Part 10 (1/2)
THE DAUGHTER. But what sort of food?
THE LAWYER. Cabbage is cheap, nouris.h.i.+ng, and good to eat.
THE DAUGHTER. For those who like cabbage--to me it is repulsive.
THE LAWYER. Why didn't you say so?
THE DAUGHTER. Because I loved you. I wanted to sacrifice my own taste.
THE LAWYER. Then I must sacrifice my taste for cabbage to you--for sacrifices must be mutual.
THE DAUGHTER. What are we to eat then? Fish? But you hate fish?
THE LAWYER. And it is expensive.
THE DAUGHTER. This is worse than I thought it!
THE LAWYER _(kindly)._ Yes, you see how hard it is.
And the symbolic representation of married life in terms of fish and cabbage is taken up again a little later:--
THE DAUGHTER. I fear I shall begin to hate you after this!
THE LAWYER. Woe to us, then! But let us forestall hatred. I promise never again to speak of any untidiness--although it is torture to me!
THE DAUGHTER. And I shall eat cabbage, though it means agony to me.
THE LAWYER. A life of common suffering, then! One's pleasure the other one's pain.
One feels that, however true to nature the drift of this may be, it is little more than bacilli of truth seen as immense through a microscope.
The agonies and tortures arising from eating cabbage and such things may, no doubt, have tragic consequences enough, but somehow the men whom these things put on the rack refuse to come to life in the imagination on the same tragic plane where Prometheus lies on his crag and Oedipus strikes out his eyes that they may no longer look upon his shame.
Strindberg is too anxious to make tragedy out of discomforts instead of out of sorrows. When he is denouncing woman as a creature who loves above all things to deceive her husband, his supreme way of expressing his abhorrence is to declare: ”If she can trick him into eating horse-flesh without noticing it, she is happy.” Here, and in a score of similar pa.s.sages, we can see how physical were the demons that endlessly consumed Strindberg's peace of mind.
His att.i.tude to women, as we find it expressed in _The Confession of a Fool, The Dance of Death_, and all through his work, is that of a man overwhelmed with the physical. He raves now with l.u.s.t, now with disgust--two aspects of the same mood. He turns from love to hatred with a change of front as swift as a drunkard's. He is the Mad Mullah of all the s.e.x-antagonism that has ever troubled men since they began to think of woman as a temptress. He was the most enthusiastic modern exponent of the point-of-view of that Adam who explained: ”The woman tempted me.”
Strindberg deliberately wrote those words on his banner and held them aloft to his generation as the summary of an eternal gospel. Miss Lind-af-Hageby tells us that, at one period of his life, he was sufficiently free from the physical obsessions of s.e.x to preach the equality of men and women and even to herald the coming of woman suffrage. But his abiding view of woman was that of the plain man of the nineteenth century. He must either be praising her as a ministering angel or denouncing her as a ministering devil--preferably the latter.
It would be nonsense, however, to pretend that Strindberg did not see at least one cla.s.s of women clearly and truly. The accuracy with which he portrays woman the parasite, the man-eater, the siren, is quite terrible. No writer of his day was so shudderingly conscious of every gesture, movement, and intonation with which the spider-woman sets out to lure the mate she is going to devour. It may be that he prophesies against the sins of women rather than subtly a.n.a.lyses and describes them as a better artist would have done. _The Confessions of a Fool_ is less a revelation of the soul of his first wife than an attack on her. But we must, in fairness to Strindberg, remember that in his violences against women he merely gives us a new rendering of an indictment that goes back to the beginning of history. The world to him was a long lane of oglings, down which man must fly in terror with his eyes shut and his ears covered. His foolishness as a prophet consists, not in his suspicions of woman regarded as an animal, but in his frothing at the mouth at the idea that she should claim to be treated as something higher than an animal. None the less, he denied to the end that he was a woman-hater. His denial, however, was grimly unflattering:--
I have said that the child is a little criminal, incapable of self-guidance, but I love children all the same. I have said that woman is--what she is, but I have always loved some woman, and been a father. Whoever, therefore, calls me a woman-hater is a blockhead, a liar, or a noodle. Or all three together.
s.e.x, of course, was the greatest cross Strindberg had to bear. But there were hundreds of other little changing crosses, from persecution mania to poverty, which supplanted each other from day to day on his back. He suffered continually both from the way he was made and from the way the world was made. His novels and plays are a literature of suffering. He reveals himself there as a man pursued by furies, a man without rest. He flies to a thousand distractions and hiding-places--drink and l.u.s.t and piano-playing, Chinese and chemistry, painting and acting, alchemy and poison, and religion. Some of these, no doubt, he honestly turns to for a living. But in his rush from one thing to another he shows the restlessness of a man goaded to madness. Not that his life is to be regarded as entirely miserable. He obviously gets a good deal of pleasure even out of his acutest pain. ”I find the joy of life in its violent and cruel struggles,” he tells us in the preface to _Miss Julia_, ”and my pleasure lies in knowing something and learning something.” He is always consumed with the greed of knowledge--a phase of his greed of domination. It is this that enables him to turn his inferno into a purgatory.
In his later period, indeed, he is optimist enough to believe that the sufferings of life cleanse and enn.o.ble. By tortuous ways of sin he at last achieves the simple faith of a Christian. He originally revolted from this faith more through irritation than from principle. One feels that, with happier nerves and a happier environment, he might easily have pa.s.sed his boyhood as the model pupil in the Sunday-school. It is significant that we find him in _The Confession of a Fool_ reciting Longfellow's _Excelsior_ to the first and worst of his wives. Strindberg may have been possessed of a devil; he undoubtedly liked to play the part of a devil; but at heart he was constantly returning to the Longfellow sentiment, though, of course, his hungry intellectual curiosity was something that Longfellow never knew. In his volume of fables, _In Midsummer Days_, we see how essentially good and simple were his ideas when he could rid himself of s.e.x mania and persecution mania.
Probably his love of children always kept him more or less in chains to virtue. Ultimately he yielded himself a victim, not to the furies, but to the still more remorseless pursuit of the Hound of Heaven. On his death-bed, Miss Lind tells us, he held up the Bible and said: ”This alone is right.” Through his works, however, he serves virtue best, not by directly praising it, but by his eagerly earnest account of the madness of the seven deadly sins, as well as of the seventy-seven deadly irritations. He has not the originality of fancy or imagination to paint virtue well. His genius was the genius of frank and destructive criticism. His work is a jumble of ideas and an autobiography of raw nerves rather than a revelation of the emotions of men and women. His great claim on our attention, however, is that his autobiography is true as far as the power of truth was in him. His pilgrim's progress through madness to salvation is neither a pretty nor a sensational lie. It is a genuine doc.u.ment. That is why, badly constructed though his plays and novels are, some of them have a fair chance of being read a hundred years hence. As a writer of personal literature, he was one of the bold and original men of his time.
XIV