Strindberg the Man/Chapter 1

I knew Strindberg long before I met him. All of that generation which was young during the latter part of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties, was carried away by the poet who wrote Master Olof and who had raged in The Red Room.

To us he was the reawakening of the Swedish spirit of literature and art. We had been terrified at the greatness to which the two Norwegian giants Ibsen and Björnson had attained and we felt almost ashamed that Sweden at this time could not show a single great man.

Then Strindberg came. He had been among us for a long time, although we had not known of his presence. When he came, all the young blood that had any vitality, joined him. Already, at the age of twenty-three, he had produced such a great work as Master Olof, the first great masterpiece of Swedish dramatic art—rich in youthful fire and turbulent ideas—and besides, so Swedish through and through that we were justified in commencing to believe in old Sweden once more. For in spite of the fact that we were young, we had already had an opportunity to see through the empty bombast with which the older writers tried to entice us and thus condemn us to the same inactivity into which they themselves had fallen.

​We knew something about that school of suffering which Strindberg had passed through in his youth. This fact made him twice as dear to us. We sent our glowing hatred up to Stockholm, to its old fogies of the press who had received his youthful but manly words with the scoffs and sheers of impotence and had refused him that recognition which every promising young poet needs in order to grow big and strong and withstand the storms which are sure to rage about him upon the mountain top. And we placed ourselves wholly on his side when, after years of insidious persecution—during which he had been the cheerful, generous giver—he took up his position of defense and finally was forced to attack in person those who refused to recognize him.

What ecstasy did he not create in our young hearts when alone he attacked the generally unsatisfactory conditions round about us! This was something for a young generation to behold. To cut down the enemy that grew like weeds in the midst of our acres and to fight great battles with them, seemed to us of greater consequence than all the warring expeditions of the Gustavians on the plains of Germany or the pursuit of chimeras in the deserts of Russia.

The teacher who believes that the young accept without discrimination all the manipulated historical expositions with which they are to be educated so as to incline towards one side or the other, is thoroughly mistaken. The young on the contrary have a great intuitive ability to see through what is purposely falsified, and when their suspicion has once been awakened, they tear to shreds ​the whole fabric of lies with a violence which can be modified only in the course of years and which later on develops—on the part of the Philistine head of the family—into a complete satisfaction with everything that exists.

This Strindberg, the poet, who was forced to give up his journey to Parnassus in order to identify himself with a pioneer movement, we loved. Continually we saw him before us in the symbolic picture which Carl Larsson^[1] had furnished as a title-page vignette to Strindberg’s collected juvenile works: In the Spring-Time. In it there is a young Titan with sorrowful eyes, painfully drawn mouth, a lion’s mane above the mighty brow, and a large thorn pointing towards the aching head.

The poet of the sharp thorn—pointing as it were from a crown of thorns directly towards his creative brain—that was the juvenile image of Strindberg which etched itself more indelibly than all others on the minds of those who were young at that time. All the contemporaries to whom I have spoken of this, once had the same visual sensation of him who aroused us out of our slumber.

Yes, he had brought life to us. For we had all gone astray in the desert where we had got sand into our throats instead of water and were on the point of dying with thirst. About fifteen years earlier, Strindberg had passed through the throes of adolescence in which we now were, and his strong intuition had guided him out of the desert, and when we saw him for the first time, he was standing at the boundary of the ever verdant ​land with a gesture full of promise and new happiness, pointing out the way for us.

We had passed through the same horrible awakening as Strindberg. With all the ecstasy of youth, we had approached what we considered the highest ideal. We had been told from childhood that nobody can be a good individual without religion, and since youth is naïve enough to believe itself goodness personified, we had all done our level best to penetrate deeper and deeper into that treasury of religion which is hidden from view by innumerable veils.

We had had the same experiences as Strindberg, but when we believed we had reached our goal, when it seemed as though the last veil would be drawn aside, then everything burst like the iridescent soap-bubble, and there we stood viewing it all from the wrong side.

His despair was ours, and every word he spoke was received by us like fresh spring water which brought us to life again.

What did we care that the so-called literary critique in the capital annihilated everything he wrote? We had entered through the lofty portal of poetic creation; we had followed his progress line for line in the characters of Master Olof and Gerdt the Printer. And we had learned how to love this Master Olof who made the walls of the old, crumbling temple fall in order to make room for a greater, freer, and more worthy structure. We loved our new Swedish master just as highly as we loved the gentle Master of Galilee.

Already the introduction to Master Olof had for us the ​beauty of revelation and recalled to us the sagas which we had read in our youth. Master Olof’s play with the two disciples whose parts in a religious drama he is rehearsing, was to us the harbinger of that new spring of which the author gave us the presentiment. We had been seized with a hatred of the religion in which we had been deceived, but we still retained that strong religious sentiment which quest and search had produced, and Strindberg’s words fell into a soil that was predisposed to receive them.

Not until many years afterwards when I saw Master Olof on the stage did I notice that my love of the play had been so great as to prevent me from fully grasping the significance of the closing scenes of the drama. My belief in the Swedish reformer^[2] had been so unlimited as to force me to overlook those traits of weakness which the poet had permitted to remain in him in order that he might be completely human.

The next work of Strindberg that came to us down there in the country was The Red Room. It was preceded by a rumor of excessive “redness,” the consequence of which was that we, the young, shrank for a time from reading it, in spite of the fact that we considered ourselves as red as it was possible to be.

And so when we read The Red Room, we felt as if a new warmth streamed into our veins. Our pulses throbbed more vigorously, and the whole description became enshrouded in a sort of red mist. And that was ​not on account of it being politically so red, since we in the country never had had any respect for bureaucratic Stockholm against which Strindberg directed his biting satire, but rather on account of the violent indignation which these initial clashes with life had aroused in the breast of the young poet.

In Master Olof he had as yet been on the great main road which seems to lead directly up to the heights. With The Red Room he had turned in on a by-path which meandered among the underbrush. He had thrown himself into the opposition and revolted against this provincialistic community which tried to keep him down and force him to turn away from the lofty genre of composition whose rhythm echoed in Master Olof.

The poet who revolted against his entire surroundings, whose indignation gave him a courage so great that not even the highest fortress-tower of tradition frightened him, the poet with the thorn pointing towards his head—we could not but love and admire, we who were young at that time.

Is it to be wondered at that we stuck to him through thick and thin? That we ourselves became revolters, each in his own little circle?

Besides this there were in The Red Room glorious descriptions of Bohemian life which for all time to come opened our eyes to the beauty of a life led in such proud simplicity as that of those young artists among their garden plots in the vicinity of Lill-Jans’.^[3] These Strindberg stories prevented many of us from making ​life a grinding Marathon, and instead sent us on our way in search of an ideal that we considered worthy and noble.

I once heard a prominent Swede declare that the whole trouble with Strindberg was that he had never enjoyed a good, secure family life. No, fortunately he did not; fate never permitted him to enjoy a calm for any length of time, and still less allowed his spirit to be stifled in that vicious atmosphere and in that insincere union of two individuals—who preferably should have shunned one another—which is known as “the good family.” On the contrary he did continue to be the same free Bohemian, whether he had a wife in the house or not, and he never enjoyed what we call “society.” He always had his knapsack packed and was ready to continue his wanderings.

The beginning of the eighties continually brought us surprises from the hands of Strindberg. We read with admiration The Secret of the Guild, Sir Bengt’s Wife, and In the Spring-Time, but we rejoiced even more at the works in which he continued the intellectual revolution that was the great achievement of his youth.

He revolutionized completely our conception of Swedish history by his work The Swedish People, in which he showed us that it was not alone the great names of kings that carried out the great deeds in which our history abounds, but that behind them there stood a people worthy of a much greater admiration.

​Strindberg’s outline of a cultural history is a patriotic achievement of extraordinary importance. No other book that has come into my hands has awakened such a love for our people as that one book. And it is a love that embraces not only the nobility with the brilliant family names, but also the great nameless masses who in silence have fought all the battles of every day life with a heroism just as great as that which our countrymen developed on the world-famous fields of battle.

Originally Strindberg’s The Swedish People at Home, was projected on a much larger scale, but the publishers forced him to hurry in order to issue the work, which was published in installments, as soon as possible. Strindberg, therefore, found it necessary to condense it more and more, and in the end he was obliged to style the book An Outline. Swedish literature thus lost one of its most monumental works. The foundation is laid, however, and it is to be hoped that the near future may bring forth some historian of cultural progress who in a worthy manner will continue the work which Strindberg began.

The next epoch-making book by Strindberg was his great social satire The New Kingdom. It caused great rejoicing among the young, but wrung a cry of horror from all the old-timers.

The Swedish realm, our entire system of government, the all-constitutive bureaucracy, we had been accustomed from childhood on to regard as a kind of divine institution so flawlessly perfect that we had to admire it as a ​model for the entire world. The leading men in the province of religion and literature were scarcely less than gods, and it never would have occurred to anyone to approach this Olympus with criticising glances.

And then there came an underrated dramaturgist who not only laid bare a great many flaws in them, but looked at the whole matter from such an elevation that the loftiness disappeared and the proud height of Olympus caved in, until it became as flat as a newly tilled field, and the resplendent temples seemed to be situated in mud-puddles instead of upon the brow of the famous mountain.

The New Kingdom could not have aroused a discussion more animated had it been a new, half intelligible play by Ibsen. We, the young blood, we revelled in the social emancipation to which we had now attained, just as we did in the case of The Red Room, which had prepared the way for the younger artists and art theories in the province of literature and painting. The older generation was thoroughly frightened and endeavored to deny the facts with which Strindberg tormented his times. They regarded us as irretrievably lost and heading towards a sad future, where, perhaps, some fine day we would be swallowed up by the earth.

In one respect they were right. It was a hard blow to a young mind to be obliged to tear to shreds, piece by piece, all that had been regarded as the loftiest and the most noble. It is like going through a series of operations and having the old members replaced by new ones. ​You are able thus to save a life, but the result is a piece of patch-work with seams à tort et à travers.

That Strindberg and his contemporary adolescent generation had to submit to this, was not our fault. We would have preferred to continue in our belief in the old household-gods, but when we noticed that the state of impotent of the preceding generations had given a vigorous start to cancerous diseases in our breasts, what else could we do but put the knife to the abscesses and remove them while it was yet time?

Because Strindberg marched at the head of us as the incorruptibly honest and fearless champion of truth, we had the power to endure the torture of the operations. We had suffered from those afflictions for years, but they were necessary in order that coming generations might be saved. In our case the mental diseases were only in a primary stage at which an operation was still possible; in the next generation, they would perhaps become incurable.

Cutting down everything that he found decaying or withered, Strindberg continued to advance upon the path which ran like a spiral around the mountain up to its summit. When he arrived, he compared the temple structure situated there to Valhalla, and he found that he himself, once a beaming Balder, had been changed into a reviling Loke.^[4] It is in his Poems in Verse and Prose that we meet him in this guise.

The spirit of the age in general he symbolizes in the ​conception The Gods of Time. He raises them up to the Valhalla of real décadence, a lofty dwelling which reminds one not a little of a certain literary Areopagus with sweetened water in the glasses before them. And after having placed those gods in a proper milieu à la Offenbach, he himself stepped into the midst of them like the young giant Loke, horsewhipped them until the strokes of the whip tore open their bodies, and only watched for the right moment to overthrow the whole assembly.

All the gentleness and goodness of the author of Master Olof had disappeared. Before us stood a young, spiteful blasphemer whose love of truth and justice forced him to speak as he did.

It was the revolter pure and simple we beheld, the revolter who had raised the banner of rebellion within the sphere of spirit and intellect. And when he raised the banner against hypocrisy and counterfeit gods, how could we but follow him? All the young people of the early eighties who had anything good in them unconditionally went into battle under the colors of this chief. Those who remained at home were the insidious and narrow-minded, who were more intent upon watching the meat-pots (and of stealing some of the meat from those who had hastened to the firing line) than to make sacrifices for a great cause.

We ourselves could not at that time realize the magnitude of the fight nor the significance of the victory which Loke and his youthful forces actually won. But now, ​almost a quarter of a century later, anyone that is so inclined can see that it was this bloodless revolution within the intellectual sphere which, after it had caused the collapse of the crumbling temples, prepared a new foundation for the new Sweden, which ever since that time has been erecting new structures for a people whose self-respect is on the point of being aroused.

Without the Strindberg revolution, our nation would still be that invertebrate, lethargic weakling who considered that he was doing enough for the age by dreaming about the boom of the leather-cannon of the seventeenth century and who admired himself while lying on his back declaiming Tegner's Charles XII.