE SPIRIT OF REVOLT

Studies and Impressions

BY

L. LIND-AF-HAGEBY

NEW YORK

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

MCMXIII

CONTENTS

[INTRODUCTION. THE RIDDLE]

[STRINDBERG'S CHIEF WRITINGS]
[INDEX]

August Strindberg—Bust by Carl Eldh.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

[August Strindberg. From a Bust by Carl Eldh]
[Strindberg's Parents]
[August Strindberg (1862 and 1870)]
August Strindberg. From Statue by Carl Eldh (not available)
[August Strindberg (1884)]
[August Strindberg (1884 and 1897)]
August Strindberg. From Bust by Max Levi, 1893 (not available)
August Strindberg. From Bust by Agnes Kjellberg Frumerie, 1896 (not available)
[August Strindberg. From Portrait in Oil by Chr. Krogh, 1893]
[August Strindberg. From Portrait in Oil by Richard Bergh, 1906]
[August Strindberg (1904 and 1906)]
[August Strindberg (1906 and 1907)]
[August Strindberg (1902). In His Home in Stockholm (1908)]
[August Strindberg. From Bust by K.I. Eldh.] Bought by the Swedish State.
In the National Museum, Stockholm
[August Strindberg. From Portrait by Carl Larsson, 1899]. In the National
Museum, Stockholm
[Strindberg in His Library in the Blue Tower. His Last Home]
[Strindberg in His Study (1911)]
[The Strindberg-Theatre in Stockholm]
[Harriet Bosse. Strindberg's third Wife as Biskra in Samum, 1902]
[Anne-Marie Bosse-Strindberg. Strindberg's only child by his third marriage]
[Strindberg's Funeral (May 19th, 1913).] Trades-Unions
and Undergraduates in Procession

AUGUST STRINDBERG

THE SPIRIT OF REVOLT

INTRODUCTION

THE RIDDLE

There have been few dispassionate attempts to discern August Strindberg's place in contemporary literature. His writings and his personality defied ordinary criticism.

He took upon himself the rôle of destroyer, he mocked men's religion and men's morality, he ridiculed propriety and poured bitter scorn on the social order. There was something cometic in the swiftness and intensity with which he appeared, disturbing the well-ordered orbits of traditions and conventions. The erratic course of his voyage through humanity caused alarm. No sooner had people congratulated themselves that his terrific lust for destruction had passed by their favourite systems and their cherished ideals, than his ruthless force was upon them, exposing ugliness and scattering treasures.

He passed on, making enemies, breaking idols, desecrating temples. He sowed reality and he reaped hatred.

His titanic spirit worked through a brain charged with explosive mentality. He poured out dramas, novels, stories, with a versatility and an accumulating energy which in themselves were offensive to the mediocre and to those who sought to place him within literary shackles. He discoursed on history, science and statecraft with the calm assurance of omniscience.

He wrote books which were decidedly and unblushingly "immoral." He compelled attention by blasphemous outbursts which filled the religious with righteous indignation and sighs for the auto-da-fé. He dissected the human heart, laid bare its meanness, its uncleanliness; made men and women turn on each other with sudden understanding and loathing, and walked away smiling at the evil he had wrought. He turned on himself with savage hatred, and in books, bearing the mark of the flagellant and reflecting the agony of a soul in torment, he pointed to his sins and his stripes.

"He is very evil," said some; "let us put him in prison."

"He is mad," said others; "let us have him declared a lunatic."

"He is most improper," said the majority; "let us ignore him altogether."

When public opinion was quite sure that Strindberg was evil, mad, and improper, when he stood convicted out of his own mouth of anti-social and satanic designs, he stayed the verdict by his own magic. He wrote more and more, and there came from his pen artistic creations endowed with virtues which could not have risen in a mind submerged in vice; pictures of scenery which bespoke a delicate and spiritualised nature-worship. His mind held a garden of flowers as well as a pile of putrescence.

On May 14th, 1912, the stillness of death descended on the battlefield which was Strindberg's life. The literary historian who justly passes the suspended verdict must hold peculiar and special qualifications. For the winds of literary taste and fashion cannot touch the giant of expression. Condemnation by temporary systems of morality and creed did not alter his course in life and will not disturb him in death. He was—himself; and he worked ceaselessly at the task of finding more of himself. Strindberg the atheist, Strindberg the scientist, Strindberg the spiritualist, Strindberg the mystic, Strindberg the sensualist, and Strindberg the ascetic, took equally important parts in his theatre of life. The critic met him day by day in different attire and pose, incarnations of the elusive self which was stage-manager of this extraordinary performance. A soul in conflict with itself, good and evil, fair and foul; sparkling with life and tense with passion to create, he could not give us peace or contentment. Like Jacob, he wrestled with God, though not for a night only, but throughout life, and he fought with the desperation of one who knows that upon the issue of the struggle depends, not his own blessing, but the liberation of countless prisoners.

An epitome of humanity, a fragment of the world's eternal and real drama of birth and death, he cannot be fully understood save by those who share his cosmic consciousness.

He studied chemistry, astronomy, botany, physics, geology, entomology, medicine, philology and political economy with a voracity which made him ridiculous in the eyes of the specialists who are satisfied with a few well-established formulæ. For him there were no barriers between specialised departments of human knowledge—all sciences were thrown into the melting-pot, in which he was preparing the new brew which would slake the thirst of parched souls. A solipsist who assimilated, rejected and transmuted the patiently accumulated theories of morals as the supreme duty of existence, he scorned the slaves of ethical communism.

The iconoclasm of Ibsen was fired by the realisation of the duties of the wise prophet amongst his foolish people. The hypocrisies and foibles of the little souls were the objects of the thundering chastisement of his trumpet. The white heat of Nietzsche's forge for the making of Superman was engendered by contempt for the feeble and sickly. The misanthropy which breathed poison out of Strindberg's writings, which showed souls and things in hideous nakedness, and painted sores and disease with horrible realism, was the darkness which he held high so as to call forth the cry for tight.

The collected works of Strindberg, which will shortly be published in a new edition, consist of some 115 plays, novels, collections of stories, essays and poems. Amongst these some seem absolutely antithetical. It is the constant changeability, the self-contradictions, which made Strindberg so incomprehensible to his contemporaries. The measure of his life-force was so liberal that he could afford to continue where others stop. He shed his skins like the snake and altered his colour like the chameleon, because he was the personification of perpetual movement and change. Thus he was endowed with ever-recurring youth; the decay of the old was immediately followed by birth of the new. The diary, in which, during the last fourteen years, he recorded his visions and supernatural experiences, will not be given to the world for many years to come. Though it depicts the last phase of his spiritual evolution, the postponement of publication is no doubt wise. Meanwhile, those who have poured curses on Strindberg's blatant atheism have been perplexed by his last words.

When death was drawing near, he took the Bible—which always lay on the table by his bed—held it up and said in a clear voice:

"Everything personal is now obliterated. I have settled with life. My account has been rendered. This alone is right."

He expressed a last wish that the Bible and a little crucifix which he used to wear should be placed on his breast after death, and that he should be buried early in the morning, and not amongst the rich. He desired to be laid to rest alone on the top of a hill under the firs.

This love of the early morning was part of his craving for more light. For many years he used to take a solitary morning walk. At seven o'clock he emerged from his "blue tower" in Stockholm and walked briskly through the streets and squares of his native town. At nine he was back at his writing-table—of late years a recluse for the rest of the day, absorbed in his work.

"Ever since my youth," he writes in Inferno, "I devote my morning walk to meditations which are preparations for my daily work. Nobody may then accompany me, not even my wife. In the morning my mind enjoys a balance and an expansion which approach ecstasy; I do not walk, I fly; I do not feel that I have a body; all sadness evaporates and I am entirely soul. This is for me the hour of inner concentration, of prayer, my divine service."

I have often seen Strindberg in the streets of Stockholm. He walked with his high forehead painfully contracted, the eyes searching and concentrated, and an expression of haughty bitterness upon his face. A solitary, suggesting to the passer-by Rodin's Penseur in motion and the futile wanderings of Ahasuerus; he seemed wrapped in his own misery, held aloof by suffering and contempt.

One day I met him with a companion. He was holding a little girl by the hand and talking to her. The child looked up in his face and Strindberg's expression was changed. Love for the child, respect for the questions and joys of childhood shone out of the face of the hater. He was not obsessed by the ugliness of things or the cruelty of human deception. His face was aglow with the early enthusiasm which, though slain a thousand times, rises again at the bidding of the Self that knows the answer to the riddle.

In the early morning of Sunday, May 19th, August Strindberg's body was laid to rest. It was a glorious spring day with sunshine and blue sky. Some sixty thousand people were astir to do homage to the memory of one whom they knew to have been intrinsically true and tragically great. Royalty, Riksdag, universities, capital and labour, statesmen, writers and artists assembled to say a united farewell to the man of mystery who, by his intense sincerity and the exuberance of genius, had at last melted hatred, and ascended the steps from shame to glory.

In a message after Strindberg's death, Maxim Gorki likened him to Danko, the hero of the old Danube legend, who, in order to help humanity out of the darkness of problems, tore his heart out of his breast, lit it and holding it high, led the way. The masses who mock and praise so easily, who crucify and raise idols with the same haste, seldom recognise their real friends. Strindberg patiently burnt his heart for the illumination of the people, and on the day when his body was laid low in the soil the flame of his self-immolation was seen pure and inextinguishable.

[CHAPTER I]

THE STRUGGLE WITH ENVIRONMENT

Strindberg's childhood and youth, as described by himself in his autobiographical novel The Bondswoman's Son, present psychological features of exceptional interest. The circumstances of his early home-life and their effect upon the unfolding forces of his genius cannot be ignored by anyone who attempts to explain the varied strata of his artistic production.

His insistent and torturous need for exact self-analysis, coupled with an equally compelling need to tell the truth, made all his writings strongly subjective. His autobiography—"the story of a soul's evolution"—is an intimate revelation of his power to dissect his past selves, to record minute incidents and to extract reflexes from the bundle of emotions and thoughts which go to make up character. Nothing is lost, nothing is too insignificant for careful examination in the microscope under which he places every cell of himself. The confessions of Rousseau and Tolstoy have not the nakedness of Strindberg's truth about himself. Though he never loses sympathy with himself, he scorns excuses and exposes his sins and his follies with ruthless exactitude. There is a strange combination of the coolly analysing psychologist and the passionate flagellant in the descriptions which range from the struggles of childhood, through the Inferno-period of 1896, to the calm of Alone, and the final visions of light.

The autobiographical novel in four volumes which was published under the titles The Bondswoman's Son, Fermentation Time, In the Red Room and The Author, was written at the age of thirty-seven, and, though the impressions of childhood are recorded with deep insight into the child's mind, we cannot forget that they were written down and interpreted by the man who had behind him years of tumultuous and bitter struggle for self-expression, and before whom the banquet of life seemed reduced to dead-sea fruit. In the preface to the fifth edition of The Bondswoman's Son, he tells us that when writing the volume he believed he stood before death, "for I was tired, saw no longer any object in life, considered myself superfluous, thrown away."

Johan August Strindberg was born in Stockholm on January 22nd, 1849. His father, whom in disparagement of his parentage he often calls "the grocer," was a merchant and shipping agent who had married a servant-girl, the mother of his three children. The father was a man of education and natural refinement who passed through many economical vicissitudes, culminating in bankruptcy at the time of August's birth. August was born a short time after the union between the parents had been legalised by the ceremony of marriage, and he was not welcome. His father bore his troubles with manly fortitude and resignation and cherished the ideals of the upper classes, whilst the mother was essentially of the people and remained so. He claimed a distant ancestral connection with the nobility of Sweden, his family having descended from the son of a peasant who was born in 1710 at Strinne in Angermanland, and who married a girl of noble birth. The discord resulting from the difference between his father and mother gave August his first impression of that class struggle which I throughout life held him in the bondage of a haunting problem, and which stimulated the development of his mordantly critical faculties.

Poverty, with its attendant cares and anxieties, reigned in the house by Klara churchyard, where, from a flat on the third floor, August began to survey life's difficulties. He tells us that he recollects fear and hunger as his first sensations. He was afraid of darkness, of being beaten, of offending people, of falling down, of knocking against things, of being in the way, of the fists of his brothers, of father's and mother's chastisements.

It was not easy to avoid being in people's way, for the parents with seven children and two servants lived in three rooms. The furniture consisted mostly of cradles and beds; children slept on ironing boards and chairs. Baptisms and funerals alternated. The mother developed phthisis after the birth of her twelfth child.

She was contented with her life, he tells us, for she had risen in the social scale and improved her own and her family's position. The father was less satisfied with his fate, for he had descended and sacrificed himself. He was tired, sad, severe and serious, but not hard.

Strindberg's recollections of his early impressions of the relations between his father and mother show the inception of the views on women and marriage which earned for him the title of woman-hater, and which found their most provocative expression in The Father and The Confession of a Fool.

"This is the father's thankless position in the family," he writes; "to be everybody's breadwinner, everybody's enemy." He concluded that his mother did not overwork herself, though his account of the daily life in the family does not support that view.

As a little boy August was as weak as other little boys. He adored his mother. He was shy, acutely sensitive, morbidly self-conscious, keenly resentful of injustice. He was not his mother's favourite, he was nobody's favourite, and this embittered him. The mother soon became an object of analysis; he was torn between love for her and contempt for her faults, which he discovered through making comparisons between her and his father. He says that a yearning for the mother followed him through life. The future misogynist was fostered by the child's passionate and unrequited love for the mother. When in later life Strindberg's attacks upon women were criticised, he defended himself by declaring that he chid woman because he loved her so well.

Disgust with the daily drudgery and routine of the household was aroused at an early age. He speaks of the family as an institution for providing food and clean clothes, where there is an eternal round of shopping, cooking, cleaning and washing.

"Glorious moral institution," he cries; "holy family, inviolable, divine institution for the education of citizens in truth and virtue! Thou pretended home of virtues, where innocent children are tortured to speak their first lie, where will-power is crushed by despotism, where self-reliance is killed by narrow egoism. Family, thou art the home of all social vices, the charitable institution for all lazy women. The forge for the chains of the breadwinner, and the hell of the children!"

This passage follows the description of an unjust punishment which was meted out to August. He was accused of having drunk some wine out of his aunt's bottle, and upon blushing in response to his father's question was beaten as the culprit. Fear of the physical pain made him confess the deed which he had never committed, and, upon telling his old nurse that he had suffered innocently, he was again seized and now beaten as a liar as well as a thief. After that day he lived in constant anxiety. The world was a cruel and unfriendly place; there were enemies everywhere.

"Who drank that wine?" he repeatedly asked himself. The search for a satisfactory reply to that question and to Similar questions was not abandoned, though it was futile. The hostility to social injustice and enforced criminality to which, later on, he gave literary utterance, had a remote though ineffaceable connection with the abducted contents of the wine bottle.

His ideas about God were vague, and chiefly formulated through saying daily the Swedish child's prayer: "God who loveth children." The windows of the house over-looked the old churchyard of Klara. When there was a fire in the night the church bells were tolled in a manner which struck horror in the heart of the child. The whole household was awake. "There is a fire," ran the whisper. He cried and tried in vain to go to sleep again. Then his mother came, tucked him up and said: "Don't be afraid; God will protect those who are unhappy." The following morning the servants read in the paper that there had been a fire, and that two people had been burnt to death.

"That was God's will," said his mother. Sacha incidents did not pass him by. The apparent inconsistency between the expectation of faith and the tragic reality troubled him and caused his first religious doubts.

The old church with its graves became the symbol of gloom, and of the joyless fate from which there is no escape. During the cholera epidemic of 1854 the child of five watched the paraphernalia and ceremonies of death from the bedroom window. In the churchyard below, gravediggers were at work, stretchers were carried past, dark knots of people were seen to assemble round black boxes. The church bells tolled incessantly.

One day his uncle took him and his brothers inside the church. In spite of the beautiful walls in white and gold, the sound of the music which was like that of a hundred pianos, and kneeling white angels, his attention was riveted on two figures. Amidst the praying congregation two prisoners in chains were doing penance. They were guarded by soldiers and dad in long, grey cloaks with hoods over their heads.

He was told that these men were thieves. A feeling of oppression by something horrible, by an incomprehensibly cruel and relentless force, overcame August, and he was glad to be taken away.

The initiation into the existence of pain and suffering which awaits every child held peculiar terrors for him. Acutely sensitive, his nerves of sympathy responded quickly to the feelings of others. One day he was taken to the workhouse infirmary to visit his wet-nurse who was slowly dying. The old women with their diseases, pale, lame and sorrowing, the long row of beds, the colourless monotony of the ward and its unpleasant odours fixed themselves in his consciousness. When he left he was haunted by a strange sense of unpaid and unpayable debt. For this was the woman who had fed him, whose blood had nourished his. Through poverty she had been forced to give him that which rightfully belonged to her own child. August felt vaguely that he was enjoying stolen life, and he was ashamed of his relief at being taken away from the sights of the sick-room.

When August was seven the family moved to a larger house. The worst days of penury were now over, and, though strict economy had to be practised and every luxury eschewed, there was more freedom from anxiety for the daily bread. His mind had hitherto been fed by daily portions of Kindergarten fare. He was now sent to Klara school for boys, where his sense of the general injustice of things was rapidly developed through the vigour with which the headmaster wielded his cane.

He was awakened at six during the dark winter mornings, and as his home was now far from Klara he had to trudge a long way through deep snow, and arrived at his destination in wet boots and knickerbockers. When late he was paralysed with fright in anticipation of the headmaster's morning exercise on those who were unpunctual. He heard the screams of boys who were already in the dutches of the tyrant.

One morning he was saved by the kindly charwoman, who pleaded for him and pointed out that he had a long way to walk. It is a pity that the charwoman who saved Strindberg from a thrashing has not been given a niche in his gallery of women.

August did not shine in this school, though his knowledge was in advance of his years, and he had, therefore, been admitted before the required age. He was the youngest at school and at home, a position which he vainly resented. This was a school for the children of the upper middle class. August wore knickerbockers of leather, and strong coarse boots, which smelt of blubber and blacking. The boys in velvet blouses avoided him. He observed that the badly dressed boys were more severely beaten than the well-dressed ones, and that nice-looking boys escaped altogether.

Strindberg records his early experiences at school with characteristic vehemence:

"... It was regarded as a preparation for hell and not for life; the teachers seemed to exist in order to torment, not to punish. All life weighed like an oppressive nightmare, in which it was of no avail to have known one's lessons when one left home. Life was a place for punishing crimes committed before one was born, and therefore the child walked about with a permanently bad conscience."

At the age of nine he fell in love for the first time. A roseate shimmer descended over the cane and the Latin grammar through the presence in the class-room of the headmaster's little daughter. She was placed at the back of the room, and the boys were forbidden to look at her. "She was probably ugly," he tells us with his usual realism where love affairs are concerned, "but she was nicely dressed." During the French lessons her soft voice rang out above the grating sound of the boys' answers, and even the hard visage of the teacher melted when he spoke to her.

August never had the courage to speak to her. His love expressed itself in gentle melancholy and vague wishes. He felt the victim of a secret within his own breast and suffered from it. The affair ended with a frustrated suicidal intention, but the lover did not attain to peace. His love affairs from the first to the last were tinged with tragedy, and were the vehicles of his restless and futile search for harmony.

The house in the north of Stockholm, to which the family had moved, had a large garden and adjoining fields. The father loved the country, and farming operations on a small scale were part of the daily duties. The boys were made to work in the garden, and were thus provided with healthy exercise. A magnificent old oak and bowers of lilac and jessamine made the old-fashioned garden beautiful. August's bitter experience of canes, teachers and unattainable feminine charm did not corrode his inborn love of nature, which remained a source of mental and physical rejuvenation when others ran dry.

The deep blackness of the freshly tilled soil, the apple trees in their blossoming glory, the tulips in their gorgeous garb called forth aspirations in his mind which responded to no human voice. The boy walking in the garden was filled with a solemnity which neither school nor church could inspire.

A summer holiday spent at Drottningholm, amidst the smiling islands and wooded shores of the Lake of Malär, had accentuated his disgust with the ugly things which abound in towns.

Stockholm's Skärgård, the archipelago which guards the fair capital of Sweden, and which is the pride of every true child of Stockholm, became his favourite scenery in later years.

There is something primæval and suggestive of the creation of the world in these thousands of rocks and islands which rise in ever-varying form and colour from the blue depths of the Baltic. The keen salt breezes which sweep round the bare and uninhabitable rocks whisper of a no-man's land, where the soul is tossed by elements neither friendly nor hostile, but restful. Through the white stems of the birches, the deep red of the cottages and the evergreen storm-bent fir trees, the islands on which the poor fisherfolk live and labour, salute the passing mariner by a trichromatic call to the simple life.

Upon this world the youthful Strindberg gazed one day. He had walked through a deep forest, and crept through whortleberries and juniper to the top of a steep rock. The picture of islands and fjords which lay spread before his eyes caused him to "shiver with, delight."

That picture, he writes, impressed him as if he had recovered a land seen in beautiful dreams, or in a former life.

He hid from his comrades; he could not follow them.

"This was his scenery, the true milieu of his nature, idylls, poor rugged rocks, covered with pine forest, thrown out on wide stormy fjords with the immense sea as a distant background. He remained true to this love ... and neither the Alps of Switzerland, the olive-dad hills of the Mediterranean, nor the cliffs of Normandy could oust this rival."

Love of nature did not curb August's high spirits in childhood. At the age of ten he played wild games, climbed trees, slid down mountains on pieces of wood, robbed birds' nests and shot their innocent owners. He rode bareback, could swim, sail a boat and handle a gun.

During a summer holiday August and his brothers were sent as boarders to the house of a sexton. It was the father's wish that his sons should share in the work on the farm as well as prepare for the winter's schooling. In the sexton's kitchen August saw the wafers prepared and stamped for Holy Communion. He mischievously ate them and reflected that there was not much in the Sacrament. He broke covenant with his host by rushing into the church, turning the hour-glass on the pulpit, and delivering a sermon. He ran through the church on the backs of the pews and threw over the reading-desk, on which the hymn-book lay. The disjointed pieces of the desk frightened him and reminded him of possible consequences. Yielding to the first impulse of self-preservation he knelt and said the Lord's Prayer.

Strindberg's mother, Ulrika Eleonora Norling

Strindberg's father Oskar Strindberg

A thought came to him. He rose, examined the reading-desk, saw that the damage was not irreparable, took off his boot and mended the desk with a few well-directed blows. He then calmly walked out of the church feeling that the power within himself was, after all, more reliable than the God whose help he had invoked. The mysterious interrelation between whole-hearted prayer and the dormant powers within ourselves is seldom understood. The child's logic humorously reflected the spiritual instability of average humanity.

His self-reliance was, however, fitful. Sometimes he wept bitterly, battling with an uncontrollable duality within his own mind, a divided will which made him unreasonable and capricious. He developed sudden antipathies, endured fits of shyness and self-abasement, during which he had to run away from other children and hide himself. At such times he would deliberately keep away when good things were distributed, and on being forgotten, revel in his martyrdom.

August's rebellion against learning lessons developed pari passu with his powers of independent thought. He did not make progress at Klara school, and his father transferred him to another, where he mixed with children of people in humble circumstances. Here he felt more at home; no one looked down on him; his boots and his knickerbockers did not give offence. His pity was aroused by the poverty of some of his school-fellows. They were expected to be clean, attentive and polite, but how could they? They came from homes where no one could afford to be clean, where families were crowded in small rooms which served as work-shops as well as nurseries, where the decencies of life were unattainable luxuries. The contrast between the two schools afforded August material for continued meditation on class problems.

Latin and Greek were the principal subjects taught. August wanted to learn in his own way and to translate in his own way. Both in classics and in history he refused to submit to the discipline of the schoolmaster. Having formulated his own method of learning and the proper form of examining pupils he defied the teacher's order. He was dumb when he should speak, and spoke when he should be silent. When the exasperated Latin master declared August to be an idiot, the father unexpectedly took his son's part and moved him to a private school. This school had introduced rational methods of teaching; flogging was prohibited, the boys were treated as individuals, and August felt that he could expand without fear of immediate repression. During the years that followed, the family attained a position of comparative affluence and comfort. August lost the dread of being trampled upon or suppressed from above, and mixed freely with titled youths who were accorded no privileges by the headmaster who lacked all reverence for the distinction of birth.

August was wont to parade his knowledge before his mother. At first she took great pride in her son's gifts and the time when he should wear the white cap of honour, coveted by every Swedish student, was often spoken of. But the mother's leanings towards a narrow pietism caused her to discern the vanity of learning in her son's mind. She warned him against the wickedness of such pride, and contrasted the humility of Christ and His contempt of worldly wisdom with the self-conceit of mere book-learning. The son listened, and concluded that the mother's resentment of culture was the result of her own ignorance. One evening the sons were called to the mother's death-bed. August was then thirteen. Overwhelmed with grief and shivering with the horror of Death, he sat hour after hour by the bed crying, and thinking over all the evil he had done.

This was the inevitable end. How could he live without a mother? The future seemed wrapped in impenetrable darkness and misery. Then oh, horror!—a shameful thought crossed his mind. Some time before his mother had shown him a little ring, and said that it would belong to him after her death. And now, at the solemn and awful moment, the promise of the ring rose in his unwilling memory. He saw it on his finger—one bright spot in this sorrowful hour, something to look forward to.

But only for a moment—such low covetousness, such a shameful thought by the side of a dying mother must come straight from the devil. The pangs of remorse and shame were so persistent that the incident fixed itself in his memory, and years afterwards the recollection made him blush.

The allurements of thoughts which we ought not to think, and which range from sudden inconvenient flashes of recognition of the comical in the midst of the serious business of life, to the haunting ideas which are the débris of mental combustion, could not be understood by the boy. Nor did he know that he was destined to live through the gamut of cerebral phenomena, an exponent of extravagant thought and lawless ideation.

When the stillness of death fell upon the room the unworthy thought was far away and August screamed like a drowning child. The father was softened and spoke kind words to the two boys. Strindberg tells us with his usual candour that his sorrow lasted scarcely three months. "Sorrow," he writes, "has the happy quality of consuming itself. It dies of starvation. As it is essentially an interruption of habits it can be replaced by new ones." After six months his father married the housekeeper.

August was now learning five languages, besides his own. Botany, zoology and the physical sciences aroused his keen interest. He had collections of insects and minerals, and a herbarium to which he devoted much time. He developed an insatiable appetite for knowledge, but he claimed freedom to find his intellectual food without extraneous interference or restrictions. He not only wanted to know everything, but he wanted to be able to do everything, to be endowed with all human talents.

His brother had been praised for his drawings; August wanted to draw. During the Christmas holidays he copied all his brother's drawings, but on finding that he could do it without difficulty his interest waned and he gave it up. All his brothers and sisters could play some instrument. The house resounded with exercises on the piano, the violin and the 'cello. August wanted to play, but without practising scales. He taught himself to play the piano and learnt to read and copy music. He played badly, but it gave him pleasure. He learnt the names of composers and the number of opus of everything that was played in the house, so that he should have superior knowledge.

He was jealous of the accomplishments of others, but the jealousy was created by unsatisfied ambition, and the consciousness of illimitable capabilities. Every subject interested him, until he had mastered it. When he knew the plants, minerals, insects and birds in his neighbourhood, he turned to other fields of natural science. Physics and chemistry attracted him. He did not want to repeat the classical experiments in the text-books; he wanted to make new discoveries. The lack of money and apparatus restrained him. Ingenuity was necessary. During the summer holidays he tried to make an electric machine out of an old spinning-wheel and a window pane. An umbrella was broken and made to yield a whalebone, out of which, with the help of a violin string, he made a drill-borer. The square pane had been made circular through patient knocking with a key-bit. This labour had taken days. When the time came for boring a hole in the middle and his piece of quartz made no impression he lost patience, and attempted to force a hole. The pane was smashed and August's enthusiasm converted into hopeless fatigue.

Recovered, he decided to construct a perpetuum mobile. His father had told him that a prize was awaiting the inventor of the impossible. After formulating his theory, which included a waterfall driving a pump, he collected his material. A number of useful articles were sacrificed for the purpose: the coffee boiler provided a tube; the soda-water machine, reservoirs; the strong-box, plates; the chest of drawers, wood; the bird-cage, wire, etc. At the crucial moment the ubiquitous housekeeper interrupted him by asking if he would accompany his brothers and sisters to the mother's grave. Irritation broke the inventive spell, and in the anger of failure he dashed the artful apparatus to pieces on the floor.

Reproaches and ridicule did not deter him. He arranged experimental explosions and manufactured a Leyden jar. For this purpose he flayed a dead black cat which he found in the street. He anticipated "Jönköping's Säkerhetständstickor" by making safety matches which he declares were as good as the later, much-advertised patent.

His wilfulness and lack of mental discipline were necessarily distasteful to his surroundings. When he wanted to unlock a drawer and the key could not be found he seized a poker and broke open the lock with such force that the screws and the plate were tom out.

"Why did you break the lock?" he was asked.

"Because I wanted to get into the chest of drawers," was the laconic reply.

The father not unnaturally decided to do what lay in his power to curb the troublesome spirit of independence in his son. August disliked his stepmother and resented her usurpation of his mother's place. He was now gymnasist[1] and treated with respect in the school. The lessons took the form of lectures, and the teachers showed due regard for individual rights and tastes. At home everything was done to humiliate him. He attributed what he regarded as a systematic persecution to the mean and revengeful spirit of the stepmother. He was made to wear old clothes which did not fit him; his gymnasist-cap, which should have been the pride of his heart, was home-made and an object of ridicule; he was compelled to work in the stable between school hours, and commanded to take the groom's place during the holidays. His weekly allowance for the school lunch was 3 1/2 d., a sum which he found sufficient for tobacco but not for sandwiches. He had a healthy appetite and was always hungry. The parsimoniousness of the home régime subjected him to humiliating experiences at school. Once he accidentally broke the eye-glasses of a friend. In vain he exhausted all his inventive resources in attempts to mend them. They had to be mended by an expert at the cost of 7d. On the following Monday August brought his friend 3 1/2 d., and after another week discharged his debt of honour by shamefacedly paying another 3 1/2 d. His miserable poverty could no longer be kept a secret, and he hated the cause of his oppression.

At the age of fifteen he fell in love with a woman of thirty. The love was platonic, an attraction of souls—a contact of minds seeking spiritual enlightenment along the same path. She was a woman of the world, engaged to another who lived abroad, animated by religious emotionalism and half-conscious eroticism. They attended the same circle for French conversation and added the spice of Gallic expression to their correspondence, which treated of Jesus, the struggle against sin, life, death, God in nature, love, friendship and doubt. August became her conscience, and she was his spiritual mother. Strindberg publishes some of his French compositions from this period in his autobiography. All speculations were eventually smashed against the bedrock of Jesus. The parental authorities objected strongly to August's friendship, and especially to the atmosphere of French secrecy in which it was enveloped.

August became absorbed in the struggle for salvation. A puritanism which despised the cold formalism of the Lutheran State Church and claimed the free companionship of Jesus was fashionable in Sweden at this time. The joyful certainty of being among the sheep infected those susceptible to sudden "revivals" within all classes of society. What could be of greater importance than being amongst the elected of God, comforted by the knowledge of righteousness, borne aloft by complete detachment from the world, the flesh and the devil? August laid passionate siege to Heaven and clamoured for immediate inclusion among the children of God.

His motives were complicated. One was fright and a desire to be on the safe side. For he had read books which predicted a terrible fate in store for youthful sinners upon attaining the age of twenty-five. He knew he was a sinner, and, if his body were condemned to painful afflictions and death, his soul would, at least, be saved. Another was spiritual jealousy. His stepmother professed great religious devotion. She and his eldest brother seemed to outshine him in religious fervour. That could not be tolerated. August imposed severe restrictions upon himself. All worldly pleasures were to be shunned. One Saturday evening the family planned an excursion for the following Sunday. August asked his father's permission to stay at home for conscientious reasons. He spent Sunday morning in one of the "free" churches, where the elect gloried in their exclusive and dearly bought salvation. In the afternoon he studied Thomas à Kempis and Krummacher. The stepmother had broken the Sabbath. She was inconsistent and a prey to the temptations of the devil; she could no longer compete with him in religious virtue. That was balm to the soul, but the peace of Jesus, which he had been told would descend like a clap of thunder and be followed by absolute certainty, would not come. He walked alone to Haga Park, praying all the time that Jesus would seek him out. In the park he saw happy families absorbed in picnics and carriages filled with gay men and women. All these were destined to eternal damnation. His reason protested, but his faith assented. He returned home unharmonious and unsatisfied. When late in the evening his brothers and sisters related the incidents of their happy day, his envy was mixed with pangs of remorse.

The puritanical phase culminated during the confirmation, which had been postponed by the father, who, knowing the waywardness of the child, feared the unrestraint of the youth. A number of circumstances contributed to the reaction which followed upon his first Holy Communion. He had whipped his reason into submission to an elated sentiment which in due course exhausted itself. The Sacramental bread was robbed of its mystery by the fatal familiarity with which he had treated it in the sexton's kitchen.

But the disintegration of the puritan was accomplished through the influence of new friends. One of these decided to cure the hungry dreamer in Strindberg by a good meal. One day on the way to the Greek lesson, Fritz, "the friend with the eye-glasses," suggested that they should play truant and lunch at a restaurant. Scruples overcome, August enjoyed his first meal in a restaurant and his first glass of brandy. The luxuries of beefsteak and beer in quantitative perfection, and the audacity with which his friend treated the waiter, made a profound impression on him. The friend paid for the feast, and August came out a changed man.

"This was not an empty pleasure, as the pale man had asserted," he writes. "No, it was a solid pleasure to feel red blood run through half-empty arteries which were to nourish the nerves for the struggle of life. It was a pleasure to feel spent strength return and the lax sinews of a half-crushed will stretched again. Hope was awakened, the mist became a rosy cloud, and the friend let him see glimpses of the future as it was formed by friendship and youth."

The friend advised him to earn money by giving private lessons. This would secure freedom from parental tyranny. He encouraged independence and self-confidence in August, who, acting upon his advice, obtained a post as private tutor. By exercising economy in the expenditure of brains at the gymnasium and limiting his studies to those absolutely necessary for the final examen, he succeeded in his dual work of learner and teacher. The sense of sin departed; he was able to take part in the festivities of his school-fellows. The platonic friendship with the woman of thirty evaporated with the advent of a less ethereal admiration for the beauty of waitresses et hoc genus omne. He went to dances and sought jollity in the "punsch-evenings" of the students. A craving for alcohol had been aroused; under its influence the demons of gloom and insoluble problems departed.

The change in his attitude to life was hastened by an influence which now made itself felt for the first time. Literature as a great tradition and interpretation of human problems became known to him. The belletristic and the puritanical conceptions of life presented themselves in their profoundest antithesis. Natural selection did the rest. His range of reading was wide and varied, as were the demands of his many-sided self. He devoured Shakespeare, admired Dickens, found Walter Scott tedious, Alexandre Dumas puerile, and Eugène Sue's Le Juif Errant grandiose. He detested poetry; it was affected and untrue. People did not talk in that manner and seldom thought of such beautiful things. The realisation of God in Nature replaced the desire to seek God in the churches, and August gradually discovered that he was a freethinker. The alarm and public prayers of the elect, which he had deserted, did not alter his course.

During the summer holidays he acted as tutor to an aristocratic family in the country. Fritz had warned him against saying everything he thought and doing everything he wanted, or disputing vehemently with his superiors. But the difficulty of submitting to the conventions of the social order could not be overcome.

August's plans for the future were vacillating and embarrassing to the father. For a short time he cherished the idea of becoming a non-commissioned officer in a cavalry regiment, at another time the plan of spending his days as a country curate, joined in happy wedlock to a pretty waitress (a brand snatched from the fire), had captivated him. But the University conquered. At the University a man could be poor and badly dressed and yet be counted a gentleman; it was the only place where one could sing, get drunk and have fights with the police without losing social standing. There was a secret satisfaction in the thought.

One day during the tutorage in the country the vicar, who was overworked, invited August to preach a "proof-sermon." The practice of permitting serious-minded students and undergraduates to try their priestly powers was not uncommon. The idea was glorious and irresistible. The baron, the baroness, the squires and the ladies would all have to listen reverently to August as the mouthpiece of the Lord. But he remembered that he was a freethinker. The orthodox conception of Jesus was no longer his. It was hypocrisy to accept the offer. And yet, he believed in God, he had thoughts to give, opinions he wanted to voice. He confessed to the vicar, who reassured him. If he believed in God, there was no real difficulty—the good Bishop Wallin had never mentioned Jesus in his sermons. August should only not talk too much about his aberrations.

August Strindberg 1862—(Reproduced by kind permission of Messrs. Albert Bonnier, Stockholm)

August Strindberg 1870

The week during which the sermon was prepared, was rich in compensation for years of ignominy. Something within him responded with avidity to the call of the messenger, the prophet.

The church was filled with people when August mounted the pulpit in clerical garb and with a beating heart. He prayed to the only true God to help him when now he wanted to strike a blow for truth. He spoke of conversion through free will and opened the gates of heaven to all—publicans and sinners, rulers and harlots—and denounced his old friends who were sunk in cruel and hypocritical self-conceit. He was deeply moved by his own eloquence. The vicar and the congregation forgave the irregularities, and the day ended in mutual satisfaction.

The experience confirmed August's contempt of orthodox religion. He became the ringleader of a section in the highest class in the Gymnasium which, in spite of threats and reprimands, refused to attend morning prayers. Once when the father begged him to go to church he replied:

"Preach—I can do that myself."

In May, 1867, August passed his student-examen. The white cap was on his head, and the gates of the University were open to him.

[1] Gymnasia are preparatory schools for Universities.

[CHAPTER II]

THE STRUGGLE FOR SELF-EXPRESSION

A university, said Newman, is a place where "mind comes first and is the foundation of the academical polity." Strindberg's contact with the University of Upsala brought his own creative mind into constant conflict with the custodians of regulations which govern the traditional pursuit of knowledge. Between 1867 and 1872 he spent periods at Upsala, during which he made vain attempts to achieve success as a dutiful learner, submissive to the discipline of professorial authority. The difficulty was not that he would not or could not study. He studied too much; his mind absorbed with intuitive and lightning quickness knowledge from men and books. But he refused to take opinions on trust; he individualised everything that was assimilated by his receptive and turbulent mind, and scorned academical routine.

In the autumn of 1867 August Strindberg went to Upsala to equip himself with the powers and graces which accompany a "university education." He possessed the sum of 80 kronor (1 krona = 1s. 2d.), laboriously earned by private lessons; his father had contributed a few cigars to his son's outfit and advised him to shift for himself. Margaret, the old kind-hearted servant, had forced a loan of 15 kronor upon him. Thus he was again victimised by a woman's heart.

The room which he shared with a friend, was rented for 30 kronor for the whole term. It contained two beds, two tables, two chairs, and a cupboard. His dinner was brought by the charwoman for 1 kr. 50 öre per week. Breakfast and supper consisted of a glass of milk and a bun. By practising the strictest economy he managed to live, but he soon discovered that he could not afford to buy the necessary books, nor the regulation dress-coat, without which no Swedish under-graduate could solicit the kind attention of the professors. He did not attract attention as a promising student. His attendance at lectures served chiefly as a stimulus to his critical faculties. He found the methods of teaching literature and philosophy tedious and ineffective, the professors ignorant and plebeian. He borrowed books and selected his own reading. He taught himself to play the cornet in one of the University orchestras, thus attempting to soothe the discord of his soul.

He grew tired of his friend Fritz. "They had worn out their friendship by living together," he writes in Fermentation Time. "They knew each other by heart, knew each other's secrets and weaknesses, knew what answer the other would give in argument." He accepted the end of their friendship as the inevitable result of the exploitation of personality which he resented in friendship and in love. Personal attractions and ties were masked warfare in Strindberg's life; he gave and he took, and generally ended by despising. Throughout life his caustic efforts to reach the centre of things did not tend to strengthen bonds which depend on a certain amount of pleasant illusion and benign deception.

His love of nature brought no disillusionment. "It was his dream to live in the country," he writes of his Upsala time. "He had an inborn dislike of town, though born in a capital. He had culture-hostility in the blood, could never get rid of the sense of being a product of Nature which did not want to be torn from the organic union with earth. He was a wild plant, the roots of which in vain sought a little soil between the stones of the pavement; he was an animal longing for the forest."

The delight in the beauty and fragrance of flowers, the preference for the simplicity of rural life which he so often expressed show a mood unaffected by discontent and pessimism. Some sprite of nature-joy dwelt within him and remained happy in spite of unhappiness. After uttering curses on the sins of humanity he would be found singing pæans to the harmony of the plant-world.

At the end of the first term he had spent his eighty kronor and returned to Stockholm in search of remunerative work. After several unsuccessful attempts to obtain a post in the country, he found a situation as teacher at the Stockholm Board-School at a yearly salary of £50, which to him seemed opulence. He now lived at home, and contributed to the household expenses.

The schoolmaster of eighteen was again brought face to face with the problems of poverty. The injustice, under which he had smarted as a child, was still alive. He was now in the detestable position of the pedagogical tyrant, but his pity had not diminished. He was expected to chastise the lazy children, but his heart refused to accept the prevalent faith in flogging. The children—ugly, stunted, pale, starved, sickly—appealed to his pity.

"Suffering," he writes, "has stamped on the faces of the lower classes that expression of hopelessness and torment which neither religious resignation nor the hope of heaven can obliterate, and from which the upper classes flee as from an evil conscience."

He studied the penalty of industrialism, and observed that the children of the manual labourer looked more sickly and less intelligent than those of the upper class:

"The trade-diseases of the urban working-man seemed to be transmitted; here one saw in miniature the lungs and the blood of the gas-worker, ruined through sulphurous fumes; the shoulders and flattened feet of the smith; the brain of the painter, atrophied through the fumes of varnish and poisonous paints; the scrofulous eruption of the sweep; the contracted chest of the bookbinder; here one heard the echo of the cough of the metal-worker and the asphalt manufacturer; smelt the poisons of the wall-paper maker; noticed the watchmaker's myopia in new editions. In truth, this was not a race which possessed the future, or upon which the future could reckon, and it cannot reproduce itself for any length of time, for the ranks of the artisans are constantly recruited from the country."

His sympathy with the working classes was no passing sentiment; it was the lasting keynote of his plea for social justice which is clearly heard through the cacophony of some of his later outbursts against the social order.

Rebellious, contempt of current morals and respectability rose as a mighty force in the mind of this extraordinary schoolmaster. His morning duties at the board-school and his afternoon work as private tutor to the daughters of a well-to-do and refined family compelled him to outward decorum. But he did not live virtuously. His sense-life was awake, and he recognised no necessity for restraint. The strivings after ascetic peace which filled his adolescence had been laid aside; with the breaking of his faith in the watchful solicitude of Jesus, natural impulses had been set free. His autobiography records his early struggles, and his later "fall" with the same detached imperturbability. He lacks the sense of shame which avoids certain topics. He observes no reticences. The pages in many of his books are studded with coarse language and unsavoury references to physical life. The sexual cynicism which pervades the story of his life is only relieved by his perfect sincerity.

He describes the pleasures of inebriation with similar frankness. At the age of nineteen he was already familiar with Bacchic revels. His brain was inflamed with ideas, congested with unformulated thought. The narcosis of alcohol attracted him.

"Sometimes melancholy, at other times gay," he writes, "he sometimes felt an irresistible craving to extinguish the burning fire of thought and to stop the turmoil of the brain. Shy, he sometimes felt impelled to come forward, to make an impression, to find an audience, to appear in public. When he had drunk a great deal, he wished to recite great and solemn things, but in the middle of the piece, when ecstasy was at its height, he heard his own voice, became shy, frightened, thought himself ridiculous, stopped suddenly, changed his tone, took up the comical, and finished with a grimace. He had pathos, but only for a while; then self-criticism came, and he laughed at his forced emotions." Strindberg finds another explanation of his craving for alcohol in the lack of nourishing diet at Upsala and the dulness of his home in Stockholm. "Strong liquors gave him strength," he says, "and he slept well after them." He adds: "Like the rest of the race, he was born of drunkards, generation after generation from pagan times immemorial, when ale and mead were used, and the desire had inevitably become a necessity."

He was not a success as a board-school teacher. There were bargains with his conscience during scripture lessons, and the prevailing system of teaching seemed a cruel parody. He shrank from the sights and sounds and smells of the herd of poor children. Ambition and intellectual hunger called him to seek experience elsewhere.

His restlessness was increased through reading Byron's Manfred and Schiller's Die Räuber. He tried to translate the former into Swedish, but discovered to his chagrin that he could not write blank verse. Karl Moor in Die Räuber laid hold of his imagination with the claims of a kindred spirit. Here was his own heterodoxy and revolt against laws, society, customs, religion made manifest in a living, literary figure by a great writer. Schiller's maturer repudiation of his fierce bandit did not trouble him. Manfred fleeing from himself to the Alps appealed to him as a feat of rebellion complementary to Karl Moor's adventures.

At the age of nineteen the rôle of the schoolmaster was exchanged for that of the student of medicine. His duties at the board-school had become intolerable, when, one evening, a Mend, an old doctor, knocked at his door and suggested that he should desert the school and enlist in the service of Aesculapius. His fatherly friend brushed aside objections on the ground of poverty by suggesting that Strindberg should live in his house and, in return, act as tutor to his boys. In spite of the dreary prospect of eight years of medical studies the kindly offer was accepted; for the profession of medicine seemed the portal to enviable knowledge. Not the dry, stereotyped dogmas of the Church and the University curriculum, but real wisdom penetrating life's mysteries. "To become a sage who understood life's riddles—that was his dream for the moment." He disliked the idea of a career in the service of the State or of being a mere figure, a wheel or a screw, in the social machinery. The physician seemed to him to be free.

His preparatory studies were carried out at the Technological Institute. Here the vigorous fantasy of the future alchemist received the first stimulus through chemical experiments which fascinated him by revealing the secrets of matter. Here he also studied zoology, anatomy, botany and physics.

But other powers were at work undermining the solidifying influence of application to science. In the doctor's house he met writers and artists. Conversation generally turned on plays, pictures, books, authors and actors. There was a fine library, offering the world's literary treasures. There was a collection of pictures and there were valuable engravings. The intellectual atmosphere was international, and afforded a pleasant change from the vulgar patriotism which had been sacred to the pedagogues of the board-school.

The Dramatic Theatre was near at hand. Here a new and gaily attractive world was opened to him. Standing in the gallery he listened to the badinage of French comedy and saw the types of the Second Empire in aristocratic setting. Thus he spent several evenings every week. The life of the actor seemed strangely interesting, for he was allowed to express himself, to speak unwelcome truths without losing popularity. The theatrical profession seemed outside and above the petty rules of society—a privileged class. It offered special and glorious opportunities for artistic self-expression.

Meanwhile the experiences of his medical education had become distasteful. The old physician brought his pupil to see patients, rich and poor, providing him with diverse "clinical material." He was asked to assist at early morning operations and to hold the patients. Whilst Strindberg held the patient's head, the doctor "removed glands with a fork." The assistant's thoughts were soaring high above the surgery, in the regions of Goethe's Faust and Wieland's novels; they were with George Sand, Chateaubriand and Lessing. During cauterisation the smell of human flesh rose in his nostrils and spoilt his appetite for breakfast. He describes his state of mind in the following words: "Imagination had been set in motion and memory would not work; reality with its bums and blood clots was ugly; æstheticism had seized the youth, and life seemed dull and repulsive."

A futile attempt to pass a preliminary medical examination at Upsala precipitated his decision not to enter a profession which was exclusively occupied with the aches of the body. In spite of the disappointment of his medical benefactor, he announced his intention of becoming an actor.

He now lived for some months in an ideal stage-world. After making arrangements for obtaining practical instruction in the autumn, he devoted the summer to private studies of the art which appeared to be his true and only vocation in life. Schiller's lecture, "On the Theatre as an Institution for Moral Education," saturated his mind with a lofty and idealistic conception of the ethical and æsthetic mission of the stage. Was not this the greatest of all human arts? Was it not a calling worthy of the finest talent and the most devoted labour? He buried his past restlessness in faithful search for knowledge of the actor's gifts and graces. Goethe taught him how to stand, sit down, carry himself, how to enter and leave a room gracefully. He studied the pose of antique sculpture and practised to walk with uplifted head and expanded chest, whilst the arms were trained to swing easily and the hand to be lightly closed with the fingers forming a beautifully shaped curve. He tried to conquer his shyness and his fear of crossing open places, and paraded his new artful self in the most frequented promenade in Stockholm.

The doctor's house was made the scene of his dramatic exercises. Here he prepared the performance of Die Räuber and appeared himself as Karl Moor. When his vocal practices disturbed the peace of the house, he repaired to Ladugårdsgärdet, the vast fields and hills, on the east side of Stockholm, which for many years past have been used for military manœuvres. They now also serve as a starting-point for aerial flights. But no mechanical wings of flight could equal those, on which Strindberg's imagination soared towards the realisation of his mission as an artist and a social reformer.

Here, he tells us, he stormed against heaven and earth. The city, the church spires of which were visible, represented Society, whilst he belonged to Nature. "He shook his fist at the palace, the churches, the barracks, and snarled at the troops which during the manœuvres sometimes came too near him. There was something fanatical in his work, and he spared no pains to make his reluctant muscles obedient."

The keen resentment of injustice and the irrepressible sympathy with the poor and the down-trodden, which the later misanthropy of the man could never quell, showed forth in an episode of this time, connected with the unveiling of a statue of Charles XII. Though the statue had been erected through public donations, the arrangements for the unveiling were such as to exclude the people from a view of the proceedings. The people threatened to pull down the stands for paying spectators which obscured the view, and the troops were called out to restore order. August was seated at a gay dinner-party at the doctor's house in honour of some Italian operatic stars, when the sounds of the battle reached the ears of the company.

"What is that?" asked the prima donna.

"It is the noise of the mob," said a professor.

August could not sit still. The clinking of glasses, the tight dinner-talk, the jests and laughter jarred on him. Who were these who spoke of the people as "mob"? Something stirred within his breast with the call of blood and the passion of identical feeling. He left the table and went out into the streets.

"'The mob'!" he writes, "the word rang in his ears, whilst he walked down the street. The mob! they were his mother's former school-fellows, they were his school-fellows and later his pupils, they were the dark background which made the light pictures effective in the place he had just left. He felt like a deserter, as if he had done wrong in working his way up."

He reached the place where the statue had been raised, and mixed with the excited crowds. The clatter of hoofs and the sight of the approaching Life Guards filled him with a mad desire to resist all this mass of men, horses and sabres. Together they were oppression incarnate.

August placed himself in the middle of the street, right in front of the approaching cavalry. Through his mind flashed the call to revolt, the born rebel's impulsive desire for self-immolation.

A hand seized him and pulled him out of danger. He was led home, and after promising not to return to the scene of struggle the inevitable reaction set in with exhaustion and high temperature in the evening.

On the day of the unveiling he was present among the undergraduates. At the end of the ceremony there was a skirmish between the police and the people. Stones were thrown and order was restored by means of sabre-cuts. A man standing near Strindberg was attacked by a police inspector. August rushed at the inspector, seized him by the collar and shook him.

"Let the man go!" he cried.

"Who are you?" asked the astounded inspector.

"I am Satan," answered the demoniacal liberator, "and I shall take you, if you don't let the fellow go."

In trying to seize August the inspector released his hold of the man. At the same moment a stone knocked oft the three-cornered hat of authority from the inspector's head, and August wrenched himself free. The police drove the crowd before them at the point of the bayonet. August followed with other enthusiasts, determined to release the prisoners. The attempt was, of course, futile; the bayonets were the strongest.

Strindberg describes how two gentlemen, one middle-aged, the other young, both highly respectable, with conservative views, were seized with his own passionate longing to defend the people against the police. Speechless, they instinctively grasped each other's hands, and with white, set faces ran to the rescue. When the excitement was over, and the wave of sympathy had spent itself, they awoke in their normal selves and were shocked at their own conduct. August himself could jest over his wild outburst, when half an hour later he was seated in a restaurant with a chop in front of him and friends around to listen to an objective account of the whole incident. The middle-aged merchant of impeccable propriety failed to recognise August, when, by chance, they met again. The composite consciousness created by the contagion of strong emotion had ceased to exist.

When his dramatic recitals to the winds which sweep over Ladugårdsgärdet had been followed by the prosaic training at the school of the Dramatic Theatre, the conflict between dream and reality was followed by the usual tragic results. His wish to make his début in an important part was rudely brushed aside. After some humiliating experiences, he was given a small part in Björnson's Mary Stuart. He appeared as a "nobleman," and all his dramatic energy was, perforce, encompassed in the following sentence: "The Peers have sent an emissary with a challenge to the Earl of Bothwell."

It was bitterly insignificant, but it was the portal to greater achievement.

The disillusionment of his first glimpse behind the scenes was manfully rebutted. The boards and the paint which, when seen from the gallery, had held so much charm, were now, when scrutinised from the other side, dusty and ugly. The actors who were permitted to play great parts were, after all, just like ordinary mortals. They yawned loudly between their turns, and gave expression to commonplace sentiments as a relief from the sublimities uttered on the stage.

After some months, during which Strindberg was only a super, he was heartily tired of the whole thing. The mechanism, living and dead, of dramatic production disgusted him. He felt repressed and misjudged. But at the same time he was ashamed of quitting the profession which he had chosen with such high expectations. He demanded his right to be tried and judged. He was given an important part and a special rehearsal, at which he appeared without stage costume and without the requisite enthusiasm. The elder actors resented the arrangement, and Strindberg shouted his sentences in a manner which made it clear that he was in need of further instruction. He was advised to resume his pupilage. But this he would not do. The humiliation was unbearable. He cried with rage and decided to commit suicide. An opium pill which he had treasured with a view to the possibility of having to summon a catastrophic end to life's difficulties was utilised for the purpose, but failed altogether of a calamitous effect. A friend, who knew the better way, re-awakened Strindberg's interest in earthly existence through a merry drinking bout.

On the following day, he tells us, he felt bruised, wounded, tom, with quivering nerves and with the fever of shame and drunkenness in his veins. He lay on his sofa reading Topelius' Tales of a Surgeon and musing over his own troubles. His brain worked at high pressure, sorting memories, adding and eliminating, calling out personalities. He heard his characters speak. It was as if he saw them on a stage. After a few hours he had visualised a comedy in two acts, and in four days the play was written.

"It was a work," he writes in Fermentation Time, "at once painful and pleasurable, if it even could be called work, for it came of itself, without his will or effort."

"And when the piece was ready," he tells us, "he drew a deep sigh, as if years of pain were over, as if an abscess had been lanced. He was so happy that something sang within him, and he decided to send his piece to the theatre. This was the salvation."

Macaulay thought that books are written either to relieve the fulness of the mind or the emptiness of the pocket. He ignored the intimate correlation between the two motives. The full mind is only too often made inarticulate by the empty pocket, whilst, on the other hand, the empty pocket sometimes accelerates processes of the mind which, but for that stimulus, would never reach fulness. Strindberg was throughout life the slave of a full mind and an empty pocket.

His first effort in drama had now to be submitted to competent criticism. He prepared the garret which he rented from the doctor for the festive reception of two wise friends. A clean napkin on the table, two candles and a bottle of "punsch" were the outer signs of the solemnity with which he welcomed his critics. The play was read to the end in sympathetic silence. The friends then saluted August as an author.

When alone he fell on his knees and thanked God who had delivered him out of his difficulties and who had given him the gift of literary expression. Perhaps no subsequent literary crises of gestation ever equalled the first in intensity of expectation; I he felt that he had at last found his vocation, the part he was called upon to play in life.

The material for his first play had been his own family troubles; his religious doubts now found expression in a play in three acts. He had also discovered that he could write rhymed verse, presumably as the result of a visitation of the Holy Ghost. A feverish power of production followed: in two months he wrote two comedies, a tragic verse drama and some poems.

The first comedy had been submitted to the manager of the Royal Theatre. Meanwhile the anonymous author continued to walk the boards, now buoyed by a secret joy. His turn would come; the thought of the day when he would be recognised made him bold. In his peasant costume he felt a prince in disguise.

But the comedy was not accepted. The tragedy which he also sent in met with the same fate, though he received a kindly hint that it would be worth his while to perfect himself in the art of dramatic construction, and that time and experience would be more profitably expended on a literary career than on further attempts to succeed as an actor. He was advised to return to Upsala. A tragedy with the title Jesus of Nazareth was sketched out. It was intended to crush Christianity completely and for all time. It was only partly written, when, happily, it was abandoned, the youthful author having succumbed to the magnitude of his subject.

His last appearance on the stage was ignominious, yet symbolic of his future as a writer of drama. No part whatever had been found for him. He offered to act as prompter and was accepted. Thus ended the career upon which he had entered with such glorious zest.

[CHAPTER III]

"FERMENTATION TIME"

Goaded by misfortune, the recalcitrant scholar returned to Upsala determined to distinguish himself by obtaining his degree or by writing a successful play which would compensate for past failures. His return was made possible by the possession of a few hundred kronor, left to him under his mother's will.

With five kindred souls he founded a poetical guild to which the name Rune—"Song"—was given. The meetings of the brethren were occasions for improvisation and tippling, for hair-splitting arguments and epicurean excesses. They philosophised over life and literature, expressed the joy of existence in music, and alcoholic melancholy in sad tales of suffering.

August wrote and read poetry which breathed idealism, nature-worship and patriotism. He sang to the guitar, sometimes sentimental folk-songs, sometimes compositions of a less worthy kind.

The dialectics of the company stimulated August's powers of expression, though they interfered with his studies.

A friend advised him to write a one-act play in verse. This, he said, would have a greater chance of being acted than a tragedy in five acts, which August thought more fitting. The one-act play was written in a fortnight. It was called In Rome and dealt with Thorvaldsen's first stay in that city. The idea had long been present in his mind. It burst into dramatic shape with unmistakable force, and the friends, recognising that it had a living spirit, prophesied that it would be accepted. The birth of the play was duly celebrated with carousals, in which the author was acclaimed with generous admiration.

The psychology of drunkenness was one of the subjects for incisive discussion and historical analysis at the meetings of the Rune. The members certainly did not lack practical experience of its mental perplexities, but, however vinous their youthful judgment of the problems of life generally, they appraised the possibilities of August Strindberg's art with singular accuracy.

Strindberg's slender resources did not save him from the pinch of poverty. He had tasted luxury in the doctor's house. His room in Upsala was squalid; the rain came through the ceiling, fire-wood was scarce, and occasional frugal suppers of bread and water were forcible reminders of life's realities. He managed, nevertheless, to study æsthetics and living languages with a new ardour. His range of reading was widened, and his critical faculties were in a continuous process of development.

Ibsen and Björnson dominated the intellectual horizon. August had been deeply stirred by Brand, when reading it a year earlier, and had felt the soul-struggles of Ibsen's deliverer to be identical with his own, but he now reacted against the Norwegian invasion of the Swedish mind. The gloom of the mountains and fjords of Norway, the poverty and enforced abstinences of its people were reflected in the minds of its writers, and had no rightful place amongst the smiling lakes and flower-strewn sward of Sweden. Ibsen's women now roused the instinctive sex-antagonism in Strindberg; he hated Nora, and the whole brood of matriarchal ideas, of which he thought Ibsen a dangerous modern exponent. Strindberg's later writings against women are indirect replies to Ibsen; and his objections to woman's struggle for emancipation were expressed with a controversial vehemence which robbed them of literary effect.

In the autumn of 1870 In Rome was performed at the Royal Theatre at Stockholm. The author was twenty-one years old. He watched the play, standing in his old place in the gallery. The inebriation of success was now followed by acute pangs of self-criticism. He felt as if he had been under an electric battery, his legs trembled, and he wept with nervousness. A friend seized his hand to calm him.

"Every stupidity," he writes, "which had slipped into the verse shook him and jarred upon his ears. He saw nothing but imperfections in his work. His ears burnt with shame, and he ran out before the curtain fell."

The attacks upon the clergy now seemed stupid and unjust, the glorification of poverty and pride, mistaken; the description of his relationship to his father, cynical.

He had found his own play stupid; he was overcome with shame, and death by drowning in the rapid waters of Norrström seemed the only atonement.

The incident is characteristic of the man. The thoughts which a few months before had been conjured up by the imaginative contemplation of Thorvaldsen before the statue of Jason, of the struggle between filial duty and artistic consciousness, were now outside their author, dismissed, objects of pity. He had grown, whilst the imperfect words lay dead on the paper.

The evening ended in the company of friends. His searchings after perfection and his intellectual remorse were assuaged by food and drink and by the gratification of the lower impulses, to which he yielded without the sense of shame or sin.

On the following day he read a favourable notice of the play, in which the language was described as beautiful, and the anonymous author was said to be a well-known critic who was familiar with the artistic world in Rome.

Thus he made his first acquaintance with the sweets of dramatic criticism. In Rome has nothing of the fierce personality which, in his later plays, outraged the critics of Sweden. There are strokes of fine picturing, and there is charm of phrase, but the piece is meagre in conception and puerile in expression.

He returned to Upsala and was now, by his father's intervention, lodged in the house of the widow of a clergyman. It was hoped that a well-regulated home-life, with sufficiency of food and a minimum of comfort, would provide his spirits with wholesome restraint. But the reverse happened. There were a number of undergraduates staying in the house; the table was laden with good things; card-playing and heavy drinking occupied the evenings. August was frequently drunk, his brain was saturated with the clashing opinions of the young men, who loudly wooed their Weltanschauung; he was dissatisfied, persecuted by doubts and unreasonable remorse. He was in love—for the eighth time—and the object of his love was, as usual, unattainable.

In Rome had met with severe, though not altogether unjust criticism in another paper. His earlier play, The Freethinker, had been printed and published anonymously through the kind offices of a friend. It fell into the hands of a hostile journalist who ridiculed it. Strindberg now underwent the painful experience of mental dissection at the hands of a ruthless critic. However willingly we may condemn ourselves and indulge in the bitter-sweet contemplation of the follies of yesterday's ego, the rude touch of another's flail arouses every fibre of self-defence.

Though he had promised his father to turn his face against the temptations of authorship and to give single-minded attention to studies, the creative impulse could not be quelled. He wrote Blotsven, a tragedy in five acts, which reiterated the religious rebellion of The Freethinker, depicting the struggle between the spirit of the Viking and proselytising Christianity. The old Icelandish tales which he now read in the original, and the influence of Oehlenschläger, had helped to mould the form.

At this time he became absorbed in the mentality of the Danish writer Sören Kierkegaard. His book Enten-Eller—Either Or—which treats of the struggle between the flesh and the spirit, and which preaches the life-fearing asceticism of the helpless sensualist, stirred Strindberg's doubts and self-reproaches. An elder friend by the runic name of "Is," whose real name was Josef Linck, managed, by the simulation of much learning, culminating in intellectual nihilism, to persuade August that his stand-point was untenable. The friend talked philosophy, æsthetics, world-history, dished up Kant, Schopenhauer, Thackeray and George Sand, and dyed August's soul with impotent scepticism.

The result was that Strindberg burnt the MSS. of his Blotsven. The friend had shown that he was not a poet, and the tears which he shed over the ashes were embittered by the knowledge that he had deceived his father.

He hurriedly decided to pass his examination in Latin compositions. He had not made the requisite preparation, called on the Professor in a state of after-dinner exaltation, demonstrated his independence of spirit, and was promptly turned out.

The suicide of a student brought the supernatural to the door of the already over-visited mind. Strindberg had met the unhappy man some days before and avoided his company. On visiting the place of the tragedy, he was completely unnerved by the sight of blood and the gruesome associations. He felt half guilty of murder, could not sleep and was haunted by the dead man. The Runic brethren watched over him, but his friend "Rejd" nevertheless found him with a bottle of prussic acid and sinister intentions. The friend shrewdly suggested a preparatory sacrificial rite of four "toddies" before the fatal poison was drained. The desired effect was soon apparent. August had to be carried home, but as the gate of the house was closed his friends threw him over the fence. He remained in a snow-drift until he had recovered sufficiently to find his room. But his ghost-ridden soul did not find peace until he quitted Upsala a few days later.

He confessed his sins to his father and obtained permission to remain at home, and to prepare for his degree in a less disturbing atmosphere. He now "felt protected as if he had landed after a night's stormy voyage," and slept calmly in his old truckle-bed. Blotsven rose from the ashes. He re-wrote it in a fortnight. It was now condensed into one act under the title The Outlaw, and was sent to the theatre.

Being thus relieved of the supreme duties to his dramatic daimon, he again descended to Latin compositions and passed his examen in spite of continued defiance of the Professor's rules of procedure. The æsthetic thesis, which he submitted shortly afterwards, was promptly returned to him by the Professor, with the remark that its contents were more suitable for the fair readers of an illustrated weekly than for an academical discourse. This was indeed injustice. August had poured out his most mature views on realism versus idealism, utilising the Danish dramatist Oehlenschläger as a buffer between his new and his old self. The essay is re-printed in full in the autobiography, and is well worth reading. The style is rich in imagery and analogy, the conclusions audacious, though a gentle world-weariness pervades every argument. Strindberg's later style as an incisive essayist is discernible in spite of the periphrastic treatment of dramatic problems from Sophocles to Shakespeare. The desire to show erudition is apparent on every page, and the author confesses that the wish to show the Professor his profound knowledge of Danish literature was one of his motives in choosing the subject. The Professor's unsympathetic attitude towards his review of Danish literature was, therefore, mortifying.

His quiet life at home had begun well. The earlier struggle against poverty had been superseded by well-ordered home-life. August's sisters were now grown up; he was impressed and felt sanctified by their unostentatious discharge of daily duties which contrasted so sharply with his own wild and worthless past. The stem father had been mellowed by time, and August spent many evenings with him in friendly talk on great subjects.

But rebellion soon drove the son away. August resented some trifling interference with his liberty, borrowed a few hundred kronor, and settled for the summer in a fisher-man's cottage on one of the Baltic islands outside Stockholm. With three of the Runic brethren he now threw himself into a healthy outdoor life, bathing, sailing, fencing. The body was to be taught natural goodness, and the counsels of Satan were to be unheeded. He studied philology, avoided alcohol, and dwelt with Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe. Natural asceticism and the mental discipline of classifying root-words would curb his vigorous fantasy and help him to acquit himself with honour at Upsala. He could expect no further help from the father.

At the beginning of the autumn term he arrived in Upsala hungry and with one krona in his pocket. He felt justified in borrowing from friends, for he was confident of the future. With the small sums which he succeeded in drawing on the bank of friendship he rented a miserable room, which contained little but a bed without sheets or pillowcases. He lay on it in his underclothing, reading by the light of a candle stuck in a bottle. Kind friends were responsible for an irregular supply of food, but no spartan resolutions could temper the cold weather. He succeeded in borrowing a little wood and carried it home under cover of darkness. A physicist taught him to extract the full calorific value from the charcoal. There was a stovepipe in the room which was hot every Thursday when the landlady did her washing. Then he stood reading with his hands on his back, leaning against the pipe, with the chest of drawers doing service as a reading-desk.

His Viking play had meanwhile been accepted. The first performance was received coldly. The critics were ungracious; he was accused of having borrowed the form from Ibsen, though the cold restraint and rugged simplicity of the language were directly inspired by the Icelandish Sagas.

Sick at heart, Strindberg resumed his battle with poverty and dejection. The darkness of uncertainty was again upon him, when, with the suddenness which is usually reserved for good boys in fairy tales, Fortuna held out her hand. He received a letter announcing that the King was interested in his play and wished to see him. He could not believe his eyes, and suspected that the letter was a joke. On being re-assured of the genuineness of the message, he went to Stockholm and was received by Charles XV. The King smiled as the young author made his stumbling way to the royal presence through the lines of courtiers, and greeted him with geniality. Charles XV, himself a poet, expressed the pleasure which he had derived from the Viking play, and his personal interest in the revival of the old northern tales. After inquiries regarding Strindberg's financial prospects, the King ordered a yearly stipend of eight hundred kronor to be paid to him from the privy purse.

August left the palace, moved and grateful, with the first quarterly instalment of the monarch's bounty in his pocket.

The short play which had won royal favour is the first work in which Strindberg's mastery over his dramatic art was foreshadowed. The terse phrasing fitly embodies the spirit of Norseman valour. It grips the reader with the force of a drapa, sung in faithful celebration of life's attempts and hard-won victories. Gunlöd, the daughter of Thorfinn, the old heathen Viking, has been secretly baptised and loves the Christian Viking, Gunnar. The human conflict between sorrow and resignation, faith and doubt, is drawn with a passionate wish to do justice to everyone. Strindberg possessed that power of visualising and speaking through the characters of a play with equally apportioned interest, which is essential to the true dramatist. His own words on his relationship to the Viking play, show that he was fully aware of this faculty of artistic self-multiplication and of its penalties:

"Johan[1] had incarnated himself in five persons in the play. In the earl, who fights against time; in the bard, who surveys and penetrates; in the mother, who rebels and takes revenge, but who is deprived of her avenging power through her sympathy; in the girl, who breaks with her father because of her faith; in the lover, who is burdened with an unhappy love. He understood the motives of all the characters and pleaded every-one's cause. But a play which is written for the mediocre, who have ready-made opinions about everything, must at least be partial to a couple of its characters in order to win the ordinary audience which is always passionate and partial. Johan could not do this, for he did not believe in absolute right or wrong, for the simple reason that all these conceptions are relative. One can be right in regard to the future and wrong in respect to the present; one is wrong this year, but considered right next year; the father may think that the son is right, whilst the mother thinks him wrong; the daughter has the right to love whomsoever she loves, but the father thinks her wrong in loving a heathen. This was doubt. Why do men hate and despise the doubter? Because doubt is evolution, and Society hates evolution because it disturbs the peace, but doubt is true humanity and will end in equity of judgment. The stupid only are certain, the ignorant only believe that they have found truth. But peace is happiness, and pietists therefore seek it in the peace of stupidity. It is said that doubt consumes the power of action, but is it then better to act without considering and weighing the consequences of the act? The animal and the savage act blindly, obeying lusts and impulses, thereby being like men of action."

Life at Upsala was strangely changed. The royal patronage endowed August with a distinction, the pleasure of which was evident. The sense of freedom from the pressure of poverty, of having achieved some measure of success, expanded his chest and straightened his back. His friends did not recognise him. They were accustomed to see in August the poor half-starved, erratic youth who needed their help. In unconsciously looking down, we add to our self-respect. August no longer needed the pity which had given pleasure to givers and recipient, and the result was disharmony. The Rune was weakened through indifference and internal strife, and died naturally, a victim of competition.

August's good fortune was not of long duration. He, die rebel, the destroyer of common idols and conventions, had not hesitated to receive the King's gift. For he had never believed that the ills of the world would be set right by the abolition of monarchy, and in the King's gift he saw not the grace of the ruler, but recognition accorded to him by a personal friend and admirer. But he soon began to chafe under the obligations and restrictions which his new position entailed. At the end of the term he manfully struggled through his examination in philology, astronomy and sociology. During the next term his mental restlessness became acute. The brain was filled with creative energy, and the path of learning was blocked. Doubt and apathy chilled his efforts to do the work which was expected of him. Sometimes he lay all day on a sofa, longing to be free and in the midst of life. He felt imprisoned by the royal stipend and sought succour in reading the history of philosophy. But the different systems seemed to him to possess the same degree of validity, and his head was replete with his own thoughts.

One evening he evoked the anger of one of the professors by attacking Dante. He declared the composition of the Commedia to be an imitation of Albericus' vision, and Dante's greatness to be over-rated. Dante was ignorant of Greek, therefore uncultured; he was no philosopher, as he suppressed thought by revelation; he was a foolish monk who sent unbaptised children to hell. He lacked all self-criticism when he classed ingratitude to friends and treason to one's country among the worst of crimes, whilst he himself sent his friend and teacher, Brunetto Latini, to the nether world and supported the German Emperor Henry VII against his native town, Florence. He showed bad taste, for amongst the six greatest poets of the world, he placed Homer, Horace, Lucanus, Ovid, Virgil and—himself.

The result of these observations was that Strindberg was dismissed as insolent and crazy.

A period of increased mental distress and uncertainty followed upon the explosion. The town was grey and dirty, and the chill of winter lay over the land. There was no stability in his soul—he felt as if it had been dissolved, and hovered as a sensitive smoke around him. A forcible new impression pulled him together. One day he found his friend, the naturalist, painting as a recreation. This was something that would condense and support an evaporating ego. To paint green landscape in the midst of dull winter, and to hang it on one's wall—that was something worth doing!

"Is it difficult to paint?" he asked.

"No, it is easier than drawing. Try it," was the reply.

August borrowed an easel, brushes and paint, locked his door and gave himself up to colour-worship. When he saw the blue colour give the effect of a clear sky he was enraptured, and when he conjured up green bushes and a lawn on the canvas, "he was inexpressibly happy—as if he had eaten hashish."

One day, when he had locked himself in, he heard a conversation between his friends outside the door. They talked as if they were discussing someone who was ill.

"Now he is painting too!" said one of the friends in a tone of deep depression.

August reflected and came to the conclusion that he was going mad. Fearing compulsory incarceration, he wrote to the manager of a private asylum in which the patients were allowed their liberty and to till the soil. He expressed his willingness to submit to the curative principles of the institution. The reply was kind and reassuring. The manager had made inquiries about the would-be patient and found that there was no need for extreme steps.

Three months, passed and the second instalment of the royal stipend was not paid. A letter of humble inquiry brought the reply that His Majesty had never meant to give permanent support to Strindberg, and that it was only a question of temporary help. A further sum was enclosed, as His Majesty had graciously decided to help his protégé once more.

The first sense of relief was followed by some anxiety as to the consequences. The King's promise was no mistake. The real explanation of the "disgrace" was not easy to find. Some thought the King had forgotten; others that his proverbial generosity had exceeded his means. Ten years later Strindberg heard that he had been wrongfully accused of writing defamatory verses about the King.

He decided to leave Upsala and to seek work in Stockholm as a journalist. At a valedictory gathering of the old friends he thanked them for their contributions to his self, "for a personality is not developed out of itself; out of each soul with which it comes in contact it sucks a drop, like the bee collecting its honey from millions of flowers, transforming it and passing it on as its own."

[1] In his autobiography he uses his first Christian name: Johan, and speaks of himself in the third person.

[CHAPTER IV]

THE DRAMA OF THE HERETIC

We may agree with Höffding that "every important individuality is a point of view for the human race, from which men catch sight of possibilities and aspects of existence which would otherwise have escaped them." But we must also acknowledge that the strongest individuality is i malleable in the hands of experience, and that contact with humanity wrenches away the mind from cherished points of view.

Though Strindberg was born with defiance of the Decalogue upon his lips, though he lived in perpetual revolt against restraint and intellectual formalism, though he sought above all to think and not to copy, he could not escape that constant pressure of others which is the essential of collective existence.

The University, with its rigid forms of instruction, its standards of learning, had been the cage on the bars of which he had exercised his muscles of independence. He had craved for freedom; his chronic disgust at the established order had made him fail through paralysis of will, where he might have excelled through natural superiority. And yet he felt strangely en rapport with the tradition of the University, when in the spring of 1872 he embarked upon journalism in Stockholm. He went into humble lodgings on borrowed money, and obtained an ill-paid post on a Radical evening paper.

The journalists with whom he now mingled lacked the culture which the University imposes even on its most rebellious alumni. They talked in ready-made phrases and wrote on subjects over which they had no mental mastery. They could harm or help fellow-creatures by the exercise of a power for which they were totally unfitted. Loose-witted and garrulous, they missed central questions and mistook the gossip of the news-hunter for judicial wisdom.

The journalistic profession of that time did not command general respect, and the littérateurs of the Radical press were often treated as a species of social brigands. They were nameless and their activities subterraneous, but they wrote "We" and held the mole's power of being able to upset the tilled fields of man.

Strindberg plunged into art-criticism, and exposed Count George von Rosen's famous picture "Erik XIV and Karin Månsdotter," in the National Museum of Stockholm, to the fire of his discontent. The ashes of his own drama on "Erik XIV," which he had burnt, lay over his judgment, and the feeling of identity with the oppressed classes, now revived through associations, made him resent Rosen's conception of Göran Persson, the favourite and evil genius of the mad king. Rosen had painted the sly and intriguing counsellor with a fidelity which was opposed to Strindberg's view of Persson, as an enemy of the nobility and a friend of the people. Rosen's standpoint was therefore condemned in Strindberg's articles, which appeared after some editorial trimming of their literary ornamentation.

A brief but eventful attachment to a ladies' illustrated paper, to which he contributed short stories and biography, increased Strindberg's knowledge of the exigences of journalism and the possibilities for feminine exploitation of the impecunious male.

He chose his friends amongst the artists. They were shabbily dressed, cultivated vile manners, were gloriously illiterate, but they had originality of feeling and thought. Without book-knowledge they had the knack of seizing the essence of life and of settling problems with intuitive accuracy. Strindberg still found solace of mind in painting. It was like singing. The brush and the colours gave shape to his vague imaginings. The post-romanticism of Corot pervaded his circle of friends. The idea that one should paint one's own soul, not stocks and stones, captivated him.

The only value of the impression lay in its fusion with individuality. One should therefore paint from memory, with fantasy.

He always painted the sea with its shore in the foreground, and angry-looking firs, some naked cliffs further out, a white light-house and sea-marks. The sky was usually clouded, but at the horizon the clouds broke, and light was let through. He painted sunrise and moonshine, but never clear daylight.

His friends wore long hair, slouch-hats, brightly coloured neckties, and lived like the birds. They dreamt of canvas so large and subjects so great that no studio could contain them. A sculptor had made arrangements with a Norwegian to hew the legendary giant out of the Dovre mountain, a painter was going to reproduce the sea—nothing but the sea—with a horizon so vast that the globular shape of the earth should be made visible.

With two friends of the new life Strindberg talked out his melancholy questionings, and sketched the future of regenerated humanity. One was a painter of thirty who had been an agricultural labourer, and who, after some years' training, had found art an inadequate vehicle for thought, and who now "lived on nothing" but the stimulus of his eclectic philosophy.

The friend's name was "Måns," and he had a remarkable faculty for discovering faulty premises in the fabric of August's dichtung. The other friend possessed the steadiness of the well-established social unit, and contributed a dispassionate and polite scepticism to the review of ideas.

They introduced Strindberg to Buckle's theories. There he found support for his rebellion against the scholasticism of Upsala, and learnt that his disease of doubt was in reality the basis of health. Doubt and discontent were the pre-requisites of knowledge and progress—the sole paths towards true happiness.

He felt irritated with all that was old and antiquated. Newspapers worked for the hour only, with no thought for the future. He could not read them without spasms of impatience.

The third volume of the autobiography describes his mental tension in the following passages: "His philosophic friend comforted him and calmed him by La Bruyère's saying: 'Do not distress yourself over the stupidity and wickedness of human beings; you may just as well distress yourself over the falling stone; both are subservient to the same laws; to be stupid and to fall.'

"'Yes, it is all very well to say that. But to be a bird and compelled to live in a mine! Air, light, I cannot breathe; not see!' he burst out. 'I am dying of suffocation!'

"'Write,' said his friend.

"'Yes, but what?'"

Out of the mists of doubt, the volatility of convictions, there rose creatures clad in flesh and blood, the warring selves of his multiple personality. The thin silhouettes of history became instinct with life; and Strindberg's first great drama, The Heretic, afterwards named Master Olof, was conceived.

He wrote it during two summer months of quiet life on his island in the Baltic. It was necessary to act, for his newspaper had died and food was scarce. His kind friends, the fishermen, gave him credit, and he could concentrate on his task without the haunting anxiety for to-morrow's meals.