The Women-Haters: Tolstoy and Strindberg
There are mornings in summer when the sunshine is radiant, and when the earth smells so fresh and sweet that body and soul expand in a feeling of exultant health and strength; and then no matter where we are, or how it comes to pass, the Russian world springs up before our eyes, and the Russian woman, with her hearty laugh and motherly figure, rises before us as the living incarnation of just such a morning. Working girls with handkerchiefs over their heads, round, red-cheeked, merry-faced girls with large hips, dressed in pink cotton skirts, their stockingless feet in high-heeled spatterdashes; little ladies with smiling eyes appearing under their flowered hats, and the large, well-developed figures of grown women kindly disposed, walking with indolent, matronly carriage—they pass us by one by one; we know their faces as little as we know their names, they vanish as quickly as they came, and like all the vague though memorable impressions of our first childhood, they come softly as the twilight, and glide away like the image of a dream.
I was born in Russia, and in moments such as these it is never the women of the other countries where I have lived who appear before me, never French women, or Germans, or Scandinavians, but always and only the Russian women, because it is only they who harmonise with nature and unite with her in an indefinable sense of unity and enjoyment.
There are other days in summer when nature seems to weep and shiver, when the clouds hang over the earth like dirty grey rags, out of which the rain drips, drips; when the grass lies as though it were mown, and the harvest is spoilt, when the trees sway hither and thither like weary people rocking their sorrow, and an unbroken desolate wail passes through the air like the sound of a monotonous sigh. Whoever has not seen days such as these dawn on the endless Russian plains and drag to a weary close, he does not know their solitude and melancholy. Nowhere as there, in those Russian wildernesses far removed from civilisation, does nature speak as clearly, and make humanity her mirror. Nowhere is happiness so careless and the heart so large, and nowhere does fear so clutch at the throat like invisible hands which grasp and then slacken their hold—slacken their hold, only to grasp the tighter....
At the moments when these impressions arise, I see behind them and through them something which resembles a large and powerful man’s head, with a broad forehead, and the dark, sparkling, deep-set eyes of a thinker and seer, eyes which seem as though they were trying to creep inwards. Sometimes this head is set on a uniform, and sometimes on a peasant’s smock; sometimes he is young with moustaches, and his hair is cut short; sometimes he is old with a wrinkled face, and the greasy, waving hair of a peasant, with a long Russian peasant’s beard; but the head always rests upon the same broad shoulders, the same giant’s body, and there is always the same shy, sombre gleam in his eyes, the cold gleam which betokens the lonely fanatic. The youthful head was the head of Tolstoy when he wrote The Cossacks; the aged one belongs to the author of The Kreutzer Sonata.
In the interval between these two were produced works of such a deep and genuine character as have not been surpassed by any contemporary writer, I allude to the story called Family Happiness, and the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina.
A short time ago Tolstoy’s writings were the great literary event of Europe. His reformatory zeal moved and perplexed even the unbelievers; his confessions startled society; and his probing into all the layers of human nature, which had hitherto been ignored in accordance with a highly-respected custom, aroused the anxiety and excitement of all who had senses and nerves, especially those with a bad conscience who had suppressed their senses, and with ill-used nerves that sought vengeance.
Tolstoy writes from the moral standpoint—his own peculiar standpoint—of the man with a bad conscience.
The man with a bad conscience had long led a hidden existence as a church penitent when the philosophical writer Friedrich Nietzsche discovered him and drew him into the light of day out of the darkness of life and of literature. Since then it has become possible to know him and to study his character.
But it is not often that this study possesses as many finger-posts to point the way, as many rifts in the veil, as are disclosed in the personality of Tolstoy.
His books are the personification of Russian nature with its golden laugh and soul-devouring melancholy; the healthy frivolity and spontaneity of the Russian woman and the self-tormenting sectarianism of the Russian man.
In all Tolstoy’s books there is an ever-recurring figure which is none other than himself, depicted in a manner that combines an intimate knowledge with perfect candour. This figure is connected throughout an extensive network of fine root fibres with the profoundest qualities of the Russians as a typical race. Concerning Tolstoy as a private individual, we are, so to speak, lacking in all psychological data, with the exception of those which he has himself given us in his various confessions, and which, for that very reason, are almost useless with regard to their psychology. But like all authors, great or small, he has unconsciously revealed himself in his novels, especially in those longer ones which he has since disowned; and now when the Kreutzer Sonata has fixed a boundary, behind which not even the most extreme moral severity can discover a second, and when the great life-painter has attained to the negation of life, there is a peculiar interest attached to the enquiry as to what were the national and individual circumstances which conducted him thither, and what were the stations on the road towards the crucifying of the flesh which are indicated in his books.
Three main points occur to my mind, although they are apparently quite unconnected with one another; these are:
A depth of intuition in his grasp and comprehension of woman which is unequalled by anything in the whole of European literature.
An everlasting bad conscience which wears a squinting expression of asceticism, and which, in all his writings, takes its stand between him and the woman and lies in wait for love’s sacrifice.
A secret hardness and spiritual reserve which acts like a bitter taste in the mouth, and gives the lie to the universal gospel of love in his later works and the craving for union with the woman in his earlier ones. With an evil-eyed love of cruelty it attaches itself to the most private conditions of life, and rejoices when sweetness is turned to gall; it evinces a refined brutality in self-torture, a sensation of positive delight in the arousing and enduring of pain, all of which are national and psychological features in the spiritual life of the Russian race, and a key to the perversities of its countless religious sects.
At the root of it all there is something like a dark unrest, a hearkening terror, a mistrust, which makes him uncomfortable where he is, and lonely where he loves.
No other literature has understood women and described them as vividly as the Russian. Take for instance Turgenev’s young girls at the time of their physical and spiritual awakening, think of the wavering indecision of their lonely inner life, filled with wishes of which they are hardly conscious, while as yet untouched by experience; think of the vegetative, half-indifferent sensuousness of his widows, think of Garschin’s inspired description of the demi-monde, of Dostoievsky’s Sonias and Gruschenkas and other doubtful social phenomena, in the description of whom he is as successful as he is the reverse in his gentlewomen. The new feature in these writers is their astonishing depth of psychology, their instinctive grasp of the side of woman’s nature which is not turned towards man, and their intuitive comprehension of her as a feminine being dumb and unveiled in their sight. French literature knows nothing of it. In France a young girl’s life begins on her first meeting with a man, and the charm of her womanhood is only revealed with her first love-affair in marriage. But that is the stupidity of authorship modelled in accordance with the conventional rules and acquired blindness of a school of literature. In Russia there is, strictly speaking, no school, either in literature or anywhere else, there is no so-called “good school” for anything at all, and accordingly there is no tradition, no taste cultivated by morality, nothing fixed, no fashion, no high road. The Russian writer, with his gentle erotic nature and sensitive yearning soul, can wander whither he will. He has the sharp eyes of a young race, the unshrinking gaze which has not been blunted by generations of culture, and which is quick to realise all that it has seen. The young Russian girl is not only “a girl,” she is a woman. She has not undergone the hypocritical convent education of the French girl, she knows nothing of the German girl’s bourgeois conventions, and she has more temperament and more natural spontaneity than either. These are two of the reasons why in French literature a woman only becomes an individual when she is loved, and why in the German literature of the last century, even in that of the newest realistic school, she is not an individual at all but only a being who belongs to a human species, and these are also the reasons why in Scandinavian literature she is endowed with a half timid, half sorrowful individuality.
Woman as woman, unconditional and complete in the essence of her being, in the relative perfection of her nature before she comes into contact with man, has never yet been described. To do so is the task allotted to a future literature starting from other presumptions and working under other aspects.
The reason that the Russians are in advance of other nations in this particular is, I think, that with them there has never been a historic period of the cult of woman with all its visible and invisible offshoots. As in their religious conceptions the ideal of womanhood is not so much the “spotless Virgin” as the “Mother of God,” so in the language of the people there is no separate form for addressing a young girl, and when the ordinary Russian wishes to ingratiate himself with a woman he calls her “Matiuschka” (little mother), regardless of her age or position. Woman in the fulfilment of her natural function—woman as a mother—is that which appeals most to the direct consciousness of the Russian. Hence the artificial barrier, which the postulate of purity had raised between the man and woman of western Europe, falls away, and the Russian beholds woman as unity, as nature.
The Russian woman sees herself in the same light. No moral arrogance, no pose of purity has become a second nature to her. With the exception of a thin coating of western European culture and notions of propriety, she is more of a natural being, more whole-hearted and spontaneous in her affections, and more decided in her sympathies and antipathies than the woman of western Europe.
No Russian writer is more profoundly conscious of it than Tolstoy, and not one has described it with greater intuition.
It was this that originated characters like the Cossack girl in The Cossacks, who permeates the whole book with the warmth of her healthy young person, whose silence is more convincing, deeper, and more apparent than any exchange of thought between a man and woman; who loves and sacrifices herself unhesitatingly with the instinct of an animal, and rejects the young officer’s love, without being aware of it, which is, to him, the bitterest and most personal humiliation of all.
This was the origin of that child-woman in War and Peace; I think her name was Natascha or Nadieschda. That enchanting being who has just reached the age of transition when so many shoots sprout which cause life to perish or starve, unless they are too feeble to grow at all,—poor little blossoms that vibrate with a nervous shudder, seeking to hide themselves in fear of the beatings of her pulse, the variations of her every mood, while she seeks relief from her tears in the bed and arms of her mother—still a child, already a woman! This was also the origin of those scenes in the same book where the boy and girl seek one another, play and dance together, and cannot be happy without one another. A true picture, a piece of child-psychology, the depth and truth of which is shown at a glance.
There is also a thoughtful young officer in this book, who is in love with the merry playfellow of his childhood; but she slips away from him, and he marries an elderly, faded, impersonal spinster, and looks for happiness in a marriage grounded on mutual sympathy.
Then, for the third time, and this time the portrait is better executed and the likeness is more striking, the same young man steps forward as Lievin in Anna Karenina. He is tall and strong, honest, with the Gallic temperament, but awkward and somewhat clumsy in confiding his inner life; he belongs to the class of men whom women ignore, whose presence awakens a vague shyness in them. There is something in his nature which arouses a feeling of distrust and dislike in women. What is it? Can it be a want of feeling, an absence of sympathy? Or is it something in his person that is physically repellent? His first advances meet with no response, it is possible that they are misunderstood, and he is bitterly disheartened. Later on, when the young girl has herself undergone a disappointment in love, she expresses herself willing, and they marry. But here already, many years before the aged Tolstoy wrote The Kreutzer Sonata, the first months of marriage are described as a torture. Lievin experiences a feeling of shame and disillusion. They try to avoid one another, to avoid being together; they have nothing in common. When they avoid each other, his conscience reproaches him; when they are together, his bad conscience is a torture to him. It is really nothing but a process of animal existence, represented as a psychological mystery. The husband goes on his way in careless indifference, and held fast by the circle of ideas belonging to society and the Church, becomes displeased and irritable. There are a number of men in whom the prudery of the spirit and the denseness of the perceptions never permit of that refinement of impulse which is love. It is merely a psychological peculiarity, and is neither moral nor immoral; but according to our ideas of morality, love must co-exist with marriage, and the thinker who realises that it is not there has a bad conscience. His bad conscience makes nature appear evil in his sight, and casts a halo over everything that might deliver him from it. Asceticism, as an eternally unsatisfied desire, possesses the extra advantage of being a never-ending delight, an inverted pleasure. This feature is deeply impressed on the character of the Slav; it is a combination of those two principal features of the Russian temperament—sensibility and passiveness. It is from this, the psychological standpoint, that we must view Tolstoy’s increasing moral rigour as displayed in his works. When we remember that it is a Russian author who chooses this problem for his motive, and that all great Russian writers are as admirable in their powers of observation as they are second-rate thinkers, as subtle in their psychology as they are helpless altruists—both indications of a young literature—then his obscure personality loses much that is incomprehensible and confusing.
At last Lievin finds rest for his conscience and satisfaction in his marriage through the birth of a child, which seems to bring a meaning into it and also, to a certain extent, an excuse. The other couple, Anna Karenina and Vronsky, cannot find either, because in their free union the child is no excuse, but only a burden. With an incomparable discernment and rare genius in the delineation of the characters and their social surroundings, Tolstoy describes the unceasing torment of this union, until Anna Karenina’s wish to destroy herself breaks out into a brutal form of suicide. Not one single moment of happiness has fallen to the lot of these equally warm-hearted and passionate people; the entire description presents nothing but a continual judgment on injured morality.
But before the sinful relationship had begun—as long as love is nothing but an unconscious wave, a sweet, painful, sunny smile in the soul of Anna Karenina—what writer can compare with Tolstoy in his intuitive understanding, his unhesitating description of the woman? With what yearning sympathy his thoughts must cling to her in order to grasp the impalpable lines of her being! But the portrait of the young girl in Family Happiness is still more worthy of admiration than that of the matured woman. There we have everything: the innocent sensuousness of the first awakening of womanhood in the child, the woman who is such a thorough woman, with her inexplicable attraction, her thoughtless impatience, and her active imagination which transforms the first man whom she meets into the man, the beloved man, to whom she gives her whole affection.
There is a scene in the book after the young girl has had her hot Russian bath, when, with her hair still wet, she sits at the coffee table out of doors and turns the head of an elderly gentleman, who is her only male acquaintance; then there is a second scene where they both look for cherries on the trees—and such a description of pure sensuous delight on a warm, damp, dreamy summer’s day as I have never seen equalled anywhere.
And yet it was this same author who wrote the dangerous, poisonous Kreutzer Sonata, and preached the doctrines of a misogynist on a basis of universal love for humanity, a love which was to end with the extermination of the human race.
The time must soon be at hand when “universal love” will be dragged from under its consecrated veil, and examined psychologically and physiologically as to its conditions and its origin. The question is whether it springs from a superabundance or a deficiency. All-embracing love, such as the “universal love of humanity,” has always looked down with an evil eye upon the great natural basis of all love, love between man and woman, and has never ceased to preach its inferiority and its baseness. Nowadays we hear the old song accompanied by new instruments resounding simultaneously from Russia and Norway. But nowadays we take the preachers themselves and analyse them through and through, heart and soul.
When we examine the personality of a great master like Tolstoy, what do we find? First that strange, absorbing impulse, the desire to create, to reveal himself, which indicates an excessive consciousness of the ego. In his youth there was apparently an intense longing to make himself understood without the mental capacity necessary for success; failure resulted in shyness, uncertainty, doubt, and according to his own confession he experienced a transient, sensual love without spiritual depth. He was out of harmony with himself in consequence, and at last the longed-for event took place—he married. It was a marriage such as there are thousands: healthy bodies, dried-up souls, the temperament of a thinker and fanatic with a narrow and obstinate nature, very little real knowledge, very little power of intellectual expansion, while with increasing years was added an increase of moral severity. Discontented with the primal conditions of existence, his writings showed an increase of pessimism, while an ever greater number of past joys escaped his memory, and there was no pleasure that did not leave an after-taste of bitterness. When as an elderly man he looked back upon the first time when a young girl caused his pulse to beat the faster, he sought to explain the circumstance in the Kreutzer Sonata by describing her as the only one who is pure and good, thus rendering a coarse touch to the imagination which betrays itself in the glorification of the child-woman. Hence the pose of a social reformer who takes an egotistic delight in nourishing the consciousness of martyrdom.
These are a few general outlines contributing to a picture of Tolstoy, as he appears to me in his writings. For I believe that it is a man’s personal experiences which determine his opinions and form the rudiments of his mind and character, and that these rudiments, however much they may be obscured by time, are still there to be discovered by those who seek them.
August Strindberg
August Strindberg is one of the most wonderful and perfect examples of a type which, in our vacillating age, frequently rises to the surface and endeavours to make its mark everywhere; a type full of aggressiveness and impatience, seldom made after a pattern and frequently full of imperfections, but with touches of real genius as well as barren wastes, full of lapses, but full of promises for the future. It is a mixed type. The strange combinations in his character, the seeming contradictions and the flaws in his education make it a very difficult study for the average person. It would require a genius, one to whom the many hostile elements appear microscopically enlarged. The mixture of races, that inseparable ingredient in human physiology, is as yet an unexplored region of investigation. The question is one with which Strindberg has been greatly troubled, and he has contributed abundant material for its solution.
He has done more. The great literature that he has created is more priceless as raw material to the psychologist than as a work of art. In all his writings Strindberg occupies the reader’s mind in a twofold manner: first, with the psychological results to which he individually attains; secondly, with the psychological results to which the reader malgré lui attains, and which often contradict the others on matters of chief importance. Whoever studies Strindberg finds himself in the presence of a double mirror; in the one he sees the world reflected in Strindberg’s mind, and in the other as an antidote, he sees the mind of Strindberg presenting its own solution in the moment of its birth and reflecting its psychology in the reader’s soul.
Strindberg’s collected works are really only biographical contributions towards the solution of the riddle of his ego. He has never ceased to speculate on the mystery of his own being, and this speculation has always vented itself in indignant storming against outward enemies. What does he mean by his angry guesses at the riddle of the woman sphinx? You have but to turn this sphinx round and it is no longer a woman. It is the man sphinx—the riddle that is himself.
No writings have ever been of a more personal character than those of Strindberg. But perhaps no writings have ever issued from an ego that was less complete. I should like to express it as follows: In a mixed type like Strindberg’s no unity has as yet been able to form itself beneath the threshold of consciousness, for there the instincts of different races and epochs rush helter skelter. All that he has written fell as an instantaneous reflection on his soul, and was thrown back in an impressionist picture. In Strindberg’s works we find no transitions, no coherence. And since he has always presented himself as a riddle to the passing crowd, it is quite fair to regard the riddle as common property, which any one may seek to solve if he is not afraid to do so.
I have often met Strindberg and have received the most contradictory impressions concerning him. But in one way he was always the same, and that was in his outward manner. He demanded respect, and he invariably treated himself with the greatest respect. There was always something subdued and severe about him as though he were keeping guard over an invisible and holy relic, against which neither he nor others might sin; his voice, when he spoke, was low and imperious, and his threatening gaze was always ready to quell any signs of feminine flippancy, although he would have been very unwilling to be deprived of it altogether.
That was Strindberg as he appeared to the multitude. But for those who knew him better, there was another Strindberg, not more sociable and affable than the first, but one who was certainly not pompous, who was a thorough Swede, a boon companion whose good hours fell at the first cock-crowing, a humourist with an indistinct smile who played at chess with life, and cared less about the results of the game than for its subtle tactics, a man of great foresight, unreliable, impulsive, a man whose intellect impressed you and who wished to be impressive, and who in addition to this possessed the cunning of a boy.
The keynote, which was the solution to the nature of this contradictory and purposely mysterious being, was a suspicion that knew no bounds; suspicion for its own sake, suspicion as a principle, as the prerogative of a superior intellect, a suspicion against every one and everything which ended by becoming a suspicion of himself.
Strindberg has Finnish-Lapp blood in his veins. He comes of a poverty-stricken middle-class family which was undergoing a period of great pecuniary distress at the time of his birth. His father had known better times, but through his union with a servant-girl he had dropped out of the social circle to which he belonged. Three children were born before marriage, the author soon after the wedding. The mother was always ailing, and she died of consumption after the birth of her twelfth child. While the boy was growing up, the father and mother, with seven children and two servants, inhabited three rooms. The furniture consisted chiefly of beds and cradles. Children lay on ironing-boards and chairs, children lay in cradles and beds. Baptism, funeral! Baptism, funeral! Sometimes two baptisms one after the other without a funeral. The father was only seen at meals; his name was used to frighten the children, and “Papa shall hear of it,” was equivalent to a whipping.
Education consisted in scolding and pulling the hair. Stern discipline was enacted in the home. Lying was unmercifully punished, disobedience likewise, and in after years corporal punishment was superseded by the menace: “What will people say?”
These facts are quoted from Strindberg’s many-volumed autobiography, The Maid-Servant’s Son, in which he lays down the law with inveterate bitterness against his origin, his childish impressions, the order of society, the system of education, and against all bonds and fetters, customs and duties, which chain a man down from his first days to his last. He knows from the very beginning that he has not the courage to break loose from them, and that is why he pursues them with such untiring and embittered vengeance.
August Strindberg wrote The Maid-Servant’s Son in his altruistic, socialistic period, when he believed in a social revolution that was to bring about the radical redress of his personal wrongs.
Strindberg is in this instance the link of a chain which winds through central Germany, but has scarcely forced its way as yet to the North and the South, for the North and Bavaria are peasant districts, and are, therefore, almost inaccessible to socialism. The middle class with its overflow into the proletariat is the real fostering soil of socialism. From a home like the one that Strindberg describes, the more gifted sons must necessarily go forth as socialists, if they have brains to think and souls to feel; or if they have any aspiration in their blood which calls itself the “honest ambition” of the bourgeois, they as surely become “jobbers” and “snobs”—or if they are geniuses, they aspire to the “super-man,” and with a juggler’s salto mortale flee past their misery into space. Strindberg’s nature was possessed of a considerable share of all three categories. Chiefly genius, which, among the many surprises of life, always prepares for itself the greatest, for geniuses live in a state of continual astonishment at the revelation of the great unknown in themselves, till at last, like Strindberg, they move about with an invisible crown on their heads, one might call it a crowned consciousness, for which they claim respect from all the world. The sure sign of a young bourgeois from a populous town is that he always requires a crowd of admirers. His self-confidence needs to be upheld by constant applause. Hence the striving for recognition, the love of advertising, and the longing to be puffed, which is the peculiarity of the newest literature proceeding from the middle class. Hence the prolonged cries of despair when this recognition or its material expression is lacking. The horizon of the bourgeois townsman is naturally bounded by the thin luminous line of those whom he sees in possession; the men who have enough, and more than enough, who inhabit the golden islands where enjoyment dwells; and whither he yearns to go, to take them by storm as a revolutionary, or enter them in triumph as a crowned genius. It is not their individuality merely which stamps these things with their personal value, they have a priceless, an imaginary worth, and only when they are his—the outward show of refinement, the elegant home, the newest fashion in dress, the woman of the upper class as wife and worshipper—everything “first-class,” in fact, only then does he feel himself in the full possession of his ego. These characteristics show themselves early; they are the phenomena of the age. It is interesting to observe whether the strongest personal emotion in a child is the desire for affection or the longing to occupy the first place. With the boy in the autobiography the last was the case; he wanted to be the favourite in the upper court—in other words, with his father and mother. When he found that the place he coveted was already occupied by his brothers and sisters, he would not accept of his grandmother’s proffered affection, but despised it, for the simple reason that his grandmother was a person of no great importance in the household.
This absence of spontaneous affection is a trait which meets us everywhere in Strindberg’s personal biography and his other literary works; it is a peculiarity that is extremely common in our day, although it is not often met with in geniuses, because genius is usually accompanied by a greater warmth of temperature. It is perhaps partly accounted for by the natural temperament of the people of northern Sweden, who are to the highest degree possessed of what the French call “la fougue,” which burns like a conflagration and not like the all-pervading heat of a continual flame. But there is a deeper reason still which is to be found in the isolation and excessive inadequacy of Strindberg’s nature, the restless, nomadic tendency, the savage impulse which impels him to obliterate his footmarks, to make himself inaccessible, mysterious, terrible, for all of which his autobiography presents many an authentic proof. It may be his inherited, restless, undomesticated Finnish-Lapp blood which feels itself imprisoned in a small bourgeois family, and gazes around distrustfully like a wild animal in a cage. It is the blood of a race that remains always apart, that does not allow itself to be fathomed, but with the true nomadic instinct seeks to wipe out all traces of its own existence. It does not give its whole affection, as a child it has no comrades, as a man no friends, only a few stray acquaintances and boon companions. It is the blood that scents the enemy everywhere, that dreads the enemy yet goes in search of him if only for the sake of the long lonely raids which it remembers in the past. What in other phenomena of the age would signify a dying, a complete withering of the expansive faculty, was in Strindberg a beginning, a youthfulness of culture, so that one can point to him with tolerable certainty as an atavism—a reversion that is driven forward by a tremendous force, a combination of atavism and genius.
There is one special feature of this poverty of feeling in the autobiography which is peculiarly striking and suggestive, it is namely this, that the boy is not only lonely with regard to his parents, his brothers and sisters and comrades, but he is also lonely in his first love. Strindberg has not omitted to give us a study on sex in his Story of the Development of a Soul, as the sub-title is called. Psychological and physiological studies on this subject are sufficiently plentiful in modern Scandinavian literature, and some of them are contributions of permanent value to culture, contributions towards a truer knowledge of mankind, casting a bold and honest light on the unknown territory of human existence, such as will only be understood and appreciated in a more subtle and less prudish future.
With regard to Strindberg’s contribution on the subject, the circumstances are not quite the same. But one thing is certain, that whatever has been confided to publicity on this subject in the north, however far-fetched and plain-spoken as regards the history of the strongest natural impulse, it is but the first seedling of a future literature—a pan-Germanic literature which will come perhaps soon, perhaps not until after our time. In these confessions everything is natural, productive and honest; souls and bodies, physical and spiritual emotions are one. Not so with Strindberg. It would need a searching discussion, a full statement of every single point in his autobiography, in order to prove the apparent and hidden crookedness of the emotions, the poisonous hostility of his terrified gaze at the opposite sex. From the very beginning his relationship to woman is as insipid as is usually the case in the middle class, and as brutal as the wildness of the nomads. The German passion, expanding with the first emotion of love in the desire for a reciprocative affection on the part of the woman, is not to be found. And here it is important to remark that this peculiar trait in his character is the origin of the celebrated drama which bears the device: “Battle of the Sexes.” There is also another point of importance connected with it, and that is that Strindberg from the first represents the man as good, suffering, tender-hearted, normal. That is not psychology, but it is the same in his later works. While his psychology of the woman is very deep, the man who is the unhappy victim of this brute is always the same brave, honest and worthy fellow. There are two sides to that. In the first place it is mere sophistry, in the second it points to a distinctive racial feature.
We find here a resemblance which few people would have looked for in Strindberg, and which certainly no one among his countrymen has as yet perceived. It points to the east, to Russia. Not only to the Russia of Tolstoy and Dostoievsky, but further to the east and deeper into the secret history of the races. It points to Asia, to the barren plains where wandered the Mongolian hordes. Yellow faces with prominent cheek bones and projecting skulls, faces with an expression of cruelty and suffering, envy and greed, terrible conquerors who exterminated the ruling races of ancient Scandinavia and the old Norse blood in Russia, amalgamated the gentle, lyrical, Slav temperament with their own fierce blood, and left memorials of their victories in mounds of dead men’s skulls. Since those days every one who knows the Russian race discovers the same conflicting elements; on the one hand the gentle lyrical faculty, the melancholy sensibility, which makes the Russians born psychologists, makes them the only intuitively psychological people in the world, and on the other hand the brutality of the Mongolian blood which, after long intervals of peace, vents itself in deeds of horrible cruelty. Hence that profound untrustworthiness that lies at the background of the Russian character. And here we must seek the connecting link if we would understand Strindberg. For this same Mongolian blood, thinned, it is true, forms the ancestry of that nomadic race from whence the Finnish Lapps and Strindberg himself are descended. It also forms the lower class in Finland from whence his first wife, although of noble birth, originated. Her features bore traces of the Finnish type as distinctly as Strindberg’s own, and perhaps this accounts for the strong attraction that he felt towards her, for he doubtless felt the need of one of the same type in order to complete himself.
The Finns in Finland are a people belonging to an ancient culture, they are a poetical people, whereas the Russian Mongolians and the Swedish Lapps are quite uncultured. The chief characteristic in Strindberg’s nature is the close proximity of genius and barbarism.
Strindberg is very un-Swedish in his outward appearance. The Swedish type is tall, slender, broad-shouldered, and the complexion, when it is not ashen grey, is fresh and delicate, the head small with fair hair. Strindberg is a strong powerful man with sloping shoulders, and latterly he has assumed a corpulence that is characteristic of the Russians; his penetrating, far-seeing eyes have the uncertain, livid hue which is never found in the north except among mixed races, his jaws and cheek bones are broad and prominent, his hair long, black and curly, the slight moustache turned upwards, the mouth small and pointed as though he were about to whistle, the lips gracefully curved, and a complexion the colour of leather. This phenomenon is crowned with a powerful, square skull. The ears are diminutive and lie close to the head. His hands are remarkably round and small.
Behind this powerful forehead all the ideas that have moved the second half of this century have fermented, but only one thing original and new has taken shape, and that is the sombre instinct of sex hatred. Strindberg’s one act has been to drag out this enmity from beneath the threshold of consciousness, where it had hitherto lain, to lend it speech and clothe it with an artistic form. He grasps hold of woman like an impetuous bourgeois, and treats her like a captured savage. Strindberg is like an instrument on which the age has played her shrillest tunes, but the strings have retained no recollection of them. As a young man he was a sincere Pietist; later on he became a pessimistic Altruist, then a Socialist and Utilitarian; he has experienced social contrasts and class warfare as few have done, and has reproduced them as none of his contemporaries have ever done. He has writhed beneath the ineradicable consciousness of belonging to a lower class, and his daily habits and sole ambition were fixed on asserting himself as a member of the upper class. He was reckless, unruly, but he does not seem to have had any of that proud confidence in his own greatness which is the birthright of great personalities, who look upon themselves as the beginning and the starting point, and to whom the idea never occurs of fatiguing themselves in the race after that which is theirs by right. Strindberg is a genuine son of this plebeian age, for it needed a Nietzsche endowed with volcanic power to enable him to rise above himself and to proclaim himself a super-man.
His self-psychology is full of contradictions, and it requires the reader’s critical attention to disentangle the undercurrent of personal confessions from the artistic super-structure. It is very interesting to watch how the absence of spontaneous affection changes to a painful yearning for tenderness; when, for example, as a child, he has the feeling of being dependent on his busy mother, a common woman who did not bestow much love on him. It is still more interesting to watch how, on the occasions when he fell in love, he seems always to have had a reason. There is his first love-affair as a boy of fifteen, when the object of his affections is a thirty-year-old girl, who is excitable and hysterical. She is engaged to be married, and forms a centre of attraction; young men and old men admire and rave about her, amongst others his father, and it is an immense gratification to be able to draw her away from them.
Already a feeling of repugnance—so often described by him in his later works as though it were the usual accompaniment of love—pervades their amorous tête-à-têtes, when she evinces her motherly superiority and completely captivates him; it is always the same manœuvring that he describes in his later women. But when writing from memory he can never depict them ludicrously and repulsively enough, cannot sufficiently indulge in expressions of antipathy and repugnance with regard to them, and this same characteristic is very apparent in his last book, called A Fool’s Confession. Here also a former love and destined bride is described as an utterly worthless being, just as the noble lady whom he married was afterwards unmasked as an abyss of iniquity. The same is the case with the newly-married wife of the super-man in By the Open Sea. It is an abiding feature of Strindberg’s works to separate with a shudder of disgust or in a paroxysm of anger and hatred after having tasted love. It is a characteristic feature of the Slav, and may possibly be a heritage from the savage blood of the Mongolians. We find it invariably, although not so strongly expressed, in Tolstoy’s otherwise pleasing descriptions. There are only two possible ways of accounting for it in Strindberg’s literary productions; it must be due either to the author’s temperament, or else to his experience of women.
For a long time I accepted the latter explanation, but after having learned to know him, and having often read his entire creative works, I am compelled to think that it would be too shallow an interpretation.
This rage against woman is connected with his indignation at every bond, every pressure, every circumstance and relationship that threatens to become permanent. Everywhere we find the same longing to escape, to leave no mark behind, to isolate himself, to hide. Everywhere in his studies, his interests, his opinions, the same sudden change, the same hatred of his broken fetters, and every intellectual and spiritual stage of development that is past appears to him like a broken fetter. In all Strindberg’s writings we trace the struggle for the possession of his ever-changing ego; we continually observe an exaggerated self-consciousness, making vain and angry attempts to attain to his real self, reproving the whole of modern science for the sake of justifying and explaining the non-existence of a central point, a unity of the ego which is the missing centre of gravity in the unknown. Everything in him is temperament, nothing the result of coherent thought; he hates coherence as derogatory to himself, he is determined to be incomprehensible, understood by none, and he introduces a dummy as a sort of pattern man, like the unhappy “Father,” or like Axel, in The Comrades, who withdraws his own pictures from the Salon in order that his wife may exhibit hers—which he himself has painted; like the second man in The Creditors, who submits to being sucked to death by a female vampire; like the “Fool,” in The Fool’s Confession, who worships another man’s wife as though she were a pure Madonna. When he sees the steamer passing by, on which she is travelling to visit some relations, he goes further and further into the sea, magnetically drawn towards the ship in which she is, and afterwards becomes her husband only to discover by degrees incredible details of iniquity in her. But he does not part from her, he does not experience that unconquerable feeling of positive aversion after which parting is no longer an act of the will, but an almost unconscious proceeding. Who is there who is not acquainted with all these traits in Russian literature? Turgenev has already described the weak man who is held captive by a brutal and licentious woman, the man who is passive and allows himself to be ruined by her, while all the while he looks on as a spectator might, and despises himself.
Despises himself! Here we find the difference, and perhaps also, if I may say so, the psychological quicksand in Strindberg’s works. I take for granted that we are all agreed that the great Russian writers are honest psychologists. I would certainly make an exception of some of Dostoievsky’s writings, some things he has concealed, and one could point out certain places where he has substituted a false trait and purloined an experience upon which the plot was built. But the earlier works of Turgenev, Garschin, Tolstoy, were never false either in themselves or with regard to their public. And when the men in them allowed themselves to be loved by a woman who claimed for herself “the man’s prerogative,” they saw clearly what they were doing and despised themselves for it.
Not so Strindberg’s man. He cries out beneath the iron-soled slipper, but none the less he holds himself in high esteem; he esteems himself all the more highly for his forbearance with the daring she-devil who derides him on account of it; in this matter he possesses a higher degree of development, and before all else, he is incredibly moral. Strindberg’s man is—especially in the stories where he manifests his hatred of women—moral to a degree such as in the New Testament is only expected of a Bishop, of whom it is said he must be the husband of one wife, and elsewhere only by Björnson and Young Men’s Christian Associations. Strindberg’s man is always strictly monogamous, because monogamy denotes a higher stage of development; his woman, on the other hand, is always polygamous, because woman and polygamy represent a lower stage of development. This monogamous man is devoted to the polygamous woman, the worse she is, the more devoted he becomes, and the more she treats him with contempt, the more tightly his fetters bind him to her. There is something in this that resembles a trait in the character of the “maid-servant’s son,” of whom it is related in the autobiography that “he was quite indifferent to the fresh, red-cheeked girls whom he met at the dancing lesson, while on the contrary, the highly anæmic and hysterical girls, with the pale, waxlike complexions and black lines under their preternaturally bright eyes, had an irresistible attraction for him.” …
I should like to take Strindberg’s women one by one and examine them in connection with his personality and temperament, as it originally was, and as it became when accentuated by friction with his social surroundings and influenced by the atmosphere of the age in which he lived. His women are a set of dismal, mischievous, heartless creatures, only fascinating so long as the man is young and easily duped; afterwards, when he develops into the great mind who sees through the small mind and mimics it, they become ever more and more shrewish, less attractive, more perverse, till at last the day comes when the man with the great mind has grown sufficiently old and wise not to allow himself to be led by the nose any longer, and the woman, whose name is baseness, is finally dismissed.
The woman? Yes, for there is only one woman, the same woman whom he has described in all his principal works during the fourteen years of his authorship. It is a type that never varies, but grows more exaggerated each time, and he clings to it as though it were the only sounding-board for his cutting discords.
Strindberg is already to the fore in his first book, The Red Room. The hero, Arvid Falk, is himself. He is a man who has not yet found his own self, who does not venture to believe in himself, and who hopes in no future; a poor, penniless fellow who allows himself to be overawed by every bragging, self-confident person—in a word, a peculiar, unhappy, harum-scarum individual who is not yet awake to the consciousness of the ego.
There is only one woman in this book; she is Arvid Falk’s sister-in-law, and has married above herself, she is a lazy and indolent person, coarse-minded and untruthful, stupid and vulgar.
This bashful man, who is like a timid savage, and the vulgar woman have as yet nothing to do with one another, they are types upon which the gaze of the young genius first fell—they represent his ego and his type of woman.
In Herr Bengt’s Wife he has developed body and temperament. It is the description of a woman’s many phases: discontent, happy love, the child, the quarrel after marriage, coquetting with others, reconciliation—it seems as though it had been written in a paroxysm of love. The description is outwardly full of admiration, inwardly full of psychological analysis. It is the work of a seer who worships, while awake, the woman whose true self he perceives in his sleep and already despises. Herr Bengt’s Wife was acted at the Dramatic Theatre of Stockholm, and Strindberg’s wife played the part of heroine with great success, the only success she ever had on the stage. His next work was a book called Marriages, which consists of twelve stories of married life, black with the weft-yarns of life, beginning with pain, ending with death. He describes the tame love of the latter end of the nineteenth century which, fast bound hand and foot, drags her span of existence through economical, pathological and “universal human” gulfs. He describes the young student who engages himself to a fully developed girl of fourteen, who, during the ten years of their engagement, becomes a thin, shrivelled, nervous being, he marries without loving her and she grows to look more wretched than ever after giving birth to numerous children. He describes how the penniless young man brings the poor girl home, and they do not know how to bring up the children on an insufficient income; the couple are isolated from their social surroundings and forced to live in a back street, where their children play about in the gutter.
He describes how the young notary and his wife begin their married life by giving expensive dinners, because it is only possible to be young and newly married once in a lifetime. And when the child comes, the bailiff comes too, and all the fine furniture finds its way into the creditors’ pockets, and the old father-in-law, the Major, who had foreseen what would happen, takes charge of his daughter and grandchild, while the young husband is left to become a celibate. He describes a man who both in character and temperament is predestined to be constant in love and marriage, but his wife, though of good family, is dissolute and wicked. He has to pay for her riding lessons and to entertain her lovers, look after her children and conceal her drunkenness—he is chained to her, he cannot free himself, he is monogamous in spite of his better judgment.
Or else he describes the marriage of a private tutor with a lady of noble birth who has never experienced a single womanly feeling, abhors her duty as a wife, and only does not refuse her husband when she wishes to obtain something from him. At the same time she is anxious to enjoy all the social advantages of a married woman, and for the sake of her frugal caresses the poor honest fellow allows himself to be chosen a member of all the associations and public institutions in which her empty vanity wishes to shine, till at last, much against his inclinations, he becomes a member of Parliament. In the midst of these tales of woe, of social and intellectual privation, Strindberg describes himself in a story about an author and his family, called The Bread Winner, in which many of his brethren will recognise themselves. It describes the great author who gets up in the morning to make his own coffee, while his wife and the servants are still asleep, it describes him hard at work till the evening when he throws himself down upon the bed dead tired—Money! Money! All for Money! It tells of every single unsatisfied longing of which our age is possessed, of the everlasting means which never ceases to become an end in itself. The children run about aimlessly, while the servant girls read novels and the wife allows her friends to pity her for her husband’s neglect. His mornings are spent in feverish effort which exhaust him till he is ready to faint, but the whip of anxiety and uncertainty urges him on till the post comes, and he opens his letters with a beating heart; the remainder of the day, until the late dinner hour, is consumed by negotiating with extortionate publishers and pressing creditors, corresponding in three languages with foreign newspapers, and reading reviews where anonymous rivals seek to deprive him of the goodwill of the public by which he lives, pointing at him with their inky fingers, leaving a dirty smudge on his reputation. And he is defenceless. How is he to punish the nameless vermin who lay their maggots in his flesh and afterwards fly off? Then follows the dinner in a strange restaurant, where the celebrated author is expected to contribute wit and intellect to the conversation, and people are offended if the exhausted man stares at his plate in dyspeptic silence. In the evening, when he would like to be with his family, his wife goes to a party or to some place of entertainment. And one day the overworked “bread-winner” dies suddenly, his wife faints in the conventional manner, and her old women friends—with or without petticoats, as the case may be—exclaim in pained sympathy: “Poor unfortunate woman! He always was inconsiderate towards her, in life as in death!”
It is real life that Strindberg has described in his Marriages, that real life which the many live, but of which only the few are conscious. It is the profound inadequacy of the closest relationship, which neither our grandparents nor our fathers and mothers experienced, but only the children of the eighties of the nineteenth century. Everything in our day—joy no less than suffering—leaves a bitter after-taste on the tongue, which neither mineral waters, baths nor digestive pills can rid us of, since the evil is not of the body but of the soul, and proceeds from the incapacity to lead a vegetative life, or to resign oneself to circumstances. Formerly this discontent was general, and in Strindberg’s works the blame was equally divided, but a couple of years after the publication of Marriages, a change took place. The universal picture of the age retreated, and everything pointed to woman and man’s relation to her. In the course of a few years there appeared a collection of dramas evincing a hatred of woman quite unparalleled in the literature of the world. It was just at the time when the Scandinavian movement for the emancipation of women was in full swing, with its natural accompaniment of women authors, and the air was filled with cries for equal justice to both sexes, the married woman’s rights of property, the man’s pre-nuptial chastity, etc.
It would be impossible to say that the Swedish ladies were graceful in their manner of introducing the new order of Society. Seldom has anything more discouraging been witnessed than the manner in which they enforced their demands upon men—demands which were in part quite reasonable. Woman forgot her womanhood and relied upon the thickness of her skull and her elbows, and in this her masculine phase she was by no one more seriously taken than by Strindberg. He waxed warm in the delight of the conflict. Armed to the teeth with the entire arsenal of superior qualities pertaining to man, brain and pockets filled to overflowing with the latest results of investigation, he went forth to wage war against the Amazons. He went forth because he wanted to be with them, for he loved the emancipated type. The emancipated woman attracted him, which the pious Marthas were never able to do, and because he loved her and because she appealed to his emotions, for that reason he also hated her, for with him hatred is another form of love.
He aimed at the wife in three dramas. The first attack took place in The Father.
The fable of The Father is comparatively well known. A Captain is bullied by the three women in his household, he is driven half mad by them and is reported to be quite mad, and is literally, not merely figuratively, put into a strait waistcoat. These three women are his wife, his mother-in-law (who does not appear in the piece), and his nurse. The three conspire together. The wife and the nurse drive him mad with their petty arguments, and the mother-in-law’s bell ringing at stated intervals serves to precipitate his desperation.
But what makes these three women conspire against the man who is master of the house? The nurse and the stepmother, says Strindberg, are of an advanced age, consequently sexless, consequently men-haters.—Good. But the wife?—The wife is also a man-hater.—Why?—Because all women are men-haters, with a few exceptions.—That is all very well, but it does not explain why the nurse, the mother-in-law and the wife should combine together. Mutual forbearance is not exactly a feminine quality, and to begin with, it is extremely unlikely that his nurse should live on friendly terms with the wife’s mother. Yet in spite of that they combine. Why?—In order to embezzle the books that are sent to him, to pamper his mother-in-law and to spoil the child. From pure wickedness in fact? Well and good. But why do they not vent their wickedness upon one another?—Because they are all three equally stupid, and that is why they prefer each others’ company. Strange that the pretty young wife should not be bored with the two old women! Something is surely rotten in the state of Denmark? No, there is nothing rotten, it is the normal condition of all families.—That is all very well, Captain, but have you ever asked yourself whether your wife is satisfied with you?—To this question the author is wont to give an answer which, owing to its plainness, we cannot quote here. But I think that in this instance the author renders the psychology of the woman too easy. The lords of creation are apt to be rather conceited. Time is short and choice is limited, and in most cases the woman takes whoever she can get, and it often happens that she does not care for him afterwards. The more he loves her, the less she cares for him, and there we have the tragic conflict. The man does not observe it and goes on loving, the woman knows that he does not observe it, is offended, and revenges herself by tormenting him. He bears it patiently and loves her, but his love is clumsy and brutal. Now the woman gains the upper hand. She sees that he has not found her out and she knows that she will never be rid of him, the thought goads her anger, she feels that she is unpunished, and by degrees she becomes a fury. Who is the greater fool of the two?
The Comrades deals with the same problem. Axel sacrifices himself in slavish subjection to his wife, who has artistic pretensions. He not only paints her pictures, but he also sees that they are accepted for the Salon and his own rejected. He works hard to earn money, and she throws it away in making merry with her friends. If he loses patience, she propitiates him with caresses. He lives solely for her, but she preserves an attitude of reserve towards him and is stupidly coquettish, easily attracted by other men, an all too tender confidante to her unmarried women friends. The society which she introduces into his house is a perfect menagerie of abandoned persons. Another yet more unhappy husband appears on the scene and confides in Axel. His wife has been a drunkard for many years, his daughters, who are still quite young, have had their minds polluted, but he allows them to be with their mother because he loves her. The dialogue between man and wife is a continual dispute with really clever variations on a limited theme. Here, as in The Father, there is the same reasoning of the great mind with the small one, which ends by the great mind becoming perplexed, yet always anxious to resume the fight. Final result: the woman is cast out and the man finds that his life is not worth living.
In another story, called The Creditors, we find the same woman and the same man, but this time the man is split in two halves—the one half consists of a great mind and the other of a sensitive nervous system. The sensitive nervous system becomes epileptic from exhaustion brought about by the efforts of the great mind (who has lived so long without a better half) to concentrate its energies and rub up its dialectics to the sharpness of a razor. By virtue of this dialectic razor the breach between Adolf and Thecla is completed, but when she throws herself sobbing over the husband who is stricken before her eyes, the great mind is thunderstruck. Is it possible that she loved him after all?
In his drama, Miss Julia, the instincts of the upper and lower classes rebound upon one another with terrific fury. John, the son of the maid-servant, who is the best male character that Strindberg has ever created, gains the victory in a brutal struggle with his wife. In this piece Strindberg seemed to assert his deliverance from the clutches of woman, and afterwards, in his Playing with Fire, the man conquers again. A superficial abuse of the opponent is the inevitable accompaniment of a victory, and in By the Open Sea, the super-man triumphs over the dubious maiden, whose obvious dissoluteness he—the noble man with the great intellect—is extraordinarily slow in perceiving, and after seriously compromising her, he leaves her unmarried as a punishment.
Strindberg’s next novel, Tschandala, is one of his least known works; as literature it is of comparatively small importance, but as a contribution to the psychology of the author it is an exceedingly valuable production.
Strindberg had gone to spend the summer in a country lodging where the proprietors are notoriously bad people. An ordinary man would have perceived the fact at once, but Strindberg’s imagination began to work and swelled itself into a book of gigantic proportions. The outward circumstances remain the same, but the scene is pushed back a century and becomes a war between the patrician with the great mind and the plebeians with the small minds, who do all that they possibly can to ensnare him and to bring about his ruin. The only reason given is the envy felt by inferior minds and small souls for the great and noble. It is difficult to understand how a learned and distinguished man can exist with his wife and children amid such extremely revolting surroundings as those described, unless he is too poor to make a change; it is still more difficult to understand why he should have any dealings with the populace, unless it is that he takes a psychological interest in their study. The landlady’s gipsy lover, who rules the house, has got him almost in his power, when the distracted lodger resolves on a plan whereby to annihilate him, well knowing that the ignorant man is subject to superstitious fear. He allures him into the meadow at night, and by the aid of a magic lantern he causes superhuman figures to pass before him. The trick is successful. The tormented and ignorant landlord dies from his fear of ghosts.
This single instance proves to how great an extent Strindberg works upon his own experiences, and it also shows that his imagination is of a nature to magnify everything to a degree that is quite immense. It is a characteristic trait in his nature. His imagination is not the weak, tame, conventional imagination of a bourgeois, which is elsewhere commonly met with in literature. It is the imagination of a savage, in which every impression is echoed a thousandfold on the sounding-board of fear. It is fresh as the wind that blows from the mountains and no less incessant. It is always at first hand, and that is the secret of its power. After reading Strindberg you may raise objections against his arguments, but at the moment you are forced to agree with him. There has never been an author who could convince with such brutal authority as he.
As long as you are under his immediate influence, everything seems possible, even probable. While recognising the truth of the principal traits, you forget the numerous errors that are never absent, the superabundance of evil qualities which he never omits to pile upon his enemies—woman and the lower orders—with both of whom he once felt himself related, and by whom he now feels himself pursued.
The second reason of his immense influence is that he is such a perfect son of this torn, restless, over-stimulated age, this age with its combination of decadence and barbarism. His writings are full of the plebeian snobbishness, the moralising hypocrisy, the perverse instincts of the sons of the present day, while at the same time they contain the direct opposite: the superhuman effort to rise above himself, to attain beyond good and evil, the unbaptised, grandiose sensuousness, the indignation against feminism and the cult of woman. His is the cry of an indignant nature in a corrupt civilisation. His is the duplicate personality of to-day, cankered and yet healthy, at once the whited sepulchre of the dead past and the vessel of the future. He reflects his secret sufferings, his half-conscious untruthfulness, his conscious boasting, the god and the beast in him.
Yet all combined could not have made his name a torch which will burn long and be held for that which it is not—one of the eternal stars.
It was a twofold influence that helped to create the red flame which proceeds from him: his language, in the first place, which only produces its true effect in the original. German gives it quite a different character, harsh and barren. But in Swedish it is like the sea that breaks upon the shore and thunders from afar, like the trumpet that brays its battle signal through the night, like the short hollow beat of fortune: “I am there, I am there!”
There are northern writers who can be rendered in German, taught new nuances, enriched with new words and new rhythm, and in whom the symphonies of the German language may be heard to advantage. But if any one tries to translate Strindberg the result is disappointing; in Swedish the sound is like bell metal, in German it resembles tin.
Materialism is the second influence which makes Strindberg a giant of his age. He has the materialist’s philosophy of life, the materialist’s ideal, the materialist’s cult of the intellect, and the materialist’s interpretation of the sexes. However deep the problem, his interpretation is always flat. In his descriptions everything is clear, sharp and rectangular; he is like an inquisitor who only enquires into that which lies above the threshold of consciousness, and only sees the growth on the rough, hard surface. The rich fruitful soil in the unseen, where everything that exists must grow organically like the seed in mother earth, is as good as undiscovered by the great and noble mind of the materialist.
As a materialist he does not acknowledge the mystic element—which is love—in the relations between man and woman; but the union, without love, of two persons of culture leads in course of time to degeneration, and this degeneration he has always very consistently described.