August Strindberg died at Stockholm
On May 14, 1912, just ten days after the first of
his plays given in English in the United States had
completed a month’s engagement. This play
was “The Father,” which, on April 9, 1912,
was produced at the Berkeley Theatre in New York, the
same little theatre that witnessed in 1894 the first
performance in this country of Ibsen’s “Ghosts.”
It happened that August Lindberg,
the eminent Swedish actor and friend of Strindberg
[who, by the way, was the first producer of “Ghosts”
in any language], was visiting this country and came
to see a performance of “The Father.”
His enthusiasm over the interpretation given Strindberg,
in the English rendering of the play as well as in
the acting, led him to cable a congratulatory message
to Strindberg; and upon departing for Stockholm, he
asked for some of the many letters of appreciation
from significant sources which the production of “The
Father” had called forth. These he wished
to give to Strindberg as further assurance “that
he has,” to use Herr Lindberg’s words,
“the right representatives in this country.”
It is gratifying to those who esteem it a rare privilege
to be the introducers of Strindberg’s powerful
dramatic art to the American stage to know that he
finally found his genius recognized on this side of
the ocean.
“Comrades,” the first
play in the present volume, belongs to the same momentous
creative period as “The Father” and “Countess
Julie,” although there is little anecdotic history
attaching to this vigorous comedy. It was written
in Denmark, where Strindberg, after finishing “The
Father” in Switzerland in 1887, went with his
family to live for two years, and was published March
21, 1888.
Although the scene of the comedy is
laid in Paris, all the characters are Swedish, which
may be accounted for by the fact that the feminist
movement, of which “Comrades” is a delicious,
stinging satire, had been more agitated at that time
in Scandinavia than elsewhere. That Paris was
chosen as a background for this group of young artists
and writers was probably reminiscent of the time,
the early eighties, when Strindberg with his wife
and children left Sweden and, after spending some time
with a colony of artists not far from Fontainebleau,
came to Paris, where there were many friends of other
days, and established themselves in that “sad,
silent Passy,” as Strindberg’s own chronicle
of those times reads. There he took his walks
in the deserted arcades of the empty Trocadero Palace,
back of which he lived; went to the Theatre Francais,
where he saw the great success of the day, and was
startled that “an undramatic bagatelle with
threadbare scenery, stale intrigues and superannuated
theatrical tricks, could be playing on the foremost
stage of the world;” saw at the Palais de l’Industrie
the triennial exhibition of art works, “the
crème de la crème of three salons,
and found not one work of consequence.”
After some time he came to the conclusion that “the
big city is not the heart that drives the pulses,”
but that it is “the boil that corrupts and poisons,”
and so betook himself and his family to Switzerland,
where they lived in the vicinity of Lake Leman, which
environment was made use of years later in the moving
one-act play, “Facing Death,” presented
herewith.
“Pariah,” the other one-act
play appearing in this volume, is the generally recognized
masterpiece of all the short one-act plays. The
dialogue is so concentrated that it seems as if not
one line could be cut without the whole structure
falling to pieces, and in these terse speeches a genius
is revealed that, with something of the divine touch,
sounds the depths of the human heart and reveals its
inmost thoughts. “Pariah” was published
in 1890 and “Facing Death” in 1898.
The period of Strindberg’s sojourn
in Switzerland, 1884-87, was most important in the
evolution of the character and work of the man who,
throughout his career, was to engage himself so penetratingly
and passionately in the psychology of woman, and love,
and the problems of marriage, as to acquire the reputation,
undeserved though it was, of woman-hater. That
this observation and analysis of woman was not induced
by natural antipathy to the sex, nor by unhappiness
in his own married experience, is made clear by the
facts of his life up to the time when such investigation
was undertaken. What, then, did sway him to such
a choice of theme? Examination of the data of
this period from Strindberg’s own annals reveals
the following influences: Ibsen from his Norwegian
throne had hailed woman and the laborer as the two
rising ranks of nobility, and Strindberg asked himself
if this was ironic, as usual, or prophetic. Feminine
individualism was the cult of the hour. The younger
generation had, through the doctrines of evolution,
become atheistic. Strindberg tells of asking
a young writer how he could get along without God.
“We have woman instead,” was the reply.
This was the last stage of Madonna worship! And
how had it happened that the new generation had replaced
God with woman? “God was the remotest source;
when he failed they grasped at the next, the mother.
But then they should at least choose the real mother,
the real woman, before whom, no matter how strong
his spirit, man will always bow when she appears with
her life-giving attributes. But the younger generation
had pronounced contempt for the mother, and in her
place had set up the loathsome, sterile, degenerate
amazon-the blue-stocking!”
Earnestly pondering these matters,
Strindberg at length decided to write a book about
woman, a subject, he declares, which up to this time
he had not wanted to think about, as he himself “lived
in a happy erotic state, ennobled and beautified by
the rejuvenating and expiatory arrival of children.”
But nevertheless he decided to write such a book, and
so with sympathy and much old-fashioned veneration
for motherhood the task was undertaken.
Regarding the mother as down-trodden,
he wanted to think out a means for her deliverance.
To obtain a clear vision he chose as a method the
delineation of as large a number as possible of marriage
cases that he had seen-and he had seen
many, as most of his contemporary friends were married.
Of these he chose twelve, the most characteristic,
and then he went to work. When he had written
about half that number, he stopped and reviewed the
collection. The result was entirely different
from what he had expected.
Then chance came to his aid, for in
the pension where he was living, thirty women were
stopping. He saw them at all meals, between meals,
and all about, idle, gossiping, pretentious, longing
for pleasure. “There were learned ladies
who left the Saturday Review behind them on the chairs;
there were literary ladies, young ladies, beautiful
ladies.” When he saw their care-free, idle
life, with concern he asked himself: “Whom
do these parasites and their children live on?”
Then he discovered the bread-winners. “The
husband sat in his dark office far away in London;
the husband was far away with a detachment in Tonkin;
the husband was at work in his bureau in Paris; the
husband had gone on a business trip to Australia.”
And the three men who were there gave him occasion
to reflect about the so-called female slave. “There
was a husband who had a fiercely hot attic room, while
the wife and daughter had a room with a balcony on
the first floor. An elderly man passed by, who,
although himself a brisk walker, was now leading his
sickly wife step by step, his hand supporting her
back when making an ascent; he carried her shawls,
chair, and other little necessities, reverently, lovingly,
as if he had become her son when she had ceased to
be his wife. And there sat King Lear with his
daughter,-it was terrible to see.
He was over sixty, had had eight children, six of whom
were daughters, and who, in his days of affluence,
he had allowed to manage his house and, no doubt,
the economy thereof. Now he was poor, had nothing,
and they had all deserted him except one daughter who
had inherited a small income from an aunt. And
the former giant, who had been able to work for a
household of twelve, crushed by the disgrace of bankruptcy,
was forced to feel the humiliation of accepting support
from his daughter, who went about with her twenty-nine
women friends, receiving their comfort and condolence,
weeping over her fate, and sometimes actually wishing
the life out of her father.”
The immediate result of all this observation
and consequent analysis was the collection of short
stories in two volumes called “Marriages,”
the first of which, published in 1884, gave rise to
Strindberg’s reputation of being a pessimist,
and the second, two years later, to that of woman-hater,
which became confirmed by the portrayals of women in
his realistic dramas that soon followed, notably that
of Laura in “The Father.” That part
of the woman-hater legend which one encounters most
often is that Strindberg was revealing his own marital
miseries in the sex conflicts of these dramas, particularly
in “The Father,” notwithstanding the fact
that this play was written five years before his first
marriage was dissolved, and little more than two years
after his avowed hesitancy to undertake the dissection
of womankind on account of the “happy erotic
state” in which he was living.
And that his analytical labors and
personal experiences, far from bringing about an acquired
aversion for woman, never even let him be warned,
is attested by the fact of his having founded three
families. One is forced to suspect that instead
of being a woman-hater, he was rather a disguised
and indefatigable lover of woman, and that his wars
on woman and his fruitless endeavors to get into harmony
with the other half of the race were, fundamentally,
a warring within himself of his own many-sided, rich
nature. He said of himself that he had been sentenced
by his nature to be the faultfinder, to see the other
side of things. He hated the Don Juans among
men as intensely as he did the lazy parasites among
women-the rich and spoiled ones who declaimed
loudest about woman’s holy duties as wife and
mother, but whose time was given up to being hysterical
and thinking out foolish acts,-these women
enraged him.
However, the psychology of woman represents
but one phase of Strindberg. In a book called
“The Author,” styled by him “a self-evolutionary
history,” which was written during the germinating
period of the realistic dramas, but was not given
out for publication until 1909, there is a foreword
which contains the following significant avowal from
the Strindberg of the last years: “The author
had not arrived in 1886; perhaps only came into being
then. The book presented herewith is consequently
only of secondary interest as constituting a fragment;
and the reader should bear in mind that it was written
over twenty years ago. The personality of the
author is consequently as unfamiliar to me as to the
reader-and as unsympathetic. As he
no longer exists, I can no longer assume any responsibility
for him, and as I took part in his execution
I believe I have the right to regard the past as expiated
and stricken out of the Big Book.” The “execution”
in 1898 referred to was the spiritual crisis through
which Strindberg passed when he emerged from the abysmal
pessimism of “The Inferno;” then began
the gradual return to spiritual faith which, in the
end, caused him to declare himself a Swedenborgian.
The play, “Easter,” included
in the present collection, belongs to this period;
it is a strange mingling of symbolism and realism,
bearing the spiritual message of the resurrection.
It was the most popular play produced at the Intimate
Theatre in Stockholm, having been given there over
two hundred times; and in Germany, also, it has been
one of the plays most appreciated. That “Easter”
is representative of the last phase, spiritually,
of the great man is evidenced by the closing incident
of his life. His favorite daughter, Kirtlin, was
in the room as death approached. Strindberg called
to her, and asked for the Bible; receiving the book,
he opened it, and placing it across his breast, said,
“This is the best book of all,” and then,
with his last breath, “Now everything personal
is obliterated.”
E. O. and W. O.