L. Lind-af-Hageby

“ Strindberg was content to dwell for a time amongst the literati of different nationalities who had assembled in Paris. Free from the stings of the bourgeois wasps upon whose nest he had trampled, he enjoyed the fresh air and the keen winds in the great republic of mind. Like other men he knew the exhilaration which follows upon the jeu d'esprit in the highways of thought, the intellectual union which rejuvenates and fatigues by its fertility. But unlike most men he soon tired of even the best company, and the craving for solitude and independence became imperative. ”

“ I belong to the great and mystic brotherhood of mountain worshippers. We are a motley crowd drawn from all lands and all ages, and we are certainly a peculiar people. The sight and smell of the mountain affect us like nothing else on earth. In some of us they arouse excessive physical energy and lust of conquest in a manner not unlike that which suggests itself to the terrier at the sight of a rat. We must master the heights above, and we become slaves to the climbing impulse, itinerant purveyors of untold energy, marking the events of our lives on peaks and passes. ”

“ There is something infinitely pathetic in Strindberg's life-long conflict with social injustice and fatuity. He was like a man digging deep for the straggling roots of a large tree. Sometimes he found one, but he could never put his foot on all at the same time. Social evolution, with its infinite variety of hidden forces, which burst into foliage on the tree of good and evil, yielded but few secrets to his spade. ”

“ For the darkness with which we are afflicted lay heavily around me, and seemed greater even than the blindness of the eyes. The war has brought the mystery of death to our hearts with pitiless insistence. Every bullet that finds its mark kills more than the soldier who falls. Ties of love and friendship are shattered hour by hour and day by day, as the guns of war roar out their message of destruction. ”

“ Axel. You look as if you enjoyed my defeat, Bertha. Oh, I feel a great hatred of you stirring within me!
Bertha. I look happy, perhaps, because I have had a success, but when one is tied to a man who cannot rejoice in one's happiness it is difficult to feel sorry when he is unhappy.
Axel. I don't know what has happened, but it seems to me that we have become enemies now. The struggle for a position has come between us, and we can no longer be friends. ”

“ As I search for more self-revelation in my books by mountain-lovers, I find myself observed through the window. It is only a cow on her way to the hollow tree into which the water courses out of the earth. But the cow brings me back to the strenuous Alpine life, and I find myself concluding, as I replace the books on their shelves, that I do not care why men climb so long as they climb in spirit and body. ”

“ The story of a young couple's improvident marriage, of their enjoyment of the home with its brand-new things—from the sky-blue quilts to the well-cut glasses—of the careless happiness which is young and foolish, and forgets all about work and duty and the wolves without until the birth of the child and bankruptcy disturb the dream, is an imperishable gem of human description. ”

“ The mountains sought her by their beauty and called forth the true mystic's ecstasy of communion. Mystics of all times and all religions have found inspiration and strength of spirit on the hilltops; they have forsaken the haunts of men for the silence of the heights, preparing themselves by meditation and self-purification to receive the Beatific Vision. They have gone up alone in anguish and uncertainty, they have come down inspired bearers of transcendental tidings to men. These messengers of the spirit have known the joys of illumination and the secret of the strength of the hills. ”

“ In these plays we have the eternal questions of the human mind, the joys of illusion, the sorrows of knowledge, the fruits of sin and hatred, the rise through pain and suffering, the soul's battle with relentless [Pg 305] fate, the awful mystery of existence, and the ultimate hope of something better to come, cast into the weird and haunting shapes of the people of Strindberg's inner world; the souls that are at once real and unreal, mad and sane, acting in the solid world of matter, and held in shadowy bondage by the mists of dreamland. ”

“ He had the nature-mystic's thirst for a touch of the untamed power of Nature, for communion with the magnificence of death, shaking the mountain with wind and falling snow, with leaping rock and earth-eating 19 torrent. Such would fain die that they may experience the joys of being possessed by Nature. For they have entered on the marriage of life and death, heaven and hell, and out of the roaring cataclysm of destruction they rise winged with a new life. ”

“ Amongst the artists and intellectual dilettanti who assembled in the Red Room of Berns Restaurant in the evening, and whose hard struggle for bread in the day formed such a sharp contrast to the comfort of the time-servers, Strindberg found the Dionysian madness, without which the sanity of the rest of the world would have been unbearable. There is still life in the making, goodness inviolable, a brotherhood that woos the joy and beauty of life, contemptuous of the badges and labels of Society! ”

“ Voltaire is always expected to contemplate the world with a truly Voltairean smile of irony, Rousseau to cling innocently to Nature, Swift to see humanity only from the satirist's vantage-point.
The man of genius who, conscious of the limitations of a single point of view, seeks another, who strides across the hilltops of past thought in rapid search of a higher one, who hugs philosophies and drops them, holds faiths and deserts them, is a phenomenon before which the critic feels uneasy. ”

“ Do culture and morality grow like flowers in a garden, obedient to the will and taste of the gardener, but destined to fade and die with the turn of the season? Do not 92 the civilizations of the past with their perfection of knowledge and art mock our faith in the permanency of human achievement? Babylon and Egypt, Athens and Rome carried the seed of corruption within their husk of glory. They had elaborate systems of social organization, of laws, of elucidation of the mysteries of life. They saw beauty and pursued it, in colour and sound, by word and chisel. ”

“ He dissected the human heart, laid bare its meanness, its uncleanliness; made men and women turn on each other with sudden understanding and loathing, and walked away smiling at the evil he had wrought. He turned on himself with savage hatred, and in books, bearing the mark of the flagellant and reflecting the agony of a soul in torment, he pointed to his sins and his stripes. ”

“ But we—how proud I am of that “we”!—who have chosen hard labour on the mountain know something which the mere visitors (though they be members of many Alpine Clubs) know not. We have a sense of home which no other habitation can impart—a passionate love of the soil, a unity with the little patch that is our own, bringing joys undimmed by any descriptions of other-worldly possessions. Our trees may be wrecked by an avalanche, our garden plot may be obliterated by a land slip; the stone walls we build up in defiance of the snow are always pulled down by mountain sprites. ”

“ Strindberg the atheist, Strindberg the scientist, Strindberg the spiritualist, Strindberg the mystic, Strindberg the sensualist, and Strindberg the ascetic, took equally important parts in his theatre of life. The critic met him day by day in different attire and pose, incarnations of the elusive self which was stage-manager of this extraordinary performance. A soul in conflict with itself, good and evil, fair and foul; sparkling with life and tense with passion to create, he could not give us peace or contentment. ”

“ You talk of Divine guidance and the sanctification of life. How do you respect life and the teaching of Jesus Christ? Jesus said, 'Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute you.' You, His professed followers, bless war and its 109 orgies of hate. You stand by hypocritically thanking God for your own sanctity, whilst Christians drench battlefields with the blood of Christians. The abolition of war is the reform to which you should all bend your lives and direct your prayers. ”

“ Here Strindberg draws the shame and agony of the broken marriage-tie with bitter realism, and yet with a delicate touch of that all-human compassion before which the flowers of satire wither. The Baron and the Baroness have decided to separate, and proceedings for a deed of separation have been entered by the husband. There is a link between them which cannot be broken—the child whom they both love; and for his sake they are determined not to expose their differences before the hungry eyes of scandal-mongers. The husband is willing to let the mother have the custody of the child. ”

“ Negroes and negresses who have given offence to white people need harbour no illusions concerning the restraining influences of our Western civilization.
Like a mountain in eruption the war has thrown up the sordid passions, the hidden reserves of destructive hate and cruelty in our common human soul. In war all things are permissible. To murder, to maim, to 90 destroy, to deceive, to make hideous waste of fertile land, to cause weeping and wailing amongst the innocent—these are the necessities of warfare. They are the commonplace incidents of war. ”

“ Jean is an excellent valet, well-made, well-behaved, who knows when to show self-confidence and when to cringe. Lady Julie has graced the servants' dance with her presence. She has favoured Jean with such marked attention that the people have begun to gossip. Alone with him in the kitchen she encourages him to make love to her. The valet is uneasy; the man is eager to make himself master of the Count's daughter, but the servant shrinks from the sacrilege. But Lady Julie taunts him with his unmanliness, tempts him with her beauty, and the effervescence of her highly-strung nerves. ”

“ One is war and the other is peace. We may affectionately survey the hospitals and orphanages, the institutions for the blind and the mute, the asylums and the charities with which each belligerent country pays tribute to the virtues of the merciful life. Whatever we do, we cannot dispel the darkness by a frenzied denunciation of war. The monster is not outside ourselves; it is created and sustained by the hardness of our hearts and the obtuseness of our brains. The responsibility is ours in war as well as in peace. ”

“ The secret of Strindberg's great influence on the theatre of twenty years ago lay in this very conception of character. His men and women are alive, moving, changing, growing, shrinking in ceaseless response to the pressure of existence. He is the dramatist of the perpetuum mobile in the modern heart, the interpreter of inexhaustible discontent in himself and others. His personality vibrates in the dialogue, and lifts the idea of the play to the surface in every consecutive scene, but the artist in him is stronger than the idealogue. ”

“ The rejection of the crude theories of spiritualism is not altogether the result of wilful blindness. In our innermost minds, in the region beyond the grasp of the brain and its ready generalizations, we hunger for inexpressible reality, for life beyond the stars. We have eaten of the tree of sense-knowledge: we have seen, heard, felt, tasted. We want a reality above the traffic and deception of the senses. Vaguely, but insistently we feel the call to the life of the spirit, and when its definition eludes us, we prefer silence and faith. ”

“ One day an image of the Madonna, carried through the streets of Paris on a cart following a hearse, had strangely attracted him. Like Tasso's vision of the Virgin in the midst of his feverish torment by noises and tinkling bells, Strindberg's gaze on the image of all-merciful motherhood brought comfort. At first attracted to Catholic prayers, and to the ideal of the monastic life by the instinct which makes the man in pain seek an anodyne, he was gradually led to a deeper understanding of esoteric Christianity. ”

“ When we in our turn have learnt all the lessons of this miserable globe of folly, when we have mastered all the virtues and shed all the vices, when we long to be free from the trammels of sense and appetite and sickness and ambition, we are transferred to Mercury. Mercury is a highly evolved planet, a spiritualized existence, free from the obsessions of sex and greed, an abode of love and freedom. ”