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patience suffers not at all that some others surpass him in hardiness. He is always eagerly on the band-wagon of new efforts and always prompt to give over those that lag.

In 1888 he wrote to his publisher, Bonnier: 'Zolaism, with its evocation and employment of nature, seems to be stirring up its last waves. Do not be surprised that I refuse to bring up the rear with the baggage train, I who am accustomed to march in the van.' To march in the van that was his motto, his daily wish, and perhaps his caprice.

It must be added that Strindberg's attitude, which is that of the watcher who scans all the universe, is not so extraordinary in Scandinavia. The literatures of small countries are more closely related than those of the great nations to the movements which stir among all nations. They follow with especial vigilance, precision, and sensitiveness, everything, from the greatest shocks to the least oscillations. The mass of these literatures is not enough to stay the flow, backward and forward, of the thought of powerful civilizations, any more than a wave in the great human currents. They are constantly swept under and sometimes almost rooted up. The miracle- one of the finest among human efforts is that so many resist and raise so proudly against the invader an immovable citadel and a supreme refuge.

Swedish literature is one of these. It has always been a field of battle where Germanism and Latinism, the East and the West, the people of the sea and those of the continents engaged in interminable combats. This struggle finds its place in the heart of man. Every cultivated Swede, that is to say, every polyglot Swede, knows that in his thought the German, Frenchman, Englishman, Italian, Russian, North American, challenge each other, struggle together, even destroy one another. He

gets used to guests who are often tyrannic. He appeals to them, seeks them as examples, and is ceaselessly afraid of being surpassed by them. The vulgar copy our fashions, attaching themselves to what is ephemeral. The sturdy spirits make another choice, and one rarely encounters elsewhere men SO widely informed, so open to every breath of contemporary life.

The Scandinavian peoples still remain conquerors of the intellectual sort. The Vikings continue to skim our oceans and to ravage our provinces. Faithful to the tradition of his race and of his land, Strindberg is king there by the very amplitude of his desires, the boldness of his excursions, and the extent of his rapine.

In literature the right of conquest is absolute. Still, the annexation must not be a mere robbery, and one naturally asks what happens to the fair prey that is reft from us. Strindberg, as I have said, boasts without ceasing of being himself. What he takes from us and from others neither embarrasses him nor makes him dull. These are only opinions, forms of art, technical processes. Artist, poet, and painter, but not thinker, in spite of his penetration and his brilliant intuition, he subdues and directs these at the bidding of his madman's heart. With them he covers his sombre ardor; they are so many masks through which his keen sarcastic glance peers.

It is precisely this aspect which fascinates us. These are the transports of the heart and passion, which allure us and draw us back again to the most moving of all spectacles, that of gigantic struggle and of desperate effort made by a man to dominate the fatalities of life, to burst asunder our limitations, and to escape from the condition of mankind.

Romantic, naturalist, mystic or magician, historian, dramatist, novelist,

essayist it is the monster himself who interests us, this sad and marvelous Titan, and not his momentary formula. Whatever that formula may chance to be, his true richness is his gift of seeing and depicting, his word-mastery, his eloquence, the sometimes appalling poetry of his sincerity and sorrow. It is the world of visions that dwells in him, the same that his pagan ancestors dressed sometimes in Italian gold or in Byzantine silk, and that have within them a complete mythology, the dazzling image of a fantastic Valhalla.

Of no other author could one say so justly, 'His work is his life.' Life and work are so intimately wedded, that to seek arbitrarily to separate them is to risk making one or the other unintelligible. The greater part of the blunders which overwhelm the memory of Strindberg, and the strange mistakes of which French commentators upon him have been guilty, spring from this source: failure to see that his fate and his monumental literary heritage cannot suffer separate consideration.

Strindberg, who was more keenly conscious of this indissoluble unity than anyone else, comes to our aid here. We have a series of his volumes giving us the key to his work and his character. This series, called The Son of a Servant. is not only the fundamental source, and up to this time the only one, to which his biographers have recourse, but it constitutes a veritable autobiography of the most valuable kind.

His other books are all made of his flesh and blood, but these bring us their living commentary, fill up the gaps, explain the transitions, unroll before us in connected scenes the evolution that he has elsewhere painted in great separate pictures. He himself attached to this portion of his work an especial value. In 1886 he wrote to Albert Bonnier: 'A man's life in five volumes is not a caprice; three years have ripened my

resolution. It is like selling yourself to a medical school; but what does it matter when you are dead and others can profit from your corpse?' With regard to The Writer, he wrote: 'It is the story of my books, my own criticism and opinion on my own work... the story of my books, their surroundings, circumstances, ideas, execution, and a commentary on them.'

Only one fragment of this autobiography is known in France, A Fool's Confession. Strindberg wrote it in French (September 1887 to March 1888), but a German version (1893) preceded publication in France (1895). In it Strindberg tells the story of his first marriage. He had at first intended to publish without comment the correspondence relative to this episode of his life; but his publisher dissuaded him for fear of scandal, though not without difficulty, as is attested by the bitter reply which he brought upon himself: 'It is true that the peace of mind of several outsiders is involved in this affair. The question is whether the interests of individuals ought not be neglected in view of the importance of the publication of a veracious narrative of a whole life. I have sacrificed my own repose and given over my own person. Can't others risk their skins in a great and worthy enterprise? My book is not an Ehrenrettung or a book of purification. It is the analysis of a soul, an anatomical psychology.'

Albert Bonnier's resistance having prevailed, Strindberg resigned himself to the novel as the form to be employed. The letters were none the less preserved, and they appeared last year in a posthumous collection (He and She). They permit an instructive comparison, for the critic can here determine Strindberg's method and the sincerity of his avowals. He offers to posterity a true confession, a work so unique and so audacious, which lets in so crude a light

upon the author's face, and brings to general psychology and to the knowledge and understanding of our time so precious a contribution, that it will suffice to make the name of Strindberg live through the future; and perhaps when his other books are forgotten, these letters will remain as a sort of testimony whose witness and whose terrible validity humanity will not dare to refuse.

When Strindberg wrote them, he regarded them as his supreme act, the final manifestation of his intellectual life. He recurs to this idea several times in the letters which we have just quoted: 'A sentiment which is concerned with the winding up of my affairs, perhaps a testament! The taste for literature is dead in me until I shall have finished my promenade across this dolorous existence.'

Perhaps this opinion was not necessary to urge him to absolute veracity. It did not the less contribute to relieve him of the last scruples which might rest on him. Public confessions, confessions in extremis, the voice of a dying man, tremble with an uneven accent; Strindberg believed himself to be dying. He is sincere, and the best witness to his sincerity is the violence of his accusations. A judge of himself, he spares neither his contemporaries nor society. All his fury bursts in this recital like the speech of a prosecuting attorney. No thought of contrition, but a mad frenzy, almost a perverted kind of joy, at opening his hurts, at displaying his wounds, all bloody, even the most secret and humiliating.

Two models haunted him: Goethe's Poetry and Truth and Rousseau's Confessions. He equals the first in the lucidity which he shows in the analysis of his own states of mind, a faculty rarely accorded to artists. Goethe fills us with admiration when he explains the genesis of Werther; Strindberg is not inferior

to him when he sets forth the origins of Master Olof; but he is much closer to Jean-Jacques in temperament, in the sympathy of their ideas, and in a host of similar points which make one question sometimes whether one is not dealing with the same man.

When he began to write The Son of a Servant in Switzerland, Strindberg discovered Rousseau. What an adventure! By his plebeian origin, his innate democracy, his hereditary jealousy, and the suffering which he endured, by his natural eloquence, his fundamental lyricism, his delirious idea of being persecuted, his cynicism, his moralizing tendencies, his nature cult and his disdain of society, Rousseau prefigures Strindberg. Father and son, a relationship which does not exclude contrasts, do not bear closer resemblance to one another. Strindberg recognized his kin, and though he did not, and indeed could not, avow the paradox which established the undeniable romantic as the founder of Swedish naturalism, the evidence of the relationship startled him.

Their lots were similar and their misfortunes twin; a century apart fate repeated itself in detail. Strindberg lived over whole scenes from the New Héloïse. The delirium and the passionate sophisms of Saint-Preux had been the charm and torture of his days and nights, though he never said so. Wolmar wrote to his wife's lover: "The wiseest and dearest of women has just opened her heart to her happy husband. He thinks you worthy to have been loved by her and he opens his house to you. You shall not go away from here without leaving a friend.' Strindberg had such letters from a captain of the Swedish guard, from which he was to give extracts in A Fool's Confession.

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Such meetings of their minds, less fortuitous than one might think, exerted a decided influence. Without ac

tual imitation - for he never imitated

Strindberg composed The Son of a Servant under the influence of Rousseau. He owed to him the confirmation of his own scheme. An example was a perpetual spur to him. Moreover, it did not displease him to invoke illustrious forerunners who should serve him as apologists in the eyes of timorous readers. He cleared himself through Rousseau, just exactly as he was to use George Sand and Musset to refute the objections of his publisher to the publication of He and She.

He is sincere. He dissects pitilessly his own heart, his life, and the life going on about him. He is a painter so scrupulous as to characters and things that they are reborn through his pen, as if by the phenomena of necessary growth, according to their law, their volume, and their light, and they could not have sprung from reality in an aspect different from that which he assigns to them. Nothing human is foreign to him; no eye more like a perfect mirror ever contemplated the universe.

Does this mean that one ought to read him without criticism? It would be doing him an ill office to say that. He does not lie, he does not trim down the facts, he does not disfigure, but he does comment. He has too much prejudice; he comments and pretends to demonstrate; his narrative approaches falsehood and still pretends to be demonstrating. His story goes to the limit of his idea of the moment. One has to read him critically and always supply both testimony and exegesis.

Does he recall his infancy and youth? Do not forget that these memories found him in full tilt against domestic institutions and society itself. The fury of a violent emotional crisis turned him against woman. His misogyny, of which he never cured himself, is the ransom of a great love. His misanthropy knew nothing but enemies. Hence the black

colors in which he daubs everything save the scenes of spring, the sweet grace and freshness of which he could not deny.

Born in Stockholm January 22, 1849, he belonged to a family originally from Angermanland, a province of the Northland where infiltrations of Finnish blood are not rare. His grandfather, Zacharias Strindberg, a grocer of the capital, had manifested artistic proclivities, and published some little dramas in the sentimental taste of the time. His father, Oskar Strindberg, grocer and commissioner of navigation, had married, late in life, an inn servant. The poet was born in a period of semipoverty, but does not seem to have been ill used by those about him. He was a precocious child of great vivacity of spirit, open and free, beloved by his family. Such, at least, are the assertions of his countrymen.

Compare what they say with the story that he tells of his infancy. The Son of a Servant must be considered critically. So far as Strindberg adds to his memories in the interpretation, and where he permits the rancors, hates, and vengeances of the man to come in pell-mell, one cannot deny that he exceeds the higher truth. The author anticipates events, but he does not falsify their nature. The child would not analyze, but he would carry in himself the germ of all the troubles which were to break out and torture the adult, that impatient imagination, that pathological sensibility, and that temperament

of a man flayed alive,' whose vigor he was never to temper and whose painful ardor he was never to calm.

All of Strindberg is in his autobiography, from the first pages. It is a replica of the Confessions of Rousseau, a document of the same order and importance, if not always of the same quality. Neither the prolixities nor the short-cuts of a stormy existence can be wholly matters of indifference.

OUR RURAL REPORTER

BY P. SIROPOTININ

From Petrograd Pravda, February 23, 24 (BOLSHEVIST PROPAGANDA NEWSPAPER)

The Kostroma-Polotsk train. - The people in the car for Kostroma are of various sorts: there is a speculator, the wife of a workman on the railroad, a woman carrying provisions, a city man on a leave of absence to look after family affairs, and many Red soldiers demobilized or on furlough. The farther we get from Petrograd the more the influence of the village is felt. By the time we leave Obuxovo, long conversations have started on what life is like in Russia now, about what and where you can get things, and how much they cost. Over the other voices rises that of a man formerly of Yaroslav, who may be a speculator or a Soviet specialist in forests, milk, or something else. He discourses eloquently about the wrongs of the peasants whose grain, cattle, hay, and other products are taken away by force. He exaggerates, giving isolated facts, so as to make a hopeless picture of the condition of the country people and of the wickedness and malice of the Soviet authorities.

The

Red soldiers are perplexed and either protest or ask questions. One happy fellow relates with enthusiasm stories of our military victories over the Whites; but listens with interest to the daily trifles of village life. He has not yet seen the village where he is to live, but already his nature of peasant proprietor is aroused, and by anticipation he instinctively feels hostile to the Communist regulations. Of course some Red soldiers are better instructed in our ideas and stand up for the village grain levies and labor conscription.

But they are a minority, and are heckled and fairly overwhelmed with alleged facts.

The burden of all these stories is: They take everything from the peasant and give him nothing. Where is equality, where justice?

Ribinsk.-I am spending the night at the house of a certain house-painter. Again there is talk about village matters, again a recital of abuses, ignorance, Soviet bureaucratism. An old workman says: 'Not long ago a comrade and I reckoned it up, and it seems that in our Building Division there are for each workman four managers. And in the 'Soviet of People's Economy' there are one hundred and sixty-five employees; managers, commissars, technical engineers, foremen, yes, and the devil knows who-all; and they all write and give orders and there is n't a grain of usefulness that comes out of it. We are working now according to a fixed schedule. We wanted to do the work more quickly, but it was arranged just the opposite. When a thing is to be done in two days, we take two weeks to it. To get a hundred pounds of plaster, paint, or cement, you have to scurry around for a week or two. You wait and wait until they write out an order, then you wait for the signature on it, and later on it turns out that it has to be written over again because the things that are needed are not in the warehouse for which it is drawn. You happen to know in what warehouse the plaster and paint is; you ask them to

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