August Strindberg: Selected Essays

This is the first fully edited translation of a series of essays by the great Swedish dramatist August Strindberg. The essays, edited and translated by Michael Robinson, have been selected for the light they shed, both directly and indirectly, on Strindberg's contribution to the European theatre firstly in such masterpieces of psychological realism as The Father and Miss Julie, and subsequently in those works, including A Dream Play and The Ghost Sonata, with which he largely established a basis for theatrical modernism. Together with the accompanying notes and commentary, these essays on psychology, history, painting, natural history and alchemy as well as the theatre help to clarify the multifaceted nature of Strindberg's project. Idiosyncratic and lively, they offer crucial insights into the intellectual and theatrical history of the later nineteenth century, while their personal nature draws the reader into an intimate relationship with the writer and his wide range of interests.

SELECTED ESSAYS

SELECTED ESSAYS by

AUGUST STRINDBERG

SELECTED, EDITED AND TRANSLATED BY

MICHAEL ROBINSON Professor of Scandinavian Studies University ofEastAnglia

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521563758 © Cambridge University Press 1996 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1996 This digitally printed first paperback version 2006 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Strindberg, August, 1849-1912. [Essays. English. Selections] Selected essays by August Strindberg / selected, edited and translated by Michael Robinson p. cm. ISBN 0 521 56375 5 I. Robinson, Michael, 1944- . II. Title. PT9804.R6 1996 839.74'6-dc20 95-26343 CIP ISBN-13 978-0-521-56375-8 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-56375-5 hardback ISBN-13 978-0-521-03441-8 paperback ISBN-10 0-521-03441-8 paperback

TillSiv Vad livet och stunden gav kan ingen ta fran oss.

Contents

Notes on the text

xi

Introduction

i

from Vivisections (1887) 'The Battle of the Brains' 'Nemesis Divina' 'Mysticism — For Now' 'Soul Murder (Apropos RosmersholmY

23 25 47 56 64

'On Modern Drama and Modern Theatre' (1889)

73

from Vivisections II (1894) T 'The Making of an Aspasia 'Nemesis Divina (Cont.)' 'The New Arts! or The Role of Chance in Artistic Creation' 'Whence We Have Come' 'Character a Role?'

87 89 92 97 103 108 in

'Cesarine' (1894) 'Deranged Sensations' (1894) 'In the Cemetery' (1896)

118 122 135

from Jardin des Plantes (1896) 'Introduction' ' T h e Death's Head Moth' 'Indigo and the Line of Copper' 'To the Heckler'

145 147 149 155 159

' O n the Action of Light in Photography' (1896) 'A Glance into Space' (1896)

160 165

ix

x

List of contents

'Edvard Munch's Exhibition (1896) 'The Synthesis of Gold' (1896) 'Contemporary Gold-Making' (1896) T h e Sunflower' (1896) 'The Mysticism of World History' (1903) 'August Strindberg on Himself (1909)

167 170 173 178 181 223

Notes and commentary Index

230 276

Notes on the text

Wherever possible references to Strindberg's works are to the new edition of Samlade Verk currently under publication (hereafter SV). Otherwise John Landquist's edition of Samlade Skrifter (Stockholm, 1912—20, hereafter SS) has been used. Volume and page number are given in arabic numerals. SgNM denotes Strindberg's so-called 'Grona sacken' (The Green Sack), encompassing the drafts, notes and manuscripts he originally preserved in a green portmanteau while travelling. These are now deposited, along with much other material, in the Royal Library Stockholm, in sixty-nine box files, transferred there from a previous deposition in Nordiska Museet. The inventory of the contents undertaken by Margareta Brundin and catalogued by Barbro Stahle Sjonell now enables an item in Grona sacken to be identified with some precision. Thus SgNM 15: 4,7 refers to Box 15, folder 4, page (or item) 7. (For later items identification is sometimes by Box only.) Letters 1 or 11 denotes Strindbergs Letters, selected, annotated, and translated by Michael Robinson (London and Chicago, 1992). Brev followed by a roman numeral refers to the ongoing Swedish edition of Strindberg's letters, edited by Torsten Eklund and Bjorn Meidal (Stockholm, 1948— ), and Inferno to the translation of Strindberg's autobiographical fiction by Mary Sandbach in Inferno and From an Occult Diary (Harmondsworth, 1979).

XI

Introduction

With the exception of the concluding interview, 'August Strindberg on Himself, which serves as an afterword to this selection, the majority of the essays published here come from two phases of Strindberg's career as a writer. They are also directly related to the two periods during which he produced his major achievements as a dramatist. Thus, the Vivisections of 1887 explores many of the themes and issues on which he focuses in the masterpieces of psychological naturalism, The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), Creditors (1888) and the series of short plays that he wrote between 1888 and 1892, while the later volume of Vivisections from 1894, the selection from Jardin des Plantes (1896) and the other pieces from the 1890s all testify to the spectacular intellectual and emotional process that Strindberg underwent during this period, which would in due course enable him to write several of the key works of modernist dramaturgy, beginning in 1898 with the first two parts of To Damascus. None of these collections is translated here in its entirety. The 1887 Vivisections also contains a brief causerie entitled 'Hallucinations', two complementary a clefaccounts of painters, 'The Small' and 'The Great', in which the fortunes of two of Strindberg's acquaintances, Carl Skanberg and Ernst Josephson, are imperfectly masked as representative destinies in the artistic world of the period, and the novella, 'Short Cuts', a study in hysteria which bears comparison with numerous other contemporary fictional anatomies of the female psyche by (among others) the Goncourt brothers and Ibsen or, perhaps more pertinently, given its original publication in Vienna, in 1887, with what is now recognised to have been Freud and Breuer's epoch-making Studies on Hysteria of the following decade. First published in German, the original Swedish manuscript of this female case study has been lost, although it may be reconstructed with some accuracy at least in part because, in an attempt to meet the fears of his publishers concerning its transparently autobiographical nature, Strindberg produced a revised version, entitled 'A Witch', in which his contemporary models

2

Selected Essays

were superficially disguised in seventeenth-century attire and then brought before the public as one of the historical tales in his ongoing collection of stories Swedish Destinies and Adventures (1882-91).

Meanwhile, the 1894 volume also includes a number of pieces, sometimes fragmentary, on Maeterlinck and the creativity of children, the reputation of Zola, the 'zoology' of women, homosexuality, racial stereotypes, and the suggestive power of lying, while Jardin des Plantes complements the items translated here with four further speculations in natural history, cThe Sighing of the Stones', 'Where are the Nerves of Plants?', 'The Cyclamen, or the Great Disorder and the Infinite Coherence', and 'Holly', as well as a collection of jottings, 'Paralipomena and Repetitions'. In its French edition, with the Baconian title Sylva Sylvarum, this collection also includes a series of reflections on chemistry, 'Corps simples, Chimie simpliste', in which Strindberg gives an account of his experiments at the Sorbonne in 1895 to determine the composition of sulphur and seeks to refute the claim of the Professor of Chemistry there, Louis Joseph Troost (1825—1911), that it is an unstable element arising from impurities in test tube corks and the water in the neck of glass retorts. 'The day on which I betook myself to the Sorbonne was a holy day,' he subsequently claimed, in the autobiographical fiction Inferno (1897), and 'after about two weeks I had obtained incontrovertible evidence that sulphur is a ternary compound, composed of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. I proffered my thanks to the director of the laboratory, who pretended to take no interest in what I had been doing.'1 Moreover, during the period from 1894 to 1896 Strindberg wrote numerous other essays in both Swedish and French on these and similar subjects, which he placed in the daily press as well as in a number of more or less fashionable literary Parisian journals such as Gil Bias or the symbolist La Revue blanche, or else with one of the numerous esoteric outlets that flourished in the occult subculture offin-de-siecleParis, such as LHyperchimie, revue mensuelle d'Alchimiey d'Heretisme et de Medecine Spagyrique, which

was edited by his young alchemist colleague, Francois Jollivet-Castelot, or Llnitiation, which Strindberg regarded as the foremost agent of scientific occultism. The latter was edited by an eccentric medical officer called Dr Pap us, a self-styled 'Mysteriarch, and Unknown Superior', whose real name was Gerard Encausse (1865—1916). Papus headed the Groupe independant d'etudes esoteriques, and Strindberg had such confidence in him that on one occasion he claims to have proposed 'to Papus that I should "kill" myself with Cyanide and he recall me to life following my prescription; but he's reluctant to do this, because a medical commission

Introduction

3

would only say: "All right, but as you see, he wasn't really dead then" (Brev xi, p. 258). Some indication of the complex intertextuality of Strindberg's writings at this time, as he shuttles back and forth between one language, subject, journal or volume and another, is given in the notes and commentary with which this selection concludes. Copious though it is, however, what the commentary does not indicate is the extent of his activity as an essayist at all stages of his career, from the early, and often anonymous, journalism on all manner of topics, from university reform to art criticism and the fashionable causerie, with which he sought to support himself as a young writer between 1872 and 1879, to his many polemical contributions on political, religious and literary issues during the so-called 'Strindberg Feud' which dominated the last two years of his life, before his death in 1912. During the early 1880s, when he was preoccupied with anarchist and socialist thinking, and in particular with the writings of Rousseau and the Russian critic and novelist Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828—89), whose novel What is to Be Done? he regarded as marking 'an epoch in my career as a writer' {Letters 1, p. 150), he wrote a series of essays on social issues. These include the extended, if desultory, analysis of Swedish society 'On the General Discontent' (1884), the still pertinent 'August Strindberg's Little Catechism for the Underclass', and, of course, a number of increasingly dogmatic interventions in what was termed the Woman Question. Meanwhile, a never entirely assuaged desire for recognition as a scholar stimulated his always insatiable curiosity, and contributed to his numerous writings on cartography, sinology and painting, a number of which were subsequently collected under the general title Studies in Cultural History. In similar vein he wrote several essays on Sweden's political and cultural relationship with France, Spain, Portugal and Rome, which are freighted with scraps of idiosyncratic but pedantically presented learning, including numerous lengthy extracts in the original from Latin sources, which comprise an entire volume in the new edition of his Samlade Verk. Scholarly ambition and an admiration for the example of Linnaeus also helped promote a variety of works on natural history and the countryside, including Among French Peasants (1886), Flower Paintings and Animal Pieces (1888), and Scanian Nature (written 1891, published 1896), but with the exception of the Preface to Miss Julie and 'On Modern Drama and Modern Theatre', the other essay from the later 1880s included in this selection for the valuable gloss it provides on his attitude to the theatre during the same period, he wrote almost nothing about the theatre, and little literary criticism of significance, until the series of Open Letters that he addressed to members of the Intimate Theatre in 1908.2

4

Selected Essays

However, from the point of view of his plays and the preoccupations of the mind that created them, it is the essays translated here that perhaps shed most light on the development of Strindberg's career as a dramatist. They testify both to the acuteness of the eye with which he regarded those aspects of human behaviour that inform his theatre, and which he directed with precise, if idiosyncratic, attention upon the natural world, and to the wideranging, if sometimes strikingly partial, scope of his reading. They also help to establish a number of underlying continuities in the remarkable development that his writing underwent from the naturalism of his major achievements in both narrative prose and the theatre during the 1880s to the fully achieved modernism of many of his later works; these continuities are otherwise easily overlooked in the apparent formal difference between Miss Julie or Creditors, on the one hand, and A Dream Play or The Ghost Sonata, on the other. Moreover, the development to which they bear witness is also frequently obscured by the often melodramatic events of Strindberg's colourfully staged private life during much of the 1890s. The first collection of vivisections, as Strindberg called the various incisive texts in which he sought to emulate the scientist and dissect his contemporaries and their ideas,3 was written between January and April 1887, following Strindberg's move from Gersau in Switzerland to Lindau in Bavaria. Such changes of place, which were frequent during what became for many years a largely itinerant life in both Sweden and abroad,4 were often accompanied by a change of direction in his writing, and this was again the case here. Having just completed the four-volume autobiographical fiction The Son ofa Servant, in which he claimed 'simply to have taken the corpse of the person I know best and read anatomy, physiology, psychology and history on the cadaver' (Brew, p. 344), he now temporarily abandoned the social concerns and polemics that had characterised much of his writing during the first years of the decade, in such books as Among French Peasants, and planned to concentrate on psychological analysis and literature. (His last play of any substance had been Sir Bengts Wife in 1882.) Thus, he pointed out in a letter to his publisher Albert Bonnier (23 February 1887) that he was 'ready to embark upon a new stage in my writing and, leaving the Peasantry and social questions behind, return to the poet's and thinker's neutral ground' (Brevvi, p. 171), and told another correspondent (the eminent Swedish writer Verner von Heidenstam) that he had 'discovered a new genre' with which he hoped 'to make my appearance . . . in the Neue Freie in a couple of months time' (Brevvi, p. 144). The latter was the eminent Viennese daily, the Neue Freie Presse, which had previously published two of the stories from his 1885 collection Utopias in

Introduction

5

Reality, and which now appears to have approached him with the intention of commissioning an original feuilleton in German. Consequently, he shifted his sights briefly from Paris, where he had for some years been seeking to establish a European reputation, and redirected them upon a German-reading public, on whom his immediate hopes were currently pinned. The essays and discursive narratives of the vivisections in which he sought to realise these hopes were also European in design, and led almost immediately to the first of his dramas with an international appeal, The Father, which he interrupted work on the essays to write in late January and early February 1887. Their frame of reference is eclectic and up to date. In the foreground are the contemporary experimental psychology of Henry Maudsley (notably his Pathology of Mindof1879, which Strindberg read in French) and the psychological theories of Theodule Ribot, whose concept of the multiplicite du moi he adopted as one of the organising principles of his own self-portrait in The Son ofa Servant and for the dramaturgy which he used to depict the central character in Miss Julie. But he also responds to Jean-Martin Charcot's accounts of hysteria, including the spectacular public demonstration of his female patients at the Salpetriere hospital in Paris, the experimental application of hypnosis to medicine by Hippolyte Bernheim and the Nancy school, Cesare Lombroso's typology of the criminal, the evolutionary theories of Darwin and the rigorous monism of the German philosopher and scientist, Ernst Haeckel. He also had recourse to popularisers like the once widely read Hungarian Jewish author and physician, Max Nordau, whose Conventional Lies of Our Civilisation (1883) Strindberg briefly considered 'Holy Writ!' {Letters 1, p. 119) or the speculations of several less well-known and respected thinkers such as the nineteenth-century German philosopher and mystic Carl du Prel, whose Die Philosophie der Mystik (1885) would become one of his most favoured texts. Meanwhile, in literature their affinity is with the psychological realism of Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, which he was to praise in the Preface to Miss Julie as attracting him 'more than anything else in contemporary fiction' (SV27, p. 109), the late naturalism of Guy de Maupassant and Paul Bourget and the scientific tropes of Edgar Allan Poe, who was to generate such enthusiasm in Strindberg when the latter encountered his short stories for the first time the following year that he even entertained the notion that he might be Poe's reincarnation (see Letters 1, p. 300, where he observes that 'On the night between Christmas Day and Boxing Day I read Edgar Poe for the first time! And noted it in my diary! I'm astounded!', and then asks, 'Is it possible that he t in '49, the year I was born, and could

6

Selected Essays

have smouldered down through hosts of spirits to me!'). Of the eight extant vivisections, four are psychological studies of living models in narrative form while three of the others are essays on aspects of psychology, similar in kind to those treated in the narratives. Poised generically and stylistically between the essay and fiction, they approach Edmond de Goncourt's conception of the 'livre de pure analyse' which he believed might embody 'la derniere evolution du roman',5 and anticipate the intriguing combination of novel and essay that Huysmans would achieve with A Rebours in 1889. As their title suggests, however, it is Zola, with his conception of the writer as a surgeon dissecting corpses, an anatomist in a blood-stained apron who cuts open the human beast laid out naked on a marble slab in a medical amphitheatre, who continues to offer what is perhaps the most fundamental example of the artist as vivisector. cLe talent de l'auteur est un talent froid et sobre, emportant le morceau', Zola wrote, in an article on 'Livres d'aujourd'hui et de demain', in L'Evenement (29 July 1866). 'L'ecrivain est un chirurgien qui, pour aller jusqu'au coeur, coupe dans la chair d'une main paisible et ferme, sans fievre aucune. II garde son sangfroid tant que dure l'operation. II scie et taille avec un plaisir tranquille. II n'a d'ailleurs ni degout ni enthousiasme, et il semble remuer toute cette pourriture humaine avec le calme du medecin qui connait la toute-puissance de la mort.' Like Zola, the narrator or essayist of this collection readily presents himself as a doctor, analysing and commenting upon the maladies of the age, although unlike Zola his concern is more with the extreme individual case than with the socially representative example; in anticipation, too, of another of Strindberg's later enthusiasms, Nietzsche, whom he first read at Georg Brandes' instigation in 1888, the dispassionate, forensic intellect at play in these works is contrasted with the emotional imprecision and sentimentality of 'the small', who are generally defined here as women, Christians, socialists and romantics. Thus, writing in January 1888 to the publisher Claes Loostrom, whom he wished to reassure about what the latter considered to be the disturbingly frank autobiographical nature of these texts, Strindberg observed: 'These vivisections are literature in the modern style, you'll see. That they deal with me and persons still living is precisely what is so fine, and the title provides a justification or explanation; but I've thought up a subtitle which justifies some of the roles I assume! See how this looks: Vivisections — A Retired Doctor's Observations (Notes, Dossiers, Stories, Memoirs) Reported by Aug Sg' {Letters 1, p. 262).

For where Strindberg is concerned, an autobiographical, and hence by

Introduction

7

association necessarily biographical element was a crucial aspect of this volume, as of so many of his writings. In a foreword to The Son of a Servant which remained unpublished until 1913, he had recently argued that the truthful writer inevitably writes about himself, since that is the only life he really knows anything about: 'How is one to know what goes on in someone else's mind, how is one to know the complicated motives behind someone else's acts, how can one know what he or she said in an intimate moment? One makes it up. But up to now homology, the scientific study of man, has not been much cultivated by writers, who with their deficient knowledge of psychology have embarked upon the portrayal of the wellconcealed life of the soul. One knows only a single life, one's own' {SVio, p. 373). In Vivisections, however, he was now concerned to extend this analysis to other people, beginning in his private life with hisfirstwife, Siri von Essen, whom, according to a letter to his old friend Pehr Staaff, he was currently vivisecting in advance of writing a detailed account of their relationship in the autobiographical novel A Madman's Defence (1887—8).6 Just as he tells Staaff how 'interesting [it is] to study the very intestines of a woman's soul' {Letters 1, p. 242), and recommends that he follow suit, so, in a letter from Vienna, where he had gone in April 1887 to supervise the publication of these pieces in the Neue Freie Presse, Strindberg justifies his supposedly impersonal, scientific standpoint in these case studies by maintaining that it is of no great moment that 'my investigation focuses upon living persons. That some of them [should] perish is quite normal with vivisections, when fistular canals are inserted all the way into their intestines. It's the spirit of the age to write about the living rather than the dead: I have myself been the subject of a whole literature' {Letters \, p. 229). Thus, in 'The Battle of the Brains', for example, he gives a fairly detailed, if grossly subjective and imperfectly masked account of the field trip that he had recently made through the French provinces, in September 1886, to gather information for his study Among French Peasants. He was accompanied on this journey by the young Swedish sociologist Gustaf Steffen (1864—1929), a future Professor of Economics and Sociology in Gothenburg, who was currently studying mineralogy in Berlin. Like Schilf, the narrator's antagonist in 'The Battle of the Brains', Steffen was indeed engaged in socialist politics and an enthusiastic admirer of the German socialist leader August Bebel. He was, also like Schilf, the son of a cloakroom attendant, though at the Royal Library in Stockholm, where Strindberg had been employed between 1874 and 1882, rather than at a German museum of natural history, as in the story. Rumour had it, too, that Steffen was (again like Schilf) the illegitimate son of someone at the

8

Selected Essays

top of the hierarchy of the institution at which his mother worked, in his instance the Royal Librarian, Gustaf Edvard Klemming (1823—93). This was in fact not the case however, although, like Strindberg, Steffen enjoyed Klemming's patriarchal protection. Steffen had originally approached Strindberg when the latter was attacked in an article in the Preussiche Jahrbiicher by the journalist Otto Riidiger. He offered to write a rejoinder, and a lively correspondence ensued as a result of which Strindberg invited Steffen to become his travelling companion, even though he soon grew irritated with the younger man's self-assurance and orthodox Marxism, which encouraged him to question Strindberg's current faith in the rural rather than the industrial proletariat. Their relationship came to a sudden and disastrous end when Strindberg accused Steffen of withholding two of the photographic plates that he had made to document the expedition in order to conceal what was in all likelihood his own incompetent handling of their valuable equipment, and also of stealing 100 francs from his wallet. According to Steffen's account, which was addressed to Klemming on his return to Berlin: cIn Toulouse Strindberg began to reproach me for having squandered our money . . . and when he found out that some days had cost getting on for 100 francs and others not more than 50, he started to speak of treachery and theft! . . . I had destroyed the hotel bills so as not to have a mass of (as I supposed) unnecessary papers. Strindberg now maintained that it was impossible for any day to have cost us 100 francs! . . . Finally, at the station in Nimes, Herr Strindberg flung 100 francs at me for my ticket back to Berlin, saying we should part, and overwhelming me with the crudest insults: I had "exploited" him or, "even worse", I was a Jew and had a hereditary tendency to betray him, an Aryan.' Although they do not tally precisely with one another, both this account and Strindberg's initial response, which is to be found in the angry letter that he addressed to Steffen from Clermont-Ferrand on 16 September 1886,7 clearly frame the version of events that Strindberg gives in 'The Battle of the Brains', where they are marginally but transparently removed from France to Italy. Characteristically transgressing conventional genre boundaries, these texts are frequently an uneasy but provocative fusion of the essay and short story, as Strindberg explores in prose the kind of conflict which he presents on stage in the mental battles between the Captain and Laura in The Father or Gustav and Tekla in Creditors. And while in many respects their range of literary and scientific reference provides a gloss upon the preoccupations of the great naturalist dramas, the generic ambiguity of these pieces is characteristic of his general practice as a writer of discursive prose where,

Introduction

9

within the boundaries of a single work, objective comment or personal polemic is juxtaposed with acknowledged or lightly masked ruminations upon his own life as he switches rapidly back and forth between expository or critical discussion, on the one hand, and dramatic narrative, on the other. Strindberg called them sketches and stories as well as vivisections, studies and essays and they are thus subject to the kind of generic slippage and revaluation that characterises so much of his work,8 particularly where the identity of the reflecting or narrating figure at the heart of the text is concerned. There is often a great deal of circumstantial evidence to link this figure with Strindberg's situation at the time of writing and yet in other, frequently minor respects, this identity has been subject to various slight displacements. For example, the writing subject of the 1887 Vivisections is identified by one of his interlocutors as a doctor rather than a writer and in 'Mysticism — For Now', he would appear to have only two children rather than the three which Strindberg and Siri von Essen had at the time; and yet it is easy enough to associate his relationship to his wife and more particularly the list of his enemies struck down by Nemesis or his account in the same text of the places where he has lived with people and events in Strindberg's life. Thus, while some texts collected here approximate closely to the form of a critical causerie or of the meditative or informative essay ('Cesarine', 'The Death's Head Moth' or 'On the Action of Light in Photography', for example), others transgress or compound generic boundaries, to pose awkward questions about the identity of the narrator and the relationship between fact and fiction. While the traditional conception of the essay as a try-out in discursive prose of an idea, judgement or experience is doubtless the most adequate description of these more or less fugitive pieces, they thus share with Strindberg's work in other genres an ability to disturb received assumptions about the writer as an autobiographical subject and the figure that she or he projects in a text. On the one hand, his writing in any genre not only demands imaginative freedom but also recognises an essential rupture between the writing and the experiencing self (as one of Strindberg's early mentors, Soren Kierkegaard, observed, 'all poetic production would eo ipso be rendered impossible and unendurable, if the lines must be the very words of the producer, literally understood');9 on the other, even the most achieved works of Strindbergian fiction solicit attention as accounts of his own experience both as texts in which he has 'multiplied himself (polymeriserat sig — SV 20, p. 377) in a more or less discernible role and by way of apertures in the fictional text through which his life may suddenly become visible, initially to the eyes of his contemporaries whom he supposes are following his

io

Selected Essays

career with close attention, and subsequently to the critical gaze of his ideal reader who will, he hopes, be reconstituting his life from 'the thousands of printed pages' (SS 19, p. 287) among which it has been dispersed, and where he claims it is to be found among what Michel Foucault terms ' [the] relationships of homogeneity, filiation, reciprocal explanation, authentification, or . . . common utilization'10 which exist between his various texts. This remains very much the case with the miscellaneous items that form the second collection of vivisections, which were written in Austria during July and August 1894. CI have a collection of new Vivisections ready', he told his old friend, the radical journalist Erik Thyselius. cMore brutal than ever, but full of new ideas and discoveries. They are written directly in French' (Brev x, p. 285). This was neither the first time, nor would it be the last, that Strindberg wrote one of his works directly in French, although he generally asked a competent friend or French-speaker to look over his text before publication. Both the second collection of stories in the volume Getting Married and A Madman's Defence were written in French; so, too, were Inferno and a collection of Fables. Moreover, when it came to publishing these works in Swedish, Strindberg rarely translated them himself but relied on the skill of an old student friend from Uppsala, Eugene Fahlstedt, who could reproduce his style with rare accuracy. His reasons for avoiding Swedish in these and other works were various, but had to do mainly with the fact that the material in question was either hard to place in Sweden (after his trial for blasphemy over the first volume of Getting Married, for example, no Swedish publisher was prepared to look at a second) or too personal even for Strindberg to confront in Swedish, as was the case with A Madman's Defence. The work in question might also be aimed specifically at an international rather than a Swedish audience: Inferno, for instance, was designed at least in part for readers familiar with the discourses of alchemy, black magic and occultism at large in Paris during the 1890s. Where the 1894 Vivisections were concerned, however, his intention was also quite practical. While living with his second wife, Frida Uhl, and their young child on her family estate at Dornach, on the banks of the Danube, between Mauthausen and Grein, he was planning a further descent upon Paris, where he did not wish to arrive empty-handed, and hoped to make an immediate impression. Thus, in one of two cards that he addressed to his current confidant, Leopold Littmansson, on 15 August 1894, the day on which he was to leave what seemed for the moment a claustrophobic rural Austrian backwater for the greater stage of Paris, the capital of the

Introduction

n

nineteenth century, he reported: 'Am bringing ioo pages of feuilleton material in French. Start right in with sensational articles so that Paris will be struck dumb. Le Journal, UEcho de Paris, LEclair will be peppered with shot within a week' (Brevx, p. 225). The preoccupations of this new collection were, however, more diffuse than its predecessor, and the various pieces more fragmentary and less finished than was normal, even for Strindberg at this time. Although they follow the earlier vivisections in their concern with the workings of the unconscious mind and (notably in the second 'Nemesis Divina, which continues directly from the essay of the same title in thefirstcollection) the mysterious processes of a retributory fate, they also possess a close affinity with his now overriding interest in the natural sciences. Recalling the time when Strindberg was working on the collection, Frida Uhl, for once probably a reliable commentator, noted that 'He [had] a book as good as finished, "Sapience", vivisections of people, corresponding to his chemical and botanical studies.'11 Between September 1892, when he left Sweden for Berlin, and 1897, when he finally succeeded in finding a form for the experiences of these years in the imaginatively composed framework of Inferno, Strindberg wrote virtually no works of literature. Indeed, he often gives the impression of not being so very interested even in the major productions of his plays that were now being mounted in Berlin (Creditors at the Residentztheater with Rosa Bertens, Rudolf Rittner and Josef Jarno in 1893) and Paris (Miss Julie directed by Antoine in January 1893 and Creditors under Lugne-Poe in June 1894). Believing that the time had now come for his scientific ideas to be taken seriously, on one occasion he even promoted the idea of his well-wishers providing him with a 'Laboratoire Libre' rather than a Theatre Libre (Brevxi, p. 142). For he was devoting by far the greater part of his energies at this time either to painting (but only in brief bursts, initially in Austria and again in Paris during September and October 1894) or to speculations and experiments in a variety of scientific disciplines, from astronomy to botany to chemistry to geology, and encompassing what he calls 'the fin de siecle problem of colour photography' (Letters 1, p. 366) as well as the making of gold. 'I still have probably 30 years to live', he had told his brother, Axel, in 1889: 'that's a whole lifetime, and Literature is something one should practise in one's youth . . . Science stands higher, and surely we must grow! not sink to the level of a literary man who has written himself dry' (Brew 11, p. 352). Thus, between 1892 and 1898, he set out to redress the balance in favour of science in earnest.

12

Selected Essays

The 1894 Vivisections consequently marks an early stage in the process whereby Strindberg painfully renewed himself as a writer through an intense involvement in a series of non-literary discourses, both scientific and pseudo-scientific. Throughout this period he may be observed exploring, with ever greater urgency, a tension that he observes in every aspect of the natural world between chance, coincidence and discontinuity, on the one hand, and order, relationship and coherence, on the other, although as always he complements the intellectual adventure of these years with an approach to the personal drama of his private life, in which the sometimes abstract preoccupations of his intellectual odyssey are vividly acted out in his everyday experience. In short, Strindberg thought, wrote and lived according to the seriously playful aesthetic that he advanced in the vivisection 'The New Arts! or The Role of Chance in Artistic Creation' — 'I act by improvising', he later affirmed, in Inferno, 'life is more fun that way' — and the experiments of these years, which culminate in his so-called 'Inferno Crisis' of 1894—6, should be seen not solely as a mental and emotional trauma that he passively suffers and patiently endures but also as a process of renewal that is actively encouraged and frequently prompted by Strindberg himself. Together with the crucial series of letters that he addressed during this period to the newspaper manager and theosophist Torsten Hedlund, the various essays that Strindberg now produces are thus the crucible in which the world view that sustains his later dramatic writing was fashioned. Dispersed with desperate prodigality in numerous journals, languages and countries ('My nerves are in disorder, mainly perhaps because of how my work has been dismembered', he laments, to Hedlund, in the guise of a modern Orpheus. 'One fragment in German {Antibarbarus), another in French (Sylva S'[ylvarum]), two more in Swedish' {Letters 11, p. 546)), they form the fragments of 'The New Cosmos' that he was both seeking and composing from the beginning of the decade,12 and, according to a plan for a book 'in large octavo of 300—400 pages' that he sent to Hedlund in October 1895, he wished to write a work that would encompass the ocean depths, the firmament and the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms, before concluding with an analysis of man: I begin by searching out the primal elements of the world and their transmutation into one another in the volcanoes. I descend into the depths of the ocean with the Deep Sea divers and observe the origin of life out of water. Ascend into the air with the Balloonists and use their observations to reach my conclusions about the atmosphere and the way in which the earth took shape, as well as its relationship to the firmament and the other worlds beyond our own.

Introduction

13

Return to earth: begin with the stones and the first forms of life. Dwell on the zoophytes, and particularly on the parting of the ways between plants and animals. Move on to the plants, which for me are living beings with nerves, perhaps sense perceptions, and conceivably: consciousness. To the Animals. Ascend to the firmament which for me, and supported by observations and proofs actually based on the accepted laws of nature, is not what others believe it to be. From there to man, who is not only an animal; who like the earth itself, has perhaps had previous incarnations. If I finally encounter God, perhaps you as a Pantheist won't want anything further to do with me, but we'll see about that when the time comes! {Letters 11, pp. 536-7) As he remarks in the brief introduction to Jardin des Plantes, the essays he assembled there were written in 'the middle of my life's journey', and the parallel with Dante that will become one of the organising principles of Inferno is already apparent. c The Sighing of the Stones', this 'pilgrimage in the temple of the Mineral Kingdom' (SSiy, p. 211) with which the volume opens, may be regarded as the first stage of the journey outlined here and concluded there, in the autobiographical fiction which marks his return to literature. But while other essays in the collection include speculations on the realms of the plants and insects respectively, it is man and his relationship to the earth and to God that present Strindberg with the greatest problems, particularly as regards the moral implication of his own situation, which remains unresolved until he finds a form to accommodate what had by then (1897) become for him a religiously inflected drama, in Inferno. Moreover, since this is Strindberg, the medium in which he conducts this phase of his experiment is inevitably autobiographical; he remains faithful to the precepts of the foreword to The Son of a Servant, and thus ensures that, however diverse and lacunary, the self that lives this life must remain the basis of all his research. It is not easy to determine precisely why Strindberg abandoned literature at this time, although a feeling of disgust with the morally dubious demands of a naturalist aesthetic in which the writer repeatedly exposes his own and other people's intimate lives to the public gaze was certainly an issue. Writing of this period in the autobiographical novel The Cloister (1898), he observed: What an occupation: to sit andflayone's fellow human beings and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them. To be like the hunter who in his hunger hacks off his dog's tail, eats the flesh himself, and gives the dog the bones, his own bones. To go about spying out people's secrets, to betray one's best friend's

14

Selected Essays

birthmark, use one's wife as a guinea pig, behave like a Croat, chop down, defile, burn and sell! Fie for shame! (SV50, p. 95) A further anxiety that impeded creativity and encouraged him to occupy himself with these other discourses arose from the fact that so prolific a writer as Strindberg had always been would rapidly exhaust the experiential capital on which this aesthetic relied; quite simply, he was in danger of repeating himself and needed to augment his holdings of experience in order to continue writing. That he also sought to renew both himself and the basis of his existing naturalistic relationship to the world is, however, a constant theme in his writings during this period. It is, for example, what links his personal drama, and the desire for moral and personal regeneration that is apparent in both Inferno and the first part of To Damascus, with the ever more urgent endeavours of his transformist chemistry in general, and with his concern to turn base metals into gold in particular. For the items from Jardin des Plantes and the other essays from the mid1890s in this collection not only represent fragments of a scientific project that is designed to declare the bankruptcy of western culture' (Brevxi, p. 102); following Strindberg's discovery in the Jardin des Plantes of a Creator who is ca great artist who Himself develops as He creates, who makes rough drafts only to cast them aside, who takes up abortive ideas afresh, who perfects and multiplies His primitive conceptions' (Inferno, p. 177), they also serve to rehabilitate the imagination as the prime creative principle, following a period during which Strindberg had frequently recoiled from the element of play in the process of creation. Some idea of the role that Strindberg assigned to the Jardin des Plantes at this time may be gained from a letter to Anders Eliasson, dated 20 October 1895: Am studying in the Jardin des Plantes, where creation is gathered together in a Garden of Paradise, and in four hours I can roam through the whole of nature (= what has not been cobbled together by man) from the stones to a man's intestines; and among many other things I've noticed that the brains of Giraffes and Lions, even of Antelopes in fact, are as finely constructed as a man's (finer as far as their convolutions are concerned), and that an Orang-outang's Ear and the inside of its hand are so like a human being's that my old hunch that there are also apes which are humans on the way back down, isolated by revolutions in nature, and degenerate [has been confirmed] (Brevxi, p. 91) In a manner that sometimes appears as a remarkable anticipation of the Parisian iconography of the Surrealists, who likewise explored the relationship between order and disorder as it manifested itself in particular quarters of this urban landscape, 'this patch of nature here, about sixty acres

Introduction

15

wide, enclosed within a wall like the garden of paradise', became for Strindberg a privileged location, a place where he could roam at will, in the certainty of encountering the marvellous wherever he chanced to look. As he remarked, in 'The Sighing of the Stones', here he could observe 'the whole of creation gathered in one place, where every item tells its story, every stone, every plant, every animal is united in memory with the name of a great human spirit. I know of nothing more impressive in the whole of Paris, apart from Notre Dame. It is as great as Genesis, and for me it is like a propylaeum to world history, like the Old Testament, though whether it contains the Cedar of Lebanon and Noah's Ark in its entirety, I do not know' (5527, p. 211).13 In these and other texts from the period which still await detailed analysis,14 Strindberg therefore relies upon a variety of authorities in chemistry and other subject areas, which he reads both passionately and partially, as well as on his own observations, experiments and excursions into nature. The result can be both provoking and poetically illuminating, not least because, as Gunnar Brandell points out,15 the style of these scientific essays owes much to Francis Bacon, whom Strindberg sometimes identifies as his 'master' (Brevxi, p. 141). Indeed, the title of their French incarnation, Sylva Sylvarum, is borrowed directly from a posthumous work by Bacon, and the combination of urgent excitement and laconic brevity that distinguishes Strindberg's prose in these essays, and which specifically recalls his Renaissance predecessor, is acknowledged in one of his letters to Torsten Hedlund, in which he concedes that 'They retain the sparse, slipshod, arrogant style that one acquires when making discoveries' {Letters 11, p. 539). Hence, too, the tendency to sometimes write in the present rather than the past tense, as if the events that he is describing or the discoveries that he believes he has made are contemporaneous with the moment of writing. Thus, for example, a typical run of associations in a few paragraphs from 'The Sighing of the Stones' carries him rapidly from a casual winter stroll to questioning the prevailing scientific orthodoxy of his contemporaries by way of botany, chemistry, crystallography, palaeontology, photography and a Berlin shop-window, in the course of which he discovers the need for a new language, and exploits, as in his paintings of this period, a remarkable ability to relate the vividly observed phenomena of the natural world to one another, and the minutiae of his own private circumstances to the universe at large. The passage is worth quoting at length as an example of Strindberg's associational manner of thought, in which the minutely observed details of experience cohere in a dreamlike pattern that looks forward to the kind of autobiographical narrative that Freud introduced

16

Selected Essays

with The Interpretation of Dreams as well as to the making of Strindberg s own A Dream Play, in 19 01: It was winter, and I went walking in the woods, over the frozen lakes, and in the fields. And I stored up in my memory illustrations of all the various kinds of plants that I noticed the hoar-frost left upon the trees or reeds. My notes record the following: palms, ferns (both Polypodium and Adianthum), the leaves of the aspen and birch; the outline of the spruce in full; the bloom of the rose; seaweed, Iceland moss, and the cauliflower. And then I posed a new question: has this water in vaporous form, after revolving perhaps many times through the plant cycle, taken and retained the imprint of these plant forms, or has the water itself, having left the lower stage of crystalline form, its own more pronounced ability freely to assume higher forms in the crystal aggregate, and is it the water which has given form to the plants or the reverse? As I was then given to selection, I let both these questions conflict sharply with one another, not suspecting that the truth might reside in both. But I went on seeking. One day I noticed that, when incompletely developed, the hoar-frost on a reed exhibited the form of an Adianthum, and fully developed of a Polypodium. I then surmised that as a form the Adianthum preceded the Polypodium, since such an evolution occurred here in the formation of crystals by water. I turned to Palaeontology and found that my guess was correct, since in the carboniferous flora the form Adianthum (the fern maidenhair) came before Polypodium (the common polypody and others). And this was confirmed by more detailed research. Thus, magnesium and ammonium phosphate crystallises in rectangular shapes when it emerges from a chemical solution; but if the same element is taken from an organic substance, the form of the fern Polypodium is already visible. When I then saw in another chemistry textbook (Huguet, Chimie Medicale et Pharmaceutique) both magnesium and ammonium phosphate depicted like the aggregate that is crystallised from guano, and noticed that it resembled the leaves of Sargasso weed, I wondered if those who derived the South American fertiliser from accumulated seaweed might not be right, and the others, who believed it to be bird droppings, wrong. I went further and began to crystallise saline solutions on glass plates, both warm and cold, in sunshine and by moonlight. And I discovered many wonderful things. That the elements frequently displayed an inner coherence in the aggregate which the simple crystals denied; that there was no division between colloidal and crystalloidal, and that least of all did this form a chasm between inorganic and organic; that the metals were not in any way specifically inorganic when, for example, ferrous chloride and potassium chromate colloided before they crystallised. In order to be able to reproduce the forms in words I must invent a special terminology drawn for the most part from the vegetable kingdom which, it is nevertheless worth noting, has its forms rooted in the animal kingdom (in the heart, kidney, egg, feather, horn, hair, etc.) [. . .]

Introduction

17

I was walking one Boxing Day along the Leipzigstrasse in Berlin, when the temperature was over twenty degrees below freezing. On account of the holiday the shops had been closed for two days, which meant that the confined moisture had had an opportunity to settle undisturbed on a very large window pane and form ice-ferns. I stopped and observed it, having in my head at the time a German philosopher's theory concerning the derivation of everything from the formula, 'concentration and attenuation'. I remarked, probably while I was thinking along those lines, that the ice-ferns on the pane revealed a greater density down near the bottom edge of the pane than at the top, which was natural enough since the water had sunk to the bottom. I began to study the colossal meadow, and noticed at the top the most distinct lichens, of which I knew the names, including Iceland moss and several others. Beneath them were algae, from siphons upwards to the Fucus, Palmellacea, and Charophytes.

Here I stopped short and thought, 'but this is the now prevailing botanical system', and so it was, more or less. From the algae it ascended towards the vegetable kingdom, proceeding downwards over the pane with increasing density: mosses, ferns, lycopodia, conifers, grasses and palms. It was not quite that regular, but nature is not so regular either. I left the window after having noted down what I had seen. And I thought that if, according to Kant—Laplace, the earth has passed from the diluted form of the nebula to the condensed form of water and the primary rock formation, then nothing is more logical than to propose the origin of plant forms out of the increasing condensation of water on the earth's surface - and consequently also on the window pane. Though fearful of the consequences I restricted the analogy between ice-ferns and the vegetable kingdom to the various algae which under water, in water, and on water sketch out every plant, up to the conifers and palms. But it is possible that this cowardly thought stopped halfway, while fearless nature pursued it to the end. I would add that I have repeated these crystallisations several times with constant results, and have also photographed a number of plates by direct copying on paper. (SS 27, pp. 216—20) Translating such works as these is not a straightforward task. There is always the possibility that Strindberg may have got the wrong end of a terminological stick or that a slippage could have occurred in the transposition of these texts from one format or language to another. Moreover, his chemical formulae and atomic weights, for example, are notoriously inaccurate when it suits his purpose, and so, too, on occasion, are the dates in 'The Mysticism of World History', where he eagerly exploits synchronicity to plot the drama of man's past just as he had once utilised the visual correspondences between ferns and frostwork or the residues of various chemical preparations in his crucibles in tracing the ground plan of nature. However, although the system of chemical nomenclature may have

18

Selected Essays

changed significantly during the intervening years, especially since Strindberg was in any case inclined to rely upon earlier authorities, such as the eminent Swedish chemist Jons Jakob Berzelius (1779-1848) or (more dubiously) the Franco-Spanish toxicologist Mateo Jose Bonaventura Orfila (1787—1853), rather than upon the research of contemporary chemists, the terminology that he employs is generally correct. But it is not only the essays in natural history or chemistry that cause problems. As Lars Dahlback has remarked, in an article on Strindberg's vocabulary and the multitude of experts in different disciplines on whom the editors of the new edition of his Samlade Verk have had to rely when preparing its various volumes, 'The polymath Strindberg positively bombards us with unusual words and facts from every conceivable sphere; in order to hold our own against him we have to mobilise an entire army of [Sweden's] foremost specialists',16 and in translating him, these difficulties are only compounded. At times, too, the proof-reading afforded some of these texts on first publication or in Swedish translation was rudimentary, and I have consequently had occasion to consult both the French and Swedish editions, and where possible the original manuscript. Moreover, in clarifying the intellectual context of these essays, the notes and commentary which conclude this volume are an indispensable part of the translator's project, as well as a sketch map of some of the further reaches of Strindberg's mind. Besides annotating the texts translated here, the commentary also provides bibliographical details of each essay and, where appropriate, of the background to its publication and its place in Strindberg's ceuvre. Any previous English versions of some of these items are also noted here, and the bibliographical conventions employed throughout the notes and commentary are outlined on page xi. Every item has been translated in its entirety, and any intervention in the text by the translator has been indicated with square brackets. Editorial notes are to be found at the end of the volume; thus any notes at the foot of a text page are Strindberg's own. Within the text of the essays themselves, the titles of books in the Scandinavian languages are given in English translation. Where Strindberg refers to a book in French or German, the title is given in English if he uses Swedish, and in the original language if that is how he refers to it. The Vivisections of 1887 are translated from the reliable text edited by Hans Lindstrom as volume 29 of the ongoing edition of Strindberg's Samlade Verk. The source text for the Vivisections of 1894 is the edition in both Strindberg's original French and Tage Aurell's Swedish translation, edited by Torsten Eklund (Stockholm, 1958). The remainder of these essays

Introduction

19

is taken from volumes 15, 27 and 54 of John Landquist's edition of Strindberg's Samlade Skrifter (Stockholm, 1912—20), with reference to the original manuscripts or the French edition of Sylva Sylvarum where appropriate. They are printed here in chronological order and, with the exception of the valedictory interview, August Strindberg on Himself (1909), which offers a retrospective survey of his life and career, they are all drawn from two quite specific periods, with the intention of providing a context for the major plays of 1887—8 and 1898—1907, on which Strindberg's international reputation as a dramatist principally rests. Among other things, what they help to document is the as-yet inadequately explored way in which at least one major strand of European modernism repudiates nineteenth-century structures of thought and feeling by its recourse to the occult and the irrational, a route which entails a profoundly ambiguous fusion of reason and unreason, science and magic, and the banal and the sublime, and where a passionate rage for order nevertheless abandons the concern of the new scientific orthodoxy with continuous sequence, inflexible order and eternal law in favour of the capricious, associative promptings of the unconscious mind. In this, there are numerous affinities between Strindberg and his near contemporaries Gauguin, Yeats, Kandinsky, Jarry, Scriabin and Blok, as well as important links with (for example) Freud or anticipations of Joyce and Surrealism. But few were as radical as Strindberg in their assault upon prevailing assumptions, which is all the more remarkable given the fact that he had, as late as 1887—8, been responsible for several of the key texts of theatrical naturalism. While contributing to a fuller understanding of this general theme, these essays therefore also help to clarify Strindberg's personal development during these crucial years. They reveal surprising continuities as well as discontinuities, and although the chemical and alchemical experiments of the mid18905 are perhaps the most striking documentary evidence of his transvaluation of values, it is worth remarking that the speculations on history of 'The Mysticism of World History' are equally significant in assessing this crucial shift from naturalism to modernism. Moreover, while it is true that Strindberg largely abandoned creative writing for several years, between 1892 and 1897, he undertook a series of experiments in the visual arts, according to the aesthetic outlined in the vivisection 'The New Arts! or The Role of Chance in Artistic Creation'. Indeed, these paintings, in which the fortuitous assembly of pigment on his palette or canvas resembles the strange relationships formed by the chemicals in the bottom of his crucibles, are the counterpart to many of the essays collected here,

20

Selected Essays

and a full consideration of the experiments which eventually issued in the new dramaturgy of To Damascus and A Dream Play needs to address them both.17 My thanks in compiling this volume are, as always, due to the staff of the Strindberg Museum in Stockholm (in particular Agneta Lalander and Marie-Louise Jaensson) for their generous and rewarding hospitality, and to Margareta Brundin, the curator of the Strindberg collection in Kungliga Biblioteket, Stockholm, who as usual sought out for me whatever I requested in the way of material in the Strindberg archives there. I owe a great debt, too, to Barbro Stahle Sjonell for so generously placing the as-yet unpublished parts of her catalogue of this material in the so-called 'Grona sacken at my disposal. I intend to make more, and better, use of this in future in one further translation, of a wide-ranging selection from A Blue Book, the multifarious compendium of prose pieces that Strindberg wrote between 1907 and 1912, in which hefinallyhad at his disposal a capacious and various enough form to accommodate both his multifaceted interests and his associational patterns of thought. A Blue Book, which was originally conceived as a Brevarium universalewith one entry for every day of the year, each one on its own page and in double columns, with a distinctive red margin and titles, is sufficiently distinct in form, style and focus from the items in this present collection to warrant a more comprehensive and separate publication. In part a pendant to his late satirical novel Black Banners (1904; published 1907), its early sections are cast in the form of a dialogue between a Strindbergian alter ego, Johannes Damascenus, and his teacher, Emanuel Swedenborg, to whom the book is dedicated, but it develops into a capacious intellectual feuilleton with more than a thousand entries, many of them illustrated in the manner of an encyclopaedia, and covering the full spectrum of Strindberg's interests. The product of his last, sedentary years in Stockholm, it has its own frame of reference and occupies a different, summative and at times valedictory position in relationship to his work than the essays assembled here; to do both it and Strindberg justice requires a separate volume. It is also a pleasure to record my debt to Elinor Shaffer who has as usual encouraged my work, not least by publishing previous drafts of 'On the Action of Light in Photography' and extracts from 'The Mysticism of World History' in Comparative Criticism, and to the British Academy for a Research Grant which enabled me to consult Strindberg's manuscripts and other material at source, in Stockholm. An earlier version of the present translation of 'The Death's Head Moth' was published in a catalogue to 'Border Crossings', the 1992 exhibition of Nordic art at the Barbican Centre

Introduction

21

in London. To Christine Lyall Grant I owe the removal of many errors and infelicities from the text. A number of other people, Jenny Campbell, Mike Cook, Desmond Costa, Vera Croghan, Nick Dent, Tom Geddes, Roger Howard, Graham Nattrass, Lena Nordlund and the Teknisk nomenklaturcentralen in Solna, Jan Trofast of Astra Draco and Richard Verdi were all also of great assistance in answering specific factual or terminological queries. I am indebted to them all, as I am most especially to Siv for sharing her life with Strindberg yet again.

From Vivisections (1887): 'The Battle of the Brains' 'Nemesis Divina 'Mysticism - For Now' 'Soul Murder (Apropos Rosmersholmf

'The Battle of the Brains

Doctor Charcot1 accepts the possibility of suggestion only where hypnotised hysterics are concerned; Doctor Bernheim2 goes somewhat further and grants that anyone who can be hypnotised is susceptible to ideas from without. But the latter, on the other hand, still finds that not everyone is equally receptive, and that one group of people is more receptive than another. Among these he numbers the lower classes, those with an aptitude for learning, old soldiers, artisans, in short, all those whose brains are at a lower stage of development or who are accustomed to subordinating themselves to someone else's will. Although no expert or authority on the subject my experiments have led me to conclude that suggestion is only the stronger brain's struggle with, and victory over, a weaker mind, and that this procedure is applied unconsciously in daily life. It is the mind of the politician, thinker and author which sets other people's minds in automatic motion. The actor hypnotises his wide-awake public, forcing it to applaud, weep and laugh; the painter is a magician who can convince the viewer that he sees a landscape where there is nothing but colour on a canvas; the orator can make the masses believe .any kind of nonsense if he is a gifted speaker and has a command of rhetoric; and what cannot a priest in full canonicals achieve with all the appurtenances of ecclesiastical magnificence? All political, religious and literary disputes seem to me nothing but the battle that an individual or party has to impose their view upon others by way of suggestion, in other words, to mould opinion, and that is merely the struggle for power which today takes place between minds, now that physical battles have fallen out of use. The battle of the brains is no less terrible if not as bloody, and I want to give an account of my conflict with a brain that, after six long months, during which the man showed no inclination to yield, Ifinallysucceeded in crushing. I suffered enormously myself, and expended so much nervous energy that, from weakness, I was later filled with remorse, as if I had committed a murder. But I subsequently consoled myself with the thought that I had only acted in self-defence, and

26

Selected Essays

since one of us had to fall, he did, because he was the weaker, and I could not be blamed for that. In January 1886, in Diisseldorf, I received a letter written in a style that aroused a vague memory in me. It was a weak hand that sought to conceal its weakness with many flourishes and capitals. I thought I had seen this style before, but could not immediately remember where. After reading the letter, it became clear. The missive was from a young man who had been born in Mecklenburg, and gained a position at the Physiological Institute in Dresden. In my earlier years I had seen him at the Natural History Museum in Konigsberg, where I was employed, and the young man, then only a youth, was believed to be the director's natural son, but passed for his ward. During my later political career I had, as public auditor, been obliged to find fault with the way in which the National Museum used the funds that were designated for its curators because some of them had gone to the service staff, including the caretaker, who was the youth's mother. The papers had got hold of the affair, embellished it, and against my will the director had been compromised, along with the youth's mother. This distressed me on his account, but I could not help it. The matter had just been raked over when I received the letter. This was respectful and addressed to an older man who had long fought publicly on behalf of the young. But it also contained a trace of compassion for me as the repudiated and fallen party leader.3 What does this young man want with me now, I asked? Revenge is such a natural feeling, particularly in an individual who does not believe in atonement, a life after this one, God or justice. And so cruel a wound as I had inflicted upon him through his mother could not be healed in a few weeks. He introduced himself in the letter as a 'modern' spirit nourished by the doctrine of evolution and by socialism. His errand lay in offering to do me a favour. I had in fact recently been harshly treated in a German paper and he undertook to gain redress on my behalf. This seemed to me doubly suspicious. A 'modern' spirit does not return good for evil, and there was something boastful about his offer, since he believed that he could rehabilitate me, and also gave me to understand that I was a fallen celebrity. However, I answered his letter, and declined the offer, politely and yet in a friendly tone, perhaps too friendly, since I felt it necessary to make good what the cruelty of public life had compelled me to do to a private individual. In his response to my reply there was now a wounding friendliness, and

'The Battle of the Brains'

27

he was free with good advice. He found my political radicalism antiquated and devoted three pages to preaching the gospel of socialism, as if I had never heard of socialism before. Since I was tired and had withdrawn from the world in order to study psychology, I replied evasively. But then he trampled all over me, treating me like an old fossil, an ignoramus whom he wished to convert. Irritated by his tone I responded, and rather imprudently, for a correspondence now ensued, which dragged on over several months, and proved an immense disturbance to my work. Summer was approaching; I went to Switzerland with my family, and settled down at an inn in a small village in the canton of Winterthur.4 Safely there, and at peace, I received a new letter from my young friend, which announced his imminent arrival. As I could have no objection, it only remained for me to await his coming. One afternoon, just as I was taking my customary after-dinner nap, someone knocked at the door. It was my wife, who apologised for disturbing me, but Herr Schilf had arrived. I was angry at being woken up and asked to be allowed to sleep on, but this was considered impolite, and I had to go down and receive him. Unsteadily, with my mind benumbed and my nerves on edge, I went down to the dining room. The young man came to meet me. I found no trace of the youth I had seen eight years ago. Here was a tall, slim 23-year-old with glasses. His gait as he walked towards me across the floor was a little lopsided, and when he stretched out his hand his body was also crooked. This was the first thing I observed, along with his uneasy glance, on account of which I thought the man looked as if he were in disguise. I welcomed him as my guest even though I was staying in a hotel, but he explained firmly that he was paying his own way, and had already reserved a room. 'It's remarkable how you've changed over the years', I began. This seemed to make him uneasy. I asked if he wanted something to drink, for I felt very weak after my interrupted sleep. No, he never drank anything. Modern people did not drink, and he also ate the barest minimum, slept little and never smoked. Drinking was idealism. Everything we old ones did was idealism. The room was stuffy, I found the man unattractive and felt sick. I asked him to go with me into the garden, where I ordered a bottle of wine and some water. Settling ourselves down in an arbour of spruce trees our first exchanges

28

Selected Essays

resounded like whip lashes at the start of a journey. From general conversation we passed on to discussion, and were soon head first in among the great questions of the day. Now he was in full spate. Like a shower he deluged me with Marx, Darwin and Bebel5 in a continuous stream, which lasted for half a hour. With these splinters of every formation, from granite down to tertiary limestone, it was as if he had flung a heap of crushed gravel over my head. But the man's stream of words also had an hypnotic effect on me. I was crushed like an hysteric and fell under his influence. Since I was forced to look him in the face while he was speaking, he mesmerised me with his glasses, from which the light was reflected in two oval, continually moving, spots. When I could endure it no longer I was forced to bend my head, but then I felt even more oppressed, and could hear from his voice that he considered himself the victor. To reply was impossible, for that was like attacking a net without a knife. Finally, I put in a word: 'It's extraordinary how magnetic you are.' 'Do you think so', he said, flattered; 'my mother was a powerful medium.' 6 I didn't respond to that, for the subject frightened me. 'It hurts my eyes to look at your glasses', I began. 'I'll take them off, he said, flushed with truly victorious pity. I now saw his eyes for the first time, sharp like those of someone with myopia. Then a new shower started. My disturbed sleep and my agitated nerves made resistance impossible. Like a great boa constrictor he had climbed up on to the railing around the arbour, and I saw his oval head staring down at me from above. I felt the mucus of his spirit spread itself over my brain; my mind was befogged, and it seemed as if I was waiting to see him stretch out his long throat, coil himself about me and gulp me down. All resistance on my part was impossible. I said that I was unwell, and suggested a walk. With the condescension of the victor he patted me on the shoulder, and urged me to look after myself. We walked for a while and then went our separate ways. When I reached my room I flung myself senseless on my bed. After a few minutes, once I had come to, my head ached. It felt as though someone had stuck his hand inside my brain and rummaged around. All the observations in psychology that I had collected over the last months, my combinations and conclusions, were all jumbled up just like the papers on one's desk when the chambermaid has been among them.

'The Battle of the Brains'

29

Finally, I asked myself: what does this man want with me? This was namely afixedpoint I had always to hold on to. Was he looking for revenge? Did he want to use me, which would be revenge in the modern style. Or did he only want to conquer me, demonstrate his superiority, trample me down, recruit me to his party? I dropped the question again, but felt a boundless desire to get the better of him. His line of argument lacked coherence, I could feel that quite literally in my head, for every time he lost the thread it bounced like a cart against a stone, and gave me mild concussion. I then drew up a plan of campaign with the intention of annihilating him, and of studying him. That evening I introduced him to my wife and invited him to have supper with us in our room. He did not look at her, never met her gaze and failed to address a single word to her. Did he fear her momentarily more lucid intelligence, which was unfettered by current issues and party passion, or was he indifferent to her as a woman because, as he told us, he was engaged? Or did he lack the upbringing which places curbs on personal opinions and egoism, and accustoms the soul to set its own interests aside and seek social intercourse with other souls, even in inconsequential conversation? After supper my children came in to say goodnight. He seemed to fear their open manner and felt obliged to explain that he felt shy with children. However, I brought the conversation round to simple matters, and praised his vigour in having endured a rail journey of 36 hours at a stretch. I extolled his virtues, his thrift, his simple life style, and so on. This puffed him up, and he soon allowed his light to shine brightly with reports about the latest discoveries in all the sciences. When he had gone to his room to sleep, I asked my wife what she thought of him, not because I valued her powers of discernment above my own, but because she was disinterested. 'He is so horribly like Meyer', she said. This opened my eyes to a side of Schilf that I had not noticed. The person in question was an opera singer, one of my old student friends, who resembled Schilf precisely in appearance.7 The same body, tall, lanky, lopsided; the same skull formation; the same strong chin and sharp eyes, with glasses. Meyer was a kind of regression to the savage, giving way to any passing impulse; so full of himself that he never noticed others, never heard them and never spoke to other people unless he scented some profit in it. In that case, however, he made love to them, magnetised them, sucked them dry and then threw them away. Meyer never sought company for the sake of pleasure, but for his advantage; he was actually a misanthrope, an extreme individualist, spiteful, vindictive, coarse and unsociable. He had

30

Selected Essays

so little control over his base desires that, for example, if he thought his hostess at a dinner party paused too long in waiting for the maid he would grab the ladle and serve himself. When one has lived a fair time and known a good many people, one is soon able to find categories for them, divide them into groups, and trace them back to basic types. Schilf I now had classified under the heading 'Meyer', the anti-social, poorly developed variety of man, and my observations subsequently confirmed this analysis. After a good night's sleep I went down to the dining room to meet Schilf. He was not there, but the landlord told me that he was sitting out on the large veranda. I had a great desire to observe him, to see what he looked like when he was alone and his face did not reflect mine. Therefore I placed myself behind the glass door and watched him. He sat leaning back against the railing, and seemed to be lost in thought. His face was such a picture of anxiety that I felt sorry for him. One of his long arms was lying across the table-top, upon which he was drumming with a finger. His hand indicated that he was nervous and its muscles would not obey his nerves, but made small, involuntary movements. His face suddenly brightened, he stared at a spot on the table, and smiled, smiled so that his incisors were visible. I always look at a person's two top teeth, not to judge the whole man but so as to get a clue by which to judge him. I had thus sought in vain for many years to get to the bottom of a very illustrious minister in Pomerania. As a writer he was a genius, as a minor official he excelled, but as minister of education and ecclesiastical affairs he was quite useless, and for all his genius a cleric. He was a head taller than others, with the build of a giant, the eyes of an eagle beneath colossal eyebrows, and enormous Russian moustaches, and he impressed everyone who came near him. One day when I was still young, I went to the ministry to seek out its head on official business. I cannot deny that I entered the presence of this great and famous man with some trepidation. He asked me to be seated, was condescending and noticed my confusion. His eyebrows, which frightened me most of all, descended like a pair of closed wings, and his eyes shone mischievously as he asked: 'Do you have the shivers?' At that moment his enormous moustaches parted, he smiled, and I saw for the first time a slight, narrow jaw with a rat's tiny teeth. So, you are only a rodent, I thought; that is why you never became a great ministerial beast of prey. Since then I have never been taken in by eyebrows and moustaches,

'The Battle of the Brains'

31

without first doing what a horse-dealer does, and look at the creature's teeth. Schilf had two big, broad chisels in his upper jaw, like a gorilla. A predator, I thought, one that also likes eating fruit. An unsociable, ill-natured creature, which lives alone in the forest, and delights in its own wicked thoughts. I stepped forward and greeted him. He jumped to his feet and his face looked friendly. 'Today we won't talk about the issues of the day,' I said, 'but enjoy life. Would you like to take a walk in the woods with me?' He was glad to, and we went out. I was amenable and we reminisced about Konigsberg. He spoke of his bitter youth, with its dire straits, humiliations and shame. He worshipped his mother, but the father who had never recognised him, he hated. The latter was supposed to have been a peasant. I tried to draw his attention to the magnificent landscape and the alpine panorama, but he saw nothing, and walked along, staring only at the ground. We entered a beech wood where the light fell in a delightful spring green across our path. Young hares ran before our feet, and in the bushes could be glimpsed the ears and hind legs of a roe deer in flight. We were overcome by the soothing scent of sweet woodruff and sat down on a bench. He talked about Dresden, about his gloomy laboratory, about political meetings with spiked helmets and the police, about the rich spiritual life in the workers' party and urged me enthusiastically to move there. 'No, I don't want to,' I replied, 'for then I would become a socialist.' 'You see!' 'Yes, for each and every milieu exerts an incredible influence on me, and I am extremely susceptible to personal impressions because I am not well. I therefore also believe that the labour movement is an occupational disease of the great industrial centres and will infect everyone who comes under its spell, leading them to believe that the whole world is tainted. In France I read LIntransigeant* for two months, and every morning I expected to hear that the revolution had broken out, and that Europe was inflames.But I'm forgetting, we weren't going to talk about all that.' We got up and continued our stroll. But after a little while we were off again. My mind was now completely rested and I was ready to attack. I now showered him with words for half an hour, whereupon he threw his bucketful of water over me for another. Thus the afternoon passed, and when we had finished our lips were dry and our brains inflamed. I hauled him off to the brook and tempted him to bathe. Bathing subdued us, and we walked

32

Selected Essays

dejectedly home and ate dinner. After which I took a nap and then persuaded him to go with me to Biilach for a game of billiards, which might serve as a diversion. Our conversation was lacklustre, but I was pleased that he, too, complained of a headache. On the way home we again fell out, quite dreadfully, but I now discovered that he was a modern music box, made in Dresden, and only equipped with four short pieces. He wound himself up, played a Marx overture, went click, and played a Bebel waltz and so on, until there was a whirring noise and everything came to a stop. I'll soon pick that mechanism to pieces, I thought, and if I can only break a few hammers on that cylinder the music will be over soon enough. After a good night's sleep and a morning walk alone in the woods I felt ready to meet my enemy again. He had a headache and was lethargic. He seemed to be ashamed of repeating all his old pieces and argued with less energy today. I felt that I was beginning to gain the advantage, and the time had come to go on to the offensive, which was when I began to keep a diary of the campaign, that brought me a new victory every day. 16 June In the morning I found him limp and dejected, so that he accepted my offer of a glass of beer. With that I opened my offensive and overthrew the prophet Marx, both historically and psychologically. I demonstrated that since Marx was born in 1818 he was a romantic and an idealist with an inflamed, monomaniacally functioning brain, who could only see Capital as nothing but work, even though it is well known that it also arises from the free production of natural forces, and through thrift, and through highly developed intelligence, and through the accumulation of many individual sums (e.g. the small but numerous fees of doctors and writers). As an evolutionist,' I said, 'how, when you only recognise inductive proof, can you swear by Marx, who was a German deductive philosopher starting out from false and unproved premises?' He did not reply save merely to insist that I was mistaken. 17 June He no longer uses Marx, but still insists that capital is theft and that man's development during a particular historical period is only a question of the means of production. I asked him to demonstrate the relationship between the Germanic invasions or the Crusades and the means of production.

'The Battle of the Brains'

33

No reply. Today he drank half a litre of vin ordinaire but still felt depressed. I showed him my little library in my room. When he saw all my modern works in political economy, psychology and logic, he was embarrassed, but he also got annoyed with me, because he had believed me to be an ignoramus. 18 June Today he is as irritated as a confined cat, and wants to bite, but makes no concessions. During the afternoon we sat out on the veranda and he explained how the machines belonged to the workers. As he was talking I heard the shoemaker's sewing-machine tapping away on the other side of the village street. 'Listen', I said. 'There, across the street, is a shoemaker with two apprentices. I know him. He was a poor worker and "exploited" by a master who gave him his board and wages. But instead of donning a silk scarf on Sundays and going to the tavern every evening, he saved until he was able to buy a sewing-machine. And so he became the master and has apprentices of his own. Are you willing to maintain that his machine belongs to the workers, and that he has stolen it?' 'Oh! Just one sewing-machine?' 'No, not one, but the machines of 10,000 seamstresses in this tiny country alone! Do you want to take them as well? And don't you find that an apprentice today, who gets just as much for using (exploiting!) his master's machine as his master did when he had to spend his youth bent over a frame pulling wax-ends through tough pieces of leather in which he had punctured every single hole with an awl, is better off (greater saving of labour)?' He did not reply but looked as though he wanted to hit me. 19 June The patient has had a bad night and today he walks around looking as though he has gone into liquidation. He has been forced to cede Marx, capital theft and the machines; but he will admit nothing. To me he is like a pietist lay preacher; the programme has taken him over like a religion, and today I accused him of being a theologian. He accepts no proof, no arguments. During the afternoon the hat-maker came down to the veranda here with a score of workers. He treated them to wine and they sang patriotic songs together. Schilf and I sat on the veranda. 'There's your oppressed worker for you', I said, ironically.

34

Selected Essays

He has a noticeable aversion to irony because it takes his own thoughts and reveals what they look like on their backs in broad daylight. c Yes,' he replied, 'he's offering them a glass of wine with their own money.' 'No, with his own', I responded. 'He, too, came here with his savings and purchased the right to set up a water wheel in the brook.' 'Got a monopoly, you mean', Schilf corrected me. 'No, sir, not a monopoly, for there are still a hundred places in the brook for a hundred other water wheels, if you want to install them! You see, nature's sources of capital are not so easily stolen.' 'Yes,' he said, grasping at a last straw, 'but in Dresden things are different!' 'If things really are so different and so much worse in Dresden, you should work to save the citizens of Dresden, and as a modern spirit not make generalisations; you see, making generalisations is dangerous. If the potato harvest is blighted in Ireland you don't go to Saxony to preach about potato blight.' 'That has got nothing to do with it; if the workers here aren't discontented, that's because they're unaware.' 'No, sir, it's awareness; all these workers here, and the maidservants too, are well educated, in excellent schools. And if not every worker is discontented, that's because some of them are content. The Belgian glassblower with 20,000 francs a year is content; the Amsterdam diamond-cutter with 9,000 francs a year is more content than the minister who earns as much; the Parisian cabinet-maker with 6,000 francs is content; and the skilled Roman jewellery-worker with 7,000 francs is very content, and would give you what for if you wanted to reduce his wages to the 1,200 francs of the unskilled worker. You see, ability is also capital, and "the unskilled worker" is a generalisation, a philosophical term, an idealistic vision! Well, isn't it? And which worker complains the most? The manual workers, perhaps, or the agricultural labourers, who have the heaviest burden? No, for they are nevertheless strong and sound. It is the machinists, who no longer work with their bodies. These gentlemen in their cuffs and loose collars, who stand beside the machines that do their work, simply twiddling a screw here or a tap there, have become highly-strung, as delicate as an old clerk from too little real work; they are anaemic neuropaths for whom we shall soon need to prescribe iron and physiotherapy. That's how things are!'9 20 June Today he has talked the whole time about 'other things'. His father now turns out to be a civil servant, whom he has seen out walking in

'The Battle of the Brains'

35

Konigsberg. It is strange that he does not suspect that I know who his father is. Like a hare, he believes he is out of sight because he has stuck his head in a hole. He told me today that he is engaged to a girl from a good family, and that he is intending to get married, because he needs a friend. In fact he hates people. I told him that if he simply wanted friendship, he should seek that in a man, because friendship between people of the opposite sex is not as dependable as it is between people of the same sex, in whom similar ways of thinking, habits and upbringing are a greater guarantee of compatibility. But he was going to have a spiritual marriage, naturally without any children, for it was to be modern. He had read about it in Chernyshevsky.10 I urged him to see that Chernyshevsky was an old idealist, and that he had nothing to learn from him. As usual, he became angry. He believed in pure love, a novelty which, I reminded him, had been invented by the troubadours in Provence, or even earlier, by a certain cat that couldn't get the cream. I told him straight out that he was nothing but a 'decadent', as they are called in France, and that his obscure desire for sterility was nothing but a symptom of a family in decay. In the afternoon we took a walk in the woods. He was sullen and I could see that he hated me but was under my influence, that he wished to escape, but was unable to. As we were strolling along he took out a revolver, which was loaded, and said that we should have some shooting practice. To avoid becoming a target I took out my revolver, which I always carry with me ever since I began to suffer from a mild form of persecution mania. We directed our shots at a pine tree and measured the depth of the bullet holes. I soon grew tired of this game, put my revolver away, and walked slowly on. Crack! Off goes a shot, and the bullet whistles past me. Was he trying to murder me with what appeared to be an accidental shot? I don't really think so, for that practice is now out of fashion, but with two small children who would have had no one to provide for them, the incident made an unpleasant impression on me. That evening he said that he wanted to go home. 21 June He no longer says a word about socialism and is quite calm, although he does not leave. Sometimes, when I sit on my balcony and see his tall, darkfigureprowling around down there in the garden, I ask myself again what he wants with me. I am neither rich nor powerful, and he has nothing to gain from me.

36

Selected Essays

But I can no longer work, for I am obsessed by him as he is by me. When he is not there, and I try to summon up his image, I can never get it in focus. It emerges either as Meyer or a Gorilla, but never Schilf. Have I devoured his self, and is he now like the man without a shadow?11 Was his self simply the programme that I ripped from him? He is shrunken and empty like a coat hung out to be beaten. He can no longer talk, now that I have extracted his dictionary; and he is incapable of small talk. He certainly confirms my philosophical conception of a tabula rasa, and now that he is newly washed clean, I have a powerful desire to cover his tablet with my handwriting. My soul wants to adopt him, devour him and make him my vassal. 22 June The motives behind the plan that I now set in motion were numerous, which is often the case where human actions are concerned. I felt cruelly indebted to this young man whom I had compelled to wound in his innermost hiding-place for my own sake and that of my party, without, however, directly injuring his career. Furthermore, I experienced a powerful desire to study him and take advantage of the extremely painful preliminary studies that I had devoted to him. I wanted to be of use to him and to use him, that is, to be able eventually to part from him and be done with him, for I was myself tormented by guilt towards other people and found it hard to accept that others owed something to me, which would only bring down unnecessary hatred upon me. This morning when I encountered Schilf I asked him for a word. He looked uneasy, but my friendly, almost fatherly, attitude overcame the inclination he felt to brush me off. 'Herr Schilf, I said. 'You are a talented and ambitious man, and the latter usually indicates the presence of considerable powers. Have you never dreamt of being able to discover something new in your discipline, take it a step forward, and in so doing advance yourself?' 'No', he replied. 'Using the methods of the new doctrine of evolution, there have recently been so many important developments in my field that it can be proved mathematically that no new discoveries are possible for another twenty-five years.' 'Good', I said. 'Then I have a suggestion to put to you. You know that I previously busied myself with botany, and made a study of the algae. Much has been accomplished in that sphere, but there remains an unexplored area, the subalpine algae of the Mediterranean flora. I have long

'The Battle of the Brains'

37

planned to undertake this task, but lack the qualities required for carrying it out in practice; in brief, I am a bad traveller. It is a peculiarity of mine. Being of a highly sociable nature, accustomed to the company and solicitude of my family, and used to having someone to look after and take care of, I get quite lost when I am away from them, even for a short while. Railway compartments give me hypochondria, while in hotels I suffer from morbid fantasies, and once wept over a table d'hote! 'How childish', he put in, pricking up his ears in delight. 'I would go to Australia all by myself if it mattered.' 'I know', I replied, a little taken aback by the alacrity with which he was on to me. 'I know,' I resumed, 'and it is precisely because you have the qualities that I lack in this respectthat I would like to suggest that you travel with me through Italy, and become my secretary, my travelling companion, or what you wish.' 'Yes, with pleasure', he replied immediately, coming to life at the sound of Italy. 'But,' I continued, 'only on one condition. I don't want you saying later on that I exploited you, and therefore I wish you to become my collaborator, and assume responsibility for the illustrations. You are familiar with microscopic photography, I presume?' 'Good heavens, yes, it isn't difficult!' 'Well, I shall finance the journey and whatever is required in the way of equipment. Can you spare the time away?' He thought for a moment. Then he replied: 'Yes, but I shall have to get someone to stand in for me.' 'I'll pay for that.' He was silent. I thought I could divine his thoughts. 'If you have any outstanding business in Dresden, I will settle up for you.' I had guessed correctly. He leapt out of his chair, his brow cleared and I thought I could see how his vest filled out, as if a great weight had been taken from his breast. The poor young man, he had debts. 'But,' I added, 'I depend upon your energy, your youthful strength, and your enterprise, for the journey will be costly, and if you go and leave me alone for a moment, everything can come to naught, and I shall simply have to turn back.' 'Oh, depend on me', he replied, and drew himself up to show his muscles. 'I shall grab you by the scruff of your neck if you fall apart.' 'Just one more thing', I said. 'Remember that this work may make your

38

Selected Essays

reputation and that it is intended to make mine. If you have compromised yourself as a Social Democrat in Dresden, I do not want my name to appear alongside yours on the title page.' c No one knows anything about that', he replied; 'but what would it matter if they did? The future belongs to socialism.' 'You know very well that socialism was the last groundswell of the Restoration and is pure Christianity; and you ought to realise that it has no future, for every truly modern spirit, who may have been momentarily duped by these ghosts, has abandoned the movement as contrary to the laws of evolution.' He became thoughtful and exclaimed: 'Do you think so?' 'To all intents and purposes, yes. Do you believe that Germany's 300,000 unarmed workers could hold their ground against a regular army of 3 million, when the time comes to do battle?' 'No, you may be right', he said, and looked regretful. This was the first time that he had admitted I was right. Self-interest, need, the desire for self-preservation had changed his opinion, and what had recently been his hope was now his fear. 'How could someone as intelligent as you are', I went on, 'defend these absurdities, these blatant errors?' 'Oh, one has to go along with all of it for "agitational ends", but the leaders don't believe in the programme themselves. It is all just to encourage the workers!' Now he was mine. When one doesn't have a rifle one has to have a programme! It all evens out, but the question is whether the programme can be as powerful as the rifle. However, the matter was settled and over our evening meal, where my wife committed me to his protection, he treated me like a helpless wretch. Later on, I head him singing as he went to bed, and was glad that I had been able to make someone happy. 23 June Herr Schilf and my wife are now engaged in kitting me out, and I am like a child here, apathetic, because it amuses me to be looked after, and it is a pleasant feeling to be the object of goodwill. My wife packs woollens and some mint liqueur; Schilf has obtained some gentian because he attributes my sensitivity to my stomach. My wife is of the opinion that I shall not survive this journey. Schilf is radiant. This alliance with my wife leads him to behave as if he

'The Battle of the Brains'

39

were my father, and today he has declared that he has never felt as warmly towards anyone as he does towards me. What a base feeling this warmth is, however, which we can only bestow upon someone who is beneath us, and never upon someone above. 24 June Today we have travelled south for ten hours. Schilf has looked after our money, purchased tickets and checked our luggage. At the station in Zurich he settled me down on a bench while he took care of the tickets. 'Sit quite still here now', he said, 'while I'm away, and for heaven's sake, don't cry' I laughed with a sense of superiority, because I know that it is my powerful mind that activates his powers of locomotion, and that I have hypnotised him so that he suffers from the hallucination that it is he who sets me in motion. He does not see that his nerves and muscles are connected to my great electric battery. This evening I feel greatly strengthened by the journey, but Schilf complains slightly of fatigue. 25 June Arrived at Milan. Schilf is extremely disappointed in his expectations of Italy. He finds Lombardy horribly ugly.12 'You see, sir,' I said, 'that you still had some illusions even though you are a modern spirit.' Today I bought a camera and levelling instrument. I handed them over to Schilf, saying: 'Here is the equipment, but you don't believe I stole these things, do you?' Then I added: 'Exploit them now, and turn them into capital, but don't "wrest them back" from me later on.' We both laughed, but I the more freely. In the compartment, where he has to sit opposite me, I have him under my gaze all day long, and I drip my thoughts into his brain in the form of well-crafted sentences. He also visited the cathedral, and I had prepared him in advance so that he could not help but find the exterior ugly. He already sees with my eyes. 26 June Travelled by rail from 5.0 a.m., then walked 12 kilometres. It was blazing hot. We sweated massively and it felt as if I had lost a great

4-O

Selected Essays

deal of strength, which impeded my physical energy. After we had been walking for 10 kilometres, Schilf showed signs of fatigue, and I took the luggage and walked on in front, which pained him. An excursion to a small lake at the foot of the Apennines where I dragged for the first time.13 Schilf proved to be clumsy at making the slides. Is out of sorts and somewhat depressed. 27 June We travelled by train all day today, and I talked without respite. My speech seemed to fascinate him and every now and again he shook himself, as if he wanted to rouse himself from sleep. I began at 8 o'clock with Hegel14 and by 12.00 I had made a Hegelian of him, although only after strong resistance. In order to entrap him I prepared dialectical snares, tricked him into sticking in a tentativefinger,then took an arm, and finally had him by the throat. Thus, I began by talking about the inherited ideas that govern even modern spirits. As an example, I tookTaine, whose discussion of the ancien regime takes for granted that the Revolution was in every respect sound and truly democratic, but who then, through further research into the subject, discovered that the Revolution became a despotic, aristocratic movement, more aristocratic than the regime of Louis XVI.151 proved to him that our belief in the Revolution was just as theological as our earlier belief in the Trinity. I continued by asking him if he had read Hegel. 'No, but I detest him', he replied. I then told him that Hegel was a proto-Darwinist. That he maintained the right of the objective powers against subjective enthusiasm, new Romanticism and private liberalism. 'He overthrew God and made the whole of creation into this eternal process that you are always going on about, and it was he who discovered the development of language and thought in history, in which the individual is only a passing moment. 'Hegel is the most modern of spirits, and if you find him or think him old-fashioned, that is an illusion, for his thoughts were so far ahead of his time that they are only now on the way to becoming modern; therefore, just because he preceded us in time does not prove that he is behind us. You, sir, are a subjective idealist, and want to revise the history of the world according to your fancy, and I find you terribly antiquated.' He stared at me in surprise, and asked: Are you a Hegelian?'

c

The Battle of the Brains'

41

'Naturally, as all educated people are nowadays.' The effect of this 'all' was tremendous. It was as if I had come upon him with an army corps. It is astounding how powerful public opinion is, even when home-made, I thought. When I wanted to feed his head with Hegel by way of reason and proof, it didn't work, but when I used the magic formulae 'all' and 'educated', he yielded to a superior force. Later on that evening I demonstrated to him that it had not been proved that the earth was a globe. At first he laughed pityingly, but when I expressed surprise that he had not readTyndall's essay in the Edinburgh Review,16 he became diffident, and felt ashamed. What a tremendous power there is in a name, and what an effect authority has, even on a modern spirit. However, he did not give in immediately. 'Yes, but the round shadow of the earth is visible during an eclipse of the moon', he objected. 'Certainly,' I replied, 'but as proof that is only acceptable in an elementary school. For are not all bodies round because they project round shadows? If you put a hexagonal or a square on an axle and spin it round, the figure appears round, as does its shadow; consequently the earth which rotates upon an axis also projects a round shadow even if it is not round. No, it is a question of the unreliability of triangulation; not the actual measurement itself, however, but the argumentation.' As he was not a mathematician, I jumbled up some trigonometric formulae, which under the influence of the names 'Tyndall' and 'Edinburgh Review he had to accept in good faith. The man is a complete theologian, and the human brain seems to function as uncertainly as in times past. Once Paul, now Tyndall; the Gospel according to St Luke or the Edinburgh Review. The same thing with a different name! That is what I told him, more or less. He is no longer able to put up any resistance, and I am convinced that I could soon instil in him any belief you like. 28 June Another walking tour today. Schilf became very tired, but I felt in better and better spirits, which only made him all the more tired. He seemed on the verge of discovering that his soul was in my hands, but could not quite grasp it. Looked uneasy, anxious and dejected. I was only waiting to hear that he wanted to turn back.

42

Selected Essays

I treat him with great delicacy; he always has his own hotel room and requisitions the best food and drink. He has an amazing appetite and keeps a bottle of brandy in the compartment. Let him! In the afternoon I remained at a village outside Modena while Schilf journeyed into the town to buy a lens. He was away for four hours. When he returned he looked fitter. Over a glass of wine later that evening he grew expansive: 'You know, doctor,' he said, 'it was a real relief to get away from you for a couple of hours.' 'In what way?' I asked. 'I don't know,' he replied, 'but I find you so terribly oppressive.' I already knew this, for I can now read his thoughts. I therefore tried him, and said: 'And you thought of running away from me?' 'Me? No, whatever do you think of me?' he burst out, as if he had been caught in the act. I would be willing to swear that I had guessed correctly! 29 June It is generally known that there are hymenopterana which lay their eggs in the bodies of the cabbage white's larvae. The eggs hatch and pupate, and the larvae are as huge as if they were in the family way. But when the time comes for them to give birth a host of hymenopterana emerge, while the larvae lie there with their empty skins. I feel like such a hymenopteran in relation to Schilf. My eggs lie in his brain and my thoughts fly out, while he gets increasingly empty. He now speaks like me; he uses my vocabulary, my jokes, my quotations. He believes they are his butterflies, but they are really only my baby hymenopterana. Every day now he looks as though he is hatching plans of escape, but the thought of seeing Rome seems to keep him going. He is not interested in the algae, because they are so clearly my idea, and to go along with me is repugnant to this individualist, who believed himself to be such a socialist. 30 June Today he felt unwell and I gave him some drops and put him to bed. He looked furious, as if he had lost his last trump. My health is unwavering and I feel my strength increasing with the exercise. What if my good wife has been hypnotising me unconsciously, through her tenderness, and I have been suffering only from hypochondria!

'The Battle of the Brains'

43

It is strange, but my energy seems to increase in proportion to his growing debility. Is it possible to take over someone else s nervous energy? I have heard that in former times dogs were placed alongside the sick, and in physiotherapy I have seen how the strong 'magnetisers' go to pieces while the patients get better. Or is it only my ambition which spurs me on! 1 July The journey continued. He was in a rage and seemed to have awoken. He resisted me by attacking my person, and I was obliged to destroy him with the same tactic. He became coarse and insulting, and I was compelled to go for him. 'Listen, sir', I began. 'We must speak candidly. You have underestimated me, and I have overestimated you, isn't that so? You possess none of the qualities you thought you possessed. You have a sterile mind and lack even the physicial superiority in which my praise of you induced you to believe.' He foamed, but I continued: 'You were impertinent to me, because I gave way and was obliged, as your host, to treat my guest politely; but you are as bashful as any bumpkin with the first railwayman who comes along.' 'Am I?' 'Yes! You can't see yourself, how you stand with your hat in your hand and are therefore badly treated. You call the waiter "Sir"! and we therefore get the worst rooms. You are a coward, so cowardly that you are embarrassed to read through our hotel bill, which is therefore always too high. You made yourself out to be thrifty, but you are a spendthrift; you led us both to believe that you were temperate and sober, and you are neither. This is no trivial comment to do with economy, you know, it is psychology! Or perhaps you really did possess all those qualities, but have lost them along with this change in your circumstances. What do you believe yourself?' He was now as pale and shattered as if he had seen a ghost. He could not answer for, like most people who don't reflect upon their character, he knew nothing about himself. And I let it remain a possibility that he had possessed all the qualities to which he had laid claim, but now had lost them. We were reconciled, and continued our journey. But he no longer laughed when I joked about socialism. He seemed to have lost all hope of raising himself with my help, and his fear of the future drove him back to the support which the party of the discontented afforded him. And he has lost all interest in my algae, so for me the journey is largely a failure.

44

Selected Essays

2 July Hostilities are suspended but our emnity is obvious. We sit opposite one another in silence like two cats, and watch carefully to see that neither of us has time to raise his paw first. It was a tactical blunder on my part to analyse him like that, and thus render him conscious. For he now seems to be awake, and is trying to liberate himself. His eyes avoid mine; his face is traversed by shifting expressions like gusts of wind, and when, this morning, he broke the silence by laughing to himself, I asked him: 'What are you laughing at?' 'At my thoughts', he replied, boldly. In the afternoon he grew brave and said straight out that socialism would nevertheless come to pass in a few more years. To which I replied, well prepared: 'Not socialism, but the revolution possibly. Socialism was a manifestation of the impatience felt by a sensitive and badly brought-up generation, which lacked discipline. Had we been able to discover a single tendency to sociability in the aspirations of the age, we might possibly have been able to accept what you anticipate. But in its place we have only seen the most ruthless individualism. Is not a small and natural association like marriage already falling apart; can you see anything save the most frenzied anarchism at large; are not family bonds in the process of dissolution so that children oppose their parents; are not nations, races, classes and sexes rising up one against another? Have you seen anyone who wishes to conform, to subordinate himself? In times past literature and the arts provided a schooling that enabled the young, who unconsciously recognised the law of evolution, to continue where their elders left off. Can you see the formation of political parties with any unity nowadays? In times past there were only two groups in parliament, Tories and Whigs, conservative and liberal, and by means of action and reaction things nevertheless moved slowly forward. But now one sees six or eight, as many parties as there are leaders, and therefore things are at a standstill, or going backwards. It is as if every individual was afraid of being devoured and therefore decided to do some devouring himself and form a party! No, sir, it is not socialism that is coming, though anarchy, may be.' 'Yes, but it's not as you describe it!' 'Well, how is it then?' Whereupon the Dresden box sounded forth again, just as if it had been mended. My power was gone; I had most certainly woken him up.

'The Battle of the Brains'

45

3 July In Rome. The explosion! On arrival I asked him if he wanted to visit the working-class district and study the social question. No, he would rather go to the Vatican. While he was away I took the photographic plates and went to a photographer. We were using dry plates and were not going to develop them until we got back home. After two hours of work at the photographer's it emerged that all the plates were useless. I asked myself if Schilf had ruined them from ignorance or out of malice, but found this difficult to decide. When I now recalled how he had handled the apparatus I inclined to the view that he had done it intentionally. He had in fact let me play no part at all in this work. He was always secretive, locking himself in with the instrument, saying that it was so fragile, and once he grabbed it out of my hand when I wanted to examine it. Was this really his revenge? No, I don't think so, for at the start of our enterprise his great interest in the subject made him conscientious. He was quite simply ignorant, but in order to gain his ends he had to promise the earth. Later, when he lost interest, perhaps he grew careless, and finally, when he became my enemy, perhaps he really did intend to mess things up. I lined up the plates, which were numbered, in chronological order on the table, and divided them approximately, according to my diary, into three groups. This proved to be corrrect, for the first ones, which ought to have been the least successful because of his inexperience, were the best; the second group was worse, and suffered from over- or under-exposure, in other words, carelessness; the last plates were all black, and had probably been extracted from the cassettes in daylight. A couple were in bits, the very ones that he had taken on the day when I conducted the analysis on him, and he was so furious. When he got back to the hotel, I took him into my room and showed him the developed plates. 'What!' he broke out. 'Have you . . .' 'I have had them developed.' He looked like an unmasked criminal. 'And this is what they look like.' 'It is the photographer's fault', he replied. 'I told you to keep them until we got home.' 'It is not the photographer's fault', I said. 'It is yours.' 'Do you think I'm a bandit?' 'I really don't know what I should think of you; however, I no longer have any desire either to think about or believe anything of you! Here is the money for your journey home. Farewell!'

46

Selected Essays

Now I really expected, perhaps because I was so used to theatrical villains, to see him say to my face, with bared teeth: 'This was my revenge!', or something even more striking. But he said nothing of the kind, and a villain surely does not let his defences fall before reaching the prison gates, if there. He replied far more simply by throwing dust in my eyes to blind me and lead me to doubt my judgement. He merely said: 'You're so suspicious, doctor.' 'You're not the first wretch to say that', I replied. 'It's what all those who have deceived me have said! Goodbye!' He seemed glad to be able to go, and left quickly. I was standing at the window when he came out of the door. He paused at first, undecided which direction to take. Then he crossed the road at a diagonal — there was always something crooked about that man — and stopped before a shop window, probably in order to buy some souvenir of Rome. Then he went up the street, with that serpentine, seemingly certain gait, which resembled his handwriting with those big flourishes that were intended to conceal his weakness. Alone once again, I felt calmer. A debt was paid and we were even, if the pleasures and lessons that I had provided him with could compensate for the pain I had caused him, which was likely since he seemed extremely insensitive. But again and again I asked myself: what did this man want with me? Did he come to take his revenge in a blood feud? The feeling of revenge, though, is so complicated. It can be the need an individual feels to redress a balance, for revenge is a primitive form of punishment, or an act of selfdefence, to prevent the attacker from renewing his attack; and many people are too cowardly to take revenge because they fear it might backfire. Who was this young man? I don't know, for I saw him change character as circumstances changed, as other people do, until they grow rigid with age and stable circumstances. He was young and had still not been able to settle upon his role in life; therefore he was more flexible and easier to study, and therefore, perhaps, I could bend him until he became conscious, or maybe it was just because my brain was the stronger!

'Nemesis Divina

The celebrated botanist Linnaeus left a manuscript about Nemesis Divina from which extracts have only recently been published.1 From these it is evident that the great scientist believed in the direct intervention of a god in human destinies. He also believed that this same god already punishes criminals in this life, if only through the children in the third or fourth generations. In order to substantiate his theory of Nemesis he quoted a great number of cases, which he had observed in the course of a long life, and reading this data concerning the proceedings of this divine justice can hardly help but make a strong impression upon the reader. Like every prominent personality who has long sought and finally attained an honourable place in life and then looks back in surprise over the difficulties he has overcome, Linnaeus also hit upon the idea that he was under a God's powerful and special protection. From this original premise he subsequently came to the conclusion that the same God who protected him must also ravage his enemies. This belief, which is very widespread, must like everything else have a natural cause, even if the explanation is to be sought a little nearer home than where Linnaeus sought it. By way of experiment I would like to seek it in the very conditions of life, and in the fundamental nature of the human psyche. A man who has reached the meridian of life, who has a wife and children, a position, and a fair prospect of supporting himself, finds this just as it should be; he may even be dissatisfied with his lot, and would have wished things better. And yet all this is quite simply a miracle. A miracle that he was not among the 20 per cent of children who die in their first year; a miracle that he has reached the age of 40, when the average length of life is 32 years; a miracle that he did not remain among the 2.5 million who never marry (out of a population of 4 million); a miracle that he obtained a position sought by so many thousands; a miracle that his wife survived her confinements, when approximately 500 women die every 47

48

Selected Essays

year in childbirth; a miracle that none of his children have died. In truth, a miracle, founded upon such natural causes as the fact that of twelve brothers and sisters he was stronger than the five who died; that he had more good fortune in escaping cholera, chicken-pox, smallpox and scarlet fever; that his parents gave him a hardy upbringing and that his father realised early on in what direction his gifts lay, so that he did not have to exhaust his strength on what for him were loathsome careers; that chance brought him into contact with the right wife, so that he escaped a grave miscalculation, and so that his children grew up strong and full of the joys of life. The miracle was thus based upon inherited and acquired qualities which favoured the struggle, and on a series of favourable circumstances as well as a powerful ability to adapt to the varied conditions of life. Every man sees only his own rainbow and is himself its focal point. So, too, every individual in his life. One sees only the brilliant seven-coloured bow which has no existence outside that of the observing eye; but nor is the blinding play of colours visible without a dark cloud as background. And the black cloud is the death and destruction of the 'others', without whose disappearance T would not have existed. Had they not gone under in the mortality figures, I should have had to have done so, for the dragon of the mortality figures must have his annual number of victims, until it pleases a St George to appear, which he has not done thus far. When, having almost reached 40,1 pause briefly to look back over those who have fallen along the way, I see a terrible battlefield, and with another outlook on life I should easily have hit upon the idea that my humble person has been under the direct protection of some god; and yet I still believe that I have not had a more dismal life than other people, not experienced greater misfortunes than other people, but only been more courageous in hunting down the corpses in my mind. I see four brothers and sisters in their tiny coffins; see father and mother dead; aunts and uncles, cousins, grandmothers, all dead. The young died because they were too young, and the old quite naturally because they were old. My mother, after twelve confinements, and my father after having reached 74, all quite normal therefore. I recall bankruptcies within the family (because I came of merchant stock and bankruptcies are pretty commonplace among merchants), broken engagements (extremely normal), unhappy love, religious brooding, schisms between parents and children, disunity between brothers and sisters, unpopular matches, bad times, illnesses, all entirely normal circumstances.

'Nemesis Divina'

49

Of my first teachers at school, one has hanged himself, four went mad, two died of consumption, a couple went to the dogs and disappeared, and others probably died without my knowledge. Of the hundreds of schoolfellows I once had, many of them are dead, one on the gallows and several totally wrecked, some in prison, some still to be seen wandering the streets as stevedores, or even worse. I have still in my possession a photograph from secondary school in which I am portrayed together with four friends of my youth. Of these four, three are dead. One died as a medical student on a warship (and did not acknowledge me during his last years because we had fallen out), one while a licentiate, and one a notary, all before their thirty-fifth year. Of twenty student friends from the same secondary school at least eight are dead, some have gone to the bad, and perhaps onlyfivestill know me. And yet as young men we had shared our ups and downs for years, gone through the same ordeals, embraced one another at the same student parties, sung in the same quartet. Well, so what? That is life: it is hardly my fault, and I have learnt not to grieve for what is unavoidable, for I am not a hypochondriac even though I am called a pessimist. If I could remember all the various shifts of nurses, maids, servants and bookkeepers who passed before me in my childhood home the background would become still darker: dismissed for theft, died from deplorable illnesses, sunk to wretched occupations; they are legion — for 'down there' the struggle is harder, the temptation easier and the drop shorter. Quite natural therefore! This was the dark background. Let us now change the point of view and assume that we can see other people's rainbows. I no longer see the tiny corpses of dead brothers and sisters; I see the living, healthy and contented, some even in positions in life which exceed by far the expectations of their young dreams; happily married, with sturdy children. Looking still further back into the past I see a conscientious, peace-loving father, living a quiet family life with flowers and music; a home with many friends, salad days with old-fashioned pleasures, dances and games; see numerous relations displaying fine, beautiful traits (unusual) of devoted family love, filial respect and daughterly love; happy (unusually happy) marriages; increasing prosperity in place of ruin, riches even in some quarters; good character, good health; great social esteem, a respected memory, a ceremony at the cemetery, a bust on the grave, and a medal from the Academy of Sciences, even though it did arrive posthumously, some twenty-five years too late. And among my teachers I see once-impoverished colleagues living as

50

Selected Essays

principals and lecturers, with respected name and scholarly reputation, some enjoying both happy and wealthy marriages. And among my school friends, two ministers, one pastor primarius,2 directors, registrars, professors, famous artists, writers of rank, a brilliant actor, doctors with good practices and fine establishments, and a muchdecorated circumnavigator of the world, a member of numerous learned societies.3 In short: life is just as black as the pessimists maintain it is, and just as bright as the optimists portray it. To maintain that it is either black or white is simply a logical blunder, for life is both. The mistake that both the optimist and the pessimist make is to allow their mental apparatus to function in a monomaniac fashion, so that it selects and accumulates only one or the other aspect. This is not an unusual procedure in scholarly argument, and is particularly dangerous in establishing historical data, where all those instances which prove the case for are collected and presented while all the facts which would count against are omitted. Which is also why there are hardly any scholarly works which could not with good will be subjected to criticism and refutation. Another just as dangerous and still more common error in logical argument is to posit a causal relationship between facts that merely succeed one another in time. If someone sees me commit a crime that remains unpunished by the law, and things then go badly for me, the interested observer readily makes my misfortune a consequence of the previous wrongdoing, and with that the Nemesis fiction is complete. Post nonpropterA — in succession to, not in consequence of! This flaw in the capacity for thought has occasioned every superstition in science, history, philosophy and religion. The patient is given a medicine and gets well, consequently it was the medicine that is assumed to have cured him, although there is no proof that the invalid would not have got well in spite of it. Sister Gisela was afflicted by cramp; she prayed to the Madonna, and the cramp vanished; consequently it was this prayer to the Madonna that helped, although the improvement could have been brought about by the relaxation in muscular tension that this release of nervous energy entailed. This is the source of error from which a belief in ghosts, evil sprites, white ladies and white horses flows,5 and now that the Darwin monomania has assumed epidemic proportions, it is questionable whether a great deal that we in our time attribute to heredity is only a post, non propter. Thus, in Ibsen's Ghosts, & son repeats a deed that his father committed before him,

'Nemesis Divina'

51

but this same deed has probably been repeated by every normally constituted son in every age.6 In a house which changes its tenants many times in the course of a year, an observer would, were he to spend a lifetime recording all the deaths, illnesses and accidents, find that the house was accursed, and possessed what is called an 'evil sprite'. But those of us who move house frequently are unable to follow its fortunes for so long a period, therefore we notice it only when we have an opportunity of observing these many different troupes of tenants at greater length. I had the opportunity of following the fortunes of a dwelling-house and its tenants over twenty-five years, and were I to amass all the misery I saw there, I would, like my female relations, though from a different perspective, easily have shared the belief that this house was 'accursed'. When we moved there in 1857 the landlord had recently gone bankrupt and one floor was occupied by a madman.7 The property was almost immediately purchased by a half-ruined farmer who was ailing and a little daft, and who had unfortunate family circumstances. It was then bought by a wealthy man, with fine habits, who loved music and himself played string quartets with the musicians who were invited to the house. Then came bankruptcy and ruin. His once-rich wife opened a tavern, his son became a guardsman and his daughter a waitress. The property was then sold to an ironmaster from the provinces. He was a hypochondriac and believed to be mentally unstable; the family circumstances were lamentable. Of the many children a couple came to a bad end and two died, as did the mother; his fortune was dissipated, and this wealthy man went around a down-and-out. Then a rich brewer arrived. He entertained on a grand scale, sought fine company, gave his children a refined upbringing and was himself a model of behaviour. It was a pleasant and attractive middle-class house. But two sons had been cast off and hid themselves away abroad as seamen, sending no news of themselves; the wife was ill; the daughters were sickly and brought with them religious musings, unhappy love and unpopular marriages; death, the madhouse and suicide. Everything ended in ruin, and the fine old burgher had to take a position as a bookkeeper with one of his old circle of friends. To witness this wealthy, respected, educated family's total spoliation by misfortune was to see Niobe and her children shot down by the vengeful Apollo's arrows. Unusually tall, handsome, loyal people, they seemed (speaking mythologically) to have attracted the jealousy of the gods, and were picked off one by one, until in ten years they were all gone.

52

Selected Essays

After that a mentally ill bishop moved in, but by then I had moved away. But while all this was taking place I had lost a brother and my mother, had had family sorrows and gone through the same storms of youth that the majority of people probably go through. What was it about this house? It was probably no different from any other house, except that its history had been recorded. Or was it really worse than other houses? Perhaps! But in that case for the simple reason that it was a small, one-storeyed house, standing alone in an outlying suburb down an avenue, with no neighbours and surrounded by an enormous garden and a large park. Once one has noticed how people who bear a social or economic wound avoid the great concentrations of humanity and seek isolation and nature, one might well conclude that all these people had necessarily sought out this isolated little house in which to hide. They were all wounded before they came, and hid themselves away precisely on that account; what we others witnessed was only the death struggle. After all, hospitals and clinics are located outside a town; this became a hospital because of its situation.* But it was not only and always so. Many other people would be able to write this house's white chronicle, and I myself might perhaps contribute enthusiastically to it, for in that property with its hundred apple trees, its white birches and enormous cherry trees, I, too, have spent bright youthful days, 8 and I know a married couple, now old, who would certainly not be able to see that remote building without growing young again, for it was there that they met for the first time; and they are still convinced that a good sprite lived there, even though Niobe and her children were convinced that there was only a wicked one! After these preliminaries we ought to be able to approach the problem of Nemesis, which these established formulae now allow us solve without any great difficulty, and to solve with the greatest of ease if, as before, one focuses upon one's own selfhood. A man who fights publicly on behalf of a majority naturally creates enemies. If the challenger is strong enough and his party is sufficiently numerous to survive the battle, the victor — even if he is himself badly injured — will be able to reckon upon there being many defeated and wounded people among his enemies. If he is also presumptuous enough to consider his call sacred, and a mite sharp-witted as well, he will believe that

It has now in fact become a home for illegitimate orphans.

'Nemesis Divina'

53

a punishing or revenging power has protected his 'sacred' cause and destroyed his enemies, particularly if they have fallen without his direct intervention. Relinquishing all such explanations that appeal to the intervention of a higher power, I would, however, like to give an example of how such a superstition may arise through a one-sided procedure in the collection of facts, and in particular of drawing conclusions from them through a false causal connection. After a 4-year-long literary, social and political feud of quite indefinite proportions,9 I looked back over the battlefield and saw there so many dead foes that to go on living felt terrible when I could easily count upon the likelihood of the same fate myself in the near future; indeed, it might be expected at any moment. The first, my principal enemy, who controlled a profitable paper, was enticed by a temporary victory to greater undertakings, which brought about his ruin. Maybe I had damaged his reputation and made him look ridiculous so that his words were no longer valued as they had been before. The second was an entire newspaper office which handled the heavy artillery. There was a palace revolution and the whole troop was scattered to the winds. One of them, the most implacable, ended in a lunatic asylum; another died of a stroke in a restaurant; a third, who had fought against me for twelve years, simply disappeared. A man of letters who had sworn my destruction died suddenly, shortly after a success that he had sought in vain to prevent. Another fell out of favour, and yet another died. A respected writer, who had written a play in which I was lampooned, died; a similar attempt at another theatre came to grief, and shortly afterwards the author had a spectacular flop which destroyed his reputation. My most powerful but wily enemy died from a horrible illness. Of a group which wrote and performed a third scurrilous play, one died and another was ignominiously dismissed from his post, flopped and was forced to leave the country in dishonour. I know nothing about any of the others. The author of a satirical song died the following year. Furthermore, a newspaper editor was deposed and his comrades-in-arms were dismissed and left on the rocks. That much I know. In the course of four years therefore: seven dead, one in a madhouse, six lost. What now is the relationship between all this and my role as their enemy? Or is there in fact a relationship?

54

Selected Essays

Here a both-and ought to appear most reasonable. Some had doubtless been reduced to dire straits by my campaign and thus forfeited the self-possession that is so vital in life's struggle. Others had doubtless been mortified by their unsuccessful attacks; others were already well on the way to ruin, and not equal to a fight; others had doubtless nothing more to lose and therefore sought an easily won reputation by lighting the pyre of a renowned heretic; others were doubtless sick and would die in any case. Moreover, were I to turn over the page and make a list of my victorious enemies, the Nemesis that emerged would be on the side of my opponents, which they could enlist against me, and to just as good effect. A publisher was decorated because at the right moment he prevented the publication of one of my works; an insignificant man of letters gained a great reputation by reviling me; three others were promoted to editorships; a minor poet was awarded a grant by the Academy because he had written opposing me; a hitherto unpromoted civil servant received the order of Knight Commander for his intervention against the freedom of religion that I had defended; my activities and my defeat breathed new life into two major newspapers that would otherwise not have survived; and the forces of reaction against which I fought were united for the first time, and victorious — for the time being. Moreover, were my enemies to count all the wounded, all the mishaps and misfortunes which have befallen me, their belief in a god who punishes would be further strengthened. This punishing god, or Nemesis, has thus no other basis than all other gods: fear, and more immediately, fear of the consequences of having struck one's neighbour, and hence the need to throw the blame on someone else. They struck me themselves, but they did not dare take the responsibility, for it is impossible to be sure that there will not be a rebound, and so they had to put the blame on god. (Compare the doctrine of atonement: cast all your sins on God.) Revenge is punishment in its primitive form; revenge is self-defence; revenge is a desire to restore a state of equilibrium in married life. Everyone wishes to be revenged, but not everyone dares to be, for revenge also calls forth revenge. In order to be able to wreak vengeance without risking its customary return, revenge was attributed to an irresponsible judge and the dangerous act was renamed punishment. Punishment thus became revenge without responsibility, but where punishment could not be achieved without peril, the matter was attributed to god, that is to say, chance. If the injured party subsequently met with an accident which might easily have been foreseen, given that the probability

'Nemesis Divina'

55

of an accident occurring is extremely high, revenge was thus implemented w i t h o u t the intervention of the individual or the judge. Probably the injured party's fear of the deferred p u n i s h m e n t ( = bad conscience) also contributed to throwing h i m off balance so that he was more vulnerable to a misfortune that he might otherwise have been able to avoid or resist. Since no direct causal connection could be discovered between this misfortune and the previously committed action, the illogical course of events was given the name 'Nemesis Divina' — the divine revenge! Divine, like everything illogical!

'Mysticism — For Nouf

A year or two ago in Frankfurt there was a miracle-worker who cured the sick by the laying on of hands, just like Dr Charcot1 in Paris and the staff of the Institute of Gymnasts. But this miracle-worker had the unfortunate habit of saying prayers while he did so, which Dr Charcot supposedly does not do. Since the man was uneducated and could find no compelling explanation for his ability as a healer, he attributed it quite unassumingly to a higher power than his own. Because this impecunious man happened to have been taken up by a highly placed invalid, and thus gained renown, it soon became an accepted part of the liberal programme to snipe at him and his miracles. A storm of hate was whipped up against him, and every freethinker considered it his duty to himself and his principles to attack the miracle-worker at least once a week, thus making a charlatan of him. The doctors, who had found his practice unscientific and dangerous to public health in general, naturally fired a salvo and under the oppressive power of majority opinion every educated man had to have an insult at the ready to save himself from the suspicion of being one of the miracleworker's adherents. The fact remained, however, that the man cured certain illnesses, particularly nervous complaints, through the laying on of hands (and prayer).2 I never saw the man but heard the outcry, and was careful not to raise any doubts about this enraged body of opinion that might have brought me and my family to grief. To remain silent was dangerous, however, for there were inquisitors everywhere who were ready to interpret a man's silence as proof of his secret adherence. I soon came under suspicion and, since I was a doctor, I was forced to speak out against the charlatan, even though I had seen neither him nor his proceedings. I did have a view about the laying on of hands because I used to cure headaches by stroking the forehead; as for the power of prayer in this, I had no opinion, for I was an atheist. I rejected it on account of a categoric postulate which enjoined me to reject everything that the prevailing scientific 56

'Mysticism — For Now'

57

point of view rejected, and I had recently seen a doctor fall into oblivion and extreme poverty merely for taking the fourth dimension as an object of inquiry.3 But shortly afterwards something that occurred in my own house forced me against my will, and contrary to my own interest, to investigate the question of the power of prayer. Since I only found a number of weak psychological explanations which it would require a great deal of further reflection to develop, the question has for the time being to be classified under the heading of mysticism, since the mystical covers everything for which we do not as yet have a satisfactory explanation. This, however, was the sequence of events. One night I was awakened by my wife who told me, with despairing gestures, that my 7-year-old daughter had been seized with cramp. Having thrown on some clothes I went into the nursery. My daughter was lying in her little bed with lockjaw. Her limbs were stiff and her thumbs turned in upon her palms; her eyes were bloodshot and staring, and her face was blue. All the signs indicated an attack of epilepsia nocturna, or falling sickness occurring at night. I went immediately to the medicine cabinet and took out some potassium bromide and belladonna, reassuring my wife by saying that it would soon pass. Although I had very little confidence in these remedies myself, my wife's desperate state of mind inspired me with an unshakeable belief, and even though I was myself in despair and fearful of losing what I held most dear, I was overcome by an indescribable calm when I persuaded my wife to be calm, just as a drunk becomes sober when he sees another drunk and wants to sober him up. I measured out the dosage without my hand trembling, and gave it to the child in full confidence of seeing her restored to health. But when it had no effect and the attacks were renewed with still greater intensity, while my wife cast sceptical glances at me, I broke down. There was nothing for it but death, for the child was delicate and seemed to me to lack all power of resistance. It was as if I was about to have a limb amputated, part of my soul extirpated, which indeed it was since this child was of my flesh, and I had infused its innermost mind with my thoughts. Powerless and lost, I felt my strength disappearing with my child's departing life, and sat down helplessly on the chair beside the bed. My wife had collapsed upon the floor at the bedside, and was like a dead weight. We had both given up and everything seemed to be taking its own course, with no resistance of any kind. Suddenly, I saw my wife straighten up, her hands clasped in prayer, her head raised and her back upright. Her lips moved, and the tiny, thin body

58

Selected Essays

seemed to fill with strength, its slack facial muscles grew taut and the eyes brightened. c Do something', she implored me. A n d I obeyed, although I did not know what to do. Mechanically, and merely so as to d o her bidding, I placed one of m y hands on the child's forehead and the other on its breast, and remained sitting there. While m y wife continued in silent prayer the attacks were renewed under my hands, which could n o t resist and were cast aside, for I was completely powerless. 'Ask G o d to help us', m y wife demanded. At that m o m e n t I recalled Kant's refutation of the power of prayer to change God's will, 4 in m y book the laws of nature, and naturally enough I did not pray. At the next attack, which we believed would end everything, my wife seized hold of m y arm, and shouted: 'She's dying! Pray for her!' At that m o m e n t all m y conscious powers of thought deserted me; I forgot b o t h Kant and atheism, and for the time being under the influence of a stronger will than m y own, m y lips began to move, and words emerged that I had n o t repeated for twenty-five years. Along with the words came old thoughts, and with the thoughts my strength grew. M y chest, which had collapsed, filled with air; my backbone, which had given way, straightened up; m y arms grew tense and I felt as if a current of new strength was radiating from m y fingers. H o p e flourished again, I was seized with optimism, and believed that I could cure the child with m y own hands alone. 'Look h o w easy it is', I wanted to say, as I do in a frequently recurring dream in which I teach people how to fly. If what happened next was a direct result of my prayers I cannot swear to before science, but the following occurred. For as long as I continued praying (if I can call it that), the child remained calm, but a short while after I ceased, the convulsions began again. A n d so I prayed once more, I believe (God forgive me!) that I repeated O u r Father and the Blessing twenty-five times, and I would have called u p o n Buddha if I had seen there was anything to be gained by it. Towards m o r n i n g the child fell asleep, and was saved! W h a t a m I n o w to make of this? M y wife was certain that no one but G o d had helped us, but I could not go along with that. I felt dreadfully ashamed, as if I had been caught up in a piece of charlatanism, but the most important thing had been achieved, and my soul had not been damaged, neither n o w nor, as I hope, for eternity. T h a t it was m y nervous currents which regulated those of the child through contact and conductivity I have impartial scientific proof; it only

'Mysticism — For Now'

59

remains to attempt to explain how prayer could awaken those currents, which initially remained passive. If I go back over my religious development from childhood, I believe I would be able to find some vestiges of an explanation which, even if it is not satisfactory at present, may nevertheless develop into a theory in the future. My oldest memories take me back to a time of continual fear. I was afraid of the dark, of thunder, of my stronger brothers and sisters, of my father. I always seemed to be confronted by a great darkness, which was probably only the unknown in life, and quite possibly the future itself. The first god, that is to say, protector that I knew was my mother, It was to her arms that Ifledwhen this childish fear of the dark overcame me. She comforted me, calmed me, bound up my wounds and taught me what lay behind all the frightening things that I saw. But when I gained a little understanding she taught me to pray to God. This was in the evening, when I went to bed and the light was about to be put out. She taught me that he watched over us while we slept and that he could resist every evil power. But — and here she reintroduced the God of fear and sacrifice — he protected only those who were good and who obeyed their parents. I found this last point less appealing, and nor was it necessary, for I was frightened enough of my father not to dare to be disobedient. After that I always prayed every evening, and it seemed that I derived an enormous tranquillity from without, which corresponded in strength to that which my mother had previously given me. But in the morning, when it was light, I did not pray, probably because I was no longer afraid. This habit of praying stayed with me for a long time. On the way to school I prayed that I would know my homework; on the way home I prayed that there would be something nice for dinner. And if I did not know my homework or the dinner was a wretched one I either forgot to check the link or was already such a fatalist that I believed it was God's will that my prayers went unheard. Or else I shut my eyes to this reverse, so that I would not deprive myself of the hope of having God with me another time. I particularly remember one occasion when the power of prayer seemed to me immediately effective and infallible. I was 8 and a boarder with a sexton in the country.5 The church was close by the house and was generally open during the summer. We boys had run inside to play, and beside myself with excitement I had clambered up into the count's pew and did a balancing act along the shelf for hymnals. The shelf fell down with a great racket and my friends ran off. I was alone in the church. The altarpiece terrified me and Christ looked sofiercelydown upon me; the solitude filled

60

Selected Essays

me with fear, but I was most afraid of the absent count, who ruled over both the church and the village, and whose pew I had just ruined. I stood there totally at a loss and trembling in every limb, without knowing what to do. Suddenly, the dry wood of the old pulpit gave a creak; I started and flung myself down on the floor of the church by the altar and prayed to God to help me mend the pew. Strengthened by my prayer I got to my feet and picked up the shelf. Looking at it calmly, I could see that the nails were still there, and that it might easily befixedwith a hammer. As though I had brought one with me in my pocket I kicked off one of my shoes, used it to hit the nails with, and the pew was mended. What did all this amount to? My fear was so great that it gave me a kind of Dutch courage and so, since escape was impossible, my presence of mind or intelligence asserted itself. I turned to myself, as it is called, pulled myself together, calmed down, and my good sense saw off the momentary madness that fear had induced. But this does not explain this later phenomenon, which is now at issue. My thoughts about God embraced the notion of an infinitely strong man, from whom I had borrowed strength byway of prayer. What is also strange, I never prayed to the weak, tortured figure of Christ, not even then, when his image hung upon the altar. Presumably, I considered him as helpless as myself, and compassion was of no assistance to me. With growing powers, with greater knowledge of the world, and with a large circle of friends, my fear vanished, and when it did, I gradually ceased to pray. But God was still there although he was subsequently diluted to a deistic premise, from which everything emanated as an inference. He had become a philosophical idea. I did not find God had been abolished with Darwinism, for the fact that creation evolved according to fixed laws and in evident order rather strengthened my suspicions concerning the existence of a lawgiver and source of order. How, then, did I become an atheist? After having lived until I was 37 as if I was sure that a life to come would give me what I had gone without in this one, and possessed by the mistaken idea that I was working for humanity, for others, while I was actually struggling on behalf of a party, I found myself with a wife and two children and faced with a crisis so desperate that I could see no way out for us but death. Our means were all exhausted, there was no prospect of my re-entering society and assuming a secure position there, and my children's only inheritance was a hated name that would block their progress at a time when, with my mental and physical powers at the lowest of ebbs, I sensed that they would soon be heirs. Now, when I was confronted by death, I felt that oblivion was at hand. But I must have had greater reserves of strength than

'Mysticism — For Now'

61

I thought, for my desire to resist now asserted itself, and instead of calling upon God, I challenged death to a bout. Instead of, as before, abandoning myself to fruitless brooding, I quickly reached the conclusion that if there was a God and a life after this one, they had to be disregarded, for as long as one places one's hope on the other side, one neglects this life, perhaps the only one there is. I became an atheist out of duty, from necessity; in that way I burnt my boats and had to go ashore to fight, alone, without friends and with no support. And with a strength of which I had been previously unaware, thrown back upon myself, I sat down at my desk and drew up my accounts. In dire straits and at the eleventh hour, I now found that I not only had great material resources which I had entirely forgotten, but also outstanding claims, unfinished work, yes, untapped funds, and that the danger was entirely imaginary and brought about by nervous depression. On closer inspection I discovered that I had many powerful friends, and that the future appeared quite bright. With that I threw myself for a time into the study of the present in so far as it concerned or influenced me; I sought out the place best suited to my nature and gifts and discovered those currents which might bear me up instead of trying, as I had done before, to direct them. And with that my bark was saved from shipwreck! For an old theist the void left behind by God was at first terrifying, particularly as the crisis unfolded, but even more terrible was what had gone before, that decade of my life during which my best years floated away while I waited for God to help me, and in expectation of an imaginary justice. But the void was soon filled by an enormous mass of material that I accumulated in the course of reflecting upon the demands of life, and it seemed to me that, after a couple of years, I had only now attained my full strength, which was within and always at my disposal; from having been a defenceless, aimless coward I became a fighter, always armed as one needs to be in life's battles. Therefore atheism became my new religion, and surprised as I was in my sleep, which had the effect of paralysing my strength, when I now had recourse to prayer by my child's sickbed, things fell out as I have described above. Had I been summoned during the day, and preferably in the morning when I was at my strongest physically, I should never have needed to have recourse to such means, and I still believe that it was not prayer but I myself who helped the child. How could it help me? And what is the physical and psychological formula of prayer? If I was a pantheist I would venture the explanation that in going outside himself the individual draws strength from the world soul and like Archimedes seeks out that point with which he can move the world, which point can only lie outside. But that is simply metaphysics.

6i

Selected Essays

Whether accompanied by sacrifice or not every people has used prayer and found it effective as a means of increasing its courage and thereby its strength. Its effect on people is thus an historic and real fact. But the weaker and lower the individual the stronger he is in prayer. Is it possible now, physiologically, that the individual at the lower end of the scale, who continues to be governed primarily by the unconscious reflex activity of the spinal system, may succeed, by stepping outside himself like this, in raising himself to the conscious activity of the cerebral system whereby reflection, composure and self-control overcome the apparitions of fear? By directing my thoughts upon some imagined 'outside' and straining my memory to recall those forgotten words when my brain was empty and my consciousness half extinguished, it seemed to me that in the course of that night I had driven my blood back up to the organ of consciousness, which thus recovered its strength and set every nervous current in motion. When my wife insisted I pray and I then obeyed her, this was only a reflex action on my part, but that I did not subsequently believe in the power of prayer to move God to perform a miracle shows that I had then recovered the full use of my consciousness and the ability to control my lower nerve centres. This is a physiological observation which is at least as valid as the blasphemous explanations that medicine has given for a saint's stigmata.* In psychological terms the question appeared even more straightforward. I pray for help, believe or imagine that I am being helped, and as hope returns so does my strength. I ask someone to do me a favour. He refuses! I lie there defeated. But if he replies evasively, saying neither yes nor no, my optimism then tricks me into hoping for a positive response; with hope comes the courage to resolve my problem, and I end up enjoying his assistance even though he has never actually helped me. Therefore the scriptures are right in maintaining that one must believe in order to be heard. But belief is nothing more than a concentration of wish and desire, heightened to conscious will, and willing is the greatest expression of nervous activity and therefore summons to its service the highest possible power. If prayer is thus only consciousness focused upon a One night I dreamt that a falcon alighted upon my left hand and drove his hind claw into the inside of my hand. When I woke up in the morning I could still feel the pain and continued to do so for some considerable time. There were two possible explanations: either a nail in the bed or a needle in my bedclothes had pricked me, and I had sought the cause while sleeping (perhaps found myself in my dream in the country and seen some birds, and thus fashioned the falcon as the cause); or the imaginary pain had arisen from the appearance of the falcon in my dream, with the dreamt blow from his claw. In the latter case there was a stigmata phenomenon in miniature.

'Mysticism — For Now'

63

single point using every available power, this is therefore nothing but a circumlocution for a believer s declaration of faith, since nature has hitherto revealed itself at its greatest and most beautiful in the wonderful source of strength that the crown of creation bears at its highest point beneath the dome of the skull, and out of which it occasionally draws the power either to lift the earth from its darkness or to wrest lightning from heaven.* * (Written in Lindau in 1886; that is, two years before the publication of L'Hypnotisme et les religions [Paris, 1888].)6

'Soul Murder (Apropos Rosmersholm,)y

Even if there are no absolute truths, every age always has its average truth, the normal common sense of the period, its obligatory way of thinking, or so-called public opinion. Someone who is above or below the norm is regarded as 'not quite all there'. Thus, Galileo was not quite all there when he opposed the public opinion of his time and assumed that the earth revolved around the sun. Thus, Ibsen's Rosmersholm is obscure to the theatregoer and a mystery to the half-educated, but quite intelligible to someone who has the necessary grounding in modern psychology. When an average human being hears a new idea he is momentarily at a loss as to whether it is he or the man with the idea who is mad; usually he assumes that the other person is the crazy one because anyone who does not think for himself has, on precisely that account, an extremely strong belief — in himself. It is therefore very easy to gain a reputation for being mad. To the not so highly educated, everything that deviates from the norm is insane, and on the continent the derision that children, both large and small, direct at the English on account of their unusual clothes and behaviour is based upon the immature conviction that they are mad. The gulf between lunatics and the sane is in many cases an inconsiderable one, and a mere five years ago quite modern French writers were including speculations about a perpetuum mobile and a universal language among the symptoms of insanity. Nevertheless, in Berlin there is a perpetuum mobile in the form of a clock that has been built into a wall, and which winds itself up with the assistance of atmospheric changes and alterations in temperature between day and night. Nevertheless, Volapiik1 is already so firmly established that in Munich singers use this universal language in their concerts and there is already a chair in the subject at the university in Vienna. It is thus dangerous to create madmen without ceremony, particularly in our time, when everything moves so rapidly that last year's Utopia is today's commonplace. As recently as a year ago, in a book, Du Delire chez les 64

'Soul Murder (Apropos Rosmersholrn)'

65

degeneres, that was published in Paris, a Dr Legrain2 included the following among the symptoms of insanity: an unsociable temperament, a preference for vegetarianism, kindness to animals, ideas about a world republic, and arguments in favour of disarmament, along with attempts at improving the world and a striving for equality, and other suchlike things. It cannot be gainsaid that a great deal of our contemporary desire to reform the world stems from our being so highly strung, an inability to bear things as they are, and that a large part of the suffering humanity that disturbs us neuropaths so much ought to be categorised as over-refined humanity. Maudsley,3 perhaps the most sensible of all madhouse doctors, although he, too, sees madmen where there may well not be any (in disobedient children, discontented revolutionaries, ambitious and strong characters), has explained the commonest causes of mental derangement most beautifully: An individual who wants to live a happy life must either beflexibleenough to adjust to circumstances or strong enough to direct matters as he wills. If he can do neither the one nor the other, or through bon sens and an influential position bring about a compromise, he will go mad, commit suicide, become a criminal, or end up in the poor-house.'4 The author has thereby indicated the intimate bond that unites individuals one to another, and how all attempts at liberating oneself from one's intimate circle will be punished with insanity. Strictly speaking, it is impossible to lead an isolated life. If one does not have people, one must have books or an extensive collection of memories with which to occupy oneself. To exist alone with one's own opinion feels just as terrible as having enemies everywhere, of being oppressed or imprisoned. Solitude instils fear, which is why the concept of God endures longer in the isolation of rural life than among the masses in the cities. Fear is an expression of the instinct of self-preservation; excessive fear is a consequence of isolation and the primary cause of insanity; suspicion and persecution mania are then engendered of necessity when a member of society has withdrawn from his protective environment. For want of a basis of comparison, from an inability to judge the relative greatness of one's own ego, there then follows either Grossenwahn, the overestimation of the self, or micromania, its underestimation. Finally, the great mind, or self-consciousness, loses all ability to gauge a situation, all power to judge danger, all control over the passions, and the nerves of movement and feeling now react only to first impressions. False causal associations, erroneous ideas, conclusions without sufficient ground, hallucinations and finally a frenzy or constant state of defence that expresses itself in hostility, soon manifests itself.

66

Selected Essays

All these prodromes occur individually and to a lesser extent in every person, for even if it is his upbringing that has made the human being human, upbringing is nevertheless only a vague accommodation, which can fall away like a loose garment in moments of strong passion. Thus, a man of good education and refinement can, in a fit of rage, become coarse, loutish, violent and even criminal. A dreamer can become exalted; artists and writers can summon up hallucinations of their own accord; and under the influence of fear the soldier is armed with a courage that is merely the reverse of cowardice, and which easily becomes a bestial desire to kill. The gulf is therefore not so great, and many people have gone mad through being too hastily confined. Nor does it always seem to be a concern for the patient that occasions confinement, which normally takes place only when someone's behaviour starts to interfere with other people's interests. Consequently, it is not until he becomes a source of danger that a madman is prevented from doing harm, and asylums are therefore in reality prisons. But the danger in this is that many a criminal, who should have been able to pay for his offence with the loss of a couple of years' freedom, has lost his reason in the asylum. Thus, ill-advised or wicked relatives have been known to save their family honour by committing a wrongdoer to an asylum, in the hope that his lack of responsibility will soon be acknowledged and the invalid will thus emerge unscathed, once his lapse has been forgotten. It is this generally accepted notion that, unlike the criminal, the madman is irresponsible that has given rise to so many painful asylum stories, which are as widespread today as they have ever been. But latterly psychiatrists have betrayed a tendency to classify the criminal and the madman in the same class of backward individuals, who are both inadequate because their capacity to govern their passions is equally underdeveloped. The question therefore arises whether the criminal motivated by need (the thief, in many cases) does not enjoy greater freedom from responsibility than the madman, with his unbridled craving for pleasure. Another aspect of insanity, to which less attention has been paid perhaps because it has only recently been noticed, is what I might call modern soul murder, or psychic suicide. Ibsen has, unwittingly it seems, touched upon the first of these phenomena in Rosmersholm. From having been purely physical (imprisonment, torture, death) the struggle for power has gradually developed into something more psychological, but no less cruel for that. In the past despots ruled by means of muscular men in armour; nowadays majorities (or minorities) rule with the assistance of newspaper articles and ballot papers. In the past one killed

'Soul Murder (Apropos Rosmersholrn)'

67

one's adversary without trying to persuade him; nowadays one creates a majority against him, 'prevails upon' him, exposes his intentions, ascribes to him intentions he does not have, deprives him of his livelihood, denies him social standing, makes him look ridiculous — in short, tortures him to death by lies or drives him insane instead of killing him. Phrases like 'tortured to death', 'driven him crazy', 'killed with silence', 'boycotted', and 'torn to pieces' are becoming more and more commonplace, and these tiny, innocent words conceal or reveal as many crimes, and just as great ones, as the oubliette** of medieval castles. One example: In the city of x a great actor was recently murdered in the following way. He and a theatre director had been rivals over a girl, and he had been preferred. Subsequently, he was enticed by the director into signing an extremely attractive ten-year contract. The first year he was given no roles. The public believed he was losing his talent. The second year he got one that did not suit him, and he failed. After which he was given no more roles. He was beaten. Then the director introduced a younger man, whom he immediately dubbed a great star through advertising, accustoming the public to him while the other one was being buried. The latter then broke his contract; was brought to court; lost his reputation as a man who did not keep an agreement; and received no further engagements. He was murdered! This procedure is, moreover, not uncommon with the directors of great theatres, who readily lure the star of a competing theatre to their own establishment in order to 'shelve' him, as it is called in the business. Is this not reminiscent of an ambush or armed robbery, as they were practised in the good old days? The same tactic can also be used, with a slight variation, by a newspaper editor, and is known in America as 'the handcuffs'. An election campaign is about to open. An influential political writer is bound by contract to write only in a particular newspaper. He writes, is paid, signs a receipt, and his manuscript is hidden away in a desk drawer until everything is over and done with. This is an absolutely legal murder. In the event of the murdered man bringing an action, he will be defeated, and also laughed down for allowing himself to be fooled; in the event of breaking his contract, he will be 'boycotted', and never find another publisher. Refinements of 'the handcuff are also to be found in combination with torturing to death. As is well known, there is nothing so destructive to the thinking process as shattered hopes, and a highly developed form of this torture can induce insanity. People make promise after promise, procrastinating as long as possible until the victim seems to be powerless, and then, when he is about to give up the ghost, they liven up the dying man with a new promise,

68

Selected Essays

which is then promptly broken, and so on, until but a shadow of a man remains. Far simpler forms of torturing people to death can also serve as ingredients. One lets a manuscript or two get lost in the post.6 A vacuum then arises in a writer's psyche; there is a break in the line, so that the circuit is interrupted; the chain of development is broken, so that the next time he takes up his pen he does not know what he has written (and had published) or not written. He begins to repeat himself, referring to texts that he believes the reader knows, but which the latter has never heard of. His writing disintegrates, and he can no longer collect his everywhere dispersed thoughts. In other, more intimate, areas of social life, the battle of the brains unfolds just as violently. Parents, who want to check certain tendencies in their children, or to awaken others that only exist in a rudimentary state; children, who torture their parents to death by compromising the family name in order to blackmail them; couples, who fight for control over their economy, the servants, or children, are an everyday occurrence. The case presented in Rosmersholm is more unusual, but extremely interesting. Rebecca seems to be an unconscious cannibal who has devoured the dead wife's soul. With her unconscious plans to assume a position of dominance in the house, her behaviour has been highly suspicious. The wife suspected her, that is, saw through her, and Rebecca conceals matters and saves herself by leading her to believe that she was suffering from ca suspicious mind'. However, this suspicion was naturally heightened by her further observations, and the impossibility of obtaining proof; thus, the likelihood of the wife suffering from a suspicious mind became even greater. It was therefore easy for Rebecca to drive her insane. The word 'suspicious' applied to another person is in itself highly suspect, and scoundrels do not hesitate to throw it in the face of anyone who has caught them in the act. A man who stole 500 francs from me insisted to the last that I had a suspicious mind, and wanted to set the police on me!7 Iago murders Othello without drawing a sword or a dagger, simply by arousing his suspicions, which are heightened by Desdemona's sluttish and coquettish behaviour, so that she too is responsible for the double murder, if not exactly culpable.8 Franz Moor9 is the typical deliberate liar, who poisons his father's mind by arousing his suspicion. In one of their short stories, Erckmann-Chatrian10 treat a theme which, in this present age of hypnotism and suggestion, no longer seems at all

'Soul Murder (Apropos Rosmersholni)'

69

mysterious. In a small town, it becomes apparent that time and again people are found hanging from the signboard of a certain inn. A psychologist arranges to keep watch from the inn window and discovers in the house across the way an old woman who stations herself there at night with a candle and captures the attention of any traveller staying at the inn opposite, dressed and made up as she is to look like her unfortunate prey. After she has caught her victim's attention, she gradually induces him, through his mimetic instinct, to repeat her movements until the bewitched man climbs out through the window and hangs himself from the sign. The psychologist dresses up as a female mannequin and through 'suggestion' and imitation forces the witch to throw herself out of the window (or hang herself from the window jamb). Such suggestions in a waking state are also practised under the popular name of 'bad example', and I have myself seen a young hereditary landowner murdered by his companions, just as the last of the Merovingians were. We do not get to know exactly how Rebecca went about her murder in Rosmersholm\ that is, precisely the sequence of events which might have formed the action of the drama, but the latter takes another direction. Presumably, she employed the time-honoured method of inducing the weaker mind to believe that it was sick, until it was possessed by an imaginary sickness, and then she showed or convinced Beate that death was a blessing. After all, Eduard von Hartmann11 nearly found himself in court because his doctrine about the misery of life and the joy of dying were believed to have been the cause of a suicide. But Rebecca probably went to work unconsciously, or persuaded herself at the outset that what she was doing was right, for the as-yet-unexplained power of self-deception is enormous, and I believe that many cases of insanity are due to self-deception; or are psychic suicides pure and simple. When conflict passed from the realm of physical violence to legal agreements, the individual had to try and conceal his intentions; dissembling became necessary, and developed into an instinct or unconscious reflex. Nor can it be denied that language, originating naturally in the need to convey thoughts, was also developed with a concern for concealing thoughts, hence the multifarious and varied meanings of words.12 The wisest, or he who best could mask his true purpose, was victorious in the struggle. Gallantry, an open nature, could only safely exist beneath a strongly forged outer garment, and noble feelings only among those who had the right to carry weapons. The humble, the subjugated ones, became more reserved, and to this day the greatest distrust and the most widespread

jo

Selected Essays

lying are to be found among the lowest class in society. A peasant is generally a master of dissimulation, which does not prevent him from being taken in himself. If one considers the recent discovery that society is a web of unconscious deceptions, we need not regard people as (conscious) scoundrels, even if one cannot deny that there are conscious ones about, particularly in the highest quarters. Those at the top break the laws at will, and those below get round them as best they can, or get caught in the traps set for them. After all, a man with property does not need to steal; accordingly, he protects himself against attack by passing laws on property rights in selfdefence. Anyway, the laws need to be changed continually, either to the advantage of those pressing up from below or in order to prevent further evasion. Ingenuity in this respect has developed amazingly, and that the instinct for lying has become unconscious and automatic is evident from the fact that people gain a reputation as discoverers (= reformers) when they are able to expose a few points where lies have established themselves all too thickly. But this has an unavoidable consequence in the horrified shrieks that greet every such discovery, since a vested interest is thereby checked and many livelihoods are threatened. However, people must have some conception of the fraud, since they almost unanimously call for an issue to be laid to rest after it has been given a good airing, fearing as they do to see the whole wretched business (the truth) exposed; and not without reason has the truth come to be seen as cynical, raw and dangerous. To be truthful, to show oneself as one is, to speak one's thoughts as they are born spontaneously in one's brain, is extremely dangerous, and such attempts as have been made have always had prejudicial consequences. When Rousseau was stupid enough to mention that he had stolen a piece of ribbon in his youth, this piece of ribbon was later used to strangle his whole existence as a thinker.13 All attempts to make people honest have foundered upon the hard-andfast law that one must hide one's intentions, and Europe's most celebrated statesman,14 who distinguished himself with the reputation of an upright politician, an honest mediator, had to conceal himself behind frankness and then take refuge in lies, as was clearly evident during the recent Seven Years War.15 Being frank simply amounts to letting oneself be fooled, therefore, surrendering one's weapons and capitulating. For that reason dissembling and simulation have penetrated all the pores of human nature, and the most ancient of civilised nations have gone furthest in the art. The Oriental is a master of conscious cunning, and the European still lives to some extent in a childish state of simple-minded

'Soul Murder (Apropos Rosmersholmf

71

veracity while his emigrant offspring, the Americans, have reverted to the more primitive form offeree (the revolver). The masks which the necessity of hypocrisy has imposed on man are many and various. The desire to tell others the truth, to reveal other people's secrets, has been hidden behind many disguises. When it was seen that freedom from responsibility was granted the madman but not the criminal, people played the madman. The court fool of the Middle Ages was one such seeming madman, who was used by princes both as a spy and as someone who spoke the truth when the prince himself lacked the courage to speak out, because he might incur responsibility and revenge. The fool became a responsible spokesman who made himself irresponsible by simulated idiotism. And do not imagine that those chosen to be fools were cretins or the feeble-minded. According to the few available facts about their origins, they seem in most cases to have abandoned the drudgery of schoolteaching or soldiering in order to enjoy an easy life, which was not without a semblance of power. If they ever let fall a sharp word to the prince himself, he knew how to take the sting out of it by laughing too, but the fool subsequently learnt from a good whipping that he had not been appointed to teach his master the truth. Does not the humorist conceal himself in the same way behind a pretence of laughing at his own weakness, thus both apparently making himself an accomplice and at the same time cunningly relieving the reader of the trouble of holding him to account? But it is foolish to laugh at oneself, and it is not in the least seriously intended, for it only needs someone to join in the laughter for the humorist to fall into a bad mood. The satirist therefore proceeds more openly, for when he attacks his enemy and renders him ridiculous, he places himself above him, and does not talk about himself and his own weaknesses. Frank, if one wants to call his straightforward deceit frank, in comparison with the humorist, who is twofaced. Hamlet feigns insanity in order to be able both to express his thoughts freely and to spy. But in so doing Hamlet committed psychic suicide, for hefinallylost his capacity for judgement and his will. However, the Hamlet type appealed strongly to young people during the Romantic period, who had to conceal their dissatisfaction with the Restoration beneath feigned melancholy and a contempt for the world, yet in their hearts probably directed this contempt at the prevailing order of things and not the world as a whole, for the spokesmen of the movement, like Byron and Musset, had a tremendous love of the world and its pleasures. Hamlet's idea of protecting himself by feigning insanity was in no way

72

Selected Essays

original or exceptional. Danger compels people with new ideas to conceal themselves, and nowadays it is said that Rabelais worked out the insanely obscure style that prevails in his works, and which has caused philologists such difficulty, in order to conceal his real meaning from an over-powerful priesthood. What should he have done? Declaring himself sane would have meant ascending the pyre that the sane had raised! But the Hamletism occasioned by necessity has not been without danger, and where it has developed into chronic illness, it has had consequences that bear comparison only with the mania for suicide! About that another time!

'On Modern Drama and Modern Theatre

The theatre is certainly not the most momentous or world-shattering of subjects, but it is an inexhaustible one, and always capable of engaging attention and sustaining interest. In the great civilised nations, with their philosophers and merchants, there has been no national drama for a generation, and yet people have managed to survive, and even produced the greatest thinkers, statesmen and inventors of the age, which makes a nonsense of the traditional belief that the drama is the highest expression of a nation's civilisation. Current crises in the theatre have led people to conclude, on the one hand, that the theatre is a dying art form, and on the other, that this art form has merely fallen behind, and needs to be modernised in accordance with the demands of the age so that it may once again assume its fairly unpretentious place as an instrument of education. It cannot be denied that there is something archaic about the theatre in its present form, as huge as a circus opening out on to a stage with a Graeco-Roman triumphal arch, decorated with emblems and grotesque masks, reminiscent of the centuries before Christ. The red drapes, the brilliant curtain, the place of the orchestra retained since antiquity, the trap which leads down to Charon, the elaborate machinery by which gods descend to close the final act all take the memory back to prehistoric times when the theatre was the site of religious and national festivals. The masses still go along to the theatre expecting to see an episode from world history, or at least scenes from the annals of their own country, which revive grand memories of important events. And one cannot therefore blame the national theatres for retaining this role while at the same time opening their doors to commemorative festivities and providing a place where the nation's leaders meet delegates of the people, to receive their plaudits — or whatever. This hardy popular conception of the theatre as first and foremost a place of amusement, an arena where gaudily clad soldiers, princes and women galore display themselves in public, and where secret, preferably 73

74

Selected Essays

inexplicable events unfold in castle halls, wild forests or trenches is so deeply ingrained that a successful piece must usually be in that style. Not long ago I dropped in on one of Copenhagen's theatres, mindful of many other matters than simple playgoing. I had taken my place at 7.0 pm so as to be there for the first appearance of all the players, which should, of course, take place during the first act. The playbill listed the names of twenty-four actors, which led me to conclude that the piece would be truly full of incident. The curtain rises and a brief flirtation with a serving-maid ensues, in which I can find nothing of interest.1 Then a group of bandits enters, of whom a number are to be found on the playbill under the heading of fencing masters', and who boast of their exploits, without in any way engaging my sympathy, since these same exploits are of the kind that would nowadays be paid for in a house of correction. A better dressed gentleman enters and negotiates an assassination which commands a high fee; then a nobleman comes in and has some business with the bandits — it was impossible for me to ascertain the nature and purpose of the proceedings, and when the curtain fell it was easy enough to put such complicated intrigues aside. After a while the whole company finds itself assembled in a warren around a barrow; a small child is smuggled in from the wings, someone in a mask, whom I recognise as the actor so and so — and consequently the Duke of Mantua — steals around complicating the plot so that I have to keep a pencilled record of all the people concerned in order not to get completely lost, especially when a tumult breaks out, in which I cannot distinguish friend from foe. When one of the heroes dies, I hope to have done with following his tangled fate, and after a suitable reduction in the numerous characters the curtain falls again. Exactly as in Ulysses von Ithaca? the curtain rises once more following an interval of sixteen years, and without the ravages of time having left the least unsightly trace upon the actor's manly beauty; swords are bought for their weight in gold, and then a few women are implicated in the various plots — a number of new principal characters are introduced — but now it is already 8.15 pm, and I have to catch the train to Helsingor. Therefore I never got to see the Hunchback himself, although I had witnessed enough of this performance to realise how little I had to hope from any goodwill the great public might have towards the theatre of the future. This popular comedy of 1852 by Paul Feval, a direct descendant of Alexandre Dumas's savage Romanticism, could still find ears able to make sense of what was for me an incomprehensible tall story, reaching specta-

'On Modern Drama and Modern Theatre'

75

tors who could distinguish between twenty-four people on stage, and who were interested in something that had not the slightest apropos. I had asked myself from the outset: what has all this to do with me? It touches my heart and mind as little as the affairs of Poland, and I fancied that the talented actors, who were obliged to perform this story, would hardly feel edified by exploiting the effects to be derived from costume and plot. As drama this was pure 1830s, when Shakespeare and the Spanish theatre of the Golden Age were revived in Victor Hugo's Cromwell and Hernani; in line, of course, with Romanticism's principal aim in every field, thus it was already a return to previous stages of development, and the decline of the theatre perhaps begins at that point. For to adopt an art form from the time of the Renaissance, which may have been appropriate to a period when people had such lively imaginations that it was possible to do without stage sets, was undoubtedly a mistake, although less so in 1830, when despair over the prevailing political reaction had engendered a longing to escape from the contemporary world, either back in time or far into the future, in Utopias about the perfect society. But what could be of prime importance in Shakespeare, when there was no decor, namely the psychological course of events, was perforce neglected by the Romantics, when so much time was wasted in intervals and operating the stage machinery. It was, therefore, necessary to create interest through the plot, which the characters had to declaim, until they became quite hollow. The Romantic drama, or large-scale play, also made it necessary to maintain a big company of actors, with all the attendant risks: the emergence of a theatrical proletariat, given that these pieces only required three or four actors of rank while all the other twenty were condemned to second- and third-rate roles, possibly for life, not to mention the generation of incalculable expenses on costumes and sets, and the ensuing deficit. Alongside this degenerate mode of drama, however, a higher form developed that had its roots in the previous period. For the psychological analyses of Racine and Corneille had not grown obsolete on account of their form but because they lost their vitality under pressure from an unenlightened despot, whose regime stifled all growth. With Moliere French drama had embarked upon a stage where all spectacle was abandoned, and the alterations in a character's inner life became so central that the wonderful vivisection of Tartuffe takes place on a bare floor with two stools. The size of the cast has already diminished, and the principal interest is concentrated firmly upon a couple of central figures. With this, the style of modern comedy is established; it proceeds with

j6

Selected Essays

minor variations by way of Diderot and Beaumarchais, is rejuvenated by Scribe and Augier and rises to the grand style in the unjustly forgotten Ponsard, only to descend into insignificance with the decadent Sardou.3 Sardou represents the imperial comedy in decline, the end of an era, and as such must needs suffer when a new age dawns. But then Sardou had abused all the resources of the theatre in order to retain interest in his jaded types and threadbare plots. Sardou's plays, in which everyone talks as if they had been born the editor of a comic paper, and where the principal question is always the one that people ask themselves when they read a cheap serial, what will happen next?, are devoid of every trace of human life. When, therefore, this man of the empire lives on as an anachronism under the republic, he must necessarily witness how the search for the new formula for the drama of the new age assumes a competitive character, in which the prize has not yet been won, notwithstanding many successful attempts. Some people are inclined to date the new drama from the Goncourt brothers* Henriette Marechal? performed at the Comedie-Francaise as early as 1865, when it was booed off the stage. But the reasons for this ascription are not well founded, since the Goncourts represent a Christian physiological movement from an earlier period and structure their play around a few bold devices, which every previous realistic movement has known how to utilise. It is more likely that Zola's Therese Raquin will be accounted the first milestone of naturalist drama, thus ascribing the origin of the latter to the year 1873.5 In our age of thoughtless democracy there has been a desire to eliminate all distinctions of rank between works of art, thus enabling the many petty talents to feel on a level with their superiors; in otherfieldsthan the theatre a majority decision has declared all works of equal value, just so long as they were equally well made, and one has even heard it said that BastienLepage's6 tedious and sentimental beggars were as valuable as Munkaczy's7 Christ; in short, people have sought to raise the insignificant to the same level as the significant. But Zola who, as a naturalist, cannot reject the most minute of things as an ingredient, has never emulated Christianity in worshipping the small as something great; rather, fully conscious of the legitimacy of his strength, he has maintained the right of the strong, sought the truly significant and from ordinary reality has extracted the essence, demonstrated the prevailing laws of nature and placed the detail in context, as befits a subordinate part of the machine. When he therefore approaches the theatre to make a serious attempt at

'On Modern Drama and Modern Theatre'

JJ

trying out new methods, he is immediately attracted by a great and powerful motif, in this case a murder of one spouse so that the other may gain the freedom to make another choice. But he does not proceed like Dumas or Augier, and excuse the murder partly because of the prevailing legal system, which does not permit divorce;8 he neither excuses nor accuses, for he has abandoned such concepts, and restricts himself to portraying the course of events, indicating the motive for the act and showing the consequences. And in the pangs of conscience of the criminals, he sees merely a manifestation of disrupted social harmony, the results of habit and inherited ideas. Therese Raquin is a new departure, but since it is adapted from a novel it is still not perfect in form. Nevertheless, the author has clearly felt that a greater unity of place would provide his audience with a stronger sense of illusion, thus enabling the action to impress its main features more forcefully upon the spectators, who would be haunted by their memories of the preceding act at every curtain up, and hence be captivated by the action through the impact of the recurring milieu. But in having to anticipate as well as trace the consequences of the crime, he commits the error of allowing a year to elapse between the first and second acts. Presumably he did not dare to offend against the prevailing law concerning a year's widowhood, otherwise a single day separating the acts would have been sufficient, and the play would have made a more unified impression. I therefore once suggested to a theatre director, whom I wanted to persuade to put on Therese Raquin, that he remove the first act; this may be done without losing anything, and in a recent work on Naturalism I have seen a deceased French Zolaist make the same suggestion.9 With Renee,10 Zola seems to have returned to the form of the traditional Parisian comedy, with greater leaps in time and space than are compatible with the difficulty that a modern, sceptical mind has in allowing itself to be tricked into believing in the conventions of the theatre. At the same time, psychology is neglected in this play, the portrayal of character is superficial and the whole treatment is sketchy and melodramatic, which is perhaps the usual consequence of recasting novels for the stage. With Therese Raquin the great style, the deep probing of the human soul, had attracted attention for a while, but it seems that no one has dared follow this up. Even so, since 1882 there has been a tendency to look upon Henry Becque's Corbeauo^l as a pioneering work. This seems a misunderstanding to me, If art is to be, as has been said, a corner of nature seen through a temperament,12 then there is certainly a corner of nature in Becque's Crows, but the temperament is lacking.

yS

Selected Essays

A factory-owner dies in the first act after, among many other things, his son has appeared in the first scene comically got up in his father's dressing gown - a completely unnecessary little prank, the significance of which I fail to understand, but which the dramatist probably included because it had happened in real life, from which this boring and rather unimportant episode has been taken. After the factory-owner's death, lawyers, his partner and various paid and unpaid creditors emerge to ransack the inheritance, so that the family becomes insolvent. And that's about it! There we have the much-longed-for ordinary case, the rule, the universal human norm, which is so banal, so meaningless, so boring that after four painful hours you ask yourself the old question: of what concern is this to me? This is the objective which is so beloved by those devoid of personality, who lack temperament, the soulless as they should be called! This is photography which includes everything, even the speck of dust on the camera lens; this is realism, a working method elevated to art, or the little art, which does not see the wood for the trees; this is the kind of misconceived Naturalism which believed that art simply consisted in copying a piece of nature in a natural way, but not the greater naturalism which seeks out those points where the great battles take place, which loves to see what one does not see every day, which delights in the struggle between natural forces, whether these forces are called love and hate, the spirit of revolt, or social instincts, which is not concerned whether something is beautiful or ugly, as long as it is great. It is this grandiose art which we encountered in Germinaland La Terre,15 which we glimpsed for a moment in Therese Raquin and which we expected to see make its presence felt again in the theatre, but which did not arrive with Becque's Corbeaux or Zola's Renee> but should gradually emerge with the opening of the new theatre called the Theatre Libre, which practises its craft in the very heart of Paris.14 The theatre, in particular the Parisian, has long been a kind of industrial concern, with a capitalist as the prime mover. Next a staff of popular actors was assembled and then writers were asked to produce roles for star performers, thus giving us those starry vehicles pre-eminently associated with Dumas and Pailleron.15 This was a back-to-front method of creating a theatre and a drama, for a play was not accepted for performance if there were no roles for the principals, and in many modern comedies written for the Comedie-Fran^aise one can discern Coquelin 16 and Reichenberg17 behind the leading figures, whose characters are sometimes distorted in order to fit those popular performers. And the repertoire which has grown up around Sarah Bernhardt and Ristori18 is quite worthless.

'On Modern Drama and Modern Theatre'

79

But every time a writer has had a theatre at his disposal a real drama has sprung up, as was the case with Shakespeare and Moliere; a repertoire allows an actor to develop his skills, which is the right way of going about things, and puts first things first. When M. Antoine opened his performances for subscribers in a room at the Place Pigalle in Paris, he had neither capital, actors nor theatre, and he was neither a writer nor an actor himself; but he did have a repertoire and knew that plays would come in without his needing to advertise for them. He was a humble employee at the gasworks, but he had been seized by the idea that were we to have a repertoire, we would soon have actors. He therefore started out with a group of amateurs like himself, who in the evening, after work, met and rehearsed until midnight, or even longer. There was not a little mockery before people had seen the feared 'parlour performance', for there exists a widespread horror of dilettantes, perhaps primarily because, from ill-advised modesty, amateurs choose small, wellworn and bad plays, that can inspire neither them nor the public. Lessing, on the other hand, held a quite different opinion of dilettante acting, which in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie he commends to the attention of theatre directors; when it was a question of new repertoire, he feared the eminent actor with his ingrained, rigid mode of expression more than the layman, who is unacquainted with the secrets of the profession. In Letter Sixteen of the Dramaturgie he tells the following story concerning some successful ventures of this kind: 'In Voltaire's early days the English actors were somewhat unnatural, and especially their acting of tragedy was wild and exaggerated; when they wished to express violent emotions, they behaved like maniacs; and the rest of the matter they drawled off with a stilted, pompous solemnity that betrayed the comedian in every syllable. When the celebrated English theatre director Hill intended to put on Voltaire's Zaire, he confided the principal role to a young woman, who had never yet acted in tragedy. He concluded thus: this young woman has feeling, voice, figure, and decorum; she has not yet acquired the spurious taste of the stage and therefore does not need to unlearn deep-rooted faults; if she can only be persuaded to be for a few hours what she represents, then she may speak as she likes, and all will go well. And that is what happened, and the theatrical pedants who had maintained against Hill that only a very practised and experienced person could do justice to this part were silenced. This young actress was the wife of the

80

Selected Essays

comedian Colley Cibber, and her first attempt in her eighteenth year was a masterpiece. It is curious that the French actress who played Zaire first was also a debutante. The young, charming Mademoiselle Gossin became suddenly famous through Zaire, and even Voltaire was so enchanted that he bitterly lamented his age. The role of Orosman was played by a relation of Hill's, who was not an actor by profession. He acted from mere love of the art, and had not the slightest hesitation in exhibiting a talent as estimable as any other. In England examples are not rare of such distinguished persons who act merely for their pleasure. "All that appears strange to us in this," says Voltaire, "is that it appears strange. We should, however, reflect that all things in the world depend on custom and opinion. The French court formerly danced on stage in operas, and nothing further is thought about it except that this mode of entertainment is gone out of fashion."'19 However, to return to M. Antoine, the latter was alert to the fact that the new repertoire could not be played by old-style actors, and therefore he began again from the beginning. But he also realised that the new psychological drama, which he guessed would come, and of which he already had some examples, could not be performed on the large stage designed for tournaments. Therefore he started his enterprise in a room and with dilettantes, with the result that after six months the Theatre Libre was hailed as a pioneering undertaking when an adaptation of the novel Sceur Philomene by the long-decried, abused and persecuted Goncourt brothers was presented on stage.20 Emile Blavet wrote the following account of this epoch-making performance in the conservative Figaro, which I reproduce here in its entirety:21 'There occurred this evening a great event up there, high up on the Buttes Montmartre. The Theatre Libre once again opened its doors to the public. Many are called, few are chosen; the Theatre Libre does not derive its name from the fact that anyone is free to enter as long as they pay for their place. On the contrary, it is by grace and favour, and only by invitation, that one can gain admittance. Consequently, the number of those assembled there was no greater than the friends who used to gather for a lecture in philosophy at Socrates' house. But select! The letter of invitation — issued on vellum, like a wedding invitation — was couched as follows:

'On Modern Drama and Modern Theatre'

81

Theatre Libre - 9 October 1887 Count Villiers de l'lsle Adam,22 Mr Jules Vidal, and Mr Artur Byl have the honour to invite you to be present at the performance at the Theatre Libre on Tuesday, the nth of this month, at 8.30. L'EVASION

Play in one act in prose. SCEUR PHILOMENE

Play in two acts in prose. I have reproduced the text of this invitation, because in all its simplicity it is indicative of the character of this venue. At the majority of theatres the authors, in particular the young ones, are barely tolerated, and are received there with a hospitality that is often not without a certain bitterness. At the Theatre Libre the actors feel at home and do the honours for the public themselves, both as regards their house and their talent. The impresario keeps politely in the background, and as soon as those who have been invited step over the threshold, he behaves as if he were their guest. This is an innovation which demonstrates the great originality of this eccentric little theatre. And it is not the only one. There are few theatres at which dramatic works are produced in all their natural freshness, with their intrinsic directness, in their original form, in other words. To begin with, they have to pass through the censor's sieve, and then undergo the collaboration of an experienced, systematic and, what is worse, perhaps ignorant director. At the Theatre Libre they appear in all their pleasing naivete and completeness, with no embellishments and without puerile cuts. If the success is but modest, the result is a severe but useful lesson for the writer; if, on the other hand, it is brilliant, the author gets all the credit. Double gain! And both the credit and the lesson are so much more valuable for not owing everything to a charming production. Here there are none of those superb settings which dazzle the eye and lead one to overlook the emptiness of the action; none of those widely celebrated virtuosities that conceal the poverty of the form as in a purple cloak. Here there is only a simple mise en scene, and the performers consist of a handful of young disciples who combine all the naivete of inexperience with the conviction and enthusiasm of youth.

82

Selected Essays

Shakespeare was interpreted no better when he wrote his masterpieces. M. Antoine is the soul of the Theatre Libre, he has made it his career, I should say his life's work. Alone, thrown upon his own resources and with this single aim, "art for art's sake", he has nevertheless succeeded in completing the task whose solution the best minds have considered a chimera, one which continues to trouble the unfortunate Laforet23 both night and day. As early as last year I sketched a portrait of this theatre's jack of all trades, at once director, actor, painter, costume donator and stage mechanic. To match Moliere it only remains for him to write Tartuffe or Les Fourberies de Scapin. But his modesty would easily find satisfaction in merely being its interpreter. On a previous occasion I have described the strange and picturesque premises where this discerning man works. There is no need to retouch this picture in any way. The authority of the fire department ends at the threshold to this sanctuary, which does not prevent me from once again, for the twentieth time, expounding the benefits of the safety curtain, the fire brigade and a central aisle. It seems to me that the mise en scene of the Theatre Libre has progressed since it staged Enfamille and La Nuit bergamasque.2A The first act of Sceur Philomene, a play which the two young authors, Messrs Vidal and Byl, have extracted from the novel by the Goncourt brothers, affords a powerful impression of the examining room in a hospital. Everything is there, even the little copper wash-basin in which the students perform their ablutions after having successfully dissected some human bodies. When the woman on duty comes in and interrupts these young men's evening meal, saying: "M. Barnier, they are waiting for you to deliver the woman in number twenty-nine!" I thought I could hear clearly the first groans and cries of childbirth. The second act is even more realistic. We find ourselves here in the midst of a hospital ward, with its two rows of beds, behind whose shroud of white curtains one can clearly feel death stirring. The hospital in the Theatre Libre has not yet been secularised. And that is fortunate, for had our magistrates taken that course we should have missed Mile Deneuilly's charming appearance, quite exquisite beneath the white head-dress of the Augustine order. In Sceur Philomene, an extremely intelligent pupil from the Conservatoire, Mile Sylviac, played a patient whose right breast had been removed. You have fooled us, mademoiselle! . . . And from certain indiscreet swellings of the bedcover, it was easy to see that if you were an Amazon, it was at least not in the ancient, true sense of the word.

'On Modern Drama and Modern Theatre'

83

The Theatre Libre is eclectic. After Goncourt, Villiers de l'lsle Adam; after Sceur Philomene, LEvasion.

Villiers has had LEvasion in his bottom drawer for a good twenty years. It is contemporary with La Revolted a short piece that was played before at the Vaudeville, in which Fargueil was quite simply admirable, but which did not have the success it deserved. Although LEvasion has a cast of ten, it is principally a monologue, in which Monsieur Mevisto — remember that name, it is the name of an artist — plays upon all the strings of horror with the same virtuosity as he displayed last year in Enfamille. Monsieur Mevisto, who excels in character creation, has carried authenticity so far as to play the galley slave, Pagnol, barefooted, and to inscribe the bloody sign of the branding iron upon his ankle. The Theatre Libre was hitherto only a theatre club; now it is an artistic theatre of the highest quality! A repertoire had rapidly arisen, enabling it to put on about twenty plays a year, and Naturalism, which had been declared impossible on the stage by critics and other timid persons, now enjoyed a triumphant breakthrough

there. Already one sees signs of a search for a form which seems to take the new drama in a somewhat different direction from the first attempts in Therese Raquin, and which breaks completely with Zola's adaptations of LAssommoir and Germinal, with their large-scale effects and elaborate theatrical apparatus. Hardly a full-length play is to be seen, with Zola himself making his debut with a one-acter; and where three-act plays do occur one notices a strong predilection for the unities of time and space. At the same time, all attempts at a plot seem to have been abandoned and the main interest is placed on the psychological course of events. All this suggests that the falsity of plays founded upon intrigue has become generally apparent. In ancient Greek the word drama seems to have meant event, not action, or what we call conscious intrigue. For life does not unfold as regularly as a constructed drama, and conscious spinners of intrigue get so few opportunities of carrying out their plans in detail that we have stopped believing in these cunning plotters who are able without hindrance to control other people's destinies, so that today the villain in his conscious falsity merely arouses our ridicule as not being true to life. In the new Naturalistic drama a striving for the significant motif was at once apparent. Therefore, the action usually focused upon life's two poles, life and death, the act of birth and the act of death, thefightfor a spouse, for

84

Selected Essays

the means of subsistence, for honour, all those struggles, with their battlefields, cries of pain, the wounded and dead, during which one heard the new view of life as a continuous struggle blow its fruitful southerly winds. There were tragedies, of a hitherto unknown kind; but the young authors of a generation that had hitherto been schooled in suffering, including what is perhaps the most terrible of all kinds, a vicious intellectual oppression which inhibits growth, and even involving such cruel forms of persecution as imprisonment and starvation, seemed reluctant to impose their suffering on others any more than was absolutely necessary; therefore they made the suffering as brief as possible, let the pain pour forth in one act, sometimes in a single scene. One such small masterpiece was, for example, Entre freres by Guiches and Lavedan. The play is so short that it is performed in fifteen minutes, and the genre was immediately called a quart d'heure.1^ The action, if it can be called an action, is as follows: In a bed lies an old woman who is dying, and beside her stand her three sons. The dying woman indicates that she wants to speak, and then reveals the secret of her life, namely that one of the sons was conceived in adultery, whereupon she falls back unconscious, apparently dead, before she has had time to say which of the sons is the illegitimate one. The sons deliberate and for various reasons settle upon the youngest. The marquis, the head of the family, suggests that they keep the secret, but that the illegitimate heir leave. At that moment the mother regains consciousness and just has time to utter the words: 'It is the marquis!' — The end! This is dramatic action reduced to a single scene, and why not? Anyone who has had the task of reading plays that have been submitted to a theatre director soon observes that every play would seem to have been written for the sake of a single scene, and that all the author's creative joy involved this scene, which sustained him during the terrible pains which the exposition, presentation, complications, unravelling, peripeteia and catastrophe had caused him.27 For the satisfaction of having written a full-length play, he has to torment his audience by arousing its curiosity about matters it already knows, inflicts upon the director the need to maintain a large company, makes life miserable for those unfortunate actors who are to play the secondary roles, the messengers, confidants and raisonneurs without whom no intrigue or full-length play can come into being, and to whom he must go to the trouble of giving a character. Therefore, well-constructedfive-actplays are extremely rare and one has

'On Modern Drama and Modern Theatre'

85

to put up with a lot of stuff and nonsense in getting to the root of the matter. After having recently read some twenty-five plays, including one of 400 pages and with seventeen characters, I have had certain suspicions of mine about the reason for the lack of good drama confirmed. Every beginner seems to me to be able to write one good act; in that he is true to life, every word is accurate and the action is honest. As soon as he embarks upon a long play, everything becomes laboured, contrived, affected and false. The two-act play forms a genre of its own, but not a very happy one. It has a head and tail, but no body; it is before and after the catastrophe, usually with a year in between; the second act frequently contains the moral — this is what happens if you do this and that in act one. The most beautiful in construction are the three-act plays which observe the unities of time and space — when, that is, the subject is a significant one, as, for example, in Ibsen's Ghosts, which ought to be contrasted with what proved to be the altogether overlong Rosmersholm. The taste of the period, this headlong, hectic period, seems to be moving towards the brief and expressive, and Tolstoy's painful The Power ofDarkness at the Theatre Libre was unable to retain the audience's interest, even with the help of Franco-Russian politics. 28

A scene, a quart d'heure> seems set to be the type of play for contemporary theatregoers, and it has a long history. For it can trace its descent (yes, why not) from Greek tragedy, which, if we regard the trilogy as three separate plays, encompasses a concentrated event in a single act. But if we do not want to go all the way back to Paradise, there was in the eighteenth century a gentleman named Carmontelle,29 who was the first to cultivate the genre on a large scale, under the name Proverbes dramatiques, of which he published ten volumes, and is supposed to have left a hundred (?) more in manuscript. The genre was later developed by Leclerq,30 and attains its highest perfection in the well-known masterpieces of Musset and Feuillet;31 more recently, in Henry Becque's La Navette?1 it forms the transition to the extended one-acter, which may well become the formula for the drama of the future. In the proverb one got the heart of the matter, the whole affair, the battle of the souls, sometimes approaching tragedy in Musset, without having to be bothered by the din of weapons or processions of supernumeraries. With the help of a table and two chairs one could present the most powerful conflicts life has to offer; and in this type of art, all the discoveries of modern psychology could be applied for the first time in a popular form.33 As is well known, in our day the proverb made rapid headway, was used and abused, became a titbit, of which one had a surfeit. However, the

86

Selected Essays

proverb proved to be the seed of a prospective form, when the author and the public cherished the same thing, but it declined and was buried and ridiculed, because no one dared use it for a higher purpose, as Musset, although not always successfully, had done. I do not mean to say that this is the only way, and the Theatre Libre never based its work on a prescribed programme, never promulgated an aesthetic, never sought to form a school. Writers have therefore taken advantage of this freedom, and this theatre's posters have advertised the most varied forms of play, new and old side by side, as old even as the tragic parade, the mystery play, and the pantomime, while the law which decrees that the action should not be set in the historical past has also been excised from modern aesthetics. All prohibitive laws have been repealed and only the demands of taste and the modern spirit are allowed to determine the artistic form. Here, it has proved possible to renew an acquaintance with Pierrot,34 but one who belongs to the nineteenth century and has studied Charcot; 35 here, Jesus Christ — that is to say, the one in the Bible — has appeared as a lover; here, one can see Tabarin's36 booth from the picturesque age of Louis XIII; here, suicide is committed according to every psychological rule; but here, fairy-tale plays are also performed — in one act, too; here, tragicomedies are done — in verse — imagine, in verse, which has only just been banned from the stage! — by the new Haugians!37 — This is freedom, the highest possible freedom — one might almost say anarchism! Is this not perhaps an emancipation of art, a renaissance, a liberation from a frightful aesthetic, which was beginning to make people unhappy, which sought to transform the theatre into a form of political dressage, into a Sunday school, a chapel? Perhaps! May we also get such a theatre where one can shudder at the most horrible things, smile at the most ridiculous and play with toys; where one can see everything and not be offended if one sees what has so far been hidden behind theological and aesthetic veils, even if this means breaking the old established conventions; may we get a free theatre where one enjoys every freedom, except the freedom to lack talent and be a hypocrite or an idiot! And should we not get such a theatre, we shall no doubt survive all the

From Vivisections II (1894):

T 'The Making of an Aspasia 'Nemesis Divina (Cont.)' 'The New Arts! or the Role of Chance in Artistic Creation 'Whence We Have Come' 'Character a Role?'

T

While out walking alone have you never sat down on a bench and with the stick in your hand begun to draw geometricalfiguresin the sand of the park path, the boulevard or the square? After a while you look at your unconscious work and see yourself enclosed in an infinity of concentric circles in which you yourself are the midpoint. It is the self's instinct for expansion, the tendency to make oneself the earth's axis, the desire to enclose a patch of earth, to trace a horizon about oneself that guides your stick, the radius of the circle which each and every one of us carries with him and cannot leave. Each of us sees his rainbow, and my neighbour, two or three paces to the left or right of me, is no longer on the same longitude as I am. Why then this ceaseless and merciless fight against people and things? The need to be right, the lust for power, the desire to carry other people's minds along in the movement of molecules. My friends have long accused me of being subjective. I have given some thought to what they have in mind and now see what the word means. Quite simply, they want me to think what they think, to assume their point of view, to adopt their opinions. To say that I detest their antiquated ideas is tantamount to saying that we are enemies, and they prefer to remain my false friends. Consequently, I continue to write from my point of view, to say what I have seen, to think in accordance with what life has taught me. What are other people to me? What do I know of their ability to see, to divine, to judge? They can lie and make mistakes, which is exactly what they do do, since they are my natural enemies, just as I am theirs: we are all enemies, rivals for the air we breathe, for the pasture-land we graze, for the female we impregnate, for the honour we scorn. Other people! I detest them as they hate me! I have passed my life's meridian, and when I cast a glance behind me I frequently see myself as the hunter, but even more frequently as the rabbit,

90

Selected Essays

since I was brought up in the religion of the rabbits. When I was young I believed that I laboured for others, I was always ready to blame myself and admit that others were right, while no one made any effort on my behalf and the whole universe yielded nothing to me. I had deposited bits of my self now here, now there, in God's bosom, in my friends' souls, in my wives', in my children's; and they all went their way, each bearing their own piece and leaving nothing behind for me of their own impoverished selves. Morally I had become bankrupt but, on the point of making off with myself, I collected the rags of my soul together and forged a skeleton of iron, which I coated with fireclay. And in the furnace of suffering and disappointment I burned my image so that it became as hard as rock. And my nearest and dearest, the one who lit the pyre, who pilfered my children's bread, who threw me into prison, cried out: 'He doesn't love those closest to him, he writes without sympathy (for us), he hates people!' Agreed! I hate with the sound and robust hatred of the strong, whose eye is sharpened by hatred, while in their impotent rage the weak are blinded by stagnation of the blood. I may be enraged, but I don't see red where something is green; I may be furious, but I can distinguish friend from foe. Recently, twelve of my literary friends published a book in my honour, consisting of twelve essays about myself and my work.l And all of them, without exception, have written directly or indirectly about themselves, about their opinions, their feelings, their work. Those who defend me defend themselves, those who oppose me expound their own ideas, which are the reverse of mine. A woman — woman! — has made a precious contribution to the psychology of women in a hotchpotch of gossip and tittle-tattle.2 She has served up her own psychopathology as a woman in the belief that it is mine she is presenting. She betrays her ignorance from the outset, secure in that absolute certainty which is so characteristic of women, and establishes the whole of my psychology on a false assertion, namely that I am descended from the Mongolian race. I know the woman; I said to her: 'Madame, all Mongols are brachycephalic; I am decidedly dolichocephalic.3 Consequently, I cannot be of service to you . . . as a Mongol.' Nothing helped. For her I had to be a Mongol, since she was Negroid herself, the crossbreed of a Livonian sailor and a Negro cook.4 Nor has she any idea about the laws of compensation in nature, particularly where love is concerned. She has discovered that I am a degenerate because in making my genetic selection I prefer women who are perverse.5 On the contrary, this proves that I have an over-abundance of sound and

T

91

vital instincts, since nature drives me to make good the defects in my feminine complement. How's that? In my tragedy The Father, where a man of superior character and intelligence is murdered by three sluts, she finds the man stupid for letting himself be murdered!6 There we have woman in all her glory! The murderer is superior to the murdered. The barbarian soldier who killed Archimedes is more intelligent than the great mathematician! Caserio is Carnot's superior.7 Woman and swindler! They are one! Finally, however, my female biographer reveals herself in all her innate naivete. After having cobbled together 2,000 lines (printed) about my person, she concedes that the subject has become altogether too mighty for her, and that she must refrain from explaining so complicated a character as mine. And this confession after having unravelled everything that my enemies have spun together in my honour! So charming, isn't it! And oh, so female! This is how other people have recently honoured me; now it is my turn to liquidate my debts to them!

'The Making of an Aspasia

Per Andersson,1 Denmark's most famous author, who has been singlehandedly responsible for an epoch in his country's literature, was summoned to Munich to inject some life into Bavarian poetry, which had fallen into decay since the Franco-German war. Andersson had a disciple, a fellow-countryman called Hanson,2 who had been living in Bavaria for four years, with a wife who had been striving to become the Joan of Arc of Young Bavaria, though without success since a niggardly nature had denied her the exterior of a literary lady. Infuriated by this miscalculation, she sent for the great Andersson, allotting him the role of bird-lime in which the young chicks would fasten. Andersson arrives and settles down near his friends in Munich. An extremely close circle had grown up around Hanson, enticed there by his moonlight, which was borrowed from Andersson's sun. With the circle now confronted by Hanson's archetype the latter fades, like a copy, with all the ensuing jealousy and intrigues, and ends with a bang and the break-up of the circle, which is swept off to a wine seller's, where Andersson establishes himself as a habitue? Here he spreads the seeds of his mature intellect, taken from an immense stock of observations on life which he knows how to exploit through his acknowledged faculty of combination. He functions as a leaven, and his seeds begin to grow in these young minds, prepared in advance by his disciple Hanson. They proclaim him master and father, and call themselves his apostles. He is inexhaustible, rejuvenating himself every new day, while his apostles make off in all directions, visiting their own private circles, where they build altars to themselves and make themselves into gods. After three months the group feels it has been fertilised, and betrays an inclination to break free of the maternal stock. The circle was composed offivechief apostles. A Polish writer4 who worshipped his master and dated his birth from the day that he first met Andersson; a Swedish artist,5 a portrait painter, devoid of imagination, 92

'The Making of an Aspasia'

93

who, when he saw that he was deficient in the most vital gift needed to attain the heights of artistic glory, began, for want of fantasy, to paint the master's often abstract visions, incomprehensible in colour but nevertheless recognised as original by the herd, who considered the artist mad and his paintings works of indisputable genius. There was also a Bavarian doctor,6 an expert surgeon and, moreover, a musician and poet, who dreamt of a rebirth of the natural sciences, for which the naturalist and poet Andersson had already paved the way. And further, Munich's dithyrambic bard,7 who had awaited new wine in old vessels, tarnished by age and drinking bouts. Finally, the lowest of the low, a little illiterate man-of-letters, driven out of Finland for a bad book and an abnormal way of life.8 Insignificant, and with a deficient upbringing, he was protected by the master, who took pity on him, the scabby sheep, who would have been driven out of the circle had not the master continually intervened and denied himself the bare necessities of life in order to clothe, feed and water his wretched protege. He lent him his friends, his literary and financial connections, his publishers and theatre directors. Having moved into the same house, the master devoted himself to giving the poor wretch a thorough education, getting him to narrate the story of his life, showing him where the profitable motifs lay. cThat is a drama', he instructed him; 'there's a short story, and there a novel.' The art of composition, the secrets of style, the ability to nose out the next aspect of the story, all this he gave freely, without asking for any thanks. The circle is sated, the minds now in motion function on their own; Munich possessesfivegeniuses in full bloom, who prompt others to flower, and the master's regular table at the Black Pig starts to grow deserted: the first sign of a reaction. The creator of so many geniuses sits alone; having become the inconvenient witness to the origin of five innovators, he foresees the moment when the circle will rid itself of his embarrassing person. Only the protege remains behind at the table where hefindssustenance, expressing his regrets to his benefactor, the object of this black ingratitude. But his pity is already suffused with a vast contempt for the fallen prophet, and there are moments when he shows his fangs. Then he ventures to teach his master, calls him simple, and advises him not to talk too much, 'for one fine day this gang will rob you'. However, from time to time a deserter returns for an evening, exhausted, empty and eager to get his rundown mechanism rewound; whereupon he disappears, only to put in an appearance more and more rarely.

94

Selected Essays

Finally, abandoned, and driven by a need to release the superabundance of his teeming soul, Andersson forms an attachment with a girl from a good family, who loves him.9 However, his slender income does not permit him to get married, and the young girl leaves Munich, to return to her parents. Andersson starts visiting the Black Pig again. Chance comes to his aid andfillsthe vacuum when the Swedish painter takes his mistress there, a pianist at the conservatoire, well brought up and from a good family.10 Tall, thin, ravaged by drink and late nights, she speaks with a languid voice, as if broken by swallowed tears. She throws herself at Andersson, whose writings she has long known, presenting herself as his enthusiastic admirer. And, inflamed by this encouragement, he leaves his mind and heart wide open. The painter, wounded, is eclipsed, and accepts the situation without offering any resistance. They are together a whole night and day, intoxicating themselves with conversation, in which Andersson takes the lead, sparkling without growing tired, enjoying the delightful sight of seeing a soul awaken from hibernation. He releases her from the despair and remorse of a disorderly life while she makes amends and recovers her self-respect. Her hollow cheeks fill with warm blood, her deathly-pale skin assumes a colour, her lifeless eyes shine. He is rejuvenated by contemplating his work, the stone statue into which he has breathed life; the creator admires his creation, and by the end of a week they consummate the union of their souls. When the spark has flared and the two currents have been neutralised there follows a pause for reflection. He discovers that she is ugly, badly dressed, lacking in taste, with no longedfor shame, and when he remembers how she gave herself he is seized with revulsion for her body, thus ensuring that the fall is never repeated. When he draws back she runs after him and proves so boring that he resolves to dispose of her elsewhere. With that in mind he sends a message to the troubadour doctor, after having furnished the place of rendezvous with a piano, to serve as pimp. The design works quite perfectly, and after an hour, with music's help, the two musicians have coupled, he singing to her accompaniment. Two weeks later the doctor brings his mistress to the Black Pig, where she is hailed as Aspasia. The circle reassembles, spring has arrived, and those who have deserted the master group themselves around the woman, this accumulator for so many ill-matched minds, while he sits in his corner like a mechanic at the controls of the machine. For it is still he who pulls the strings of these dolls that dance before him, and there are times, towards morning, when under the influence of wine his disciples place their master on a throne and worship him in verse and prose. Which displeases Aspasia,

'The Making of an Aspasia'

95

in whose heart a jealous hatred has begun to grow, the furious hatred of the debtor for the creditor. Pregnant with painting, literature, philosophy and surgery, Aspasia nevertheless develops, assumes the air of a protectress of genius, which disgusts her doctor lover, so that he sets about finding a successor. In collusion with Andersson, his eyes alight upon the Pole, until now invisible and unknown to Aspasia. Her curiosity is steered in the Pole's direction, and one fine evening the doctor takes Aspasia with him in a cab to the Pole's house, together with a bottle of brandy. He introduces them, opens the bottle, and then leaves, pleading a sick-call. He doesn't return, but after two days Aspasia takes the Pole with her to the Black Pig, where they are both received with acclaim. However, the Pole is unable to shine in the master's presence, and he seeks solitude along with his Aspasia. He is seriously in love, and although he knows all about his mistress's past he insures himself against a successor by marrying her. The Black Pig is dead. Andersson has gone abroad to marry,11 and peace reigns in Munich all summer. But something germinates and grows in the sun, and that autumn Aspasia opens her salon in Munich, in a furnished room. To the young Bavarians, who never knew the master, this stolen wisdom is entirely new, and Aspasia is hailed as an innovatory genius. And her first task is to extirpate the master, to decry him as old and antiquated, while all the time adorning herself with the tatters of his mantle. The circle from the Black Pig is summoned to assist, and this band of thieves proclaims itself the modern school. Asked what the modern is, they reply: 'It is us!' And Andersson?' — 'He is the past!' And yet their modernity is pure Andersson! A year has passed! The Pole has published a pamphlet, an Anderssonian bastard, in which Andersson is reviled.12 The poet has published a volume of Andersson, in which Andersson has the sobriquet 'feeble-minded woman' bestowed on him.13 The painter has daubed together an entire Andersson exhibition, where Andersson features in caricature.14 A failed dramatist is declared a Shakespeare for a play a /*z Andersson which exploits the new formula that he has propounded, and which he has kept back for the next season, so that Andersson's own play suffers the fatal destiny of being plagiarised by his epigone's.15 And the miserable little wretch, the suckling, has published two

96

Selected Essays

infamous books about the man he called his Saviour when he was unhappy and damned. And he has had them printed by Anderssons publisher.16 Well, what do you expect? That's life, isn't it? But first and foremost, it is all Aspasia's doing. People say that negroes gather round a pot, chew on a fruit and spit in the vessel. Their combined saliva ferments, and then the company gets tipsy on the strong brew. Isn't that just like an Aspasia, this communal nigger pot!

'Nemesis Divina (Cont.)y

What has occurred since my previous article in 18861 is certainly strange. I have just read in the paper that my bitterest foe, who in 1884 convened an assembly in Stockholm with the aim of having me banned and thrown into prison, has himself been locked up in this very same prison for forgery.2 Who would have believed then that this man, a member of the higher chamber, a consul-general, knight, and plutocrat, a religious man, a prophet and conservative demagogue, as well as a friend of the king and queen, who would have believed that he was destined for the country's principal prison? No one! And of the six women who represented the myopic opposition to the publication of my findings on the woman question, not one has survived their defeat. One actually took her own life, two are dead in mysterious circumstances, two perished in a violent frenzy and complete idiocy; the sixth, who travelled around giving lectures on morality and attacking me, is living in enforced exile, accused of playing around with young girls.3 Furthermore, the literary head of the enemy camp has been compromised in unsound commercial transactions.4 Likewise the editor-in-chief of the official newspaper.5 The whole band has been dispersed, drowned in darkness and oblivion. Actually, I find it frightening! May the same thing not happen to me! I am on the verge of succumbing to the old, superstitious belief in Nemesis. So much the more so because of a specific incident that is linked to the above. In 1887 I wrote a dramatic work, a tragedy called The Father. What led me to explore the problem of fatherhood was as follows. I was reading a history of the Swedish king Gustav III which maintained that his mother, jealous of the power of which her son had abruptly deprived her, in revenge spread the rumour that the king was not the crown prince's father. At about the same time, I read that the problem of fatherhood was preoccupying the literary world in Paris, where Glouvet had just released a drama on the subject.6 I should add that the Nouvelle Revuehzd focused attention on the 97

98

Selected Essays

same question with an article on Matriarchy and the baneful consequences of society's regression to this primitive social formation.7 The atmosphere was charged, and I let fly my arrow. As an experienced writer who researches a subject before instructing others, I amass material, seizing hold of lived experience where I can. The drama appeared. I had depicted a married man driven mad by a horde of pestering women. Consequently, the author was a madman. My play became an accumulator for all the hatred that had been gathering for decades, and a society for the protection of the author's wife was dredged up. I received a letter from an old Swedish friend whom I had not seen for fifteen years.8 Naturally, it was a Letter of Uriah.9 I remarked at once that the writer wished to hide what he had in mind. It was awkwardly phrased, and ended with him affecting cunning and simply being stupid. He circled around the subject like a snake, and invited me to stay with him on his lonely island for a year, together with my children, on the pretext that from my recent writings he found me overworked and in need of rest. The weak point was the utter failure to mention my wife. Just me and the children, and what he was proposing was an escape route. In a sudden flash of inspiration I handed the letter to my wife who read it, pretended to be indignant, and complained vehemently at the infamy of people who wanted to deprive her of her children. She thanked me in a manner which convinced me that she knew all about the letter beforehand. So, people thought I was mad, or pretended to believe it, in blind spite, while they concocted plans to have me locked up. I remained calm and let things rest. A year passed and I had now identified the four active members of the plot to deport me to an island, to stay with a brutal and uneducated non-commissioned officer whose wounded vanity thirsted for revenge on a superior. In the middle of winter I received an anonymous letter which, in carefully chosen words, intimated that my wife had betrayed me. The letter was signed with a false name which I noted, likewise the postmark on the stamp. And then I thought no more about it. Two months later a rumour spread abroad and reached me, that a Mr X in Stockholm had been committed to a mental hospital. Number i, I said to myself, and bided my time. But I found the wait too long, and in Denmark, where I was living, I took the risk of embarking alone, in spite of the warnings of my Danish friends. And true to my old tactic of looking my enemy straight in the eye, I invited myself out to my friend, the non-commissioned officer, on his island.

'Nemesis Divina (Cont.)'

99

Armed with a furious hatred of this underclass creature, who wanted to wrest my children from me, I entertained vague notions of retaliation but had not drawn up a plan since I knew that plans are so rarely realised, and that circumstances and chance are far more effective. Good! My friend gave me a more than hearty welcome, perhaps a little overdone, and his behaviour as a whole seemed somewhat forced. But in the presence of the sea, in solitude upon this island, we recovered our common memories, forgetting everything in our high spirits, all illfeeling, revenge and intrigue. Abandoned by everyone because of his despotic behaviour and his persecution of the islanders, who hate him, he lives here with his wife and never meets anyone. He has not spoken to anyone for six months, and I am overcome with compassion for this enemy of mine, whom I rediscover a castaway. He talks and talks, forfivehours, for ten hours, foaming at the mouth and with his head burning. He has thought so much, philosophised so long, only to discover a mass of already discovered things. But I encourage him to unburden himself and he has an eruption that lasts for three days. His wife confides to me in secret that he suffers from megalomania . . . there you are! Well guessed! He believes he is a Napoleon exiled to the island of St Helena. He likes me, congratulates himself on having found an equal (what next!), and honours me by entrusting his hidden and secret thoughts to me. I act a part, all humility and appreciation of his comprehensive view of life and the universe. It is simply that he has married his predecessors mistress, and if he is to be completely happy everyone else's marriage has to be out of kilter, too. On the fourth day he has acquired enormous strength from my encouragement, and begins to treat me like an idiot. He makes slanderous comments about my wife and congratulates me on my divorce, which from what I have said he takes for granted. Then he veers round, puts the blame on me, withdraws his accusations, and sides once more with my wife. This continual shifting back and forth in his point of view convinces me that the man is a neuropath. I give way continually, so that he is never able to get a purchase on me, and so that lacking support his mind begins to waver. My predicament is extremely interesting and I enjoy it. The story of my madness has done the rounds of all the papers, and in the event of an angry outburst from my side this man could intern me with impunity on no further evidence. What is more, the islanders detest me because I have portrayed them in my works, and as a result no one would assist me in a possible escape attempt.10 But I am in favour with his wife for providing her with a lightning conductor against her husband's violent outbursts, for

ioo

Selected Essays

he beats her. She hints at a mass of things that she wishes to confide to me, but her husband never leaves us alone. A week passes, he worships me. He has never met such a submissive man, and it makes him conceited. One evening, he insults me; I forget myself for a moment, get angry . . . and go to bed. He had it in mind to read his wife a parody he has made of one of my poems. Then I interrupted him: 'Read that to your illiterate friends.' He went pale with fury. I slept badly that night and recall that he has nigger blood in his veins; that I am at the mercy of a savage. The following morning I met his wife on the stairs. 'For God's sake take care', she said to me; 'you don't know that my husband is half mad. His sister has just been committed to a mental asylum after having set fire to some share certificates.' What a solace! Number 2, I say. 'When did this happen?' She told me the precise date and — good God — it was the same as the perfidious letter he wrote me, when he enticed me out to this backwater. We met at breakfast. He was full of regret and showered me with tokens of friendship, and all was well. Then I sent for my family in Denmark, hired a small house on a neighbouring island, and went my way.11 We parted as friends looking to the future, with a promise to see one another once a week. This sudden solution to the drama of my marriage did not surprise him in the least; it was in his style, and he took back his accusations against my wife, denying that he had ever uttered them. He is a pathological or ethnographic liar, for lie he does, laughing that idiotic nigger laugh of his, which makes it impossible for me to take him seriously. From now on I hate him with all my being as soon as he is not there, and I tell the other islanders, who are his enemies, about all his illegal doings. This coarse sergeant thought to put the life of a man and his family at risk; wanted to abduct three children from their father . . . By heaven, there is no punishment severe enough, and I weave my net and continue to bide my time. Three weeks have passed. I receive a letter from his wife who begs me to come at once and visit her poor husband, who has been reduced to despair by a sudden family affliction.

'Nemesis Divina (Cont.)'

101

I set sail and find my friend broken-hearted. On his desk were several crumpled letters and telegrams. His brother had just been detained as a criminal of unsound mind . . . he had forged his brother's signature. You may imagine that I found my role as comforter a little hard to take! And my principles as a freethinker fairly shaken. Number 3! But what particularly caught my attention was an envelope on the table with the same address as the second anonymous letter in which my wife was accused of being unfaithful to me. This meant that my friend had got his brother to write or copy this shameful letter. The pupil had shown ability, and ended up copying his teacher's name. What infernal logic on the part of Nemesis, if such a person exists! Let us continue! Six weeks later I read in my paper that this brother had smashed his head in against afireplace,having gone completely insane. Yet another journey as comforter, and this time in all sincerity since I found the cup full; this poor brother had been punished in proportion to his crime, indeed, rather more so, since his surname appeared in all the papers. How naive he was, this 50-year-old, when he wept in my arms, howling like a child, and forgetting that he had recently conspired against my freedom, and against my name! However, not a word to recall this, neither from his side nor from mine. Justice had been done and I drew back, resolved never to take my revenge again when justice itself succeeded so mysteriously in effecting it. Fate had chosen another solution, and chance was an exterminating angel beyond my wildest dreams. I left the neighbourhood after a while and had forgotten my friend on his rock. Suddenly, I heard his name mixed up in a sensational divorce suit. Using his position as a local councillor this non-commissioned officer had intrigued on behalf of a perverse woman, taking her side against her innocent husband, and crowning it all by inviting the concubine to live with him.12 Now I asked myself what he was after, what kind of person it is who demands that children should be snatched away from an honourable man and handed over to a sodomite mother and her paramour? Sterile and a priapist,* he collected birds' eggs, was an oologist, and * See the analysis of his character in The Man of the Future}^

102

Selected Essays

seems to have been driven by a criminal desire to steal children from their father. Accordingly, he put himself on the criminals side and revealed his feminine and criminal nature. But see what chance intended. During the trial, I read one day in the paper that the non-commissioned officer's other brother had committed suicide in the most terrible circumstances. He was the headmaster of a school for the deaf and dumb and it had been proved that he had had sexual relations with his pupils, female as well as male, and both minors and others. The affair went the rounds of all the papers and the family name figured there together with all the details. And you believe that there is a God for the innocent, for children? Not so! This non-commissioned officer testified falsely that the woman, who was known to be perverse, was innocent, and the unfortunate man's children are still in that sodomite home, maintained by emancipated women and sexless, gynocratic men. It is difficult to credit, yet that is how things stand. But: two brothers and one sister gone mad in four years! A year later the non-commissioned officer was driven out of the local council, although that had nothing to do with Nemesis Divina but was humana pure and simple, given that I had catalogued his virtues in the district. If we assume that an avenging God has struck this scoundrel down why did He not then protect the children abandoned to this monster of a mother? Evidently an avenging God, Jehovah perhaps; but a protecting God, hardly! To continue! Two years later the daughter of another member of the outfit that wished to have me put away went mad and was shut up as the result of an unhappy love affair.14 I must add that, without in any way wishing to, I assisted in this in so far as I had convinced my friend that the girl was not for marriage since she was cruel, miserly, ambitious and misanere (= a man hater). At about the same time, and after writing a lampoon against me, the head of the opposing literary camp suffered an attack of persecution mania and fled and hid himself away with his in-laws! He was also a member of this aforementioned outfit, and thus makes Number 6! What is one to say? I don't know!

'The New Arts! or The Role of Chance in Artistic Creation

They say that the Malays make holes in the bamboo stems that grow in their forests. When the wind comes the savages lie on the ground and listen to symphonies performed by these gigantic Aeolian harps. The strange thing is that each man hears his own melody and harmony, just as the wind blows. Weavers are known to employ the kaleidoscope to discover new designs, leaving it to blind chance to assemble the bits of coloured glass. On arriving at the well-known artist's colony at Marlotte,1 I went into the dining room to look at the celebrated painted panels. There I saw a portrait of a woman: a) young, |3) old, etc. Three crows on a branch. Very well executed. What it represents is immediately apparent. Moonlight. A rather bright moon; six trees; still water with reflections. Moonlight, of course! But what is it? — It is precisely this initial question that affords the first pleasure. There is a need to search, to conquer; and nothing is more delightful than when the imagination is set in motion. What is it? Painters call it 'palette scrapings', which means that when an artist hasfinishedworking, he scrapes the remnants of the colours together, and if he feels so inclined, uses them to make a rough sketch. I stood enraptured before this panel at Marlotte. The colours possessed a harmony that was, of course, readily explained by their having all been part of the same painting. Now freed from the trouble of finding the right colours, the soul of the painter enjoys the freedom to elicit shapes, and as his hand manipulates the spatula at random, still retaining nature's model in mind without seeking to copy it, the result reveals itself as a charming combination of the conscious and the unconscious. This is natural art, where the artist works in the same capricious way as nature, without a specific aim. I have seen those scraped panels a number of times since then, and always found something new in them, according to my state of mind. I sought a melody for a one-acter of mine called Simoom,2 which is set in Arabia. To that end, I tuned my guitar at random, loosening the screws 103

104

Selected Essays

haphazardly, until I found a chord that struck me as something extremely bizarre, though without overstepping the bounds of beauty. The melody met with the approval of the actor who was playing the role; but the director, an ultra-realist, found out that it was not genuine and demanded something authentic. I hunted up a collection of Arabian tunes and showed them to the director, who rejected them all and finally found my little tune more Arabian than the genuine article! The melody was performed and enjoyed a certain modest success when the composer of the hour came to ask my permission to base all the music for my little play on my Arab' air, which had touched him deeply. Here is my melody, as it was composed by chance: G, C#, G#, B, E. I knew a musician who amused himself by tuning his piano anyhow, without rhyme or reason.3 He then played Beethoven's 'Pathetique' sonata from memory. It was an incredible delight to hear the old piece rejuvenated. I had heard him play that sonata for twenty years, always the same way, with no hope of seeing it develop — it was fixed, incapable of evolving. Since then I do the same thing on my guitar with hackneyed tunes. And other guitarists envy me; they ask me where I got this music from, and I tell them I don't know. They take me for a composer. An idea for the manufacturers of those barrel-organs so much in vogue. Pierce the revolving disc at random, here and there, and you will have a musical kaleidoscope.4 In his Life of the Animals' Brehm maintains that the starling imitates every sound it happens to hear: the noise of a door closing, the knife-grinder's stone, the millstone, the weather-vane, etc. That is not at all the case: I have heard starlings in most European countries, and they all sing the same potpourri, made up of memories of the jay, the blackbird, the fieldfare and other such birds, so that each listener can hear what he wants to. The starling in fact possesses a musical kaleidoscope. It is the same with parrots. Why are all grey parrots with scarlet tails called Jacob? Because their natural sound, their call, is 'Iako'. And their owners believe that they have taught their parrot how to talk by beginning with its name! And all the cockatoos! And the macaws! It is amusing to listen in on an old lady who is under the impression that she is teaching her parakeet to speak. The creature utters its incoherent cries and the lady translates by finding the nearest approximation, or rather sets a text to this accursed

'The New Arts! or The Role of Chance in Artistic Creation'

105

music. It is consequently impossible for a stranger to understand what the parakeet is 'saying' until he hears the words from its owner's mouth. I once had the idea of making a clay model of a young worshipper, in the classical style. But standing there with his arms raised I was disatisfied with him and, in a fit of despair, let my hand fall upon the poor creature's head. And behold! A metamorphosis that Ovid could never have envisaged. Beneath my blow his Greek tresses were flattened into a Scottish tam-o'-shanter that covered his face; his head and neck were buried between his shoulders; his arms fell until his hands were on a level with his eyes, which were hidden under the bonnet; his legs gave way; his knees came together; and the whole thing had been transformed into a boy of nine crying and hiding his tears behind his hands. With a little touching up the statuette was perfect; in other words, the viewer derived the desired impression.6 Later on, in some friends' studios, I improvised a theory of automatic art. 'You all remember the fairy-tale about the boy out strolling in the woods, who comes upon a "wood nymph". She is as beautiful as the dawn, with emerald-green hair, etc. As he draws closer she turns her back, which now resembles a tree stump. 7 Clearly, the boy never saw anything but a stump, and his lively imagination invented all the rest. This has happened often to me. One beautiful morning while walking in the woods I came upon an enclosed strip of fallow land. My thoughts were far away, but my eyes observed a strange, odd-looking object lying on the ground. One moment it was a cow; an instant later two peasants embracing; then a tree trunk, then . . . I delight in these rapidly changing impressions . . . then my will is engaged and I want to know what it is . . . I feel the curtain veiling my consciousness about to rise . . . but I don't want it to . . . now it is a picnic breakfast in the country, people are eating . . . but the figures are motionless as in a waxworks . . . ah . . . so that's what it is . . . an abandoned plough over which the ploughman has thrown his coat and hung up his knapsack! There is no more to say! Nothing else to be seen! The pleasure is over! Does this not provide an analogy with the modernist paintings that the philistines find so incomprehensible? At first, one sees only a chaos of colours; then it begins to assume a likeness, it resembles, but no: it resembles nothing. All at once a point defines itself, like the nucleus of a cell; it

106

Selected Essays

grows, the colours group themselves around it and accumulate; rays develop which sprout branches and twigs as ice crystals do on a windowpane . . . and the image presents itself to the viewer, who has assisted at the birth of the picture. And, what is even better, the painting remains always new, it changes according to the light, never wears out, and is endowed with the gift of life.' I paint in my spare time. So as to master my material I choose a mediumsized canvas, or, better still, a piece of cardboard, on which I can complete the painting in two or three hours, while my inclination lasts. I am governed by a vague design. I have in mind the interior of a shadowy wood, from where the sea can be seen at sunset.8 Fine! With the knife that I use for this purpose — I possess no brushes! — I distribute the colours on the cardboard and mix them so as to obtain the rudiments of a design. The opening in the centre of the canvas represents the horizon with the sea. Now the interior of the wood, the network of branches and twigs, is extended in a group of colours, fourteen, fifteen, pell-mell but always in harmony. The canvas is covered; I step back and take a look! Confound it! I can see no trace of any sea; the illuminated opening shows an endless perspective of pink and bluish light in which vaporous beings, without body or definition, float like fairies with trains of cloud. The wood has become a dark subterranean cave, barred by brambles: and in the foreground — let's see — why, rocks covered with unknown lichens — and there, to the right, the knife has smoothed down the colours too much, so that they look like reflections in water. Well then! It's a pool. Perfect! But above the water there is a patch of white and pink, whose origin and meaning I cannot explain. One moment! - a rose! -The knife goes to work for a couple of seconds and the pool is framed in roses, roses, what a mass of roses! A touch here and there with my finger, which brings the rebellious colours together, blends and dispels the crude tones, refines, gives air and the picture is done! My wife,9 for the time being my good friend, comes up, looks, and goes into ecstasies before 'Tannhauser's Grotto', from which a great serpent (meaning my floating fairies) is winding its way towards the land of wonders; and the hollyhocks (my roses!) are mirrored in the sulphurous spring (my pool!), etc. She admires my 'masterpiece' for an entire week, valuing it at several thousand francs, and guaranteeing it a place in a museum, etc.

'The New Arts! or The Role of Chance in Artistic Creation'

107

Another week and we have fallen back into a period offierceantipathy; in my masterpiece she now sees nothing but tripe! And they say that art exists as a thing in itself! Have you ever gone in for rhyming? I imagine so! You will have noticed that it is detestable work. Rhymes fetter the spirit; but they are also liberating. Sounds become the intermediaries between notions, images, ideas. This Maeterlinck fellow, what does he do? He puts rhymes in the middle of his prose.10 And that degenerate beast of a critic who concludes from this that he is mentally deranged and gives this sickness the scientific (!) name 'Echolalia'. Every true poet since the creation of the world has been an echolaliac. With one exception, Max Nordau,11 who uses rhyme without being a poet. Hinc ilia lacrimd12 The art of the future (which will pass away, like everything else)! Imitate nature closely; above all, imitate nature's way of creating!

'Whence We Have Come

A little girl is brought into the world by an overclass mother, an acknowledged beauty. The girl looks like an old man in miniature. Bald on the crown of the head, a little shock of hair on the temples, but with her sleek hair trimmed short like a dignified old man; domed and lined brow like a philosopher's; she puts herfingerto her brow or nose with a gesture full of profundity; her mouth toothless and sunken as in decrepit old age. The young woman evidently starts off from where the old man ends. But she also enters life as a meat-eater. Her sustenance is exclusively animal, and vegetable foods act as poison. Just like us, says the partridge, where only the young eat nothing but worms while the elderly birds are vegetarians. Between the ages of about 3 to 4 my little girl is an angel, the ideal human being, unconscious, with the teeth of a sheep, the canines appearing last. How erratic this evolution is, and what do all these sudden shifts mean? No trace of an ape! On Christmas Eve another Darwinist1 and I met an extremely welldressed 6-year-old boy on a Berlin pavement; he was standing in front of a shop-window, gazing at the miraculous toys. We both stopped short at this delightful sight. A countenance at once open and firm, an angelic expression in his big, clear, innocent eyes, beneath honey-blond locks. 'That,' I said, 'on my soul, that is no ape!' And my friend: 'But the old man, there's the ape!' 'So, we come from heaven, and descend towards the anthropomorphs. Is life then evolution backwards?' At the age of 6 my daughter detests animal flesh and remains frugivorous until secondary dentition. The little lady emerges: lecherous, thieving, false and at once the crimi108

'Whence We Have Come'

109

nal type is there. The disproportions in the face: nose too short, upper lip too long; an incessant, silly laugh, secret whispers, greediness and every kind of vile desire. The young woman: in a young man's eyes an angel; in her mother's a devil. The young mother a goddess; the wife, a she-devil. The old coquette between 30 and 40; demented, half-crazy, religious, around 50 perverse. The elderly mother-in-law Satan in person. For the boy: the same beginning! Between 11 and 15 the avowed knave. Every vice in the offing. Around 20 a terrible struggle. Reason takes control of the emotions, and the instinct of self-preservation enjoins the young rogue to hide. Ambition reigns sovereign until 40; after 40 disillusion on every front; the power to repress the young affords a little satisfaction, but the beast is revealed. One starts to eat with greater reverence. As a rule one doesn't eat before passing 40. The age of the swine. After 50, one either rots or withers. It all depends. And the old man, lecherous, jealous, perverse, wicked, as vicious as an ape. There you see the true end of life! To be an ape. Oh Rousseau! Oh Zola! And so much trouble just to become an ape! Rousseau has had a hard time since Darwin's disciples arrived on the scene. Everything pointed to evolution, and for the young and simple-minded everything that evolved meant progress towards perfection. However, they forgot that sickness could develop and turn into death, and that degeneration grew ever more perfect until the species or the family was extinct. The worship of any kind of progress, of stupidity, of usury, of horse-trading, of androgyny, caused people to forget that there had been decadent periods that bore no comparison with the ages that preceded them; that the reign of Caligula in no way constituted an advance upon the previous century of Augustus. And so on! The history of mankind does not follow a straight line, and it is more than probable that the course of the human race has been subject to a number of hiatuses since its origin. In the animal world we see (with Haeckel's eyes) the snail develop backwards and become a mussel, losing its head in the process;2 why then reject far less bold suppositions? In an essay on the anthropomorphs Linnaeus cites four examples of abandoned children who have been brought up by animals, and who all returned to the level of their teachers.3

no

Selected Essays

The story of a lost Paradise may be well founded if one presumes a uniform and suitable climate, dependent upon another inclination of the earth's axis than the one which presently obtains; and the tradition of the great flood would serve as a motif for a universal return to the animal stage, when different pairs that had saved themselves on various islands underwent a retrogression. There must therefore have been at least two creations, and children aged between 3 and 6 would be a reminiscence of paradisiacal man. And we should once more have the right to use the expression antediluvian, although in a more beautiful sense. From this comes the vague memory of a previous existence, a golden age which shines forth in our dreams and an explanation of this fact, which the physiologists cannot grasp, namely that life presents the image of two distinct steps, from ideal beauty to brutal ugliness. It may well be that Rousseau will enjoy a renaissance, after a period of general and blind mockery.

'Character a Role?'

What one is, and what one believes oneself to be, are regarded as two different things. But what does it really mean, to be at one with one's character? Is it not the case that we continually adapt ourselves to people and to circumstances, that reality, so varied and shifting, makes us changeable, and that we play along in the comedy of life without knowing it? The criminal is supposed to have formulated a philosophical system before committing the crime, and thus exonerates himself from guilt in advance. He plays the innocent before himself, and finds he is in the right at the moment when the crime is committed. The contrition which follows his imprisonment can therefore stem only from his isolation, from being uprooted out of his natural milieu; in detention he is no longer sustained by his accomplices' opinions and the presence of the judges, with their imposing attributes of abstract power, with their superior logic, demolish the sophisms of the guilty man. A few months of abstinence, with little food, in solitude in prison, and he is no longer the same man. There are notorious cases in which an innocent man has been induced by the examining magistrates into accepting that he is guilty, so powerful is the influence of the milieu and those around us. Let a steady worker lose his position and become idle, and within a couple of weeks you will have a drunkard, an incompetent, perhaps a candidate for the petty sessions. In my parents' home we had an employee, a trusty servant, a real treasure of devotion, who remained with us for thirty years, never neglected his duties, never got drunk, never assaulted the maids. Sober, misogynist, proper, a little religious, he had reached 50 when one night the house was awakened by a police constable who had the servant in question with him in a cab, allegedly dead-drunk and accused of having, while so disposed, broken a window pane. My father challenges the accusation, a priori, swearing that the servant never drank and enjoyed a reputation in the neighbourhood for his good character. The constable did not wish to in

H2

Selected Essays

dispute this well-known fact, but he insisted on the main point: that the man was drunk. The doctor arrives, and his intoxication is confirmed. This was the start of our faithful servant's decline and fall: he died five years later of a so-called shameful disease. A change of role after 50, most assuredly! It would appear that character is not as stable a thing as people would like to believe. That is why I do not undertake to classify Characters: people cannot be classified. Every time I choose to study a man, I find I end up thinking the object of my studies mentally deranged. So incoherent is the way people think and act if one follows closely the restless movements of their souls. Record from day to day their expressions of opinion, their fixed ideas or their passing fancies, and one discovers a hotchpotch that does not merit the term 'character'. Everything has the appearance of inconsequential improvisations, with man himself the greatest liar in the world, continually at odds with himself. The simplest bourgeois will emerge as the most complex of individuals; after a while you will be obsessed by him, and in the end you will be convinced that this man is concealing something, and that he is making fun of you and your interests. It is dangerous to rack one's brains as to another person's character. With a married couple the case is very common. One only needs to hear a proper matrimonial quarrel in which the two friends for life accuse one another of the most incredible things. They love one another, yet there is hardly a mean action, a baseness, a crime that one of them does not charge the other with. Are they sincere? Yes, entirely sincere, and they have a presentiment of all the filth concealed within a human soul. A typical matrimonial retort which repeatedly crops up in these outbreaks of intermittently recurring hatred is: 'I believe you capable of anything!' This is not an insult, it reveals a complete knowledge of the soul, which verily conceals all the animal's evil instincts. Marriage is thus possible only if one makes oneself blind and deaf and ceases to speculate about one another, returning to an unconscious state when the need to procreate makes itself felt. To let oneself be fooled while demonstrating good taste; to never question other people's feelings, to respect minor failings and major sins, that is the basis for marriage. The bitter disillusionment of the newly wed proceeds from an incomplete knowledge of Character. Under the extreme pressure of sexual selection, which nature discharges independently of our will, the two partners

'Character a Role'

113

do everything they can to display themselves in all the splendour of a pure and elevated human nature; they conceal or suppress their wicked inclinations, and all with absolute sincerity, so that they shortly discover how love ennobles, and quite rightly. In a moment of weariness the tension relaxes, the animal appears and they accuse one another of duplicity, and quite wrongly. So too with love. An intermittent feeling that comes and goes, with moments of suspension; when one is preoccupied with work, with anxieties, with gloomy thoughts, the genetic instinct is checked in its workings. 4 You don't love me any longer!' Where is the man who doesn't recognise that reproach! An answer to note: 'Just now I don't love you since everything leaves me apathetic! In a moment I shall perhaps hate you, since an aversion to all contact with another soul estranges me from you; something which does not prevent me from loving you in half an hour and for ever, though with interruptions, as necessary as the reversal in an electric current when the tension is recharged.' There is a banal definition of the word Character: A man who knows what he wants! That is a Character.' But the wise man wants only what he can, with greater or less effort. Accordingly, it remains to know what one can. But how can one know in advance what will happen? And hence what one ought to want? In recent years no one has been so falsely acclaimed a Character with a capital ' C as Prince Bismarck. Why? That would not be so easy to determine were it not that his career has been more eye-catching than any other. The bourgeoisie, the majority, maintain that right from the outset he pursued a single and unique aim, which he achieved: the unification of Germany (in parenthesis: under the supremacy of Prussia). But to begin with the story of this unique aim is not true, since up until 18 51 Bismarck was Austria's declared friend. In 1850 he opposed the endeavours of Prussia to bring about the Union. From then on he detests Austria and works for the expulsion of the Holy Empire from the German Union, which he achieves in 1866. He is thus responsible for dismembering Germany, not for unifying it. The great dismemberer also bears the title of the first Prussian, the Prussian before all others, who is supposed to have mustered the Prussian states. However, Prince Bismarck is no Prussian, since he let himself be presented as a Frisian in that remarkable book, Rembrandt als Erzieher^ and on another occasion, at the birthday of the King of Saxony,

H4

Selected Essays

as a Saxon. Note well, this was after the break with the House of Hohenzollern. And moreover, this man of iron, as unshakeable as a rock in his views, is a veritable chameleon. In his youth, he was a rebel; later a conservative; then an anti-semite, then pro-Jewish, then a liberal-conservative (this shade is magnificent!), after that a friend of Lassalle2 and an anti-socialist, a little later a state socialist and at the same time the socialists' bitter enemy; the friend of the Hohenzollerns and the Hohenzollerns' enemy (in Die Zukunft and Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung)? finally, after a dinner invitation and a grey cloak, a friend of the Hohenzollerns — until a new changement h vue.^ And as for the man with no heart! Read the letters to his wife, in which he bewails their separation, where he laments their domestic idyll, the good food, beer, pipe, slippers and dressing-gown. Add to that this entirely feminine trait: this civilian and one-time rustic barrister admires uniforms. And especially the white uniform of the cuirassiers, white as a woman's slip, with yellow and gold braid! This is a character adapted to circumstances, like every other, with provisional opinions, ideas apropos^ and an emotion for every situation. Are they successive roles that he plays? Absolutely not! He adapts himself to the shifting needs of his changeable time, and it is precisely therefore that he gives the impression of always remaining steadfast at his leader's post. His peerless skill, his superior talent, resides in his ability to create the optical illusion of being a man of iron instead of gutta-percha. The Inflicted Character or the Humorist Against His Will I saw him as a youth, starving, skinny, his complexion yellow, his eyes wild, jealous of the whole world.5 He had no overcoat in winter and covered himself with a white student's cap, his threadbare frock-coat was pitiful to see. But an ambitious devil who will get on in the world, I thought. I got to know him five years later. He was then a supernumary on the Judicial Board; well dressed, and in the latest fashion, he looked solid, in a sound position financially, was immensely proud and enormously ambitious. A most talented conversationalist but limited by unintentional gaffes, well mannered although often the opposite, too. He had himself drawn up definite plans for his future. A wealthy and aristocratic marriage, a landowner with castle, servants and horses. Of noble birth himself, from a family that had seen better days, his father

'Character a Role'

115

a retired non-commissioned officer and good-for-nothing with many children, my friend cherished the most noble ambition of restoring his name and fortune. Intelligent and well behaved he appeared in society, met young girls with all the desired qualities, but after a time he fell in love with a poor girl from the petite bourgeoisie. Swayed by this passion he quickly polishes off his university exam, and so as to be able to marry he becomes a grammar school teacher. Incapable of enduring privation, hungry for good food after an abstinent youth, he is continually forced to augment his income, and is thus drawn into the vicious circle: privation or abortive career. Very soon he perceives that his career has miscarried, that his role is a little false. Ambition remains, however, and with it the desire to rise to the top. He elbows his way to the fore at meetings and in company, speaking in public, giving lectures, proposing toasts. Undeniably a talented speaker but uncontrolled, he goes too far, draws a blank and misses the target; as a result people laugh in this serious man's face, and he tries to hide his bitterness. This happens time and again, and after having experienced several such involuntary comic successes he gets used to it, finds profit in the popularity they bring and ends by accepting the role of humorist. I heard him recently deliver a political speech in which he was on the verge of bringing in the votes. He spoke very well, but just at the decisive moment he made a gaffe; the audience laughed, and he relapsed into the old comic banter, kept it going and reaped a tremendous, droll success! Since then the philistines slap him on the back every time he is out in company, and expect something humorous from him. And then they exclaim that he is cjust too funny'! Unfortunately, his once slim and elegant figure has assumed unappetising bounds; he has gained a paunch, his cheeks have become puffy, and at 50 he is no longer particular about his dress. He serves as buffoon to his wife, who was the first to discover his weakness and therefore cannot take him seriously any more; a buffoon for his pupils, too, who appreciate him as afigureof fun. Isn't it tragic! — To me, who has observed him for thirty years, who has followed the backwards development of a noble ambition, it is gruesome. But there are terrible moments when he wakes up and throws off his mask; on such occasions I have seen him on the way to becoming a murderer. Full of malice, vindictive, he pries into other people's secrets, and woe betide anyone whose affairs are not in proper order! The jolly dog conceals a wild boar!

n6

Selected Essays

Another character. The mother, a rich widow, was well known for her monstrous avarice. The daughter, who to start with is unaware of her mother's weakness, upholds the family tradition. But by chance her reputation reaches her, and the word 'miser', directed against her absent mother, awakens her. Then she begins to react against the same unfortunate tendencies in herself, and like every apostate, she exaggerates. Tight-fisted by nature she plays the bountiful. Gives sumptuous dinners, pays bills without checking them, practises charity and ends up patronising the arts, even though she has no liking for artists. Generous outside her home, parsimonious towards herself and her family. She forbids her children to pick the strawberries in their garden and takes them to market herself, travelling for an hour by rail, so that the fruit is unsaleable, and comes back rotten. This charming miser ended a spendthrift, when death came to deliver her from her frightful role. It is well known of old that misers' sons become wastrels on principle; the role forces itself upon them. Now say that heredity does not seek compensation by means of a compulsive reaction! I know a nun on whose honesty I set great store!6 But I also know her turn of mind. She is extremely sensual, and drinks a little, too. On discovering this I immediately marked her down as a hypocrite, but after a while it all became much clearer, and I understood. She is religious because she is sensual. She does not feign piety, and the penance she performs is to curb her dangerous inclinations. I no longer see a contradiction there, but I am afraid of religious people, or rather of what those criminal types are hiding. It is dangerous to awaken naive people with comments about their person. I have known a little girl, charming, lovable, affable, adored by everyone, winning the most recalcitrant with her sweet little smile. On every side people say agreeable things to her, and she learns that her smile is especially irresistible. After a year she plays cute, putting her toys aside with obvious display. Her little smile sets, and is transformed into a grimace. Her charm has vanished, and she has become conscious. Her mother shows her how affected she is, and says she has become artificial, a coquette. After this new awakening the girl sinks into complete indifference, grows morose, unhappy, and no longer knows how to be liked again. Well, you know what it means to sit for a painter or sculptor! It is frightful! After posing for a month I no longer recognised myself. I came upon myself as a poseur, my person revolted me and I began to take down the

'Character a Role'

117

mirrors in my room; I wished to see neither the painter nor his portrait again. Not that it did any good. I had lost my innocence! for three months! The other day I came across an old portrait of General Boulanger.7 It was dated 1880. What struck me was the perfect likeness with Sweden's foremost tragic actor, Edvard Swartz,8 exactly as he played Hamlet. Cheeks hollow with unsatisfied ambition, eyes on fire, staring up into space, jaw well formed to crush the prey which once eluded him. Why had his prey escaped? Let us consider the following word chain, which represents quite separate ideas, and agree that it conceals a clue for those of us who have never met the man. Boulanger — general — born in Rennes, the capital of Brittany (= Brittany, the last refuge of the monarchists); English origin; = England, the aristocratic—democratic land; England, Shakespeare's fatherland; the creator of Hamlet; Hamlet, the gentle watchdog who cannot bite; Hamlet, dressed in black, black as the horses of our death's hussars; Hamlet, the revenger without vengeance, who follows his Ophelia and deserts the flag. Who or what has allotted this role to M. Boulanger, so well played all the way to the grave? Birth, experiences, circumstances and Ophelia?

'Cesarine On Alexandre Dumas filsy drama La Femme de Claude No feeling compares in intensity with that of the dramatic author at work. He creates people, sometimes from nothing, sometimes from a lump of clay; he controls their fates according to his whims; he punishes and rewards; he rules over life and death in bringing his world to a happy or unhappy end. And people take his creations as if they were real, love or detest them, at the very least discuss them and criticise the creator just as they judge the great unknown, each after his own heart. With what right do people take the liberty of saying to the author, 'You should have done this or that'? Is he not the master of his little world? Certainly! But we are polytheists, we others, demigods, and there are always Olympians, who seek to overthrow the titans, or what amounts to the same thing, to educate them. Therefore, and since I have been asked to give my views on M. Dumas's play, here is my opinion. M. Dumas seems to have done himself an injustice with the preface to his admirable drama. The artist works unconsciously, creates like nature, at random, with an astounding profligacy, but the moment he, post festum, tries to think his work over, to analyse it, he awakens from his half slumber, and falls to the ground like a sleepwalker. Consider Cesarine in this play. What a character, at once various, complex, sympathetic and abominable, a complete woman! In the preface the writer pares her down, reduces her to a paragraph in the penal code, imputes intentions to her that she does not have in the play. Why call this poor creature, who cannot even seduce her husband, a Messalina? Is it because she is a monster? I no longer believe in monsters. His wife's infidelities are certainly destroying the marriage and, in the absence of a divorce, M. Claude has drawn a distinction in mind and body.1 He has even saved himself through a new love, one to his taste, and everything ought to go well, if that abstraction, honour, did not demand satisfac118

'Cesarine'

119

tion; that is to say, that the injured husband let himself be gunned down by his rival so that the latter may enjoy his prey in peace. However, M. Claude, who is far too taken up with his science, and for whom woman is only an intermezzo, despises the sport of the jealous, and his supreme contempt seems to me to be the most destructive of attitudes towards this courtesan. He does not forgive, if by forgiveness one means a complete reconciliation, and it is certainly a proper revenge when, on returning home, Cesarine finds her place taken by another. Quite probably this intelligent man said to himself: 'A woman who besmirches herself is disgraced. A husband's dishonour begins with forgiveness, for to forgive is the same as to condone.' But M. Claude is said to have shown forgiveness because he has not killed anybody. Killed? Is death a punishment, then? Does one even break free from a woman in that way? In this last case, it would be better to replace her: the only infallible method. Besides, such pointless killing arouses disgust and smacks of savagery. And in the drama M. Dumas himself lets the deceiver die and not the adulteress. In the preface it is quite otherwise! And even as he displays this severity towards a poorly endowed creature, Dumas makes himself the woman's advocate with a lack of logic that is, for that matter, all too normal. Or is it still the deceiver who takes upon herself the man's superior qualities with the following line: 'I have hurt you, your pain has sought consolation, it is therefore still me whom you have to thank for your genius!' M. Dumas certainly does not believe that care and suffering alone afford the gift of genius; the line just quoted is therefore false even if Cesarine acted on a whim, without conscious intent. No, and if one concedes that everyone can read what he pleases into a work of art I find in La Femme de Claude the instinctive hatred of woman for her superior, man. The man of talent is loved by his wife only because of the outward lustre that his position can bestow on her. Woe to him, the poet, the scholar, the inventor, if his intellectual qualities do not bring him the honour and money that his woman has dreamt of as the necessary attributes of genius! In short, M. Dumas is a woman-worshipper, and that is why he makes such a to-do about woman. A thief, any one at all, would have acquitted himself far more competently and with greater prospects of success. There is nothing remarkable in being lecherous, and to break one's marriage vows

120

Selected Essays

in secret does not demand any exceptional qualities. And yet the author makes a somebody of this female nonentity with her frail emotions and her inability to love while he reproaches the man because his emotions are more enduring and his fidelity survives his wife's infidelity. The criminal who cannot live and develop in obedience with the laws of the community is an inferior creature, as inferior and weak as the soldier who killed Archimedes.2 The involuntary respect which the crime is accorded is a survival from the childhood of the race, when the art of wrong-doing was a virtue. And M. Dumas fils, who believes without qualification in heredity, ought to recognise that he has inherited this tendency from that admirer of tramps, M. Dumas pere. More than once this old sympathy for 'the woman of the streets' makes itself felt. As when Cesarine defends her crime by attacking Claude's pure devotion to Rebecca! 'He wants to love, sure enough, but he doesn't want me to love you. Men have their peculiar rights.' Yes! And women have their peculiar logic! What is at issue is that Claude will not forgive a criminal love. By inference: because Claude wants to descend to a criminal love. And again, the place where Cesarine blames her victim, after having seduced him. M. Dumas seems not to recall the seductive power that a mature woman can exert upon a young man, which raises an important issue in this age of woman-worship. According to the laws of nature it is for the man to take the initiative, seduced as he is beforehand by a woman's charm. Where nature is concerned, there is no question of guilt; but as soon as the matter becomes a human concern, the fact of guilt itself is not enough, one has to know whose it is, and thus the conflict begins. A futile conflict since one never will know who was aroused first. There is a fatal power in love, which one ought to respect, as M. Claude understands when he forgives Antonin for having loved his wife in secret, and when he forgives his wife for having succumbed to this sudden passion. The author is more exacting than he is, and particularly towards Cesarine. One takes revenge like Claude, but one does not preach. A critic recently reproached M. Claude for nourishing ignoble feelings like revenge. That is to say, the gentleman in question insists that the victim should not move a finger while the thief is plundering him. Which is to permit the right of legitimate defence where the body is concerned, but to deny it to the soul! May those who believe in God and righteousness leave revenge to them

'Cesarine'

121

and get their own ears boxed. I don't find their behaviour at all praiseworthy, since, in leaving revenge in God's hands, they promise themselves something more exceptional than they could themselves accomplish, weak creatures, craving revenge nevertheless, but all too cowardly to take it in person. Is the art of tearing a man to pieces really so great that one has to grant the destructive woman mysterious qualities? Love, a mental transfusion, in which the man is sucked dry, gives the man nothing but a reactive impulse, from which he himself creates a source of action. The woman, an accumulator, in which the man stores up the currents of his soul, goes her way without further ado, cutting the wires so that the machine malfunctions or stops working until the lost apparatus is replaced. Claude's wife is far from successful in her destructive manoeuvres. M. Claude's intellectual qualities are splendidly developed, whether his wife is there or not. And the gift of genius grows constantly, irrespective of a Xanthippa's nagging or an Aspasia's fun and games. Cesarine has taken nothing away from nor added anything to Claude's stature, which resides as always in his work, and which he finally protects with a pistol shot. In brief, we find in him a man who is able to live in spite of everything, who can profit even from the follies of a woman, whom he kills as a thief and replaces as a faithless wife. And as for poor Cesarine, in her we see a true woman, woman herself perhaps! Common in her lechery, indecisive in the moment of revenge, sublime in her unconscious naivete. Cantagnac3 paints her portrait: undisciplined, irresponsible, cruel and wanton. Cesarine surpasses him, and surpasses the author in his preface, in the portrait which she paints of herself: 'I am simply a woman, that is to say, a weak, ignorant, unhappy and stupid creature!' She is delightful, this Cesarine. And I would love her — if I could believe what she says!

'Deranged Sensations'

I come from the mountains and the valleys, from down there by the banks of the blue Danube. I have left behind my cottage by the roadside with the as-yet-unharvested grapes, I have left the still-ripening tomatoes and melons, and the roses, which are in bud. For the hundredth time I have strapped on my rucksack and set off to seek work in the great city, the market-place and workshop of embattled minds, Paris! For all of forty-eight hours I have sat like a prisoner in a railway carriage, forced to breath in the carbon dioxide and nitrogen of people I do not know. To begin with I simply loathed them, for they disturbed me, these creatures who made me learn their features and compelled me, forcibly, to listen to their conversation, which agitated my mind. I slumped back there unable to defend myself against these attacks upon my spiritual self-determination, and it was no help that my soul rebelled, it was carried along such everyday paths all the same by listening to these commonplace exchanges of ideas. And from the bottom of my heart I cursed my companions, shut up in the same box as I was. But when tiredness got the better of them, and they fell silent, their faces assumed such sorrowful expressions that I ended up feeling sorry for them. Uprooted from their normal sphere, from their loved ones and from their habits, theyfilledme with compassion. A general feeling of discomfort settled upon this mean and trying intercourse in the railway compartment, where one has to imbibe coal dust and sulphur in the form of smoke, where sand and invisiblefilingsmake one's eyelids creak upon their leather hinges; and when night had fallen, when these poor people had gone to asleep, with their unwashed hands pressed together upon their stomachs and their pale, sweat-drenched faces bent down over their breasts, our compartment resembled a battlefield strewn with corpses and the scattered remains of human limbs. Sleep brings no feelings of happiness, and our torture chamber resounds with sighs, sighs from crea122

'Deranged Sensations'

123

tures who, after millions of years of civilisation, have relapsed into an animal or savage state, and dream of green pastures, or perhaps also of a good murder, rape or incest! I awake in sacred Versailles,1 after having slept for sixteen hours at a stretch in a real bed. My tiredness has gone and with it, too, the black demons of my imagination. All my worries have vanished into thin air, all my sorrows have disappeared, my very memories have evaporated. Even the most deeply rooted of my emotional ties has relinquished its grip and been replaced by a liberating indifference. But the jolting of the railway carriage has so thoroughly tumbled my brain tissue about that I have lost the ability to keep my thoughts in a sequential order. The wires within seem to have snapped, my head feels empty; and although I make a continual effort to remember things, they escape me. To stretch my legs a little I go out to look at the chateau, a beloved old acquaintance from 1876.2 'Straight on, and to the left!' I turn off to the left. Before me stretches the straight and interminable Avenue Saint-Cloud, completely filled at the far end by Louis XIIFs pavilion in brick-red and yellowish grey. I walk on. I walk for perhaps a quarter of an hour and start to feel tired. I have chosen one of the paths at the side, lined with lime trees whose branches have been pruned into cross-vaulting, and although I trudge on and on, the building appears to get no bigger. It moves forward with me and recedes to the same extent that I approach. I hold out for another quarter of an hour, but then turn back the way I have come, feeling perplexed and yet convinced that I must have been mistaken as to the true distance. On the way home, I told myself that this malfunctioning of my visual perception was the natural result of a taxing journey. However, the same afternoon I took a walk in the direction of Viroflay without noticing any sign of tiredness . . . The following morning, I decide to take the chateau by storm. Without any preconceived ideas I once more walk along the Avenue Saint-Cloud, with my sights set on Louis XIII's distant pavilion, framed in foliage. I immediately find the inordinately broad avenue boring; unconsciously, I end up on the path to the side, where the tree trunks soon press in upon me and the cross-vaulting tweaks me like pincers. Halfway along, I sink down on a bench. Crushed and inconsolable, I look at my watch and ascertain that my

124

Selected Essays

walk has lasted ten minutes, no more. With my sight sharpened by anger I measure the distance and fancy I can distinguish some busts on the central section of the building . . . seen from the front. . . I take out my map of Versailles, calculate the distance once again, and find that I have only 500 metres to go to reach the chateau, since the entire length of the avenue does not exceed 1000 metres. Surprised by this simple fact, I explain the whole business to myself as follows: 'the perspective changes as I stride along; at the same time, the optic angle grows larger, and this infernal play of invisible lines confuses my mind, where the irradiating rays of the enchanted castle imprint themselves'. Once the problem has been solved, I grow calm again, turn into another path and emerge after two minutes in the wide Place d'Armes. There, a new surprise awaits me: the palace in no way resembles my old Versailles of 1876. In the first place, it is smaller, and besides, its style is modern. Smaller, for in my memory I have borne its traditional image, which symbolises the greatness of the century of Louis XIV in its colossal proportions. More modern, for the Versailles style, brick in combination with natural stone, has in the last twenty years become much more common. How reassuring it is to be able to explain everything! It dispels the fear of the unknown. Now I have to cross the Place d'Armes. This vast semicircle gives one the impression of a sea, and when I have embarked upon it, I feel myself a prey to an indefinable fear. The great building draws me to it as large bodies attract small ones; but the open area terrifies me like empty space. I search in vain for a focal point. A cab comes towards me; I follow it a short distance but it passes me almost in the same moment as I hasten my steps. A policeman gets slowly nearer; I catch him up and attach myself to him; I feel protected by his presence, in so far as I experience a feeling of well-being under the influence of the animal warmth that emanates from him, invisibly and, moreover, indiscernibly. He stops and looks at the sky as only a keeper of the street's peace could look at it, and I also stand still a moment. The man becomes aware of me; he examines me closely, and I feel his gaze as you do when someone follows you along the pavement, looking at you. Instinctively I turn about, brought to life again by the fear of being suspected of God knows what, and find refuge in an enormous lamp post which rises up there like a lighthouse on its rocky cob out at sea. I cling tightly to this iron post; the sun's rays have warmed it, and I fancy I can feel how this rise in temperature has

'Deranged Sensations'

125

softened it, which is a complete illusion since this softening process is impossible to detect with the senses, even though it is a correct enough assumption, since the metal really is softer when it is warm. The palace constantly draws me on towards it, and yet I cannot resolve to leave my island, shipwrecked as I am among these paving-stone rocks. I am seized by a feeling of genuine terror. In order to fight it I again start philosophising, and call to mind similar phenomena which are so often repeated without one understanding why. Walking straight on along the pavement, for example, you turn your head to look at someone or something to your side; immediately your body begins to drift, and bang!, you have collided with a tree beside the path. Is it not the general attractive force which has just exerted its power upon my body while the rudder which the latter has in the mind is momentarily put out of action? Another and better example! You are walking along the boulevard: a drunken man, whose mental functions are paralysed, comes towards you. From experience you know that a collision is unavoidable, but you do not want to change course, and governed by this thought, you entertain fresh hopes of avoiding the drunk. In vain! He sails straight towards you, and you lose all hope, but too late and — bang!, the collision takes place with the same imperative necessity as the attraction exerted by the earth. Is an unknown force at work there? Is there more than one force? Scientists deny this and declare that energy is constant. I am thus under the influence of the pull from this force. I revolt against this blind, brutal power, and so as to be able to oppose it more successfully I personify it, transforming it into a god. Certainly, I want to reach my goal, the palace, but at the same time I want to defy that superior force. My brain divides into two parts and joins battle with itself, and I expect to see half my body stroll across the Place d'Armes while the other half remains by the lamp post. I seek in vain to connect the two parts of the machine and strive to discover a self which stands above my self, when suddenly, through an involuntary but inevitable chance occurrence, my hands meet around the iron pillar, with the immediate consequence that the mental currents are united by the iron, which closes the chain by creating a psychomagnet that acts upon my immediately restored nervous system. However, I can hardly carry this bracing source of contact away with me! Anxiously, I cast around in search of a vessel that might save me from this desolate rock, and out of habit turn my gaze upon that blue formation of gas, through which rays of warmth and light filter down, and which the faithful have rightly called heaven, since it is there that the primordial force resides. Just now white

n6

Selected Essays

clouds are floating across the disc of the sun and casting their great, mobile shadows down upon the paving stones of the Place d'Armes. Sun, heaven, god — it matters little by what name we invoke you — my thanks, for you have placed at my disposal a whole flotilla of boats! What does it matter that, when all is said and done, they are only shadows, like everything else! Now I am a poet and magician. I select the most substantial of these steamers, I step carefully aboard . . . Onward . . . Wonderful, the crossing is over! I take advantage of my regained strength and cross the Cour d'honneur to reach the entrance to the museum under the protection of Richelieu, Bayard, Colbert and all the other silent marble statues, whose presence in this desert encourages me. In front of the door a flock of people are waiting for the sanctuary to open, and I join the queue. Hardly have I been enrolled in this troupe, where chance has turned me into a number, before my ego rises up, under the threat of being annihilated by the crowd, by contact with the others. Those standing behind me detest me, and I know how they hate me, because I myself curse those who have found a place ahead of me, and who brush against me with their clothes, which stink of the successful rival. I break away and take flight in the direction of the park. An immense sea of light envelops me, a substance denser than air which instils in me the sensation offlyingwhen I only touch the ground lightly with my feet. I experience a feeling of joy at the thought that I have not seen inside the chateau, which has consequently remained half unknown to me, as something mysterious and enchanted. I am alternately intoxicated by the scent of millions of flowers in the gardens and made sober again by the wind from thefields,so that I seem to glide between two kinds of wine, an indescribable delight. I step out on to the terrace, as blissful as a god, only to notice that the ground is quaking beneath my feet, though very gently, as if I were walking across a suspension bridge. I know that the arched ceiling of the orangerie lies beneath me, and I draw the reassuring conclusion that in exerting a counter-pressure outwards, the arches ought to offer a superabundance of strength, against which the soles of my feet react, so that the impression is transmitted to my nervous system, whose sensitivity is heightened by physical or mental suffering. I descend the marble staircase. I reach the Piece des Suisses; — and believe me, dear reader, I then saw the forces imprisoned in the vault of the orangerie radiating above the arcades like the aurora borealis. . . And why not? If electric light is nothing but power transformed, why will you therefore deny that the nervous tissue in my eye has the ability to

'Deranged Sensations'

127

convert an impression of energy into an impression of light?. . . Doubt it, it is all the same to me! Do I need to give you a good punch over the eye for you to be aware of the transformation of my physical power into light in the form of yellow and red flashes of lightning? . . . I want to escape from the enchanted castle. I want to take a look at the flowers in the garden, but the mass of stone holds me back, draws me to it . . . continually, in direct proportion to its size and in reverse proportion to the square of the distance. My hatred of the giant has been transformed into love, and I let my hand glide over the stone base, I caress the stone as if fondling a large dog. I prowl along close to the walls and am now once again out in the Cour de Marbre, where I pause to rest and plan how I shall elude all the invisible enemies who are besetting me. As I stand there, leaning against the wall, I become aware that the Cour de Marbre comprises the auditory canal of a huge ear, the auricle of which is formed by the wings of the building. Captivated by this new fantasy and happy to have come upon this bizarre idea, that I am like a flea in a giant's ear, I listen pressed against the wall . . . What a surprise! . . . I can hear! I hear a rumbling sea, the wailing of crowds, abandoned hearts, whose beats pump up an exhausted blood, nerves which break with a tiny dull thud, sobs, laughter and sighs! . . . I wonder if these are not subjective sensory impressions, if it is not myself I hear. No, I know every vagary of my mind and senses. Does this murmur come from the streets of Versailles? Impossible . . . The little town over there is so quiet, as if it were sleeping, and besides, the line of hearing does not allow for the sound to come laterally. I have it! — A vague memory from my youth comes back to me, the story of a sailor who embarked from Lisbon and could still hear its bells ringing far out to sea two days into the voyage, but only on the side where the sail was stretched in a concave shape and thus served as a burning mirror. After two days at sea! . . . What do I hear now? . . . Whispering voices Directly above my head is King Louis's huge window . . . The rogue! He had divined, discovered before me, that here was an ear of Dionysus!3 . . . He lay in wait here and spied upon what people were saying in Paris! For it is Paris that I can hear murmuring along this chain of hills, which stretches from Courbevoie to Sceaux and spreads out in a semicircle where the principal focus is Versailles, and the auditory canal is the Sevres valley.

128

Selected Essays

Is it possible, I wonder once again. Or am I out of kilter, since I was born in the good old days, when people had oil lamps, stagecoaches, boatwomen, and six-volume novels? I have passed with involuntary haste through the age of steam and electricity, as a result of which I have possibly lost my breath and got bad nerves! Or is it that my nerves are undergoing an evolution in the direction of over-refinement, and that my senses have become all too subtle? Am I changing skin? Am I about to become a man of today? . . . I am as nervous as a crab that has cast off its carapace, as fretful as the silkworm in its metamorphosis. Will the butterfly fly out of the pupa before one has had time to unravel the silk of the cocoon? Will it freeze to death? Whatever it is, I remain here at my ear of Dionysus, and listen with profound attention. I listen to what people are whispering in the great workshop of the intelligence, Paris. II

I am residing alone in a large property in Versailles. My countryman X has placed at my disposal a completely unoccupied house on three floors (with fifteen rooms and three kitchens), and I have been given a bed and table in a room on thefirstfloor.4 Solitude has something sublime for an individualist like me. My dwelling is a monastery of the most modern kind, and I make myself comfortable on the bed. I have spent three-quarters of my life stretched out on a bed: in that way the blood is better able to moisten my brain marrow, so that it sprouts buds, which I then amuse myself with grafting on to other people's wild stock. But for some reason, that I cannot fathom, my bed today does not afford me the rest I desire. Uneasy, I get up and take down my guitar in order to seek out my nerves' chord. It is a habit of mine to tune my soul and the instrument to each other in this way, and when I feel depressed, I raise my soul tone by tone while turning the pegs of the guitar. Today my nerves are in the key of D minor; a bad sign. I am mournful, suicidally gloomy, as dismal as a funeral march. After a few efforts I succeed in raising myself to F major, and feel like a new man, martial, full of exultation and enthusiasm. I lie down again on the bed. I immediately descend three tones, and every sorrow, all the griefs that I have lived through, are reborn in my brain, which strives in vain to chase them away. Life's whole emptiness, the vanity of existence, the uselessness of work oppresses me in a fashion that I know

'Deranged Sensations'

129

only too well. When I reflect and compare this state of mind with that which assails me when I ride backwards in a carriage I realise that I am lying in bed with my feet up and my head back. I cast a glance through the window and notice, from the direction of the light, that I have my head turned to the east, so that I am tumbling head over heels in line with the earth's movement, or in other words, am really sitting back to front on our ride through space. A childhood memory comes to my aid. I recall how my mother used to warn: 'One's bed should always be placed north to south in order not to suffer from worms.' I leave the roundworms to their devices and put my bed in the same direction as the astronomical meridian, and when my body is thus stretched out in harmony with the earth's axis, I feel quite delightfully cradled in eternity, running my course at a speed of 40 kilometres a second. Calm now reigns in my nervous system, anxious thoughts vanish, and the same half-voluptuous feeling that one experiences when riding on a roundabout deadens all care, which gnaws away at one like intestinal worms. 5 My poor mother, perhaps she was right, although she did not herself really believe in that superstition. I doze off and sleep for an hour. On waking I notice that I have been crying. I dream the same thing over again: between the white trunks of the birches I catch sight of my children. I go towards them to embrace them, but they turn their backs on me and will not recognise me, because I am poor.6 I open my eyes, fix my gaze upon the white marble stove and see there a web of blood-red threads. It is my own eye's retina, enlarged and projected there — a discovery then, which no one has made before me? I shut my eyes again for five minutes, and when I open them once more I see on the stove a begonia with white and red flowers, which are trembling. I wonder why these flowers are shaking . . . At the same moment the sight vanishes . . . What is this? The blood vessels of the cornea with the white and red blood corpuscles, seen at a distance in prodigious magnification. Could my eye be in the process of developing into a solar microscope of unprecedented strength? I feel no inclination to sleep any more. Sleep brings me suffering instead of affording me the consolation that has been promised the poor and the hapless. Holy sleep, one's nightly peace and final refuge, is thus exhausted like everything else!

130

Selected Essays

But why should I complain? Is it not a lack of sleep and my excesses that have heightened my senses and nerves? Is it not my tears with their corrosive salts that have prepared my cornea so that it has been granted me to see my own blood vessels projected as if by a magic lantern? Without a doubt! All right, I want to weep once again so as to be able to study my new discovery. I summon up every unpleasant memory from a life that has been rich in misery. I conjure up my mother's ghost, without being able to mourn her, for she detested me from the day that I began to learn Latin and Greek, which she did not understand. I bless her and forget her again. I focus my thoughts upon the injustice people have done me, but only succeed in becoming furious without being able to elicit a tear. I think of my children, who are lost to me . . . But suddenly, from an involuntary impulse, my feelings react against the pain, and like a wound at the touch of a doctor, my heart contracts with its valves closed. Trying to guide one's feelings is impossible! They go their own way, according to their pleasure. But now there surface memories of stupidities committed, good opportunities, which I have missed out on, luck, which I have let slip through my fingers; my cheeks grow warm, my eye lights up and I see red, sparks of fire and blood red. Yes, it is not wickedness, not our crimes that we are ashamed of, it is our stupidities! And how suddenly they emerge, uninvited and unwelcome! Fixed in my mind's eye is an unsuccessful speech that I once gave at a party in 1867; I see the guests' faces, which blush on my behalf... I don't want to remember it . . . I start to choke . . . I leap up from the bed and stand by the window, which faces on to the woods of Meudon. I seek some object upon which to fix my glance, to divert the course of my unhealthy thoughts. I search heaven and earth, the whole horizon round to discover a point, that point outside myself, the fulcrum, which will help to lift me out of the well into which I have sunk: a bird in flight, a pillar of smoke, a conflagration. I long to hear a noise, the sound of an alarm clock, a drum or a gun shot. . . Suddenly, a round grey prick rises above the beeches of Meudon. It ascends and grows larger. It approaches, coming towards me, as if sent by some unknown power, in whose favour I for the moment was. It is a hot-air balloon from the balloon park at Meudon! It is travelling from east to west, that is, in the opposite direction to our planet; and when it now ceases to move, I ask myself, silently, of course: c Why, oh great gods of the wind and of movement, of celestial and terrestrial physics and mechanics, doesn't the earth fly away and leave that thin and light machine far behind, floating in the air, freed from all weight and

'Deranged Sensations'

131

gravity? After all, the globe covers 29,450 metres in a second, irrespective of all movement about its axis! . . . Why? Why? Just because Copernicus has said so, Galileo maintained it and Newton believed it! But Newton, that honourable man, also believed in the Book of Revelation!7 Which still does not prevent Father Secchi8 from being the great astronomer he is, even though he is explicitly forbidden by his religion to believe that the earth revolves around the sun. And remember that the Assyrians, Hebrews, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans knew how to establish their calendar and predict eclipses of the sun, remember that Columbus could discover America without knowing anything about the earth's crazy course around that molten core, without ever reaching it! Like everything else, all that is in reality a matter of complete indifference to me: I must just confess that it would be moreflatteringfor us individualists if we resided at the fixed centre of the universe, and I await with a delight that I cannot possibly express in half a dozen lines the new proof that Monsieur Beaudonnat has promised concerning this matter at the world exhibition in 1900.9 Yes, new...! That is what we have need of! But it had better be amusing, and above all not too old! The sight of the balloon having overturned my childish belief in the revolution that should happen to the house and my bed, I no longer dwell upon my miseries. I now seem unable to feel the passage of air that is created by our tremendous speed through space. I observe how drops of water fall in straight lines, without diverging. I contemplate the surface of the water in the carafe on my bedside table, but it remains quite still. The lamp, which hangs from the ceiling, does not move either! How perfect a creation the world is, after all. It is enough to make one jealous. However, for the last few days I do not know what to believe. I remain lying on my bed, still in the direction of the meridian. Is it not nature that has assigned us this position on our backs, that fine board which provides the greatest number of points of support, and is so well padded! Anyway, for three days I have been observing two large, badly executed paintings in solid frames, which are hanging on the wall in front of me. Suspended by string, which is fastened horizontally behind the frames, these pictures have only one point of support so they are sensitive to the slightest movement. The wall runs from east to west, or vice versa, which is immaterial in this instance. Can you believe it, every morning when I wake up, these works of art

132

Selected Essays

have slipped to one side, so that their western corner slants downwards and their eastern end points up! What is one to think? Nothing! My house is solidly built, on ground which dates from the tertiary formation, and is not situated beside a road, where vibration from vehicles could exert an influence. I am pleased to profit from this discovery of mine (without waiting for 1900), and my nightly sundial shows me both what hour it is and the movement of my dwelling around the earth's axis. Perhaps it moves after all! I have recently discovered the wood between Viroflay and Ville d'Avray. From my window in Versailles the horizon to the north-east is bordered by a wood, above which there always hang rose-coloured clouds, whether the sky is clear and blue like Nevers faience or not. These clouds, which are also exquisitely formed and resemble frayed silk, have puzzled me for some time, and these common beeches, hornbeams and oaks, which conceal some mystery, attract me as does everything mysterious. One beautiful morning before sunrise I make my way into that wood. Influenced by my surroundings, which I do not wish to resist, I feel myself stripped of my civilised attire. I discard the mask of the citizen who has never recognised the so-called social contract; I let my rebellious thoughts roam freely, and I think, t h i n k . . . without fear, with no reservations. Then I see with the penetrating vision of the savage, I listen and sniff the air like a redskin! And I say to myself: 'Learned opinion has it that plants exhale carbonic acid during the night, and all night long, too. All right! But since this gas is heavier than air, so heavy that one can draw it off from one glass container to another before it becomes subject to diffusivity, carbonic acid must consequently still hug the surface of the earth just as it is to be found in the vaults of a brewery or in the Grotta del cane at Naples. 10 Therefore a walk at night in the woods must also be fatal! Ask the tramps who spend all night sleeping in the grass, among the bushes, in the Bois de Boulogne, perhaps? 'Why resort to authorities, from below or from above? Because one is a coward!' Fine. I lie down on the ground and breathe in the beautiful air, more refreshing now than in the middle of the day, when the plants have no choice but — if one may believe the learned — to exhale intoxicating oxygen. The experiment does not kill me. I laugh at the superhuman idiocy which gives credence to so much that has been instilled in us by

'Deranged Sensations'

133

suggestion. And I smile at the thought of fully grown men in green tailcoats, who pronounce in public that herbaceous plants take their carbon from carbonic acid in the air at the same time as they emit a carbonic gas at night. To take so much trouble to achieve precisely nothing! I contemplate a gigantic pine in front of me. I ask myself if it really has built up its powerful trunk with the assistance of the 4/1000 carbonic acid that is contained in air, and of which only 28 per cent is made up of carbon? But enough of that! Like an animal which has come into being through crossbreeding between a polyp, an insect, a snake and a fish, the pine towers up into the heights. Its elongated body, all covered in scales, encloses the circulatory and lymphatic system, whose ducts ascend as far as the leaves with their green needle points, which resemble a pike's comb shaped gills. On a nearby acacia the gills recall, indeed resemble exactly, the respiratory organ of the tadpole, which like them is lobate. The pine sinks its open belly down into the earth, its outer and inner intestines secreting digestive juices over its food before it sucks it up, just as the fly does. The wood cells carry the rising sap to the leaves, where it is oxygenated, while the bark bears the ready prepared blood downwards. My pine is a living being, a large animal that eats, digests, grows and loves! And so, they love one another, theflowers,in monogamy, in polygamy, like androgynes! He loves, this pine. Hence he has nerves! Where? . . . u Just beside me, in a heap of withered leaves and on a really shady spot there grows a clump of Impatiens noli-tangere.12 But I touch them! With my knife I cut two of their stalks, one in the swollen node, the other in the middle of the central node. Five minutes later one of them has withered, wounded in a node; the other still lives. Does this mean that there is a ganglion, a nerve centre in the node, where the leaf and buds are generated? - Yes! - And elsewhere? - Yes! - In the seeds, a kind of pupa, where the life force is stored? - Yes! - And in the root's mouth? - Yes! - And the nerves? - They exist everywhere! Particularly in the tubers that contain albumen and which stir when the leaves of a mimosa close up to sleep. Enough of this! He feels, my pine. Therefore he suffers; and perhaps the dryad, who sobs beneath the woodcutter's axe, will one day reveal herself to spirits equipped with a refined sensibility in order to beseech their mercy

134

Selected Essays

and implore their protection against the bad treatment, cuts and wounds that are inflicted upon the tree in cold blood. The sun is rising. I also get up and walk towards the east to meet the sun, in the direction where the wood thins out. Already I can discern an immense limpidity between the tightly packed leaves of the young beeches; reaching the edge of the wood, I can see nothing save an infinite bluishgrey expanse, and faced by nothingness, I come to a standstill! Is it the sea, the end of the world, chaos? A plain without end, without form or colour, surmounted by a perfect arch. The arch, that is the sky! . . . But the surface down below? A camp, since a hundred thousand pillars of smoke are rising from it? Or a desert, where sun-worshipping pilgrims light their fires to greet the rising sun? It is not a city, for there are no houses . . . Yes, there are, but only monuments, temples, churches, towers, triumphal arches! A veritable Heliopolis for gods, heroes, emperors, prophets, saints and martyrs. And that is how I have dreamt the City, the great city, the greatest in the world, swathed in a white and chaste mist, which conceals the dirty little houses of the buyers and sellers . . . It is really Paris . . . Hail!

'In the Cemetery

A year has now passed since I took my first morning walk in the Cemetery of Montparnasse. I have seen the leaves fall from the elms and lindens, seen everything turn green again, the wisteria and roses come intofloweron the grave of Theodore de Banville;11 have heard the thrush strike up his seductive song beneath the cypresses, and the pigeons cooing among the graves. Now the lindens are turning yellow again, the roses are withering and the thrush no longer sings, but only emits a short derisive laugh at his springtime amours, which have vanished in order to return again. And the filth of autumn and the slush of winter are approaching, to pass away like everything else. On entering the cemetery, I leave behind the rather commonplace and noisy quarter of Montparnasse. The night's unhealthy dreams still pursue me, but I shake them off at the main gate. The din of the streets dies away, and is replaced by the peace of the dead. As I am always alone here at this early hour, I have grown accustomed to regarding this public place of refuge as my pleasure garden, so that in every occasional visitor I see an intruder, come to disturb us, the dead and I! During this whole year I have not brought a single friend here; no man or woman who would, perhaps, have left some memory behind, to intrude upon my personal impressions. While greeting my favourites, Orfila,2 Thierry3 and Dumont d'Urville,4 I turn into the Allee Lenoir, which like the Allee Raffet is bordered by cypresses along the whole of its length. It inspires in one a sense of extreme power to advance between these lines of trees, straight like grenadiers in green bearskins, presenting arms. When the wind blows a little, their tops bend, and bothfilesbow as I march on, proud as afieldmarshal, to the end of the avenue. There I read and reread on the tombstone facing me: 'Boulay was the very soul of honour' (Napoleon).5 I do not know who Boulay was, nor do I wish to either, but for Napoleon 135

136

Selected Essays

to address me like that every morning from beyond the grave warms my heart, and I fancy myself one of his intimates. Between the cypresses there peep these thousands of graves, covered with flowers sprouting up beside the hard stone slabs, nourished by the corpses of those buried there, and watered with more or less genuine tears. Everywhere in this immense garden there are small chapels, decorated like dolls' houses, and among them crosses, with their arms raised to heaven in protest and crying loudly: ' 0 Cruxy ave spes unica!'G That is the common creed, it seems, of suffering mankind. And from the midst of the foliage, here, there, everywhere, in shortened form: 'Spes unica!' In vain do the busts of small capitalists, with or without the legion of honour, sit up straight in order to show that there is some other hope for those who depart this life. I was warned that these frequent visits were dangerous because of the unhealthy vapours pervading the cemetery air. I had in fact noticed a certain taste of verdigris, which used to linger on in my mouth for as much as two hours after I had returned home. Thus the souls, the dematerialised bodies that is, remained floating in the air; this led me to try and trap some and analyse them. Armed with a small flask containing liquid lead acetate, I set about this hunt for souls, I mean bodies, and with the unstopped flask in my clenched fist, wander around like a bird-catcher, exempt from the labour of enticing my prey. Safely back home, I filter off the abundant precipitation and place it under the microscope. Poor Gringoire!7 Was it really composed of these small crystals, that brain-machine which, in my youth, awoke my early sympathies for the impoverished poet, who was nevertheless capable of winning the love of a young and beautiful girl? And you, honourable Boulay (who, as I have now learned, drew up the Code Napoleon), is this you that I have snared with my butterfly-net? Or perhaps you, d'Urville, who took me on my first voyage round the world during those long winter evenings, far away from here, under the aurora borealis in Sweden, with a caning on the one hand and homework on the other? In reply I pour a drop of acid on to the slide. The dead matter swells up, it stirs, begins to come alive, exhales a putrid smell, grows still once more, and dies. Yes, I know how to revive the dead, but I don't try it again, because the dead have foul breath, like revellers after a night on the town. Is it possible that they don't sleep so soundly down there while awaiting the resurrection? I became an atheist ten years ago! Why? I don't know exactly! I was bored with life, and had to do something, above all something new. Now, when

'In the Cemetery'

137

all that is old, my wish is not to know anything, to leave questions unresolved, and wait. For eight months I have been observing the most beautiful monument in the entire cemetery. It is an amalgam of sarcophagus, sepulchre, vault, mausoleum, cenotaph and urn, in the most beautiful classical Roman style. Hewn in red granite, it bears no inscription. I have long taken it for the broken column, 'the monument of remembrance, in memory of those who do not have one'. What secret is hidden there? A proud modesty, which obliges the visitor to ask questions, or else requires of him prior knowledge. The other day, deeply preoccupied by my solitary thoughts, I halted in front of a sign showing the name of the transverse path where the magnificent anonym had erected his monument: the Allee Chauveau-Lagarde. A sudden glimmer flashed through my mind, then the night of forgetfulness closed in completely. Staring at the sarcophagus, red and flecked with yellow like coagulated blood, I repeated: 'Chauveau-Lagarde', as one does the forgotten name of someone one has once known. The Allee probably owes its name to this Chauveau-Lagarde . . . Chauveau-Lagarde . . . wait a moment. . . rue Chauveau-Lagarde! The rue Chauveau-Lagarde, behind the Madeleine! The mysterious murder of an old lady in 1893, in the rue Chauveau-Lagarde . . . red with coagulated blood . . . and the two murderers were never discovered! Accustomed to observing everything that happens in my soul, I remember having been seized with familiar terror while the images crowded in one upon another, helter-skelter, like the imaginings of a madman. I saw Louis XVI's counsel for the defence with the guillotine behind him; I saw a great river lined with green hills, a young mother leading a little girl beside the water: then a monastery with an altarpiece by Velasquez: I am in Sarzeau, at the Hotel Lesage, where there is a Polish edition of the Diable boiteux. I am behind the Madeleine, on the rue Chauveau-Lagarde . . . ; I am at the Hotel Bristol in Berlin, where I am sending a telegram to the Savoy Hotel, London: I am in Saint-Cloud, where a woman in a Rembrandt hat is writhing in the agonies of childbirth: I am sitting at the Cafe de la Regence, where the cathedral in Cologne is on display in unrefined sugar... and the wine waiter maintains that it was constructed by M. Ranelagh and Marshal Berthier . . . 8 What was all that? I've no idea! A tempest of memories, of dreams, conjured up by a tombstone, dispelled by cowardice. Whether this sepulchre hides the remains of Chaveau-Lagarde, I don't know, but it surely hides a secret that my own tomb will perhaps reveal!

138

Selected Essays

Nothing happens in this city enclosed by death, one day is just like another, and the stillness is only disturbed by the birds as they build their nests. A flower-covered island in the midst of the sea: in the distance a sound like the surging of waves. The Isle of the Blessed, an enormous meadow where children have gathered flowers and toys together, plaited wreathes and dotted them with pearls, which they have collected on the shore, and lit candles, decorated with ribbons and other frills . . . But the children have run away, the meadow is deserted . . . However, one beautiful July morning I saw a young woman wandering along the main avenue. She was not in mourning and seemed to be waiting for someone, for she looked anxiously towards the main gate through which so many enter, never to return again. 9 'She is waiting for some neglectful lover, though that is a rather dismal place they have chosen', I said to myself, and left the cemetery. The next morning she was there again, looking down the main avenue. It was heartbreaking. She walked up and down, stopped, listened, watched. Each morning she was there, ever paler; sorrow had brought refinement to her plain features, as she waited for the miserable wretch! I went away for five weeks, to a distant country. 10 When I returned, having forgotten the whole business, I caught sight of the abandoned woman from the entrance to my cemetery, standing in the middle of the main avenue. Her emaciated body stood out in relief against a cross behind her, as if she had been crucified, and above her that inscription: ' O Crux, ave spes unica!' I move closer and notice the ravages that have befallen her face in so short a time. It is like seeing a corpse in the crematorium under its asbestos veil. Everything is still there, imitating the human form, but burnt to ashes, lifeless. She is sublime, thus proving that suffering at least is not banal. The colours of her coat have faded in the sun and rain, the flowers in her hat have yellowed like the lindens; even her hair has faded . . . She waits here all day and every day. A madwoman? Yes, someone who has been struck by the great madness of love! She will die while awaiting the act which is the source of life and prolongs suffering! I let something slip there! Prolongs! Why not to eternity just as well? Since matter is eternal? I would gladly become a believer again, but I cannot because I require a miracle. However, I came quite close to it a few days ago. A storm was

'In the Cemetery'

139

brewing, the clouds were massing, the cypresses shook their heads threateningly and insisted on bowing down deeply to me. Napoleon continued to maintain that Boulay was the soul of honour; the pigeons billed and cooed on a stone cross; the dead exhaled sulphurous smells, and the unhealthy vapours left the taste of verdigris in my mouth. The clouds, which at first extended horizontally, suddenly reared up and, towering vertically upwards, resembled the Lion of Belfort,11 which stands on its hind legs. I have never seen anything like it except in paintings of the Last Judgement. The lines of the black figures now float apart and the sky takes on the form of Moses' tablet of the law, immense but finely etched. And on this slate of grey sheet metal the lightning, as it cleaves the firmament, suddenly writes in a single, clear and legible stroke of the pen: 'Jehovah', that is to say, the God of Vengeance! The atmospheric pressure made me bend at the knees; but as I heard no other voice from heaven than the thunder's, I returned home. 11

Autumn is once again here. The lindens are turning reddish-brown and shedding their heart-shaped leaves which, on reaching the ground, rustle beneath my feet as I continue my triumphal march over these desiccated, crackling hearts. From above my head, high up grazing the clouds, come strange and yet familiar sounds, which recall a hunting horn; intermittent, panting, plaintive, they awaken in me the memory of an old Swedish song, as nonsensical and charming as a fairy-tale: Is my linden playing? Is my nightingale singing? Is my little son weeping? Is my husband ever happy? Your linden is not playing; Your nightingale is not singing; Your son weeps both night and day. Your husband will never, never more be happy.12 It is the wild geese, migrating from the north and greeting me on their journey to warmer lands with wider horizons. The night breeze has shaken the lindens and - a miracle! - the buds in keeping for next year have opened, so that, like Aaron's rod, the black skele-

140

Selected Essays

tons of trees bear new greenery. The lindens of the cemetery, then, are becoming semper virentes^ immortal like the eternal ones, thanks to the mortals who nourish them from below with their bodies and souls. 'An organism draws continually upon its surroundings for new molecules, which pass from a state of death to life . . . If only one of these molecules would tell us its history - "For as long as there has been an earth," it might then say, "I have made some extraordinary journeys, I can tell you. I have been a blade of grass and then, having once again been set free, was absorbed by a mighty oak, became an acorn and then — alas! — was eaten by some creature or other . . . I was salted down for a long journey, digested by a sailor, and subsequently become a lion, a tiger and a whale, to then be given as medicine to a consumptive girl, and so on."' So writes J. Rambosson 14 in his book Legendes des plantes, thus confirming my speculations over the cycle of transformation. And in passing Banville's grave, I wonder why the dead poet's friends have planted roses and jasmine there. If this was the deceased man's wish, did he know that cadavers give off the scent of roses, jasmine and musk? I presume that he did not, but then I am inclined to believe that we are most knowledgeable in those beautiful moments when we are most ignorant. Besides, why is it that graves are strewn so profusely with flowers? Flowers, those living-dead, which lead a sedentary life and put up no resistance to any assault, which suffer rather than hurt anyone else, which imitate carnal love, multiply without fighting, and die without complaint, superior beings that have realised Buddha's dream of desiring nothing and enduring everything — self-absorbed to the point of voluntary unconsciousness. Is this why Indian sages imitate the passive existence of plants and abstain from any relationship with the outside world, whether by a glance, a gesture or a single word? A child once asked me: l Why can't flowers, which are so beautiful, sing like birds?' 'They surely do sing,' I replied, 'but we don't know how to hear them.' I stop in front of Banville's medallion. Is there a trace of rose or jasmine in this capitalist's face, with its fat cheeks, its lips swollen as if after a hearty meal, its eyes like a miser's? No, this is not the poet of Gringoire: it is someone else. But in that case who? I recall the bust of Boulay. With its nose like a dwarf's in a fairy-tale, an evil old fortune-teller's mouth, and the features of a rich and mean peasant, this cannot be that soul of honour. And as for Dumont d'Urville, the learned scientist and linguist, the bold

c

In the Cemetery'

141

and prudent explorer! What the sculptor gives me instead is a common stockbroker. What does this mean? Is it a mark that man bears, this screen of flesh and skin, pierced with five holes, five sewage pipes to the great cesspit... I summon up the images of some great contemporaries: Darwin, an orang-outang; Dostoyevsky, a pronounced criminal type; Tolstoy, a highway robber; Taine, afinancialspeculator . . . Enough! However, there are two faces, at least two under the more or less hairy skin. A Roman legend tells us that Jesus Christ had an incomparably beautiful exterior, but that in moments of anger his ugliness was hideous, bestial. Socrates, who looked like a faun and had a face in which every vice and crime was reflected, lived like a saint and died like a hero. Saint Vincent de Paul,15 who gave generously all his life, looked the very model of a sly and even wicked thief. Whence therefore these masks? An inheritance from a previous existence, on this earth or elsewhere? Socrates has perhaps provided the solution to the riddle in the famous reply to his detractors, who reproached him for his criminal mask: 'Judge then for yourselves how great my virtue is, when it has had to contend with so many evil tendencies.' Freely translated: the earth is a penal colony where we must do penance for crimes committed in a previous existence and of which we retain a vague memory in our conscience, which drives us on towards improvement. We are thus criminals one and all, and the pessimist is not so mistaken, who always thinks and speaks badly of his fellow men. This morning in the Allee Lenoir my eye was offended by something quite trivial. The straight lines of the cypresses were broken by a treetop, which had been snapped off so that it hung down over the path. Shaking in the wind, it signals me to stop; I slow down and come to a halt. A blackbird, hidden in the branches, flies up with a burst of exuberant chatter, and perches upon a stone cross on the transverse path. He looks at me, I look at him. He pecks at the cross with his beak to attract my attention, and I read the epitaph: 'Who follows me shall not walk in darkness.' The blackbird flies off, penetrating more deeply among the mass of graves, and I follow him without a second thought. He alights on the roof of a small chapel with the following inscription above the door: 'Your sorrow shall be made joy.' My guide raises his wings and leads me further into the labyrinth of tombs, all the time whistling an unusual call, which I would dearly like to understand.

142

Selected Essays

Finally, when my pilot disappears at the foot of an elder bush, I find myself in front of a mausoleum that I had never noticed before. An artist's dream, a poet's vision, or rather, a half-forgotten memory, refreshed by the tears of sorrow. It is a child of 6, reproduced in high relief on a gilt base, being borne aloft by an angel above the clouds towards heaven. There is not the slightest trace of the typically criminal man in this child's face, gentle and perfectly serene, with large eyes, created rather to radiate beauty and goodness than to look upon this unclean world; a tiny nose, lightly pushed in at the tip from habitually pressing against a mother's breast; placed there like a delicate ornament, its shell-shaped nostrils above the heart-shaped mouth are not meant for scenting prey or for taking in sweet perfumes or foul smells, not yet a true organ: beauty for beauty's sake. Here is the child who has still not lost his milk teeth, those pearls with no other apparent function than to light up a smile. Try telling me that this creature is descended from an ape! And yet, on the other hand, it must be admitted that a common, shaggy, wrinkled old man, with teeth like a dog's, a stooped back and bent knees, has started to resemble one, unless this exterior is only a mask. Progress backwards, then, or what? Did the golden age of Saturn exist, and are we the degenerate offspring of those blessed ones, whom we can never forget, and whose loss the child mourns by weeping on his arrival in a world where he feels like a stranger. Are we aware of what we do when we feed small babies on milk and honey and later on more or less golden fruits? A reminder of the golden age when: flumina jam lactis, jam flumina nectaris ibant, flavaque de viridi stillabant ilice mella.16 Why do we tell children those stories of a promised land, of elves and sprites and giants, without letting them know that it is all a lie? Why give them those toys which represent monsters and angels, antediluvian beasts and deformed plants, which do not exist in nature? If it were honest, science would reply: 'To let the child review his phylogenesis, in other words: relive the past stages of his development once again, just as the foetus in the womb passes through the whole chain of its evolution as an animal.' The blackbird has returned from its excursion and calls to me with his harsh cry. He has perched on an iron railing and has with him in his beak an object whose shape and colour I cannot distinguish. When I approach,

I n the Cemetery'

143

the bird flies off leaving his prey behind on the top of the railing. It is the chrysalis of a butterfly, with that unique outer form that resembles no other shape in the animal kingdom. A terrifying picture, a monster, a goblins hood, which is neither animal, vegetable nor mineral. A shroud, a tomb, a mummy, which has not been born because it has no ancestors here on earth, but has been made, been created by someone. Like an ordinary artist, the great artist-creator has amused himself with shaping something with no practical purpose; it is art for its own sake, perhaps a symbol. This mummy, I know very well, encloses only an animal slime, formless, with no structure whatsoever, and with the smell of a fresh corpse. And this splendour is endowed with life, with the instinct of self-preservation, since it wriggles on the cold iron, and will be able to attach itself by threads if it feels in danger of being shaken loose. A living corpse, which will assuredly rise again! And the others, those down below, who are in the process of being transformed in their chrysalises, and who are undergoing the same necrobiosis, they will never again come back to life, if one is to believe the academicians, who have become apostates of their own master. Voltaire's profession concerning final things has been forgotten. As a Voltairean, I shall take pleasure in raising this rock of offence by quoting that sceptic who admitted everything while denying nothing: 'Resurrection is really quite natural; it is no more astonishing to be born twice than once.'

From Jardin des Plantes (1895):

'Introduction' The Deaths Head Moth' 'Indigo and the Line of Copper' 'To the Heckler'

'Introduction

Having reached the middle of my life's journey, I sat down to rest and consider. Everything I had hitherto boldly dreamt and desired, I had attained. Sated with shame and honour, pleasure and suffering, I asked myself, 'What is going to happen now?' Everything was repeated with deadly monotony, everything was the same as it always was, everything happened all over again. The older generation had said, cThe universe has no secrets; we have explained all the riddles, we have solved all the problems. By means of the spectroscope we have found that the sun lacks oxygen, which does not prevent it from burning just as well as antimony in chlorine or copper in sulphur. ' We have traced the canals on Mars, which bear a disturbing resemblance to the Widmannstatten figures on meteorites,1 and yet we have only just recently gained a clear idea of what the interior of Africa looks like, and we know nothing about either Borneo or the Polar Sea.' A generation, which has had the courage to abolish God, to destroy both state and church and society and morals, nevertheless bowed down before science. And in science, where freedom ought to reign, the watchword was 'believe in authority or die!' No Bastille column had yet been erected where the old Sorbonne stood, and the cross still reigned over the Pantheon and the cupola of the Institute. There was thus nothing further to do in this world, and, feeling useless, I decided to disappear. The spirit lamp was already lit beneath my retort, potassium cyanide, yellow like gold and smelling when heated like lady's bedstraw, distilled from blood and iron, was ready to receive the sulphuric acid, which is deadly when it is concentrated, and creates life through fermentation when it is diluted. This time it was to be diluted in order to occasion death. — What is then the difference? And what a magnificent contradiction!2 Cyanide, begetter of the blue colour, born of the yellow salt, began to develop in the most innocent of all relationships, wherein pure carbon has 147

148

Selected Essays

entered into a terrible alliance with neutral nitrogen, a unique relationship which has forced science to admit its ignorance regarding the nature of this wonder. The fumes rose from the container and immediately stifled my throat like diphtheria or the non-oxygenous, cadaverous poisons. Paralysis began to overtake my arm muscles and I felt a stinging pain in my spinal marrow. I interrupted the experiment when the smell of bitter almonds was released; without knowing why, I thought I could see an almond tree in flower by a garden path, and I heard an old woman's voice, which said: 6No, child, do not believe in it!' And I no longer believed that the secrets of the Universe have been revealed, and sometimes alone, sometimes in company, I have pondered the great disorder, in which I nevertheless finally discovered an infinite coherence. This book is about the great disorder and the infinite coherence. Look, here is my Universe, as I have created it, as it has revealed itself to me. You, pilgrim, wandering by, if you choose to follow me, you will breathe more freely, for in my Universe disorder reigns, and that is freedom.

'The Death's Head Moth An Experiment in Rational Mysticism

The bleak, which lives at the water s edge and looks the sun in the eye, is silvery white and has only one bluish-green streak down its back. The roach, which keeps to shallow water, already has more pronounced colouring, and is sea-green. The perch, which is confined to deep water with a stony bottom, is already darker, and the lines down its back are black like the outline of the waves on its sides. The tench and theflounderwhich grub around in the mud have become as dark as the olive-green mud itself. The mackerel bears the marks of the billows so clearly outlined on its back that a marine painter might copy them and present them in perspective on a canvas to give the appearance of waves. But the golden mackerel which dwells in the crests of the waves has all the colours of the rainbow, with gold and silver as well. What is this but photography? On its silver plate, which can be either silver chloride, silver bromine or iodyrite, since seawater is believed to contain all three halogens or, on its albumen or gelatine plate, which is silvered, the fish catches the colours refracted through the water. Since it lives and moves in the developer, in magnesium sulphate (iron) for example, the effect in statu nascent^ will be so powerful that colour photography is accomplished directly. And thefixer,or natrium hyposulphite, should not be that remote for a fish that lives in sodium chloride and salt sulphates, and which also carries its own supply of sulphur. Is this more than a metaphor invented by Niepce de Saint Victor2 and his followers? No doubt it is, although that is not the whole truth: it will surely prove difficult to demonstrate that afish'sshimmering silver scales are indeed silver to those who do not accept the premises, but that it could be tin, or one of the ethyl phosphines or amines, is something that I have shown is probable elsewhere.* That in Austria shimmering silver pearls are made from the scales of the bleak shows that the scales have a metallic character of their own.

149

150

Selected Essays

That the drum fish, Eques lanceolatus, has photographed the shadow of its great nape fin on both sides of its body I have no doubt, no more than that the pipefish, which resembles an eel, has gone and helped itself to the vegetation of the seabed. I also believe that the kingfisher, which bears those brightly coloured feathers resembling scales on its throat and wings, acquired them from sitting and watching for its prey for hours on end, day in, day out. I have already indicated where the pheasant and the boa constrictor might have got their ellipses from, when I spoke about the eye markings on the tail feathers of the peacock.3 Higher up, among the mammals, chemistry hardly suffices; the tiger has the small-leafed but long grass of the jungle down its flanks, and on its brow it bears a palm combined with a bamboo. The panther and the leopard reproduce the variegated shadows of the deciduous forest, while the lion has only the golden-brown tones of the desert sand and the burnt rocks. There can, of course, sometimes be other causes than the so-called chemical, but in the end they turn out just as mechanical. Thus, the striped zebra lives on the plains. Shy by nature it is always ready to bound off, feeling the tiger's claws in its tender hide, which it contracts into folds in order to find the speed to escape. The leopard has spots which may resemble the shadow of the foliage, but they are also deceptively like the footprints of a wet dog or cat. Could a pregnant female have once been in a fight, so branding her young, only for the spots to be found beautiful and preferred in selection? That is something which Darwin ought to have been able to say, even if he does deny such free-standing acts of creation, though not when he discusses the bull that lost its tail in the barn door and subsequently fathered a race of tailless cattle. The role of chance in the origin of species! That humming birds resemble flowers and flowers butterflies and other insects is well known, of course, but how the death's head moth has acquired the skull upon its thorax perhaps no one knows. I had never seen the Acherontia atropos, but had a suspicion that the reproductions in books were not exactly faithful. So I went and bought him from a dealer, only to discover that in reality the skull showed up far more clearly than in the illustrations. And then I read of him that the Bretons believe he betokens death; that he has a mournful singing cry; that his pupa is buried deep down in the ground; that the larva lives upon real jasmine, on beans and on the beautiful but deadly thorn apple. There was a good deal for the imagination to be getting on with. The moth's burial ceremony, the funeral song, the poisonous food . . . and in

The Death's Head Moth'

151

the midst of all this the beans, to all appearances so innocent, yet by the Danube a pious woman told me that beans were the heads of the dead, and I smiled, of course. Reader! I have hitherto not been what one calls superstitious, but when, having amassed these details, I discovered that the famous physicist Reaumur4 had observed that this moth appears periodically and generally in conjunction with great plagues, I began to ponder if a connection might not be found between the skull on the thorax and the moth's habits. With that in mind, I put forward these premises as a starting-point. The larva of Acherontia atropos lives on the thorn apple, whose poison is called daturine and is said to be a mixture of atropine and hyoscyamine, the former from belladonna, the latter from henbane. Both these poisons are plant alkaloids, related to morphine, but also very similar to cadaverous poison. Cadaverous poison sometimes smells of jasmine (there's the jasmine!), rose and musk.* There are carrionflowers(Aroidaa,Stapelior, Orchis and others), which smell of corpses, have the colour of corpses, and attract insects which otherwise seek out the carcasses of dead animals. It is logical, then, for Acherontia to be attracted to places where epidemics are raging, and corpses are to be found in abundance. What is the origin of this moth, and from what kin? His larva is very similar to the ordinary privet moth's, and he himself is so like this same moth that if one sees specimens of the two alongside each other the only noticeable difference is in size, a few nuances of colour and the skull. Since no one was present when Acherontia was created, I am justified in making up this fairy-tale. Once upon a time there was a diurnal moth which lived on privet leaves, which are very innocent. But the privet leaves gave out in winter, and when the pupae hatched in the spring, there was nothing to eat. Since all moths are mighty botanists and have the natural plant families at the touch of their six feet, they sought out lilacs, which are closely related to privet. But one day a moth flew astray in a region where no lilacs were to be found, and she laid her eggs on a plant which resembled the lilac in colour, but did not smell so pleasant. And then she died. When spring came, the larvae crept out and ate of the little tree of knowledge, of which they knew nothing. They spun their chrysalises and the moths came swarming out, all around the belladonna, where they had been born. But look, they could no The genus Sphinx among which the death's head moth was formerly accounted contains species that smell of musk.

152

Selected Essays

longer bear the light of the sun, for the atropine had dilated their eyes so that they could not close them. And therefore they slept by day and only went out after the sun had set. This could have been the way nocturnal moths originated. But when the privet moth began to eat of the thorn apple, he grew sleepy and slumbered all day, went out at night, but only before midnight. This made him fat and he began to grow, just like pigs in France, which are fed on the sleep-inducing seeds of the thorn apple. But when he left the delicious pink juice of the privet berries, he lost the pink stripes on his abdomen and grew as ugly as a drone. When intoxicated by love and delirious from the poison, he did not always find the right poisonous plant, in spite of its flowers not emitting a fragrance until after 7 o'clock in the evening, though its leaves stink throughout the day, and in the dark he was led to sites of carrion, to cemeteries perhaps, where there was nothing to light his way except bleached skulls, which was where he laid his eggs. The larvae ate carrion and solanine in turn, and when they were ready to enter the chrysalis, they shunned the light and dug graves for themselves, for they had, of course, no inkling that they would be resurrected. Given that no one knows what really happened when Acherontia atropos was labelled poisonous, the way is open for all suppositions, mine included. Since the above was written, I have read in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre 5 that the death's head moth is called the Hate in French because that is the sound it makes. What sound? cAi!' The cry of pain among every people. The scream with which the sloth laments the pain of existence. The expression of loss which Apollo emitted after the death of his friend Hyacinthus, and which marks the flower that bears his name. But there is another flower which bears this lament depicted at the base of its nectary, and which we all deciphered as children, when we could barely read. That is the cyanic blue larkspur, which that consistent transformist Ovid says sprang from the earth where the blood of Ajax flowed.6 Blood and cyanogen! Battlefields, cemeteries, cadaverous poison and death's heads! Ai! But Bernardin de Saint-Pierre adds, quite scientifically: the flaky material from the wings of the death's head moth is highly dangerous for the eyes. I have examined this material, which consists of scales and hair, under a microscope. In the reagent it responded like a plant alkaloid, that is, like

T h e Deaths Head Moth'

153

atropine or strychnine, etc., which is no stranger than that the sanderling (Cicindela campestris) contains triethyl phosphine and that the Cantharides give cantharidine, which chemistry places among the alkaloids, immediately before digitalis. If I now adopt a sceptical attitude towards these attempts at tracing the cause of the death's head appearing on the moth, the procedure is one with which I am quite familiar, having already had occasion to use it. I start by saying that it is a freak of nature. A freak like the fact that the wasp builds its nest as an hexagonal, following the shape of its eye; like the fact that in bindweed the flower buds resemble the bracts of cereal; that a dog comes to resemble its master, as the master does his wife, and that Catarina von Emeritz7 [sic] gets the stigmata in her hands. Morphologically—psychologically: the Sphinxes, to which Acherontia formerly belonged, are peculiar in that their larvae are able to withdraw their first segment and their head into the following segment, which is provided with spots that resemble eyes. Precisely why these creatures should have acquired protection for their eyes can, of course, depend upon the well-known effect of atropine on sight, but why has the rear segment photographed the telescoped eye? Atropine and morphine have been used as developers in photography! Why do so many moths have eyes outlined on their wings? What does the larva do in the chrysalis? In scientific terms, the larva's tissues undergo a histolysis, that is to say, a fatty degeneration or phylogenetic necrobiosis.8 In translation: the larva goes through the same process in the chrysalis as a corpse in the grave, which is transformed into an ammoniac fat. Necrobiosis is in fact two words, of which the first means death and the second life. But according to the physiologists necrobiosis is the form of dying off that precedes casein degeneration (tubercularisation). In short, the larva is dead in the chrysalis since it has lost all form and only consists of a fatty substance! But how can it live? How? It is dead, yet it lives! Perhaps there is no such thing as death? Perhaps the dead buried in their graves are not dead even though the doctors have certified livor mortis9 and fatty degeneration. There is a latent warmth which is cold, there is latent life in the seed though it looks as lifeless as a grain of sand and seems to have undergone an amyloid degeneration, there are forces that we do not feel, like the catalytic force in chemistry, where a body has a destructive effect merely through its presence, without it entering into any noticeable relationship with the body. The larva is dead in the chrysalis, but it lives and rises up from the dead,

154

Selected Essays

not as a regression to some lower mineral or elementary matter but as a higher form, in beauty and freedom. If this is merely a poetic image, then what is poetry worth? A child asks where the candle-flame goes when it is extinguished? In the last century scientists would say that it returns to the primary light from whence it came. Our scientists, who pronounce energy indestructible, nevertheless say that it has ceased to exist! Ceased to exist, to be perceived? But nothing can cease to exist. Where did one moth get the eyes on its wings or the other the death's head on its thorax? Trifling questions beside the great one, that the larva is dead, physiologically and anatomically, is completely dead scientifically, and yet it lives!

'Indigo and the Line of Copper or The Unity of Matter Confirmed by BerzeliuSy1 who was an Alchemist' For the last year I have taken my morning walk in the Cemetery of Montparnasse. Right from the start, whenever there was moisture in the air, I noticed on returning home an unpleasant taste of verdigris in my mouth, which remained with me during the morning for at least a couple of hours. As the taste of verdigris did not appear when I forwent my walk in the cemetery, I concluded that it had been occasioned by the miasmas of the dead. And when mild toxic symptoms resembling those of a cupric salt also appeared, I began to wonder if it really was copper. One morning I therefore took along a bottle of ammonia, expecting to obtain a shade of blue which is, of course, characteristic where solutions of cupric salts are concerned, but it did not materialise. I had with me some lead acetate and within half an hour I obtained a small amount of black lead sulphide and a little carbonate. An old textbook on poison had recently come my way, in which I had read about Raspail's epoch-making appearance in a celebrated trial for murder by poison,2 where he warned against placing too great a confidence in chemical analyses, when the unexplained capacity of the reactive agent to participate in the new formation of the element that is being sought may often lead to a synthesis. In the course of the discussion there was also a report about the occurrence of copper in the human body when it has not been introduced by chance or with criminal intent. Orfila,3 the most famous toxicologist of the period, finally formulated the facts as follows: the human body, especially the liver, always contains copper, and this constituent metal can be released by boiling in distilled water. On the other hand, the copper which has been introduced more or less intentionally into the body cannot be released directly with water, without the part of the body in question being first burnt to ashes and treated with a powerful acid. What can this mean other than that the metal copper may take at least two forms, it is formed in the body and it results specifically through combustion? 155

156

Selected Essays

This tallies with what Lemery4 and others had believed in the eighteenth century of the iron that is always to be found in the ashes of plants, but rarely in the plants themselves. Before I now embark upon a longer digression, I would like the reader to bear in mind the following list. Copper. Blue colours. Dead bodies. Above all, the liver. On my desk I had a piece of Bengalese indigo. As everyone knows, indigo is blue, but if you scratch it with your nail, a bright copper line appears. It had never occurred to me to connect this line on the indigo, which is the same blue as the bluest of copper salts, with copper, for the same metallic lustre is also to be seen on fish, on birds' feathers and in other places. But my room was damp, and one day I noticed that the line of copper on my indigo had become coated with verdigris. I still did not believe that there was any copper present even though the phenomenon had made a strong impression on me. But the following morning I happened to walk past a farmstead where a peacock was preening itself. I was stopped short by its dreadful cry and contemplated the sight, which is indeed beautiful. To begin with I noticed the ellipses and the caustic on the tail feathers, and again called to mind the enormous power that the sun enjoys in warmer climes where it brands horn and silicon with enamel colours, and then . . . all of a sudden my mind lit up, and I saw the copper sheen on the fan encircling the blue eye. I was now convinced that there was a connection between copper and indigo, and copper's blue salts. Back home I examined the miraculous piece of indigo and now noticed that it had a clayey grey fracture which resembled the marl on which sulphur 'grows' in Sicily. I scraped the grey surface with my nail and, lo and behold, it produced a line with a metallic lustre, white, like iron. Then I said to myself that if this is copper and generates verdigris, it may also be iron, and ought to rust. Left out in humid air it rusted. But neither the verdigris nor the rust gave the due reactions using a blowpipe or by the wet process, which they would not do in an organic compound either, when neither the lead in lead tetraethyl or the iron in ferrous cyanide compounds can be recovered with ordinary reactive agents. Copper and iron are there, but not in the usual form; they are there in embryo, perhaps, flash past momentarily, and enter into new relationships only promptly to withdraw from them again.

'Indigo and the Line of Copper'

157

What then is indigo? In certain plants, whose leaves (particularly those of Isatis and Neriurn) are bluish-green, it is chlorophyll. But in the most upto-date chemistry chlorophyll is regarded as very close to biliverdin and bilirubin, two pigments of the spleen, which are produced in the liver. And all livers contain copper, constitutive copper. There you see how the liver, indigo and copper are all linked with one another via chlorophyll. How am I now to link the dead in Montparnasse with the taste of verdigris in my mouth? Well, indigo is also produced by blood and urine, and is a decomposition or end product of nitrogenous compounds. And if I burn indigo it produces the nauseous smell of a compound called skatole, a word which has the same Greek root as eschatology (from to eskaton), or the doctrine of last things. And materially, the human body's final secretions contain skatole! Surely that will suffice! But the line of iron? There is another blue pigment, Prussian Blue, which also produces a line of copper that turns green in the air. Prussian Blue is made from blood and iron. And there is iron in both the blood and liver, and in chlorophyll, indeed everywhere, or so they say! The molecular weight of Prussian Blue is double that of indigo, and indigo's is double that of potassium permanganate. But potassium permanganate can, if one takes the lowest computation of the atomic weights, weigh as much as iodine. When I sublime indigo in a low flame, it deposits red crystals with a bewildering resemblance to potassium permanganate. If I heat indigo in an open crucible, it gives off a violet-purple smoke which is remarkably similar to that of iodine. If I grate iodine and amyl I obtain a blue which resembles indigo and has a corresponding molecular weight that indicates they are related. If I pour sulphuric acid on to potassium permanganate and heat it, I obtain a violet vapour, which a novice would take for iodine, because analysis shows this vapour to be characteristic of iodine, particularly if the element is heated with potassium bisulphate. (Notice here the formation of potassium sulphate by sulphuric acid and the potassium in potassium permanganate.) Is this so miraculous? For indigo, which in organic chemistry already affords a large number of decomposition products, including resin and rubber, has provided me with the following reactions in a borax bead with

158

Selected Essays

m y blowpipe: titanium, tungsten, lead, antimony, molybdenum, uranium, vanadium, cerium, manganese and iron. T h e blowpipe is in fact a handy instrument and could possibly be developed m u c h further, but it has fallen somewhat out of favour. Rightly or wrongly, spectral analysis 5 enjoys a higher reputation, and has given two absorption spectra for indigo and malachite (copper carbonate), which are almost identical. This proves there is a kinship! A m o n g m y laboratory protocols I found the following notes: I sublimed indigo; dissolved the crystals in boiling sulphuric acid and diluted with water. Added ammonia and got a blue colouring. This is the reaction o n copper, and has been so ever since the days of Berzelius and Thenard.6 I heated particles of copper, sulphur and nitric acid together in a crucible. T h e melt resembled indigo, blue with copper-red fractures. It smelt of skatole throughout. U n d e r the heading of copper sulphite Roscoe and Schorlemmer 7 state that the same thing occurs in nature in dark blue hexagonal crystals and is called copper indigo.

In his Dictionnaire des alterations et falsifications Chevallier8 declares that

indigo is falsified by among other things iodine on starch and Prussian Blue (see above): which suggests that the similarity has been evident for some considerable time. This is the unity of matter made manifest, and the doctrine professed by every modern scientist since Darwin, although a goodly number have recoiled from the consequences. From what he himself avowed, Berzelius at least believed in the transmutation of carbon into silicon. Paracyanogen heated at very high temperatures keratinised, produced nitrogen and left a black mass as residue, which was no longer carbon but silicon. Brown9 performed the experiment, and Berzelius adds, 'Hitherto no chemist has succeeded with the metamorphosis of carbon in the radical of sililic acid.' Berzelius was thus an alchemist!

'To the Heckler'

Modern science does not admit the existence of simple bodies. The hunt for new elements thus belongs to the old science. The atomistic chemists call an element that forms the hundredth part of another impure. No, Sir, I am a transformist like Darwin and a monist like Spencer1 and Haeckel. Has not the cyclamen shown you that all botanical systems are arbitrary and vain, and that nature does not create according to a system? You ask me what an atom is. I don't know, and nor does anyone else. Roscoe2 admits that it is an hypothesis and only recently has it been found to be a 'concept'. I long believed that it was a body's equivalent, or saturation point. However, I am assured that I am mistaken. Enlighten me and all the other people who believed that the exact sciences do not work with fictions and fantasies. You are afraid of the power of my imagination. Listen to Tyndall: 'Without imagination we could not take a step beyond the purely animal world, perhaps not even reach the limits of the animal world.'3 The Author

159

'On the Action of Light in Photography Reflections Occasioned by the X-rays'

How often have I not been surprised that light rays, which are said to be vibrations in the ether, cannot penetrate a door, while the notes of a piano, which are said to be merely air-waves, can penetrate a stone wall. And this: in the upper atmosphere the sun and moon appear blood red, exactly as they do when rising or setting, when their rays have to penetrate denser gases, while sound concurrently decreases in strength, so that balloonists finally cannot hear one another's voices. According to prevailing theories, the latter would mean that ether increases in thickness with height while air gets thinner. But this is again at variance with the first observation, namely that light waves do not pass through solid matter even though its every molecule, indeed its every atom, is thought to be surrounded by an atmosphere composed of ether. During recent decades there has been a great deal of discussion about the unity of matter and the unity of forces, i.e. that light, heat and electricity are one and the same thing. But sound was always excluded. Light and sound remained discrete entities, and continued as such, among other things on these grounds, that light is transplanted through a vacuum, but sound is not. Matter was one and whole, but air and ether were still two, quite separate, and no one bothered to investigate what a vacuum was or what air was. Ether was an hypothesis, as everyone agreed, and hence inaccessible to analysis and synthesis. Now, with the discovery of X-rays,1 people sought as usual, as in regula de tri,2 to explain the unknown with the known: they resorted to ultraviolet rays, Crookes' radiant matter,3 and so on, but as a result the new phenomenon proved to have more properties in common with sound than with light, thus raising for the first time the notion of an analogy between light and sound, and hence between air and ether, which is perhaps the greatest and most important aspect of this discovery — where science is concerned. 160

'On the Action of Light in Photography'

161

That all bodies are more or less transparent is evident from Le Bon's4 development of X-photography under ordinary lamplight. This has, of course, been quite widely known. Gold leaf transmits light, though shaded green. The Japanese magic mirror is also fairly well known, and, though hitherto unexplained, it is possible that it can now make an important contribution to the investigation of this question. Last autumn, whilst engaged in chemical experiments that required a microscope, the following happened to me. I had placed an ordinary Swedish nail, bluish in colour, on the slide of my microscope and treated it with diluted sulphuric acid. Light from the lamp was admitted from above through a lens, and when I looked at the nail, magnified 150 times, it showed no trace of any metallic lustre but was marble white and transmitted the light so that its whole structure was visible. Thread by thread, some in spirals like the ducts of plants, the whole resembling a monocotyledon with its duct clusters. Then I cut a strip of silver plate, treated it with nitric acid, and viewed it in the same light under the microscope. The silver possessed a translucent light, without any metallic lustre, and had a grainy structure. I repeated the experiment without acids, and obtained the same result, which convinced me that it was the metal itself that I saw, and not any salt that had formed. I repeated the experiments with all kinds of substances and found among other things that under reflected light coal was not black but white. One month after my last experiment the news about the X-rays emerged. It was thought at first that this was only a new kind of light, the cathode in the Crookes tube, but when it was discovered that ordinary lamplight had the same, or even better, effect, interest somewhat declined. It was simple, like discovering America, and science has no love for such things. The Xrays have lived their short life and left a shaft of light behind, perhaps a theory, about the passage of light rays through solid bodies and the like. From having been a scientific experiment, photography has now become a game, and yet the whole process remains a mystery. Take a plate of silver chloride; throw an image on the plate with a mirror, and it will produce no image in the developer. Expose a silver chloride plate to full daylight. Now observe what takes place. The plate does not darken, even though the laws of chemistry state that silver chloride, which is white, will blacken in daylight, by being

162

Selected Essays

reduced to chlorine. But no such reaction takes place, and a plate exposed to daylight over a long period does not even blacken in the developer. But if I hold a dark body between the light and the plate, I get a shadow on the plate in the developer. I placed a cut Christmas rose {Helleborus) on a plate, and as the flower is half transparent, I obtained an image of the flower in outline with light from the lamp. If I put the plate in a camera and expose it there is, as everyone knows, no darkening of the plate until it has passed through the developer. If I place an albumenised silver paper in the camera and expose it, I obtain no image, not even in the developer, But if I place a negative on the paper and expose it to full daylight, I get, as everyone knows, a positive. This has always been a great mystery to me, but perhaps the X-rays will clarify how it comes about. Is it thus: that the rays gain in luminosity when they penetrate a more solid medium of a particular kind? Is this the partial effect of glass lenses in telescopes and microscopes? In 1891 I had by chance two colours together on a silver bromide plate in an eiconogen developer. The exposed object was a yellow-stained retort stand, holding a horseshoe magnet, painted with red-lead paint. The objects were so clearly coloured red and yellow that I thought I ought to complete the experiment. But, first speculate, then experiment. And I speculated as follows. The sound from an instrument in a nearby room reaches my ear all the better if the door is open than if it is closed! By analogy, light ought consequently to have a stronger effect in a camera if it does not have to pass through a solid medium - like a glass lens. This was at once true and false, for sound is more easily transmitted in solid bodies than in air. - And yet, when I open a door, I can hear more easily! And I do see more clearly through glass lenses than through air. — Here I stopped, amazed at the insatiability of the stable laws of nature, their capriciousness, their self-contradictions and their inexactitude. But I continued, removing the lens from the camera and inserting a diaphragm that had been pierced with a sewing needle. I took someone's picture and the result was in every respect more successful than when using a good lens. Against all the rules I had placed the man against a window, which opened on to a landscape with fir trees in the foreground and woods fringing a series of bays in the distance.

'On the Action of Light in Photography'

163

The man stood out in sharp relief, and so did the trees, in perspective, all the way to the horizon. Control test with a lens and the same pose. The man appeared flat, with no trace of any trees, and the entire landscape simply a light background. But my diaphragm gave me yet another advantage. The subject's coat was white with blue stripes. These blue stripes should normally turn out white, but here they remained dark, outlined against the white coat. For me this fact, that blue retained its value, became the starting-point for experiments with colour photography.5 I had speculated correctly in removing the glass lens and allowing the light to work directly, without passing through any medium. I speculated further, saying to myself: 'a chemical effect is usually intensified by allowing substances to meet in statu nascentif or in the moment when they emerge from another compound'. Therefore I exposed a silver plate, whilst simultaneously developing chlorine vapour inside the camera. But poor equipment and unfavourable circumstances compelled me to break off these experiments almost immediately, even though I had obtained a few colours, however incomplete. (If anyone wishes to utilise my speculations, they are free to do so.) Today, when people are amazed that X-rays require neither a camera nor a lens, it is a fitting moment for me to relate the real circumstances concerning my photographs of celestial bodies taken without a camera or a lens in early spring 1894, which provoked considerable amusement at the time, and were near to ruining me, indeed perhaps did so. There happened to be a mirror on my table, in which the image of the moon was reflected. I thought: how would the mirror catch and reflect the moon if the lens of my eye and the camera were not there to distort it? According to the laws of optics, every point on the plane surface of the mirror must return the light of the moon. If the mirror was spherically concave, the rays of the moon would on the contrary be collected in one point and produce a small round image, similar to the one we call the moon, and can see with our naked eye. This was correctly reasoned! And so I exchanged the mirror for a silver bromide plate, and to achieve a stronger effect I placed it in the developer and exposed it at the same time. Now, I had read in Vogel's classic work on photography7 that under certain conditions an exposed plate could be re-exposed to diffuse daylight and then give an inverted image. I employed this method and from the light of the moon I obtained an

164

Selected Essays

image that resembled a honeycomb and which I considered to be the consequence of an interference phenomenon, in short the ability of light rays of the same value to cancel each other out and produce dark light rays. This experiment with the moon was repeated many times and yielded different results according to different procedures. Subsequently, I exposed a plate to the sun at sunset and obtained an image covered with flame-like shapes. The night sky filled the plate with white spots, blurred like when one looks at the stars through a pair of spectacles. I sent these photographs, along with an explanatory text, to the Astronomical Society of France, where they were shown at their meeting in May (?) 1894,8 but nothing came of it, least of all support for any further experiments. That they had been misunderstood I later discovered from the Compte rendu, where it merely stated that the photographs had been taken without a lens. I cannot, of course, refer to my unpublished manuscript, but will merely point out here that moonlight has a stronger effect on a silver bromide plate than sunlight. Furthermore, that the light from a kerosene lamp has a stronger effect than daylight under similar conditions. So what may be concluded from all this? Of X-rays that are ordinary rays, of the relative transparency of bodies, of photographing without a lens, of photographing with a camera and lens? Well, at least this much, that physics and chemistry as presently constituted have yet to solve the problems of the world; that the laws of nature, as they are called, are simplifications, dictated by simple people and not by nature, that the universe still hides secrets from us and that mankind therefore has the right to demand a revision of the natural sciences, on which the X-rays have thrown a highly unsympathetic light.

'A Glance into Space

It was Easter Day when the mezereon was in bloom in Haga Park.1 Mezereon which has a lilac'sflowerand scent, but is no lilac. We were to see the sun dance, as the legend has it, on this day of resurrection. When I raised my eyes to the day star I saw at first only a brilliant clarity, a cloud of white fire, and I immediately refrained from this dangerous spectacle. Many Easter Days have passed since then, and at length it happened that I wanted to look at the sun, in order to trace its spots. Because it was the vernal equinox, it was located in the celestial equator. Raising my eyes I saw at first nothing but a large white cloud of fire, which little by little converged to form a golden yellow disk, which rotated within another disk that was now silver white, now iron black. It was then that the thought struck me: is the sun round because it looks round to us? And what is light? Something outside me or within, subjective perceptions? Light is a force, not an element, and should of course be invisible, since forces are not otherwise visible. Might the sun be the omnipresent primeval light, which my imperfect eye can only apprehend as that round, yellow spot on the retina? And what is light when darkness is not its opposite, which may easily be confirmed by going into a dark room and pressing upon one's eyeballs. This is the very experiment that I have carried out, repeated and controlled. When it is dark and I press on my eyeballs, I see at first a chaos of lights, stars or sparks, which are gradually condensed and gathered up into a brilliant disk, which rotates. This disk then begins to give off sheaves of red light, imitating the sun'sflares,but also resembling a sun-spot, a tourbillon, or the spiral nebulae in Virgo or Canes Venatici. At the extremity of pain occasioned by this pressure, the sun disappears and a single, blinding star remains. When the pressure is reduced, the lighting effects cease, and a display of colours begins. In the centre there appears 165

166

Selected Essays

a cavity in Scabiosa atropurpurea, surrounded by a soft sulphur yellow and in outline resembling a sun-spot. Is it in that case the inside of the eye that the astronomer reproduces in word and image, and is it the lenses of the telescope that he photographs on the photosensitive plate? And there for the moment I paused. However, I chanced upon an ophthalmoscopy with colour prints, and readily admit to my surprise when I saw in the reproductions of the powerfully illuminated interior of the eye these illustrations of the retina which imitated the cloud of light, the sun, the concentric rings, the stars, the Milky Way and the whole firmament's every phenomena. Where does the self begin and where does it end? Has the eye adapted itself to the sun? Or does the eye create the phenomenon called the sun? According to Schopenhauer,2 'The world with infinite space, in which everything is contained, with infinite time, in which everything moves, with the wonderful multiplicity of things which occupy both, is only a cerebral phenomenon.' The sun delineates an imaginary circle in the imaginary firmament. This circle forms an angle of 230 to the celestial equator. The eye, which is formed as a globe, possesses a round yellow spot, resembling the sun, and this single light-sensitive spot in the eye is situated 230 above the point at which the optical nerve enters the eye. What might this mean? Is it possible that when he emerged from the primal matter and looked the sun straight in the eye, man was blinded in what is now the blind spot, and that the sun, the omnipresent light, created for itself a new focal point? Or did the earth, when it shifted on its axis, compel man to rise these 230?

He who knows, let him speak out, and may he at the same time say why the heart also assumes an angle of 230!3

'Edvard Munctis Exhibition

However incomprehensible are your words, they have their charm. Balzac - Seraphita1

Edvard Munch, 32 years old, the esoteric painter of love, jealousy, death and sorrow, has frequently been the object of deliberate misunderstandings by the critic-executioner, who practises his profession impersonally, at so much a head, just like the executioner. He has come to Paris to find understanding among the initiated, with no fear of being annihilated by ridicule, which kills the cowardly and the weak but like a beam of sunlight increases the lustre of the brave man's shield. Someone once remarked that one ought to set Munch's canvases to music in order to explain them properly. That may be true, but while we await the composer, I shall sing the praises of a number of these paintings, which recall Swedenborg's visions in The Delights of Wisdom Concerning Conjugal Love and The Pleasures of Insanity Concerning Scortatory Love?

The Kiss:3 - T h e merging of two beings, of which the smaller, shaped like a carp, appears ready to devour the larger, as is the custom with vermin, microbes, vampires and women. Or else: The man who gives, creating the illusion that woman repays. The man who begs to be allowed to give his soul, his blood, his freedom, his peace of mind, his well-being in exchange for what? In exchange for the happiness of giving his soul, his blood, his freedom, his peace of mind, his well-being. The Red Head:^ A shower of gold which falls over the unhappy creature kneeling before his worst self, begging a merciful death with a blow from a hairpin. Golden ropes which bind him to the earth and suffering. A rain of 167

168

Selected Essays

blood cascading down over the lunatic, who is seeking unhappiness, the divine unhappiness of being loved, that is to say, of loving. Jealousy:5 Jealousy, a healthy feeling of purity in the soul, which abhors intermingling with someone of the same sex through another's agency. Jealousy, a legitimate egoism, born of the instinct for preservation of the self and one's own stock. The jealous man says to his rival: 'Away with you, you poor creature, you wish to warm yourself at the fire which I have lit; you will breathe my breath from her mouth; you will imbibe my blood, and you will remain my thrall since it is my spirit which rules over you through this woman, who has become your ruler.' Conception'^ Immaculate or not, it's all the same; the red or golden halo crowns the consummation of the act, the only justification that this being without an autonomous existence has for living. The Scream-? A scream of terror before this nature turning red with fury, which is making ready to speak on behalf of the storm and the thunder to the tiny, heedless creatures who, without resembling them, believe themselves to be gods. Dusk'} The sun is extinguished, night falls, and the dusk transforms all mortal beings into ghosts and corpses at the moment they return home to shroud themselves in the winding-sheets of their beds and abandon themselves to sleep! This seeming death which restores life, this ability to suffer which comes from both heaven and hell. Trimurti of Women:.9

Sinneress / 3 Or else:

2 \

Mistress

'Edvard Munchs Exhibition'

169

Paint

Enceinte / 3

2 \

Saint

The Beach'}0 The wave has broken the tree trunks, but the subterranean roots revive, creeping over the barren sand to drink at the eternal source of the sea-mother! And the moon rises, like the dot of the i, rounding off the sadness and the infinite desolation. Venus rises from the waves and Adonis has come down from the mountains and the villages. They pretend to look at the sea, fearful of drowning in a look in which they will lose their selves and merge in an embrace, in which Venus will assume a little of Adonis and Adonis a little of Venus. August Strindberg

'The Synthesis of Gold Explained by the Falu Process in which Gold is Seen as Being "Extracted" from Copper Pyrites

(CuS + FeS3 and CuS + FeS )

The copper pyrites is oxidised with NaCl and transformed into Cu2Cl2. 1 But Cu2Cl2 weighs 196, as does gold, and it therefore seems possible that it can partially change into gold. That is also indicated by the fact that Cu2Cl2 precipitates gold from its solutions (Fremy, Pelouze).2 To precipitate seems to be synonymous with promoting the reconstitution of a decomposed body. The refined gold: Cu2Cl2 is transformed into gold monochloride by means of chlorinated lime and hydrochloric acid. The gold is now precipitated metalically with green vitriol, as a result of which an Fe S = 196 — Au seems to occur and contribute to the gold's reconstitution. But in the Falu process lead acetate is also added in order to 'collect the fine gold powder' through the formation of lead sulphate. The lead acetate and lead sulphate probably have another action than this purely mechanical one, for: on the one hand, acetic acid reduces gold from its salts, and on the other, it is possible for PbSO , which weighs 303, or the same as AuCl, to produce gold monochloride. That this lead sulphate can be transmuted into gold monochloride is indicated by the following fact: In the older methods of refining gold with a percentage of silver there comes a moment when the solution contains lead sulphate, iron oxide and copper sulphide. Heated with nitric acid and soda this solution obtains: 970 per cent gold, 28 silver and 2 platinum. (Fremy, Pelouze.) The reaction would then be as follows, would it not? — the iron oxide (oxidule?) takes the sulphur from the copper sulphide, which the nitric acid turns into sulphuric acid and produces iron sulphate, which precipitates gold from PbSO = 303 = AuCl = 303. The surplus FeO2 H2O = 107 = Ag = 107 constitutes itself as silver, etc. 170

'The Synthesis of Gold'

171

Experiments demonstrating that the Falu process is a synthetic and not an extraction method: Example 1. A strip of paper is dipped in a solution of iron sulphate; is cured over a bottle of ammonia and turns sea-green like aureus oxide; is dried in a mild heat (over a lighted cigar) and turns chestnut-brown like gold oxide; finally, golden-yellow scales with a metallic lustre appear. To be sure, these are dissolved by nitric acid and by hydrochloric acid, but this is also the case with particles of fine gold. The yellow scales are not sulphur pyrites, for with acids they do not produce hydrosulphuric acid. They amalgamate with mercury, which iron does not. Yellow prussiate of potash induces a blue colour in the paper, for it contains ferric salt; but gold salts also yield Prussian Blue with ferrocyanide of potassium. The reaction can be explained in three ways: Either: Or: Or:

Fe S = 197 = Au. Fe'o + iH 2 O = 197 = Au. Fe(NH4)2(SO4)26H2O = 392.

That ammoniacal iron sulphate is formed seems the most probable; this weighs 392 or 2 x 196, which is double the weight of gold, and either splits or, as 392, which is the chemical equivalent of the gold monochloride, is reduced by the nicotine, which possesses the quality of reducing gold monochloride. In favour of this latter detail is the following fact: according to Orfila,3 'Tritosulfate de fer et ammoniaque', or ammoniacal iron sulphate, is obtained when gold, which has been dissolved in ammonium chloride and nitric acid, is precipitated with iron sulphate and left to stand for a month. The use of gold in the preparation of a simple ferric salt suggests, of course, that an exchange occurs, and that iron and gold possess the same integral components. Moreover, according to mineralogy gold is found together with pyrites, and all gold sand contains iron. Example 2. A strip of paper is dipped in cuprous chloride Cu2Cl2, and then in iron sulphate, and is cured with ammonia as well as dried over cigar smoke. The yellow scales are now richer and withstand the reagents better.

172

Selected Essays

The reaction can be explained thus: Cu 2 Cl 2 = 196 = Au, which is precipitated by the iron sulphate. What role the ammonia plays here may be put on one side for the time being. Cu 2 Cl 2 is most successfully obtained by precipitating a cupric salt with stannous chloride, and in this connection it should be remarked that stannous chloride precipitates gold from solutions, in which Cu 2 Cl 2 and Au would appear to possess an essential quality in common, apart from the aforementioned fact that they weigh 196. Example 3. Cuprous chloride, iron sulphate and lead acetate are thrown together in a bowl, moistened with ammonia. The bowl is filled with water and left to stand in the sun or at room temperature. The fatty flakes which remain swimming on the surface can be fished up on paper and do not require fixing.

'Contemporary Gold-Making

To the Chemical Society in Stockholm The moment William Crookes1 declared that there were no elements the further question immediately arose, what do they consist of, or how are they constituted; and with that, a new project in chemistry begins. Some twenty years ago, at the Academie des Sciences in Paris, Lockyer2 presented a paper on the composition of phosphorus in which his spectral analytic investigations convinced him that phosphorus was not an element. Kriiss or Krauss3 (I am quoting from memory) had transmuted cobalt salt into nickel salt; at the Institute of Physics in Berlin Gross4 had declared that sulphur was not an element, since in the electrolysis of sulphate of barium he had regularly lost a certain amount of sulphur. In the meantime, Berthelot,5 who had studied the alchemists, had declared publicly that he did not believe in elements, and that a solution to the problem of how to make gold was only a question of time. Like all opinions, this was not a new one. Through the discovery of molecular substitution Dumas6 had been able to conclude that the chemical compounds, such as they are listed in the textbooks, were only arbitrarily chosen, an idea formulated in his well-known expression: 'There are 400,000 kinds of ammonia.' Proust7 attempted to found a system based on the unity of matter which established that the elements were only condensations of hydrogen, upon which Blomstrand8 built further in the essay 'The Elements of Nature', even though he shrank from the consequences. Independently of the struggles of these scientists, Tiffereau,9 Vial,10 and Le Brun Le Virloy1 x had been concurrently working on the transformation of metals. In the September issue of the journal LHyperchimie,12 Tiffereau recounts, for perhaps the twentieth time, how in the 1850s he presented his synthetic gold to the Mint in Paris, where it was accepted as genuine. Tiffereau is unacquainted with the alchemists, and is the naturalist 173

174

Selected Essays

among gold-makers. From Nantes, where he was an assistant in chemistry, he went to the gold and silver mines in Mexico, observed the deposits and incidence of gold, studied metallurgy and came to the conclusion that here it was not a question of extracting gold but of making it. His method, learnt from the old art of transmutation, is briefly this: heat copper and silver with nitric acid, and a quantity of gold is regularly formed. I have seen Tiffereau's gold at his home in Paris, where he now lives and lectures, and no one denies his gold-making. I have also seen Vial's gold produced according to another principle. Vial had found that sulphur pyrites (yellow pyrites) were gilded on the surface, and by submitting a black iron sulphide to a galvanic stream for a month, he achieved a pronounced gilding. Tiffereau and Vial received strong support from the mining engineer Le Brun Le Virloy, who was convinced of the transmutational capacity of metals after observing that ores yielded more or less metal as a result of different treatments, and that without containing the sought-after metal, the means of reaction thus contributed through commutation to bring about an increase in the amount of metal. In this way he succeeded in obtaining an increase of 50 per cent in poor copper ore. Tiffereau has published Le Brun's views and his experiment on how to increase the quantity of metal. The representatives of this tendency within chemistry have inclined to see the cause of the diminishing value of silver in improved methods of commutation rather than in the discovery of new, richer mines. A galenite, these chemists argue, contains neither lead nor silver, but only the possibility of producing lead or silver with metallurgic treatment. According to metallurgy, if I melt galenite in a porcelain crucible I obtain no silver, but if I cupellate lead in a crucible lined with boneash, I do. In this case, phosphate of calcium in the bone-ash has entered as a component into the constitution of the silver; thus here, silver is made of lead. But also according to metallurgy, this silver, which has been obtained by cupellation with lead, always contains gold; thus here it is also a question of making gold. These views on the transition of metals and the other elements from one to another are not new but have a long history. Thus, Scheele13 believed that manganese passed over into iron, and Berzelius14 that the carbon in paracyanogen was transmuted into silicon. The more recent metallurgic processes in the extraction of gold, particularly in the Transvaal, point towards the correctness of this view.15 In the Transvaal there was in fact a red clay, containing iron, in which gold existed in an unknown, almost inaccessible, form and not a trace of gold could be discovered with a microscope. But even though it weighs nineteen times more than water, under treatment with potassium cyanide the gold floated

'Contemporary Gold-Making'

175

up, thus contravening the law of gravitation. The potassium cyanide method proved too expensive but the introduction of chloride of sulphur caused a revolution with the emergence of multi-million companies. Here, the chloride of sulphur appears to contribute to an increase in the amount of gold, and Tiffereau is now seeking to extract gold by treating ordinary clay containing iron with chloride of sulphur. There is an old, erroneous opinion, first that gold can only be dissolved in aqua regia,16 and thus that gold cannot be dissolved in nitric acid. Gold is dissolved according to its consistency in any one of at least fifty solvents, among them an elementary acid, selenic acid. In the past, goldsmiths avoided aqua regia and replaced it with common salt, saltpetre and sulphuric acid. Nowadays, gold is dissolved in a combination of copper vitriol and sodium sulphite, and precipitates with sodium sulphide. Finely diffused gold is dissolved by pure nitric acid and by pure boiling hydrochloric acid. It is therefore no good trying to determine the presence or absence of gold, as a pawnbroker does, by depositing a drop of nitric acid on a fine specimen of gold. With these introductory remarks, I now pass on to my own goldmaking. STARTING-POINT

If one dissolves gold in aqua regia and lets it evaporate one gets gold chloride, which dissolved in water is a yellow liquid bearing an extraordinary resemblance to a weak solution of potassium chromate. In order to recover the reduced gold I pour the gold solution into a solution of green vitriol. Asking the justifiable question, 'why green vitriol in order to recover the gold', I arrived at the following facts: In popular parlance, green vitriol is iron, sulphur and oxygen. In Europe, before the discovery of the iron mines of America and Australia, gold was extracted from iron sulphide or copper sulphide, or both. Chemistry textbooks maintain that all iron sulphide is more or less goldbearing. In mineralogy gold sand is said to contain iron. Iron and sulphur reappeared so frequently as established facts that it was no idle speculation when I undertook my first experiment with green vitriol in the following way: A strip of paper (all organic substances reduce gold compounds!) was

176

Selected Essays

dipped in a solution of green vitriol and the paper emerged colourless. The paper was then cured over a bottle of ammonia and turned sea-green. This should be ferrous oxide hydrate. Next, I warmed the paper over the cigar so as to dry it, and the colour now became a yellowish-brown. This should be ferric oxide hydrate. Finally, the paper dried and encased itself in flakes of shining gold. I showed these, which were to my mind gold, to Tiffereau, who has spent forty years working with gold, and when he was also appraised of my procedure, he had no doubt that this was the case. I was encouraged in my belief by the following facts. When the green vitriol assumed the sea-green colour, according to the textbooks the oxidulated iron hydrate should precipitate; but it just now happens that aureus oxide is also sea-green. And when with warming this sea-green turned into a golden-brown, it should be ferric oxide hydrate; but there, too, it so happens that gold oxide is also a yellowish-brown. In order to ascertain that there was no iron salt or rust there, I detached the curdled flakes with potassium oxalate, as I do when dissolving rust, and then collected the brightly shining gold flakes on a new piece of paper. Then I began to calculate. Taking away the seven molecules of water, the molecular weight of green vitriol adds up to 152, which is exactly half that of gold monochloride. I now calculated in another way and discovered that any ammoniacal iron sulphate that might have formed weighed exactly 392, which is the molecular weight of gold (not atomic weight). When I then read in an older chemical textbook that ammoniacal iron sulphate was produced by gold monochloride, it seemed to me that the synthesis of gold from iron was demonstrated both backwards and forwards, since iron arises in the preparation of gold from its solution, and, in the latter case, gold arises in the preparation of an iron salt. That the cigar smoke as well as the warmth also contributed to the reduction of the gold seems probable, since we know that the nicotine, pyridine and acetic acid contained in cigar smoke reduce gold from its compounds. Now to the analysis. On an unwashed sample yellow ferrocyanide of potassium produces Prussian Blue, but the ferrocyanide of potassium has the same effect on compounds of gold chloride. The blue colouring was exactly the same on genuine samples of gold as on mine. It dissolved in nitric acid, as finely diffused gold does, and furthermore the paper was bleached with chlorine so that a quantity of chlorine could easily have been developed to dissolve the gold. It was not possible to obtain any decisive proofs of an ordinary analytic kind, and I therefore undertook

'Contemporary Gold-Making'

177

a number of practical ones. I amalgamated mercury with my gold, and the mercury was gilded on the surface with a splendid matte golden hue. With the addition of a drop of common salt solution, saltpetre and alum which goldsmiths use in staining gold, there was complete amalgamation and, when heated, gilding occurred on the glass inside the bottle. This was therefore gold, for ferric oxide (ferrous or hydrates) does not amalgamate with mercury. And iron has as yet never been used in gilding! I have explained how I developed the synthesis of gold still further in my essay 'The Synthesis of Gold Explained by the Falu Process'.17 I know that I am on the right track; but I do not know if I have reached the goal yet. So far as contemporary American gold-making is concerned, this is based on Carey Lea's18 experiment in precipitating argentic (argentiferous?) tartrate with ferric (ferrous?) tartrate, when the silver precipitates a goldenyellow. The remainder of the treatment has as yet still not been made public. Klam, 26 October 1896

'The Sunflower' {Helianthus annuus) Analogies = Correspondences = Harmonies To M. Guymiot 1 If you would know the invisible, look carefully at the visible The Talmud2 Twenty years ago I read the Botanic Excursions ofElias Fries,3 Linnaeus' last pupil in Sweden. In one passage the author discusses the relative superiority of various flowers, and awards the prize to the sunflower for the following reasons. The sun, the omnipotent, the source of life, light and power, makes its influence directly felt throughout the plant kingdom. Plants, the daughters of the sun, adapt themselves to their mother, and strive to imitate her. None has succeeded better in this than the sunflower, which reproduces the image of the sun in its inner and ray-flowers, and which follows the sun's movements and completes its period of growth within a year, the time it takes the sun to traverse the twelve houses of the zodiac. At that time people knew nothing of Swedenborg's 'correspondences',4 and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's 'harmonies' had been forgotten.5 The mental ability to 'see similarities everywhere' was pardonable only in poets, those harmless makers of images, unpardonable in others — who were called mentally deranged. Fries' discovery was therefore dismissed as a very beautiful rhetorical figure, and things went on as they were. It was last year that Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's posthumous works opened up the world of harmonies to me, and in the author of Paul et Virginie, otherwise an engineer in the national survey and the director of the Jardin des Plantes, I rediscovered Fries' idea, but more fully developed and more striking. Were we to begin with his notion of sun harmony, we would find that trees are directly related to the sun through the concentric circles of their trunks (their annual rings). 'These rings are always identical in number with the revolutions of the day star. The moon, on the other hand, appears to extend its influence to the plants. I have observed in the roots of those 178

'The Sunflower'

179

vegetables that grow in our gardens concentric strata as numerous as the months of the moon under which they have lived. This can be seen above all in carrots, beet and onions. Perhaps it is on account of this connection with the moon that the Egyptians consecrated the onion to Isis, or to the moon, which they worshipped under this goddess's name.' The sun and plants: guided by my teacher and master, I set to work to investigate the harmonies between the sunflower and the sun. According to botanists, Solrosen, le Tournesol, le Grand Soleil, the Sunflower, die Sonne, or Helianthus annuusis a native of Peru. In the article on 'Perou' in Larousse Peru is identified as the land of the sun, the cult of the sun, whose rulers were the sons of the sun, Incas. The most important religious symbol was an image of the sun, turned towards the sunrise, watched over by the virgins of the sun. This is already a good deal concerning the sun, but still not enough. Peru's national colours are red and white, the two colours offireand the sun, and its current coinage is still called the sol today. Physiological harmonies. The dial has bisexual flowers, the ray-flowers are sterile females. [Phoebus and Diana.]6 The seed leaves have three veins. [ Trimurti.}7 The thalamus consists of alveolar like the cells in a honeycomb, and bees delight in seeking out theseflowersfor their golden yellow honey, the honey which, in unconscious harmony, gilders employ when they grind gold-dust. The sun is gold. Both have the same sign O.8 The sun is gold, the moon silver. Thirteen moons to one sun, in monetary value thirteen parts of silver equal one part gold (the eighteenth century, B. de Saint-Pierre). Cut off the stalk of a sunflower and dry its pith lightly over aflame.It is gilded with a weak metallic lustre. It is gold, though not yet mature, as Tiffereau9 expressed it; a draft of gold. Burn the pith, and the ashes will resemble bronze, something that chemists of old knew well. Is it gold? Berthollet10 said it was, and insisted that the ashes of every plant contained gold. And as proof, he extracted 40,32 grams of gold from 5 hundredweight of ordinary ashes.11 Besides, the pith is used in the production of potash from carbonic potash. It has also been used as moxa, and burnt upon the skin against certain maladies.

180

Selected Essays

When the benevolent sun has incarnated itself in this handsome rather than beautiful flower, it has embodied in it all the things that man requires for his well-being. The fire of heaven has been amassed in its wood, and in unforested countries the inhabitants use the sunflower as fuel. The seeds yield a golden-yellow oil, excellent for lighting, of use for food, and without equal in the manufacture of colours and soaps. Moreover, the seeds produce a kind of grain, flour, butter, alcohol, and beer. The leaves are eaten by cattle, and the pith makes excellent paper. One always returns to the pith, and it deserves special consideration. Chemistry teaches us that this pith is soluble in nitric acid. It is not therefore composed of cellulose, which only dissolves in an ammoniac copper solution. But with dry distillation it yields ammonia, which indicates a more animal, more differentiated origin, even though botany has not as yet shown us what role the pith plays. Although a botanical layman, I would urge the initiated to perform the following experiment, which proves nothing and yet which says so much. With a shaving knife cut the pith of a sunflower into slices. Observe the miniature that appears in white on gold, and you will see a man's image, stylised like the image on a pre-Grecian coin, or if you like, the head of a Mexican (Peruvian) statue. What is it? I don't know! Heat it, and it is gilded, as I described above. The sun, gold, the sunflower! In his excellent Astronomie Theocentrique, Delestre12 notes that: 'During the solar eclipse of 12 December 1871, observed at Shoolor (Hindustan), Janssen noticed no ring in the sun's corona, but something resembling a flower, radiant and gigantic, whose petals in the form of pointed ellipses formed a glittering train, showing the structure of the firmament in the area where the eclipse occurred.' The sunflower corresponds with the sun and the sun with the eye; consequently, the sunflower also corresponds with the eye. And if one makes a cross-section through the eye's cornea, there is a sunflower. When packed with seeds, the sunflower's thalamus presents a honeycomb with cells, with the seeds resembling bee larvae; but in its entirety it also resembles an insect's eye. In a rough sketch the hermaphrodite inner flowers of the sunflower resemble the rods of the retina. We have seen similarities everywhere, for the simple reason that similarities and correspondences are to be found everywhere, and those who say that they believe in the unity of matter - and the spirit - agree with us! Isn't that so?13

'The Mysticism of World History

When the people of Israel departed from Egypt the country was ruled by a pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty, This exodus marks the founding of Palestine, the small state from which Europe would acquire its culture once Graeco-Roman civilisation had ceased to flourish and faded away, to become the fertile mulch beneath the newly sown seed. The obscure myths record that in the same year a mighty expedition from Hellas was fitted out to seek unknown lands to the north and north-east. In the old sagas this migration is known as the voyage of the Argonauts. This is remarkable enough in itself, of course! But at that same moment, like an insatiable earthquake which for no known reason spreads in a particular direction, the legendary Assyrian queen, Semiramis, is supposed to have crossed into India, where an enormous movement was already under way. For the Hindus were also migrating to the east, and the two races encountered one another in the tremendous conflicts depicted in the Mahabharata. The movement extends still further eastwards, to China under the Yen dynasty, which was the scene of great strife. Races from the south pressed northwards, a struggle raged over the succession and the regent once more moved the capital from Shensi to Honan and then back again, just as Moses moves Israel's camp in the desert. Now the question is: is this the same movement that is transmitted from the Nile delta to the deltas of the Danube, Euphrates, Punjab and the Yangtze? (It is a matter of deltas, too!) Or did these upheavals occur simultaneously in several isolated places, issuing from the same unknown source of energy? If we suppose that these earthquake-like migrations of peoples could arise in a so-called natural fashion by an initial movement from the Nile, it becomes even more difficult to account for the great upheavals in spiritual life which occurred simultaneously within the then known civilised world. When Moses wandered the desert for forty years instead of taking the direct caravan route to Palestine in fourteen days, he had, as we know, a 181

182

Selected Essays

definite purpose. And he initiates his - conscious or unconscious - world historical epic by climbing Mount Sinai (which was, incidentally, occupied by Egyptian temples and possessed working copper mines). On Sinai he exchanges the Noachian laws for the Ten Commandments. Correctly interpreted, the first of these commandments expresses the great secret of monotheism, the doctrine of unity, monism — one God, the father of all, in whose name every people will one day be united. Tradition has placed the emigration of Cecrops, bearing the seeds of culture from Egypt to Greece, to about the same time. Cecrops has been dismissed by scholars as apocryphal, but he may readily be retained as a complement to the voyage of the Argonauts, and as such he is expedient to us here.1 What is certain, however, is that at precisely the same time as the Mosaic Law was published, the Indians received all their Vedic books, notably the Rig-Veda. This collection of laws also preaches monotheism, for the Indians declare their many gods are only symbols. 'There is only one God,' the Veda declares, on numerous occasions, 'the highest spirit, the Lord of the world.' And this moment in the history of the Indian people is also the moment of transition from nature worship (Indra) to intellectual religion (Brahma). (In contrast to the Mosaic Law of exclusivity, the Veda has nevertheless explained 'that all religions must be equally pleasing to God, since he would otherwise have founded only one religion!') This occurred in India during the thirteenth century B C , to which time the people of Kashmir ascribe the birth of Buddha, whereas the Chinese and the Japanese assign his birth to the year iooo, and others to 600 or 650. If the former is true, then this is all the more remarkable since Buddhism, in advance of Christianity, teaches atonement through suffering and self-denial as well as ordaining the love of one's neighbour. This love for all, which many have wanted to make a uniquely Christian commandment, is to be found in all religions, and even in the Israel of the Old Testament. For in Leviticus 19: ijff. it is explicitly stated: 'Thou shalt not hate thy brother... Thou shalt not avenge . . . Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.' What was happening at that time in the Far East, in China? In 1324, that is, when Moses is in the twenty-fifth year of his desert wandering, the ruler is Wu-ting, who appears in the midst of general disorder to reform morals and institute laws. This emperor had long been vainly seeking a competent minister when he was shown the man for whom he was searching in a dream. He had a portrait made, based on his description, and, just as Samuel found his David, so with its help the chosen man was found.

'The Mysticism of World History'

183

This was a carpenter, who was mending a sluice. He was taken to the emperor who addressed him in the same manner as David spoke to Nathan: 'My dear Fu Yue, you are the one whom heaven has chosen to help me. I look on you as my master. Regard me as an unpolished mirror that you will polish, or as a weak man poised perilously on the edge of a precipice, whom you will guide, or as a patch of unfruitful earth that you will cultivate. Do not flatter me; do not spare my faults . . .' The carpenter became a great minister, who saved his people exactly as Moses did. 'Concord and discord depend upon the ministers', he said. 'Tasks should not be given to those who follow their passions, but to deserving men. Distinctions should not be bestowed upon the wicked, but given to the wise.' And in another place: 'if one behaves unjustly towards people, one is despised; if one fails to blush over an unintentional fault, one readily commits a new one'. But according to a number of scholars it was also during this century that the writing of the Chinese Shih Ching, The Book of Odes, and third of the sacred books, was begun.2 This book contains everything and can sometimes compete with the Old Testament in the vehemence of its style. Although it does not date from the same century as Moses, the following Jeremiad by an unknown Chinese Isaiah can nevertheless serve as an example. 'The people are unable to enjoy either rest or calm because the kingdom is poisoned by thieves, by the unrighteous who dispossess it of the fruits of its labour. While feigning to be men of honour and insisting that they deprecate the criminal actions which they commit (in the name of the royal tyrant), they are nevertheless liars and rogues. Therefore my words of accusation are censured, and you would like to stifle them in my throat! But others have already sung of you, and cursed you!' If one also wishes to date the advent of Zoroaster to this period (according to the experts it occurred between 1700 and 1200 BC), 3 it would seem as if the entire civilised world had awoken simultaneously to an awareness of mankind's great common aims and tasks, or as if the world soul had forced its way down into the consciousness of the masses everywhere at the same moment, revealed itself and been transformed according to each people's ability to understand and express it. How this came about we do not know, but thinkers have sought to explain it in two different ways. Some believe that the will and the movement are innate and implanted in the human soul from the outset (immanence), others that this soul is influenced from without and fashioned as an instrument for a will that exists outside us (transcendence), which leads the destinies of peoples and individuals from above, to a conscious goal which is only known in its

184

Selected Essays

entirety to this leader. The present author would subscribe to this second view, since he has found it confirmed by his excursions through world history. If, for example, we consider the advent of Christianity and its entry into western civilisation, this world historical event appears as premeditated, or a carefully planned campaign, which has been drawn up beforehand, and carried out according to all the rules of tactics and strategy. So far as Christianity's fundamental idea, 'atonement', is concerned, this was, as we have seen, not new, even where vicarious atonement or suffering for others is concerned. India knew both asceticism and sacrifice, Israel propitiatory sacrifice and in China, when the country suffered great disasters, which were attributed to the sins of all the people, the emperor confessed and did penance for the people as a whole. Codrus, the last king of Athens, gave his life for the people, and Curtius consecrated himself to death before he sacrificed his life for the Roman state.4 St Augustine, the Church Father, declares, quite openly: 'What one calls Christianity in our days was already to be found of old, and has never ceased to exist since the origin of mankind, right up until the advent of Christ, when Christianity began to be called the true religion, though it had existed in former times . . . Christ's truths do not diverge from the old truths, they are the same, only further developed.' But there is supposed to have been no vital spiritual intercourse between the civilised peoples of the time. The Old Testament, for example, knows nothing of Homer and Greek philosophy, and the Greeks never mention Moses or the prophets, even though they were neighbours, and Alexander was familiar with India. The few places in the Old Testament where the name Javan occurs is thought to refer to the Greeks, but nothing more is known, while Israel and its literature appears to have been unknown, at least to the Greek tragedians. One passage alone, in Aeschylus, is thought to indicate the coming of Christ, and as such it has been used as a prophecy even by Christian authors. As is well known, the following wonderful passage occurs in Prometheus Bound: Prometheus: . . . But for me there is no limit of suffering set till Zeus fall from power. Io: Can Zeus ever fall from power? Prometheus: Then know that this shall be. Io: How? Tell me, if there is no harm to telling. Prometheus: He shall make a marriage that shall hurt him.

'The Mysticism of World History'

185

Io: Is it his wife shall cast him from his throne? Prometheus: She shall bear him a son mightier than his father.5 If we pass over the oracle in which Prometheus explains that this son will be born of Io's line, since Io is a figure from mythology who is later transformed into Isis, the main point nevertheless remains that what Prometheus proclaims is the overthrow of Zeus by a son who is mightier than he is. If we now forget the myths and ask of reality and experience, who overthrew Zeus? Who uprooted him from people's minds and memory? The answer will be Christ, who in fact succeeded Zeus in the consciousness of his people, for while Greek mythology may well describe how Zeus overthrew Cronos, it is silent where Zeus' fate is concerned, and he vanishes into thin air.

11

Now, many people have doubtless asked themselves what is meant by 'gods': who was Zeus, who was Jehovah? Have these gods existed as objective personalities, or are they created by a people's ideas or fantasies? The latter is surely the general opinion nowadays and we are able to see how fantasies can develop into enormous generators from which nations take strength, powers which, having once been conjured up, finally establish themselves in control of, and judgement over, their own creators. If one assumes that 'the gods' once existed — and every people has believed as much for as long as a certain form of religion has prevailed — in what relation did they stand to one another? The Old Testament cites a written source called 'Jehovah's Battles' which intimates that Jehovah was not believed to be the only god, and when the Mosaic Law urges, 'Thou shalt have no other gods before me', there is an oblique hint that 'other' gods do exist. The Greeks recognised several usurpers against Cronos, among whom Zeus was one. A Gnostic text, the Pistis Sophia,6 or way of wisdom, has ventured to touch upon the genealogy of Jehovah, and even to introduce the question of Zeus' identity. In this Pistis, Jehovah is called 'the Father of all the paternities of infinity'. But Jesus' father is 'the Father of the treasure of light'. Jesus himself is 'Aberamento', and Zeus is called 'the little Zeboath, the good', and was the fifth archon. The five archons ruled over 360 archons, who reigned over 1,800 archons in every ^Eon. Even if we are unable to elicit any meaning from these words, we nevertheless find that thinkers have treated these creations of the imagination as

186

Selected Essays

individual beings, which in a way, of course, they might well be since for them that is precisely what they had been. And when Zeus was forced to give way to Christ, this was a battle of souls, a violent war of extermination against ideas that had finally to come out into the open. In the century before Christ Europe possessed a single culture, the Greek, for that of Rome was in the main a copy, a translation or echo. But 400 years earlier, poets and thinkers had already begun to doubt in the gods, and especially in his tragedies Euripides rebelled against them as depraved oppressors whom it was unworthy to serve. He even permits one of his heroes to say that men are better than the gods. Socrates took poison on this account, and with that the decline of Olympus begins. But Greece was not suited to the role of missionary, for as a nation it was also depraved. Thus, its culture was laid fallow while the Romans accomplished their task of converting Europe to Christianity. The Romans occupied Greece but they also sacked it. Mithridates and Sulla ravaged and destroyed the temples.7 And when they grew tired, the mysterious pirates, of whose origin nothing is known, continued the great work of destruction. They plundered the largest temples of their treasures, altars and consecrated gifts. Then the oracle fell silent, the tragedies ceased to be performed, and farces, bullfights and gladiatorial games were put on in the amphitheatres. Eventually, Caesar cleared a way through Gaul, Germany and Britain, where the spadework was accomplished for the future culture of the west, which is a Germanic and Christian graft upon the Graeco-Roman wild shoot. But the period around Christ's birth is also characterised by important movements, both of nations and in spiritual life. India was invaded by Scythians, who killed all the native princes. The land was subsequently liberated in order to embark upon a new period called the Saka era. This movement seemed to give a push to the east, for with the birth of Christ Buddhism penetrated into China. Although it is true that Christianity did not come, the mild Buddha and his doctrine of atonement and asceticism arrived instead. The strange thing is that the same year in which Christ was born, the young Hiao Ping Ti came to power. In the Annals he is called 'the humble and peaceful', and he was soon poisoned. During the rule of his successor, Wang Mang, a comet was seen (AD 16), and the people of the west rose up in revolt. His son, Ming Ti, dreamt of a gold-coloured man whose head and throat shone. He enquired of his ministers who responded: 'In the west there is a genie or supernatural being whose name is Fo.' This was Buddha, who had died 500 years earlier, and whose teachings were now

c

The Mysticism of World History'

187

adopted by the emperor. Thus, both China and the west received their Messiahs at the same time. But according to some people, the idea of a Messiah is to be found in Kung-Tse, who writes that the 'holiest man' was to be sought in the west. Now, Buddha died in 550 BC and Kung-Tse in 551, but since both dates are uncertain, the Chinese prophet may very well have known of the existence of the great Indian founder of a religion. A Messiah is also announced in the Zend-Avesta.8 Called Sosiosch, the saviour and redeemer, he will awaken the dead. The Veda, too, proclaims its Krishna who will be born of a virgin in Kali-juga, the present epoch, and the world will be saved by a god who becomes a man. In any case, the spirit of Christianity existed in India when Christ was born, and we have recently heard this confirmed on the European stage in the drama The Little Clay Cart, which dates from the year of Christ's birth.9 At the end of the eighth act, the mendicant friar says, 'Tame your hand, govern your mouth, curb your mind, and do not trouble yourself about the lustre of royal power, for your kingdom is not of this world.' Or in another passage, 'Everything in this world is only appearance; accumulate good deeds. What kind of tomfoolery is it to go with shaved heads! Your mind, your heart, should be scraped and new born. If the mind is pure, the head will be, too!' What ought one to believe of these coincidences, which regularly appear on every major historical occasion? Is the power of thought so enormous that it defies time and space and immediately transmits itself, to set kindred spirits in comparable movement, even at a distance? Or is the world soul the sum of all souls, and does mankind comprise only a single being which responds in all its parts when a movement occurs in any one of them? Or does the conscious world will stand above everything, ordering and controlling? The latter seems most probable when one observes a well-ordered campaign like the christianisation of Europe, where every troop movement seems to have been decided at headquarters, and the field commanders carry out their orders without knowing the overall aim. The heathen Caesar believes he is Romanising northern Europe when he is in fact baptising it for Christ. The migratory hordes move from east to west without knowing why, and lay waste the decayed cultures of Rome and Greece in the belief that they are conquering nations and amassing treasure. The most inexplicable event of all, however, is the appearance of the Huns, for none of today's scholars can explain where they came from, and the Huns themselves knew nothing about their origin, but invented a story that they were born 'of witches in the deserts'. Only Attila knew his mission as 'the scourge of God'.

188

Selected Essays

The great purpose of these migrations was doubtless also to give rise to healthier progeny, for every conquest was naturally followed by an irresistible interbreeding with races that had ceased to be governed by sound instincts in their propagation. And after 800 years of interbreeding with Germanic seed one can hardly speak of Romans and Greeks other than as an historical notion, since the Germans inherited the imperial throne in Rome. At least, along with the fair Messiah a new regime enters the government of the world, and the blond man's chosen people become the blond Teutons. The world is gladdened by the birth of the child, and every people received christening gifts. The Germans received lands and kingdoms, the Scandinavians iron, runes and wiser gods, India the Vasantasena, China the spirit of Christianity and distant, unknown Zipangu, 10 which is now called Japan, the cultivation of rice and ships (so say the laconic annals!). The highly knowledgeable sinologist, M. G. Pauthier,11 who has discovered the regulated movement of mankind's destiny particularly in the history of China, has made the following remarkable observation in the course of a discussion of Chinese philosophy: 'Mencius was born in the fourth century before Christ and was active in the period when Socrates, Xenophon and Aristotle were teaching in Greece, just as Lao-Tzu and Confucius flourished at the same time as Thales and Pythagoras. This contemporaneousness of great men who were to enlighten the world leads one to reflect on the existence of secret links, unknown means of communication between the most widely separated peoples, or else one must suppose that — just as they are governed by the same sun — all these peoples are ruled by the same intelligence.' in

The next great event of world importance following Christianity and the great migrations is probably the appearance of Muhammad. That he, like Attila, was a man of providence the Christians had no doubt. Christianity was in fact so degenerate that it was worse than heathendom. The bishops of the various Churches excommunicated one another after having spent 200 years quarrelling over the divinity of Christ and the place of the Holy Ghost in his genealogy, and even the original document, of the Apostolic Creed (Symbolurri), was adulterated (and remains so today, when every Christian denomination has a different version). The worship of images had developed to such an extent that the heathens believed that Christians worshipped idols.

'The Mysticism of World History'

189

Then Muhammad, the Arab, came and sounded his war cry: 'there is only one God!' This antichrist, who nevertheless loved and worshipped Christ, assumed Israel's mantle and raised the banner of monotheism again, thereby reviving the oppressed Israel, which had suffered under the Synods and the Church Councils from the half-concealed polytheism of the Trinity. It was a terrible moment for Christians when they saw themselves abandoned by their God, and many probably asked themselves if they had lived believing in a chimera. Muhammad in fact rooted out Christianity in Palestine and Asia Minor, the Apostle's native lands, and in Egypt, Persia, Babylon and Arabia, which had only accepted Christian missionaries with reluctance, the masses defected and embraced Islam. The Lord of Hosts appeared to stand on the side of the Muhammadans against the Christian God and his only begotten son! What was one to believe? What could one not believe? Neither Attila nor Alaric had founded a religion or created a culture but Muhammad did both and more, for his pupils possessed learning and scientific knowledge that had not existed since the time of Aristotle and Pliny. The age of Christianity appeared to be over and Rome trembled. Then, to speak in the style of the Old Testament, the Lord aroused a man in Rome itself who became a mighty bulwark against the christianised heathens, and it was Gregory the Great.12 The way in which the bishop in Rome had come to worldly power was very simple and logical, and in no way depended on roguery. When, for some obscure reason, the emperors moved to Byzantium, Italy and Rome were governed quite loosely by the exarch in Ravenna. When the Goths and Huns threatened Rome, the Romans requested the assistance of Byzantium in vain. Abandoned in their need, they had to defend themselves, and discovered competent generals in their popes. In gratitude they placed power in their hands, and found themselves well off. Later, 100 years later, in fact, when the Longobards invaded Italy, the Pope, Stephen III, asked Constantin Copronymos13 for help. When the latter refused, the Pope turned to the French king, Pepin,14 who defeated the Longobards and appointed the Pope governor of the conquered provinces. The older Caesars had called themselves Pontifex MaximusP but although it would have been easy enough to do this, the Christian Pontifex did not make himself a Caesar. Instead, he bestowed the Imperial crown on the lords of this world, from Charlemagne right up until the present. If the popes retained power over the city of Rome and its surroundings, this was a gift of the people to the defender and restorer of the eternal city after the

190

Selected Essays

devastations of the Caesars and the barbarians. In general, one ought not to be animated by world events, least of all by those which took place long ago, and if we still lament the great worldly power that the popes once held, even though it was largely of a spiritual kind, we can now console ourselves, since it has fallen away as unnecessary. Nevertheless, Gregory the Great was a worthy contemporary of Muhammad, whose triumphs he did not, however, live to see. He carried out Muhammad's work before Muhammad. He rose up against the paganism in the Christian worship of idols; he forbade the reading of pagan authors (he particularly detested Livy, and with good reason); and he is said by some to have burnt the Palatine library, although as usual others have denied this. Instead of casting glances to the east, he sought support in the west, in Gaul, the future France, where Roman culture and Christianity will subsequently give birth to a European culture, the first in Europe. But he also looked to the north, for he converted England. Does it not appear as if the 'Conscious Will' in history was as prepared to make use of its friend Muhammad, as of Gregory, in order to carry out an intention that is beyond man's comprehension? And that the same will set up targets for both of them? Italy, Gaul, Britain and Germany were protected from Muhammad's assault, but Spain was relinquished, albeit 100 years later. The preparatory work was performed in Muhammad's time, however, for the Visigoth, Leovigild,16 destroyed the power of the Suevi in Galicia, Reccared I merged Goths and Romans, and the Aryan Goths became Catholics. It is rather as if a statesman sat and planned the political events of the future a century in advance. During the same period in Greece the national situation is also prepared for the arrival of Islam with the arrival of new semi-savages in the country. These are the Slavs, who arrive eight years after Muhammad's birth. Great events occur in the east. Islam achieved what Christianity had not been capable of, namely the rooting out of pagan idolatry among the Arabs, Persians and their neighbours. Muhammad was what would nowadays be termed a syncretist and Unitarian. In the Koran he achieves a compromise between Judaism, Christianity and eastern monotheism, and he therefore succeeded in creating a kingdom so great that Alexander could not have conceived of a greater. But while the Arabs were founding the Caliphate, another empire with fresh powers was already being planned for the future, far away in the east, by another untapped nation that would, in the fullness of time, succeed the somewhat worn-out Bedouin. This is the Turks, who can be espied upon the horizon, where the sun rises. When these semi-savages emerge from

'The Mysticism of World History'

191

their dark hiding-places at Altai, around the time of Muhammad, they initially come into contact with the Chinese. At this time China experienced a renaissance under one of its greatest emperors, T'ai-tsung [j/c].17 A vague fear of some pressure in the west aroused the nation, and the rather downat-heel common-sense religion derived from Confucius was revived. The canonical books were once again collected and revised, the universities and schools were restored; in short, people were arming themselves against Islam without knowing it, and it would appear that the latter was not permitted to enter China, only India. During the same period, China also comes into contact with the west. Its chronicles contain what is possibly the first mention of the Christian religion, which is found worthy of admiration, but superfluous, 'since all religions are good'. Ambassadors from Byzantium are received in China, which hears of the great triumphs of the Arabs. The Turks also send emissaries after they have attempted to force a way eastwards, where they are checked, and they later turn about slowly towards the west, where they will finally come to rest, maintaining the balance of Asia against Europe. Just as Greece planted an offshoot in the Roman empire, China will now graft a branch on to healthy wild stock — Japan! Here, Chinese culture, writing and Buddhism are introduced during Muhammad's life-time, evidently as a buttress against the pressure from Islam. It is exactly like an enormous game of chess played by a single player who moves both black and white, is completely impartial, takes when he ought to, makes plans for both sides, is for himself and against himself, thinks everything out in advance and has only one aim: to maintain balance and justice, while ending the match in a draw! Another milestone in history is the year AD IOOO. The Christian part of mankind also had a presentiment that something new and important would take place, for during the whole of the previous century people had awaited the end of the world and the arrival of the millennium (chiliasm). This fear of course increased the nearer the appointed day approached. People gave away their possessions, ceased to work and resorted to penance and prayer. The emperor himself became apprehensive, undertaking a pilgrimage to Adelbert's grave in Gnesen and the opening of Charlemagne's grave in Aachen, where he removed the gold cross. Then the legendary emperor awoke and it was as if his spirit resumed its arrested activity. With the conversion of Russia under Vladimir18 an immense new kingdom was incorporated into Christianity And in almost the same year Europe stretched itself, and expanded to the north, where, as a Christian, the Swedish king established relations with Rome. Hungary, the outpost

192

Selected Essays

against Islam, received an apostolic crown from Pope Sylvester II. France was already civilised and the Capets transformed Lutetia into Paris; Germany acquired the imperial crown and the German Otto III settled in Rome. 19 The Margravate called Austria went into training for the great role it would subsequently play. The Scandinavians became Europeans and settled in France, Spain and Italy, after having founded the kingdom of Russia. Iceland embraced Christianity and planted the cross on the other side of the Atlantic, in America, though here the 'conscious will' seems to have changed its mind! More preparations were necessary before America could be discovered in earnest, or perhaps the outlet to the west was not yet required, and in advance of the new Israel's entry upon the scene, Leif Eriksson20 was only to glimpse the new land of Canaan, confirm its existence and then bury the secret until the chosen man appeared. Meanwhile, in the Far East, it appears that even without the chiliasm of the Book of Revelation, people had been filled with unease towards the end of the century, for the emperor Shen-tsung, warned by a comet, settled matters with his conscience precisely as the Emperor Otto had done. He published an edict, implored people to tell him his faults, subjected himself to a penance, freed 3,000 prisoners and lowered taxes. In India Mahmud 21 raged against the prevailing idolatry. The Turks unite under Seljuks (around the year 1000) and have already reached Bokhara, embracing Islam and biding their time while the Caliphate collapses. The Jews are happy under the Arabs (Moses was for a time a Bedouin in the home of his father-in-law, the Arab Jethrod); they thrive in Palestine but decline in Babylonia. Persecuted in Byzantium and flourishing in France, they are to be found in Bohemia, Saxony, Swabia, Franconia and Vienna. On the other side of the globe, something remarkable happened in Peru. For in AD IOOO a stranger named Mano Capac appeared. He knew nothing about his origins, but was received as a saviour. He founded the kingdom of the Incas and a dynasty that ruled for 500 years over an educated and contented people that perished when Spain was given the task of laying fallow their land for the needs of future centuries, and to unknown ends. IV

What the Romans were able to accomplish by means of the Punic wars against a Carthage that embodied the threat of Asia, the newly fashioned Europe could not achieve against the Caliphs, who had taken the shores of

'The Mysticism of World History'

193

the Mediterranean in the east, south and west, and surrounded the new Roman Empire with a whole series of Carthages. The Crusades had helped form a closer acquaintance with these new Carthaginians, who were not pagans, and yet not Christians either. The Arabs, that paradoxical people, who were nevertheless fired by the spirit of Christendom, possessed superior learning, could display all the virtues of chivalry, courage, magnanimity, generosity, and compassion, which were finely displayed in the character of Saladin, and taught the Europeans that their faith was not the only one. And when the Christians saw that the Lord of Hosts did not side with his first-born, but shared his favours equally, a faint scepticism began to emerge in the minds of the westerners. An age of reflection, which goes under the names of humanism and Renaissance, commenced, and people began to read the ancient pagan authors in whom they discovered many things worthy of consideration. Thus, after one thousand years of penitence, with their gaze upon heaven, men turned their eyes to the earth and resumed their concern with ordinary everyday life. But in many the newly awakened doubts abolished every trace of faith. In the fifteenth century the papal power, which reached its height under Innocent III, who turned the tide of the Crusades against his fellow Christian Albigensians, began to revert to a shabby paganism. Sixtus IV (1471-84) was a libertine, who was also given to nepotism and simony. Innocent VIII laboured on behalf of his seven illegitimate children, and was thus given the name 'Father of the Fatherland'. Alexander VI, a Borgia,22 had five children with Rosa Vanozza, among them those jewels Cesare and Lucrezia, with whom he lived in an excess of intimacy. The great drinker and warrior Julius II was considered an atheist. Leo X, a freethinker, collected and published the pagan poets, and also sold indulgences. Under these two, Raphael and Michelangelo, who were at least as good pagans as Christians, both flourished. Extremes are best cured by extremes, and this lack of restraint in the spirit of the time seems to have brought about some good: uncritical belief was shattered, thought grew bold and the will took flight. New and great things would come in Europe, but first the descendants of old races had to be swept away. The Crusades had certainly helped thin them out, but this was more thoroughly done by the Hundred Years War between France and England, and in England's civil War of the Roses. Thus, France was liberated from 9,000 superfluous noblemen, counts, princes and dukes at the one battle of Agincourt. And England is said to have been relieved of one million game-cocks, mostly noblemen, including more than eighty princes and other relatives of the Plantagenets, during the 30-year-long War of the Roses. This excess of excellencies who were no

194

Selected Essays

longer required for the purpose of conquest now that the national boundaries had by and large been regulated were thus despatched, and the useful, peaceful and public-spirited bourgeoisie was able to step forward. Thus, the different states flourished, the population increased and people began to feel at home in their own Europe. The old Alexandrian ideas of conquering Asia were abandoned once it was seen that the Lord Zebaoth did not even wish to defend the holy sepulchre for his new chosen people, which the Christians believed themselves to be. Precisely a chosen people, for 'without Christ there is no salvation' was the word, the idea probably being taken from the Old Testament. Christianity, which had fled to Byzantium during the era of the Germanic invasions, had degenerated there into a theology. Every sin flourished, but the Lord wanted to spare this Sodom until Rome reached maturity. To be sure, the Arabs had attempted to conquer Byzantium, but they were not permitted to. When the forces of Islam had taken Sicily for a second time, and were intending to attack Rome under Otto II, the Byzantine emperor, Basil II,23 was unchristian enough to aid the Muslims, although unsuccessfully. Nevertheless, the Alexandrian idea had emerged quite unexpectedly in another part of the world. Between Siberia and China, where a secret self-generation of peoples seems to have taken place, in a distant region with the vague name of Tartary, a mighty man of providence was born, known to us as Genghis Khan. Inspired by a prophet, he decided to conquer the world. He was a strict monotheist but did not adhere to any creed or faith and so bound himself neither to Islam not Buddhism. He therefore permitted all kinds of religion to flourish about him. Anyway, he conquered China, which was no small thing, and since he had only a single goal, namely the conquest of the world, he intended to murder all China's farmers and peasants as useless, since they were not fit to be warriors and the cultivated land could best be used for pasture and consequently did not need to be tilled. This illustrates the man's grandiose conception of his task. What the Crusaders had not achieved in the east, he accomplished both in the east and west. His kingdom stretched from China all the way to Poland, and from India to Siberia. He was an uprooter and an incendiary, and he destroyed the empire of the Caliphs in Baghdad and paved the way for the Turks. Europe was now pushed westwards, and the Mongols, who controlled Russia, pressed ever onwards. At that moment the Turks suddenly captured the capital of the eastern empire, Byzantium. Europe awaited its fall and no longer looked to the east, for now they would be destroyed or forced westwards, into the ocean, to drown as in a new flood. Then a new Noah appeared and begged together an ark

'The Mysticism of World History'

195

which would save the Europeans. This was Columbus, on the caravel Santa Maria. Muhammad II, who captured Byzantium (1453), struck fear into the whole of the Christian world, but he was not really so dangerous. He did not demolish Constantine's cathedral, Sophia, but cleansed it of images, exactly as Calvin was to do, and he gave the Christians religious freedom — yes, he helped them to choose a patriarch. He was a profoundly educated man, spoke Greek and Latin, and is said to have read Curtius on Alexander.24 But he was to go no further than here, to Constantinople, for when his troops stepped ashore in Italy, he died. But the previous year, the Russians under Ivan I25 had driven out the Mongols. Russia consequently establishes itself, and the Mongols disappear from world history as superfluous. Ivan marries the niece of the last Byzantine emperor, however, and the Russian kingdom thus obtains the impress and tradition of Rome, the memory of which is still preserved in the Russian coat of arms, which is the Byzantine double-headed eagle. Russia had already been converted to the Greek Orthodox Church, and it now became an offshoot of East—Rome, which died, but not without issue. Of course, Greece immediately fell to the Turks, along with Byzantium. The Parthenon became a mosque and Hellas, or at least Athens, a gelding, subject to the harem and governed by a black eunuch. That is what happened to a people which worshipped beauty and did not wish to propagate itself! The Turkish presence in Europe was a fact and people soon grew accustomed to take him as he was. They thought as Gregory the Great spoke, or wrote, to the murderer and adventurer Phocas,26 when he ascended the throne of Byzantium: 'Honour be to God in the highest: it is He who changes the times and permits power to pass from one to another.' For immediately afterwards we see Pope Julius II mobilise a Turkish force to assist him against France,27 and not long after that Francis I concludes an alliance with the Ottomans!28 Constantinople had to be captured before America could be discovered, but something else had also to occur. We know that Columbus was forced to wait a long time for his ship, and that this was blamed on the war against the Arabs, who still held Granada. Granada fell — and Columbus got his ship! When the Turks entered from the east, the Arabs, like the Mongols, had to leave the west. But the Mongols, who had fulfilled their task in Russia, were now despatched eastwards to found the kingdom of the Great Mogul in India. This mission was carried out by a descendant of Genghis Khan. He was called Babur29 and was born in the same year that Louis XI

196

Selected Essays

died, the year Luther and Raphael were born. He has left behind some memoirs in which, among other things, he describes his arrival in Hindustan, which occurred at approximately the same time as Balboa's discovery of the Pacific and Cortes' conquest of Mexico: CI had never seen Hindustan before, nor any other so southern land. It was a new world!' The East Indies, which Columbus believed he was seeking when he found the West Indies, can thus be said to have been discovered. Columbus died without knowing what he had done, another example of how men do not know what they are doing when they are sent with sealed orders on the missions of the 'conscious will'. In the same move as the great discoveries were made in the west, the Portuguese settled in China, in Ningpo and Macao, and the old walled-in kingdom was literally shaken to its foundations when an earthquake carried off half a million people, probably of the same kind as the children of Korah. However, 'the cargo was trimmed', the old earth had been given new centres of gravity apportioned according to the needs of the law of equilibrium, and the news of the antipodes was spread around the world with undreamt of speed by the newly invented printing presses. The new land, a new world which had lain in reserve for future needs, had no conception of its purpose, the real nature of which has only been revealed in our own times: to gather together and blend all peoples, to tolerate all religions and languages in a single nation, all kinds of manners and customs and where all remember the words of the Apostle: 'Ye are bought with a price; be not ye the servants of men.' And the Spaniards, who believed that the purpose of the new land was to lay gold, saw themselves, after a brief period of prosperity, driven out of their possessions, until finally, two years ago, they lost Cuba, Columbus' first conquest.30 All in all the current of civilisation moved westwards and to the east, but also northwards, as far up as the polar circle. But always north of the equator. 'And the strong went out and desired to go forth over the earth. And He said: Go and travel over the earth. And He called me and spoke to me, and said: "See, they who go to the land in the north, they shall spread my spirit over the land in the north."' Why does 'the spirit of the Lord dwell in the lands of the north', or all lands in the northern half of the globe? Why are prophets, heroes and lawmakers not born in the southern half, why did the tree of knowledge not grow beneath the equator and south of the meridian? Perhaps there is a true north and south, although the existence of this

'The Mysticism of World History'

197

higher dimension has been denied today. One thing is certain, there is a Zenith, just as there is a Nadir!

The history of Europe is still being played out on the peninsulas of the Mediterranean, but it has moved westwards from those of Greece and Italy to Spain. The population there was already as mixed as in a little America. Celts, Iberians and Basques had been crossed with Phoenicians. Then Greeks and Romans had gone across, before the Goths, Suevi and Alans settled there. And after they had done their stint, they were followed by the Arabs and Jews, who had time to accomplish a great deal. It had now befallen this well-prepared nation to inherit the imperial Roman throne for a period. With Charles V,31 Spain becomes a world state of terrible power. Northern Europe trembles when the Emperor and the Pope are in accord. The Emperor was a welsch,32 that is, a Roman who could hardly speak German, in short a foreigner, and he had received the imperial crown on the recommendation of the Saxons. This was forgotten neither by Frederick the Wise nor his Saxons, and it is from Saxony that the liberation of northern Europe comes. We recall what problems Charlemagne had with these Saxons, a race of mountaineers that he believed he had subdued. Having ancestors who had conquered England, their final submission was for the sake of appearances, and with the end of the Carolingians, the Saxon emperor received the Roman diadem. Tradition also maintains that the newly founded French royal family, the Capets, stemmed from the Saxon, Witekind.* It is, however, from Saxony that the great liberation of the northern lands begins, but on a pretext, and certainly without the man who started it being aware of the political mission that he was carrying out. The occasion of the fall of Roman power, both spiritual and temporal, was a doctor of theology in Wittenberg who wanted to reform the articles of faith, and who died believing that he had done so. Such was Luther's task. Just as the whole art of chemical separation can be traced back to two basic procedures, to dissolve and to precipitate, so in the whole progress of As usual there are many views about this. The most recent inclines to Witekind. Previously, Hugh Capet33 was derived from Clovis, Pepin of Heristal, the Welfs, Bavarian dukes, and Charlemagne. Dante makes Hugh Capet the son of a Paris butcher. On the distaff side Hugh was a true Saxon, for his mother, Hadwida, was Henry the Fowler's daughter. And when Louis Capet (Louis XVI) was beheaded, it concerned the head of a Saxon, for Louis's mother was Maria Josepha of Saxony, the daughter of Frederick August II.

198

Selected Essays

peoples two courses of action prevail, namely to divide and to unify. The task of the divider is probably the most difficult and thankless, but at the same time the most effective. The chemist is well aware how difficult it is to obtain a clear solution, while precipitation most frequently takes place on its own. Luther was a man of discord who began with denial and ended with affirmation, and it is quite insufferable to follow him in all his self-contradictions. He maintained on every occasion that his life's task was to combat papism, and held to this to the end. But both Julius II and Leo X were humanists and men of the Renaissance, who represented the emancipating tendency of the time, and Luther therefore finds himself in conflict with its spirit at the very moment that he is borne up by its undercurrent. He is quite like Julian the Apostate who was brought up in a monastery and grew tired of Christianity, but instead of trying to seek out what lay ahead of him he looked behind and rediscovered Zeus, with all his sins and crimes. Luther returned to the Christianity of the Apostles, which was now in the process of being humanised, and he was more orthodox than the popes and Church Councils. One has only to think of him at the defence of his thesis on the Holy Sacrament, when he writes on the table in chalk, 'This is my body and my blood.' 'This is!', it is a literal faith, without import, without interpretation, without explanation, it is blind faith, submission, without appeal. Luther has been called a Ghibelline, imperially minded in contrast to the papal Guelphs, and in that respect he is related to Dante. But in place of the Pope he installed the infallibility of the Bible, which was a greater affliction since that book can be used to prove everything and nothing. From the epistles of the New Testament, Luther could prove against the Catholics (and this was his principal dogma) that faith was the only way to righteousness, while the Catholics could prove from the same letter that faith without deeds was death. And with the Bible Luther's pupil, Karlstadt,34 could defend his reformatory radicalism, when he followed Christ's example and placed bread and wine in the hands of the faithful, when he encouraged the students to feed themselves by physical labour like the Apostles and when he repudiated the baptism of children or defended the peasants' war. John of Leyden35 drew support from the Old Testament when he established a socialist Zion in Minister and went around among his ten wives with a gold crown on his head, like a lesser King Solomon. It was through such literal applications of his teachings that Luther was gripped by those celebrated 'temptations of the devil', which were in all probability nothing but doubt as to the truth of his teachings. But Luther has even been deprived of the honour of being the first to disseminate the

'The Mysticism of World History

199

Bible, since it has emerged that seventeen German editions appeared before Luther's, in both High and Low German. If Luther's mission was the death of the papacy one can hardly say he was successful since the earth still contains 275 million papists, of whom 40 million unconverted ones live in Germany and Austria. He certainly loosened a number of ties, and when he cast the first of his anathemas against the horribly abused practice of selling indulgences, he received the approval of the Pope. However, he also tied others still tighter, and in his doctrine of a material hell he was a complete obscurantist. No Renaissance eye for other, non-Christian, religions is apparent where Luther is concerned. On the contrary, he magnifies his church into the only true one, when he states, in the Augsburg Confession: 'The promise of salvation does not apply to those who are outside Christ's church', or when he writes in his catechism, 'he who stands outside Christendom, whether he be heathen, Turk, Jew, false Christian or hypocrite, remains eternally under wrath and damnation, even if he believes in a single and true God'. A man of Providence, a common soldier who proceeds blindly without knowing the commander's intentions, a great instrument, a token of contradictions and a rock of offence, a man full of pride and humility, of clear thoughts and unclear purposes, this was Luther. A warrior of the spirit who hated war and armed violence, he did not live to see the religious wars, but they broke out the year he died, in 1546. At the outset it was called the Schmalkaldic War36 and immediately showed its political nature when Maurice of Saxony united with the false Catholic, Henri II of France, the husband of Catherine de' Medici and the persecutor of the Huguenots. This war in Germany only ended 100 years later, by which time the confusion was so great that it was hardly possible to distinguish friend from foe, or religion from politics. For the Peace of Westphalia was first brought about by the intervention of Catholic France on the side of the German Protestants, just as Leipzig—Breitenfeld could only hasten the undertaking with the assistance of French money and the alliance between Gustavus Adolphus and Cardinal Richelieu (through the Treaty of Berwald, in 1631), after Richelieu had first had time to subdue his own Protestants at home. These paradoxical combinations, Maurice of Saxony, Catherine de' Medici, Gustavus Adolphus and Richelieu, belong to history's forever recurring antinomies, which finally dissolve into a regular logic.37 Perhaps its limitations lead mankind to establish false oppositions such as Catholic and Protestant, which are not purely contradictory even if they appear to be so? Perhaps the forces of history operate like the laws of thought, through thesis and antithesis forward to synthesis, which is creation. Passive and

200

Selected Essays

spontaneously generating water is, of course, produced synthetically by the active male acid and the receptive female hydrogen. It is a strange spectacle to see the Christians in Europe undertake crusades against each other, and to continue to do so for ioo years. Christianity, based on the divinity of Christ, had now been an accepted fact for 1,500 years, and so, when this form of religion had created a European culture and civilised savages, a discussion started concerning the basis of its doctrines. At the beginning of the new period many probably believed that Christianity would break up like the other ancient religions and be succeeded by a general humanism with no distinct form or articles of faith. But when religion loosened its grip, it emerged that the life of the different states hung upon this homogeneity in ways of thinking, and religion was shown to stand in the closest of relationships with politics. Thus, when the French Huguenots sought to defend their faith, they formed small defensive groups which ,came into conflict with the state. Francis I, who sought an alliance with both Luther and Melanchthon,38 and whose sister was a Protestant, found himself compelled to act against the troublemakers, who nevertheless had his sympathy. These Protestants subsequently committed the crime of seeking the assistance of their own country's enemies, in the first instance from Elizabeth I of England, to whom they handed over the town of Le Havre. If one considers how obnoxious calling back the English might appear, after it had taken 100 years of struggle to drive them out, one sees how St Bartholomew's Night could occur. If one adds to this intervention from the German side, when Coligny's39 brother, Andelot, enlisted German troops and Johan Kasimir of the Palatine was called upon to send help, the Huguenot wars appear an abomination, and the right of the state to maintain its integrity entirely justified. How little the articles of faith played in all this can be seen by Henri IV's behaviour. He did not believe in the dogma of either side but gave his own Protestants the freedom to practise their religion and join the German Protestant union against the House of Habsburg, although the latter represented the Catholic, or Roman, interest. Rulers who have dreamt of world domination have always thought of the latter in terms of uniformity, governed by a single idea, but in his wellknown 'plans' for a united Europe Henri IV (Sully?)40 demonstrates another conception. He dreamt of an edifice held together by conflicting centres of power. 'All the kingdoms of Europe, divided into fifteen equal powers, should form a union of states which on the basis of complete equality united three Christian religious communities, the Catholics, Lutherans and the Reformed, together with three forms of government, the hereditary monarchy, elected monarchy and republic. The two small republics

'The Mysticism of World History'

201

Holland and Switzerland would be abolished, as would Venice, the Papal See and Savoy. However, the Empire would no longer be the inheritance of the House of Austria, and Spain would be restricted to its former boundaries while the Russians (?) and the Turks would once again be driven out of Europe. A parliament with representatives from all the states would decide their internal disputes and ensure the continuation of peace between all members of this great Christian republic' The idea is a great one, of course, well worthy of a Renaissance man, and it was partly adopted by Richelieu. When the latter came to power, he entered into an alliance with England and Holland in spite of their Protestantism, and he also declared war upon the Pope, in spite of his Catholicism. And when the religious—political conflict of the Thirty Years War broke out, he was at once prepared to support the Protestants in Germany, though not before crushing the little Huguenot republic of La Rochelle, which constituted a state within the state. VI

The whole of northern Europe was thoroughly tired of Rome, no longer had need of it and wished to emancipate itself. That only Spaniards and South Germans should occupy the imperial throne in a distant country which had seen its best days and really belonged to paganism and antiquity, its christianisation notwithstanding, was found to be unacceptable. And when the Emperor began to reach out to absorb Poland, the heritage of the Vasas, when Spaniards, Italians and South Germans stood on the shores of the Baltic, then the Swedes under Gustavus Adolphus took the field, fully conscious that it was a question of north against south, Teutons against Romans. There has been a desire to exalt Gustavus Adolphus by making him solely a missionary, but this is to diminish his stature. He was a great statesman and we ought to remember his wide-ranging plans of 1623, when with the help of the Dutch he wanted to invade Silesia by way of Poland and from there march directly upon Vienna, or when he later intended to assemble all those opposed to the Habsburgs and do what Henri IV had planned to do. These political plans do not preclude the idea of free religious observance between fellow-believers, and the two aims are easily combined. But we must not regard the Protestants in Germany as spotless martyrs and entirely without guilt. We need only recall their illegal breaking of the reservatum ecclesiasticum whereby, contrary to the agreement in Augsburg in 1555, they

202

Selected Essays

appropriated Catholic church property . And with the greater tolerance of the later emperors Catholicism was not so bad. Indeed, Ferdinand I41 had been so tolerant that Pope Paul IV42 did not want to recognise him as a true believer. Maximilian II,43 who was brought up by a pupil of Luther and Melanchthon, had entertained the idea of going over to Protestantism, but was prevented by the quarrels between the Calvinists and Lutherans over the admission of apostates, and by his dislike of the destructive internal feuds of these two sects. Besides, when the great powers, England, France and Holland, were reformist or Catholic, a Lutheran Emperor would not have advanced unification. It would only have increased the confusion. It is curious that during its first hundred years the new period was preoccupied by petty doctrinal disputes, religious discussions and exchanges of opinion. It is probable that once someone has an idea or opinion, it is, as it were, assimilated in his person, and becomes an item of property, which first requires defining and then needs to go on to the attack in order to increase its domain, as with any other kind of property. To relinquish one's belief or opinion for another's is rather like being defeated and becoming someone else's subject, and no one wants that. Hence intolerance, which is nothing but the self-defence of the personality and the individual's striving to grow and expand by planting the seed of his thought in another man's life cycle, to be present and in control in the realm of the spirit. And so a great deal of natural struggle and pressure arises, and these conflicts on a higher spiritual plane also become more violent than quarrels over mere earthly possessions. Luther probably enjoyed a more intense sense of power when he defeated an opponent in a public dispute than Tilly44 when he had won a battle. However, while the Christians quarrelled and fought one another, the Turkish unbeliever occupied Constantinople, Greece and Syria, and one fine day, while all eyes were focused upon Luther, he took Egypt. For a moment people were alarmed and turned to their enemies in friendship, until he advanced again, and once more frightened the disputants into a new truce. But in 1571, following the Battle of Lepanto, the Turkish fleet held sway over the entire Mediterranean, so that the Christians were excluded from their own lake, on whose shores they had seen their history unfold, while to the east, on the mainland, the Turks occupied the Balkan peninsula, threatening Hungary and Vienna. And yet, even then the Europeans were unable to remain at peace but sought help from their hereditary enemy, who had rooted out Christianity in the east and in Africa. This general frenzy against Christendom seemed to extend from Europe

'The Mysticism of World History'

203

as far as the Far East. In China the Christians were persecuted in 1615. In Japan all Christians were suddenly exterminated in 1612 and 1614, when as many as 40,000 are said to have suffered martyrdom. In India the great Akbar45 summoned all Christian missionaries to his presence, to see them, listen to their disputes and make fun of them. But by the Peace of Westphalia46 two ends had been accomplished: Rome, represented by the Emperor and the Pope, had been cut down to size, and freedom of religion had been granted to Lutherans and Calvinists. Moreover, now that the introduction of the Bible had made the Old Testament a canonical or symbolical book, the Jews had to be included as at least half-Christian people, even though Luther had condemned them as heathens whose synagogues he wanted to pull down. Charles V had already given the Jews reichsschutz47 in 1530 and 1541, and in Austria there were ennobled Jews. But with tolerance came, first, forbearance, and then indifference and doubt, for when it became evident that one religion produced just as good citizens as another it was easy to see that one's own religion possessed only relative truth, with a subjective power for every believer commensurate with the power of the latter's faith, which is probably the secret of religion, in any case. Therefore we see the Wars of Religion cease with the first half of the sixteenth century, and during the latter part of this century men's minds are occupied with more mundane matters. It is now that England comes really to the fore for the first time. Henry VIII, a burlesque phenomenon not unlike Luther in his grotesque moments, filled the first part of the century with his own highly eccentric private Reformation. He deposes the Pope throughout England and makes himself pontiff, yet retains Catholicism. That is to say, he had nothing actually against the power of the Pope, if only it was in the right hands, and nothing against Catholicism, if only it was interpreted to his advantage. This was a curious Reformation, but it nevertheless marked the start of one, for Britain broke free from Rome, and began to grow with its own roots. One hundred years later the fruits appear. For, one year after the Peace of Westphalia Charles I loses his head, and in 1689, exactly one hundred years before the French Revolution, the Declaration of Rights is promulgated. One can say that this marks the beginning of the era of revolutions, the awakening of the will of the people and the recognition of human rights that would later take their name and form from the ideas of the French Revolution: constitutional principles, parliamentarianism, selfgovernment etc. The man who swore allegiance to this Declaration of Rights and who

204

Selected Essays

founded a new dynasty in England was the governor of the Netherlands, William of Orange, whose ancestors had fought against Spain for Dutch freedom. He thus embodied the groundwork and tradition. He was not so concerned about the throne, which in this country was so often exchanged for the scaffold, and he made no cowardly concessions to his ambition when he sanctioned the declaration which later became the cornerstone of every constitution in Europe. 'The right of parliament to raise taxes, make laws and assemble, the right of citizens to elect their representatives freely, the independence and sanctity of the courts'. It ought to be recognised that this was only a restoration of ancient freedoms from the time of the Magna Carta and the Petition of Rights. By the end of the seventeenth century the entire world has been discovered. Communications were maintained by sea and land; post and transport now existed; and during the Thirty Years War newspapers began to appear. Ideas now had material means of conveyance, and from this time on all people may be considered as living and working together for a common but unknown end. But now the apportioning of the earth between the kingdoms of the old world begins. America is divided according to the latitudes, so that the northern Englishmen take North America and the southern Spaniards confine themselves to the south. The Dutch, pressed by their importunate sea, set off on the billows and are to be found almost everywhere, least of all at home. The small coastal land of Portugal does likewise, and becomes a nation. New worlds were reserved for new peoples and one hears no more of Romans and Greeks as colonists; they had gone to rest. The Jews are without land but dispersed throughout all of them, following a belief in their mission to extend and maintain the faith in the one true God. But they were also to disseminate western science and philosophy as well as appear as masters in the arts of trade and finance. The first half of the eighteenth century is taken up by numerous rearrangements in the contours of the old world. New kingdoms arise and old ones are dissolved, all with the purpose of retaining an equilibrium, and it is with this century that one begins to speak of diplomacy and the balance of power. The great wars of succession which follow one upon another reveal a number of circumstances which were already well known, but whose consequences had not yet been determined. The European royal families had, in defiance of nationality and patriotism, intermarried so that all of them finally found themselves related to one another, and consequently put themselves forward for the succession on every demise. If, for example, we

'The Mysticism of World History'

205

look only at the Franconian and the French royal house, we find that Louis the Stammerer was married to a Spaniard, Charles the Fat to a Scot, Charles the Simple to an Englishwoman, Hugh Capet to an Italian, Henri I to a Russian and Philip I to a Dutch woman. Later on it is Italy, Austria and Spain which provide France with consorts who at least had the merit of introducing foreign languages and manners, even if they were unable to bring the families together. In the eighteenth century all the princes had therefore become cousins and as heirs they fought wars of succession which are typical of thefirsthalf of this century. But even the common people had been interrelated by the enlisted armies, which comprised all peoples. They were truly cosmopolitan, not least because of the frequent changes of nationality that arose from the continual to and fro of conquest. In parts of the north the French were Englishmen one minute and Spaniards the next. Certain of the Dutch had been alternately French, German and Spanish. And what hadn't the Italians been, not to mention the Greeks, who were for the moment Turks! Anyway, the states of Europe were now not even races but abstract ideas, amalgamations of peoples of different religions, different languages, differing customs and traditions, and so long as the sovereigns regarded the lands and people as their private property, disputes over the inheritance would, of course, arise. But altered circumstances and new ideas of natural law and good manners soon brought these to an end. VII

The map of Europe, completed in the north and west, now begins to take shape in the east, where two new states are formed and an old one erased. Russia, which is said to have received its first culture from the Scandinavians, takes its Christianity from Byzantium, its influx of peoples from the Mongols and finally its civilisation from Peter the Great. Thus, Europe obtains a mighty ally against the Turks and a dependable borderguard against the hordes of Asia. One can imagine the lack of judgement that Charles XII revealed in seeking to prevent the rise of Russia, and what an unchristian disposition he betrayed when he entered into an alliance with the Asians in Constantinople against Europe's common friend, Tsar Peter.48 The Swedish warrior king was even more short-sighted when he attempted to retain Poland, which was now historically superfluous and had to fall away like an unused limb. Poland, a provisional country, an improvised territory, had extended itself here and there like a multicellular amoeba, without a centre because it possessed three, Gnesen-Posen,

206

Selected Essays

Warsaw and Cracow. An open land of passage without natural frontiers, always sedentary, never despatching hordes, never conquering, never colonising, it had grown up as a pendant to Austria and become a stronghold of the Holy Roman Empire and of Catholicism. For a long time it was a thorn in the side of the Swedes, who regarded it as part of the House of Vasa, even though the hereditary kingdom ceased with Sigismund II,49 when Poland became an elected monarchy. Speculating in foreign princes — a Swede, a Saxon, a Frenchman — and always occupied with civil war, it first lost its importance with the rise of Prussia, and later fell apart in three segments, precisely as if it had been perforated from the outset in order to be torn into just so many pieces.* Europe had need of a powerful Russia, but not too powerful. Therefore Prussia was required as a counterweight. But Prussia also had another mission: to become the core of a Nordic Germany opposed to the Romanised southern Germany. The Scandinavians had dreamt of this role during the Thirty Years War, but Charles XII's incompetence and political stupidity prevented its realisation. The honour of having given Prussia a start remains, however, with Sweden and Gustavus Adolphus and Charles X. A conglomeration of pieces from Denmark, Sweden, Poland and Austria, Prussia later became Germany, and as culture moved northwards government was transferred from the half-Roman Vienna to the harsh, serious, half-Nordic Berlin. Berlin is not the Prussian capital, nor Brandenburg's, nor Germany's, but it is one of Europe's capital cities, in which all cultures have been intermingled, and where all races soon will be, too. The newly drawn boundaries were ready and people began to devote their attention to a state's inner life. They discovered there was much that was out of date and backward, that the new had to be made and the old remade. The second half of the eighteenth century has the mark of something very light. It was light of heart and mankind appeared to have been given a holiday from school. The austere era of penitence was at an end and the carnival followed upon the past. The teachings of Christianity, with their contempt for this world, began to be taken less seriously, and the sovereign's rod was felt less keenly. The people of Europe had been given a hard upbringing and now entered upon their majority, and the rulers felt obliged to grant their subjects their rights. The fact that the monarchs began the On 4 July 1661, in his speech to the National Assembly, King Johan Kasimir50 had already predicted why, how and by whom Poland would come to be divided. The long-lamented event seems to have come about with a fatality that was generally foreseen, though Charles XII remained unaware of it.

'The Mysticism of World History'

207

process of reform and thereby served the revolution is the most distinctive feature of the period. In their different ways, Frederick II, Joseph II, Catherine II and Gustav III51 did what Dan ton and Mirabeau would do. One in fact saw the Emperor Joseph act more democratically than his people and come to see his reforms founder upon their conservatism. It was a spectacle never before witnessed, this topsy-turvy world, and ought to have taught the more sensible that kings and their subjects were not entirely hostile adversaries. But the sovereigns served high ends without knowing it. Catherine II did not know what she was doing when she supported the publication of the Encyclopaedia,52 and neither did Gustav III when he granted freedom of the press. Louis XIV acted blindly when he supported the American War of Independence and assisted the rebels against their legal ruler. The spirit of the age, the all-pervasive power, penetrated everyone's mind, harmonising all thoughts, and mankind awoke again. In France, where conditions had been worse than elsewhere, the effect was correspondingly serious. But this people, who no longer wished to have a king, found itself with an emperor, and then with kings once more, before ending up a republic. The nineteenth century begins with reaction, a counter-movement against the process just begun. In times of reaction a closing of ranks takes place, in which the vanguard halts to await the rearguard. The impatient then suffer and complain until the forward march begins again. The nineteenth century is probably the greatest of all centuries — the great age of discovery and invention, of constitutions, parliament and social revolution. Life gathers speed, becomes richer and more intense. Peoples move closer to one another. Japan is Europeanised, China opened up, Africa colonised. And the century ends with religious congresses at which people of all confessions talk to one another in concord about insoluble riddles. The peace congress, summoned by a good-willed autocrat, begins slowly and carefully to discuss the question whether or not peace can exist on earth. Long before this the socialist congress had addressed the problem of how to share the bread more evenly among all! From a quick reading of world history one gains the impression of a picaresque novel with glaring surprises and violent jumps, proceeding relentlessly and with a certain lack of feeling for mankind's suffering. A hasty consideration of world events makes one more inclined to regard their course as somewhat in keeping with nature's insensitive method of employing thousands of years to form a geological strata, only to break up

208

Selected Essays

and recast what it has made. Here, for example, a small state with peaceful citizens grows up, cultivating its soil, fulfilling its duties and thinking no evil. Then along comes a conqueror who sets fire to the houses, tramples the fields and drives out the meek and law-abiding to wander the wide world, homeless, desperate, doubting in providence and bereft of their faith in virtue. Either one assumes that change is part of the design of the world, and sedentariness incompatible with the development of the higher forms of organic life (only plants remain fixed, sleep insensibly and die on the spot), or one takes consolation in the thought that this uprooting from an old, grimy dwelling on undrained land is an act of charity, and when the fire takes hold of the ramshackle houses it is a hygienic measure. Perhaps the expelled experience a secret pleasure in being able to see new lands and leave the patch of earth on which they have lived a torpid existence like oysters. A little pain for a great pleasure! Who knows if the pain even existed? Those who leave home and friends in our time to go to the colonies without really knowing why are probably driven by an unconscious purpose in their individual lives and in the lives of other people, and although it is painful to abandon something old, the new and unknown has the attraction of a vast future pleasure. It is also possible that history in outline shows events as too close to one another, foreshortened, so that extremes appear too rapidly, unfolding in an altogether insufficiently worked-out form, as in a bad play. If, for example, one reads Karamzin's account of his journey in France in 1789—90,53 one is surprised by the almost cheerful tone that prevails in Paris, where the author heedlessly pays his visits and goes to the theatres and cafes as if nothing of any significance was happening down the road at the Bastille or at Versailles. But Karamzin takes a day at a time, and spread over two years the terrors of the Revolution are considerably diluted, like a solution in an overabundance of liquid. The Englishman Arthur Young also describes the situation in the French countryside on his journeys through France the year before the Revolution.54 The predicament of the farmers certainly appears bad, but it is not so hair-raising as it is subsequently portrayed in reports to the National Assembly. If one thinks of how the Revolution appears in one's memory, then the blazing Bastille rises up as the culmination. And yet it is only the point of departure, for on 14 July and the succeeding days, the King remained quite calmly at Versailles, without lifting a finger, even though troops were on hand. Louis XVI seems to have taken the matter fairly good-naturedly, for this is when he reconciles himself with the National Assembly and recalls Necker.55 No idea of a dethronement or republic yet existed, and it was

'The Mysticism of World History'

209

only in the third year after the fall of the Bastille that the king was executed. Portioned out over three years, with long pauses, with great and beautiful deeds, brilliant victories against foreign enemies and legislative reforms, the Revolution forms a picture both beautiful and ugly, though mostly beautiful, andfinallyof such overwhelming sublimity that viewed from a distance it could leave Goethe with a feeling of tranquillity. Either he did not really understand the scope of events or he felt that something was taking place which ought to happen, and which could not be prevented. VIII

History can appear grim, but we who have seen the beginning of a happy end now know that this is not the case. For example, take a brief glance at the history of Greece, Hellas, the motherland of our European culture. Rising up out of a dark world of myth, where the voyage of the Argonauts and the Trojan War seem to stand as godparents and probably are related, this tiny state establishes itself as a colony, the first in Europe. It is an offshoot of the Orient and Egypt, taking more from Egypt than people imagine. For in the opinion of Lycurgus, Thales, Pythagoras, Herodotus and Plato, Greece took the majority of its gods from there. Moreover, the Egyptians were an active people. Thutmose III,36 who lived immediately after the Trojan War, already went via Syria to the Ganges and Scythia. His successor, Mernefta, had to combat a coalition of Achaeans, Lycians, Sicilians, Sardinians and Etruscans. Rameses III defeated Sicilians, Danaans, Etruscans and others. Sisak captured Jerusalem in Rehoboam's fifth year. Psamtik57 ascended the throne with the help of Ionian and Carian troops. According to mythology culture first reached Hellas through Cecrops from Sais and Danaus58 from Upper Egypt, but history denies this and seeks to make Greece a colony of Phoenicia and Asia Minor, in short of the Orient. That is as it may be, but the landfirstflourishedin 500 B c and bloomed so rapidly that 150 years later it had become a province of Macedonia. No harm was done by this, however, for Greek culture was spread by Alexander, and the Greek language became so dominant in the east that during the time of Christ the Jews spoke Greek, which explains the otherwise incomprehensible fact that the New Testament is written in Greek and not in Hebrew. The Roman conquest had the same effect for Greek culture then moved westwards to Rome, which took its laws from Lycurgus and Solon. Christianity made slow progress in Greece, in spite of the fact that Paul visited both Athens and Corinth, where he was believed to be Mercury or Apollo (see the Acts of the Apostles). Theodosius the

no

Selected Essays

younger transformed the temples into Christian churches in the fifth century, but the Mainots did not become Christian until the ninth century, when Ansgarius converted Sweden.59 Greece fell under the sway of Byzantium in AD 395, by which time various peoples had migrated across the land. In the sixth century the Slavs appeared and left lasting memorials behind. In the eleventh century the Normans passed through, and when the Crusaders arrive this same Hellas becomes a province of the Latin empire. In 1204 the Frankish kingdom is formed in Athens, Achaia and Naxos. In 1453 the Turk becomes master and remains there until 1832, although the Venetians possessed the Peloponnese for a time. Today Greece is Greece again, but ruled by a Danish prince. The Parthenon remains on the Acropolis, but only as a memorial, for neither Zeus, Allah nor Christ dwells there. The language is still the same, although it has been modernised. Homer is read in school and Aristotle at university. The form remains intact, but the content is different. The people are not Hellenes but a mixture of Slavs, Turks, Albanians, Italians and others. In geology this phenomenon is called Pseudomorphism as when malachite has the structure of copper carbonate but the crystal form of copper oxide, that is to say, a new content arising from chemical decomposition and reaction, but still preserving the old form. Everything repeats itself, and in 1897 the King of Persia was succeeded by the Sultan and the old battlefields of Pharsalia and Thermopylae were recycled, though to no end. Hellas is dead but Greece lives: the Greek enjoys the same Christianity and the same culture as other Europeans; Athens has the same hotels, the same cafes, the same plays and the same constitutional and ministerial crises as Europe's other capitals. In the Chamber of Deputies the tanner, Cleon, and Alcibiades appear in the forum as before. Patricians and plebeians still quarrel over power. A Socrates may not have emptied the poisoned cup today but nothing is impossible. Everything is just the same, and yet so unfamiliar. Greece's destiny is typical of what occurs in every state, which are sometimes independent under their own rulers and sometimes conquered under a foreigner, sometimes conquered but governed by their own princes, and sometimes independent but with a foreign ruler. England was free under Hanover, Denmark under a German, Sweden under a Frenchman. The rulers as cosmopolitans, the people as patriots, once again one of the antinomies of history! An Alsatian who swears loyalty to France is conquered and becomes a German, emigrates to Cuba and swears a third oath of allegiance to Spain, is conquered again and becomes an American citizen. Nationalities are dissolved and the citizens of different states become world

'The Mysticism of World History

211

citizens, like their rulers, while the states have become mere ideas, hazy, changing, effacing themselves. The idea of Persia, Egypt or India remains but the states and their peoples are something completely different. Within a single lifetime Japan is impregnated with European culture which will be the fruit of Christianity, but Japan does not accept Christianity. In their high schools the Japanese are taught in German but they also speak English and French. And Japanese art becomes fashionable in Europe just as the costumes and hairstyles of Japanese women come to determine European dress while the Japanese themselves wear Parisian fashions. At the Hague Peace Conference the Japanese delegate expresses himself in favour of an extension of the Geneva Convention and its humanitarian agreements, using the expression 'in the interests of mankind', in short, 'in the spirit of Christianity', even though the man is probably a Buddhist or Shintoist. Sometimes religion seems to play a part in the life of states and nations, sometimes not. Of the historical events that are now unfolding in the world, and which one can read about in the newspapers, it would seem that France is the most preoccupied with religion. The dissolution of the congregations is nothing but the Reformation's closing of the monasteries and the confiscation of church property. It is Richelieu's war against the heretics when their religion threatened the welfare of the state. It is also an attempt to establish a homogeneous education system, just as military service is the same for all. This means a concession to the spirit of the times, which does not desire isolation and separation but prefers co-operation in work and the education of individuals by their association one with another in public life, which has become more and more public and educates the thin-skinned. The state religions continue to coerce conscience today and demand their sacrifice through these innumerable perjuries, these public religious services with or without official prayers, this antiquated religious education in schools, the confusion of allowing science to teach one thing and religion to contradict it. But through these evident contradictions the state is commiting a folly when it educates perjurers while simultaneously punishing perjury, for it will, of course, bring about its own corruption and dissolution. Regents who ought to govern are ruled by parliamentary majorities. Laws which are not appropriate for today are applied in all their stringency; moral codes remain after the morals in question have changed; taxes that have come into existence under other economic conditions still prevail after the taxable objects have been changed for others. In short, and with reference to the prototype, Greece, the European polities today are only shells, eaten-away fossils, where the bulk consists of bits from every possible

212

Selected Essays

formation. This can best be seen in the educational programme in which the child learns paganism one minute, Judaism the next and Christianity the third, where one lives mainly in the past while the present passes by unobserved, this present on which the future is built, and which one must finally understand in order to live an adult life as one's own contemporary. It is not by simply inhabiting the past that one learns about it; but by seeing the past in the context of the present one understands one's own time better. One does not gain in strength by setting up the past as a pattern one cannot live up to, for no one strives after the unattainable, simply because it is hopeless. The study of the past ought to teach us, first, a certain confidence in the future, once we observe how it nevertheless advances towards a definite goal, and, secondly, tolerance, since we have seen how many mansions there are in the house of the Lord, how one child is not rejected for another, or — what amounts to the same thing — how justly it is arranged when no single nation or religion can be said to have the support of the great teacher. Unlimited tolerance like that of the freethinker Frederick the Great,60 who gave sanctuary even to the Jesuits when they were persecuted, but with the proviso, 'as long as you leave others in peace, if not, the rod will follow'. This was in a Protestant country, however, and since Protestantism was at the outset only a negation, this worked on that occasion; but Protestantism has now ceased to negate, and has already had time to make doubt a precondition, without creating anything apart from pietism, which has become northern Europe's 'only saving faith'. The reproach that has been directed against Protestantism, that it produced nothing, neither a religion nor a religious style of art, is no reproach, for the removal of excessive and cumbersome limbs, pruning, cutting back and thinning out, is an important part of gardening. But that two bodies of Christian people with the same faith could oppose one another so stubbornly as complete opposites amazes both heathen and Christian alike. Every European state has bloomed at one time or another. Some have proved to be remontants and bloomed again in the autumn, others have the prospect of doing so. Palestine stood highest about iooo B C under Kings David and Solomon. Greece shone between 500 and 400 B C , with the successful conclusion of the wars against Persia and under the wise government of Pericles. Rome was mightiest immediately before Christ, under Caesar and Augustus, but Italy is nowadays better equipped as a state, and probably happier. France was united under Philip Augustus II and Louis XI, became a great power under Louis XIV and terrible under Napoleon I; it then went downhill but rose again under Napoleon III, only

'The Mysticism of World History'

213

to sink once more in the war of 1870—1. At this point, something strange happens: with the political decline of France after 1870 this old Roman country not only retains its spiritual ascendancy but, hardened by misfortune, immediately raises itself and becomes pre-eminent in literature, art and science, which all, of course, require a sound economic foundation. Liberated from the political management of Europe, the Third Republic reorganises its administration, legislation, education and defence, and is also able to participate in the great division of the globe outside Europe. Thus, it seems that states can prosper under every circumstance, and that the trappings of external power do not always yield Augustan ages. Israel had its greatest prophets in the days of misfortune and exile. The German nation ruled the spirit through its great thinkers, who grew numerous and flourished during the hard times when Napoleon went backwards and forwards like a steamroller over the fields of Germania. England was outwardly powerful from 1500 onwards, but at its most brilliant around 1600, when it was threatened and hated. Conquered Greece conquers Rome through its culture, and with the fall of Byzantium, Byzantine learning spread out into the world to govern men's minds for a while. And never was the north German spirit so merry and full of the courage of life as when the Nightingale of Wittenberg was singing, even though bonfire and broadaxe awaited the victor, and civil war laid waste the land. World history appears perhaps more cruel than it is, and the ruler of this world is probably not the one referred to in the Bible. IX

When we Europeans ask ourselves where our Hellas obtained its culture, we get no definite answer because the information is contradictory. Some important authorities say from Egypt; others, just as important, from the Orient. The original inhabitants, the Pelasgians, worshipped Zeus on high mountains and had an oracle at Dodona. An image of Zeus from Dodona looks exactly like an Assyrian or Persian king, and the Olympian is no pure Hellene. If one looks at Greek sculptures from the acceptable point of view of their documentary value, one finds three definite types among the Hellenic heroes of the Trojan War. The clear-eyed Achilles with a thin face and straight Grecian nose that continues directly from the forehead, represents the Thessalian, perhaps Doric or northern race. Agamemnon from Mycene has the typical hooked Roman nose with an obvious transition from the

214

Selected Essays

forehead, which is broader and cloudy, the mouth wider with coarser lips, a shorter eye and turbid gaze. The third type is Diomed from Argos. The head is round, the forehead low, sloping backwards with a callus at the root of the nose, and the nose almost Roman. The eye is broader than it is long. To guess at tribes or races is probably not worthwhile, but Achilles' pure Greek profile is certainly to be found in Scandinavia; it may still be seen today in the Swedish countryside. Socrates is not a Greek type. His forehead is not that of a thinker for it is too narrow for its height, and such a forehead is still to be found today in the landscape around the Danube, with a special name that does not imply intelligence. His nose is ignoble and is to be seen in Satyrs, and his eyes are not straight in the head. It is a Silenus, and also similar to Marsyas (in the Medici) 61 as well as a Pelasgian. If one searches lower down one finds the Grinder with his terrible shoesole-oval of a face, where nose and chin resemble one another in sharpness, and where the mouth is a nick. Others of interest are the dying Gaul and the Finnish type of gladiator, an hexagonal from the front, with the form of a pear or death's head, the face flat and the nose squashed. This Finnish type is also to be found in satyrs and in one of the giants of the Pergamon frieze as well as in certain centaurs, for other centaurs resemble Socrates and the Pelasgian. The figure Pan and fauns often reproduce the eastern Jewish type with the crooked, bent nose in parallel to a similarly crooked chin, sometimes with a callus above the root of the nose. Aesop is a low type to be found again in the lowest classes in the Teutonic lands, which furnish the ugliest noses in the world, a nose without name or equal, perhaps called at one time the shoemaker's seat or the clothes' hanger. Diogenes is a Roman cripple, normal in Italy. Finally, to make a mental note of, there is the bas-relief in the Villa Borghese, 'Hephaestus at his Forge'.62 The God himself is half Greek and half Roman; the apprentice is a Gaul, the satyr or centaur. But right down at the left sits a dwarf with a pointed head and full beard exactly like the elves or dwarfs in our story-books. The fact that he is forging a helmet awakens our memories of the dwarf smith and the pupil who is teasing him by pulling his knitted cap suggests that the little kobold belongs to a despised tribe. He is not malformed but a fully grown man who, if he were to stand up, would only reach the apprentice's navel. Otherwise he is not unlike the archer from the Crimea known to us from an electron vase. In any case, here is every European tribe gathered together on the Balkan peninsula where the highest types, Alexander and Aristotle, reproduce all the features of the finest intellectual life, and banish all thought of ethno-

'The Mysticism of World History'

215

graphic issues. But no one thinks to ask where they have come from, nor if they have always been found there. Neither does anyone know from where thefirstseed of Roman culture came, which nevertheless germinated among the Etruscans. However, it was from the Sabines that Rome received its Jupiter and Mars, its lares and penates.63 The ancient Latins contributed Saturn and Janus, the gods of thefieldsand home. The Etruscan religion was gloomy, with human sacrifice; their graves resembled pyramids, their vases may be compared with those of the Pelasgians, and the Tuscan pillars are not unlike the Doric. They wrote from right to left like the Semites and had the duodecimal system. Their language was a hybrid and heaped up consonants or left out nearly all the vowels, like Hebrew. Clytemnestra was written Klytmsta; Alexander was Elehnstre. Strange gods were: Vertumnus, Nortia (destiny), Vejovis, Veius, the evil Jupiter, the dark Summamus, Mantus and Mantia of the underworld, Voltumna, Mater Matuta and Minerva. Philologists have traced their language from the Semitic to as far away as the Finnish. One may take one's choice. Etruscan faces are like Assyrian. The chronology of Rome begins at almost the same time as that of Greece, 753 and JJ6 B C and both seem to have the same origin. But then Hellas gains an advantage and definitely impresses its character upon Rome. For already, in 700 B C , Hellas has colonies in Tarentum, and Rome becomes itself with the Tarquins. According to the myths, the town Tarquinii, in Etruria, was founded by Tyrenian Pelasgians in prehistoric times. The Corinthian Demartus moved to this city and his son, Tarquinius Priscius, was born there. He became King of Rome and introduced both Etruscan and Hellenic culture. It was he who had the Forum, Circus, Capitol and Cloaca Maxima built. He introduced the insignias of royal power, the diadem, the ivory throne, the purple toga and the rod with eagle from Etruria, all at the last moment, for his son became the last king of Rome, the last, that is, until he was succeeded by the little king of Rome, the Duke of Reichstadt,64 who never became king; always excluding the many kings of Italy, including the great Napoleon. Rome perpetuates Hellas but does nothing new in art, literature or science. It achieves hardly anything in legislation either, for when the Ten Commandments or the law of the copper tablet was to be written, Terentilius Arsa sent three delegates to Athens to study the laws of Solon. Roman history is about class war between patricians and plebeians, and about conquests, although the great anti-Semitic war against Carthage is accounted a defensive war. Otherwise, Rome is a veritable America where everything is put into the melting-pot together, every kind of people is accepted as citizens, every god is incorporated into the pantheon.

2i6

Selected Essays

Roman history lacks interest until Caesar and Augustus, only then does it become Roman. The emperors are complete citizens of the world. Claudius was born in Lyon, Pertinex in Liguria, Septimus Severus was an African, Macrinus a Numidian, Maximus was the son of a Goth and an Alanian woman, Philip Arab us was an Arab, Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius and Commodus were Spaniards. To trace the origins of the Illyrian emperors is impossible, for Illyria was originally populated by kinsmen of the Thracians who mingled with Phoenicians, Hellenes, Italians and Celts. The portraits of the emperors therefore form an ethnographic collection of great interest. Caesar has a Germanic face with familiar features, as if we encountered him only yesterday in the Chamber of the Riksdag or on a lecturer's podium. His nose is not Roman, although it once was, while his mouth has a trace of humanity, of indulgent divinity which smiles at human weakness. It is not the face of a noble but of a learned man. With his downy cheeks Nero as young (in the Louvre) looks like an intelligent Israelite; a little further on he is beautiful, with a broad forehead and a tiny lower face, a young Dionysus perhaps. Later he resembles a gamblingsaloon hostess from Melbourne. Vitellius may be seen at the Palais-Royale theatre in Paris, a bon-vivant, quite inoffensive in appearance. With his galosh-shaped chin Vespasian is a nasty customer. Nerva is very Roman, Marcus Aurelius' nose is neither Roman nor Greek but northern, almost Scandinavian with Aesop's as a point of departure. Julian the Apostate from Illyria has something Phoenician or Assyrian in his long cranium. Augustus is the most beautiful, with a modern, rich, fine expression, not very Roman, but then he was a Volscian. Among his subjects Maecenas bears a Goethe and Humboldt head. Virgil is Greek and Teutonic in appearance. Marius is the Greek centaur and satyr, and very like his kindred spirit, Marat. The imprisoned Dacian (the Farnese) is a Russian peasant. Pan (in the Ludovici) is an eastern Jew, Peto in the group 'Peto and Ara (Ludovici) is to be seen in Christiania. Marsyas (the Medici) is Silenus, Socrates' Pelasgians, the Phrygians. The history of Italy following the emperors is not a pleasant one. Like an enormous harbour jetty the peninsula juts out into the sea and has subsequently served as a place of passage, a transit stop or free harbour, featuring most regularly perhaps as a bequest in the estates of rulers, passed from hand to hand both as spiritual and worldly empire, French, German, Spanish, Scandinavian, but never Turkish or English. We recent comers who have seen so many contradictions resolved, so many desperate situa-

'The Mysticism of World History'

217

tions unravelled, so many accomplished destinies repeated, havefinallywitnessed a united Italy. And it was a pirate, Garibaldi, and a Caesar, Napoleon III, who restored the Rome of the Tarquins. Between Ingolstadt and Regensburg there are still to be seen today the traces of an earthwork that stretches along the east side of the Rhine over Odenwald, Spessart, Taunus and towards Cologne. The Germans call it the Teufelmauer, and this earthwork, or wall and towers, was built by the Romans as protection against the Germans. It was a demarcation line between Ager decumanus and Germania. West of this wall the land was placed at the disposal of the Gauls (and of Roman veterans), and Rome's greatest and most abiding colony, France, grew up behind it. For here the Roman language still prevails today along with Roman laws, the Roman spirit in public life and class war. But France never obtained the imperial throne. Francis I was certainly a candidate at one time, together with Henry VIII of England, but Germany stubbornly retained the purple, if only as an adornment, until 1815. In its stead France enjoyed a certain independence vis-a-vis the Pope in Rome which was first legitimated through Louis IX's pragmatic sanction in 1269. In this land so favoured by nature, Roman-Hellenic culture was replanted and developed so that by the seventeenth century the French became the leading nation of Europe, and remain so today. With the French Revolution a certain demoralisation occurs, but immediately a Caesar rises up from the imperial graves, the Roman spirit incarnate. And like Charlemagne he founds an empire which soon disintegrates, but only after accomplishing its mission, to awaken and breathe new life into the old Europe. Napoleon was so Roman in character, a conqueror, legislator and regent, that his nephew regarded him and his work as an idea, Caesar by the grace of the people's will, who ruled with the plebeians and became emperor by a plebiscite. Napoleon I called himself the Emperor of France 'by the grace of God and through the constitution of the republic'. When he brought the Pope to Paris and marched into Rome himself, the French felt like Romans, and the whole of Europe wished to be related to this cultural tradition. Bonaparte becomes emperor in 1804. In 1806 his brother, Joseph, begins to excavate Pompeii (which was destroyed at the same time as Jerusalem), thus giving rein to the whole immensity of Roman life. Europe attired itself in Roman dress and lived in Roman furniture; Roman-style temples were built, to the divinities of both war and love, and so many colonies were established that they still exist today. But a Caesar has, of course, to march out against the barbarian: Napoleon discovered his in Moscow, but there he was broken and fell like

218

Selected Essays

an ancient tragic hero through pride, hubris! He broke, but the nation held, for it was a strong alloy of many metals with a high melting-point. Originally Gauls, later Franks, as well as Saxons, Goths from eastern Europe, Burgundians from the southern coast of the Baltic, Scandinavians, Englishmen, Spaniards, even Arabs had been fused together over the centuries, but the Romans had emerged victorious. First through Caesar's colonisation, then through the Christian missionaries, who came directly from Rome and introduced Latin. The Frankish conquest left no lasting traces, for these half-savages only conducted its defence while they left the administration to the Romans who had remained behind. And the newly planted Roman culture is so strong in France that it is from there that England obtains its vocabulary, rather than directly from Rome. For although the Roman conquest of Britain had introduced Latin, this had been rooted out like the original language by the invading Angles, Saxons and Jutes. It was only with the Romanising Normans that Latin truly emerged, and to such an extent that 40 per cent of Chaucer's language is Roman. And through the church and universities Latin won out so that today, in our contemporary, Macaulay,65 it is 50 per cent. This split in English culture, which is half Germanic and half Roman, has already been remarked in its two greatest writers, Shakespeare, whose locution is mainly Germanic, and Milton, who resorts to Latin for his 'elevated' language. The highly educated Bulwer66 is a Roman while Dickens, the man of the people, is Anglo-Saxon. England became Rome's most northerly half-colony and Spain the most southerly. In short, Rome moved westwards, west of the Teufelmauer and the Rhine, until in our time it took the Ardennes and the Vosges as its Chinese wall. The Germans formed Europe's central kingdom and the Slavs its huge eastern domain. Yet the Germanic and the Slav are penetrated by a current of the Roman spirit in the form of Christianity and learning. Church and school. Western culture is Christian and classical. x SUMMARY

If at the outset of this rapid excursion through world history we could see no goal, but only made out dark purposes, the goal and intention began to be discerned at the beginning of the last century. All the countries of the earth entered into a closer relationship with one another, people united in great common interests and dissimilarities in education, custom and habit were evened out. In short, there was a great striving for homogeneity, and

'The Mysticism of World History'

219

uniformity became apparent in every sphere. This is, of course, how Herbert Spencer67 has described the course and goal of evolution: from the heterogeneous to the homogeneous [sic], and this is also the aspiration that socialism has discovered, and which it consciously seeks to follow. But evolution, movement forward, can only follow upon the internal interaction of conflicting forces, and we have seen that the entire conscious striving of mankind to achieve this homogeneity has foundered. It seems as if the spirit of history hated man's universal monarchies and religions, and yet the goal of evolution proves to be precisely that. It was thus not the goal but the means which divided people. One wonders with justification: why, when the whole of Europe (excluding Russia) once comprised a Christian society under a single spiritual leader, the Pope in Rome, should the split with the Protestant churches occur? The power of the papacy was, of course, at one time an excellent counterweight to the imperial power and therefore possessed a beautiful raison d'etre, yet for all that it disappeared from the history of the north Germans. Charles V was in the process of building a universal monarchy for the whole of Europe, and so was Henri IV. Napoleon had almost realised the idea, and yet on each occasion the work disintegrated. The one unites, the other divides, and vice versa, but with every return to the old, something new has been added. This undertaking bears a strong resemblance to the chemical analysis in which one precipitates a solution and then dissolves the precipitate in order to precipitate again, and in both cases one remains in ignorance about the process, for only the result is visible. But this secretive aspect of the world process which we cannot explain, this unconscious aspiration of mankind which is unaware of the goal but at the service of the conscious will, is what I have called mysticism, which is, of course, the name given to everything that is for the moment, or for ever, inexplicable. It has been inexplicable to us that two contrary opinions are both correct, for it was our limited intelligence that propounded the false assumptions. It was inexplicable to us that there are so many religions when there is only one God, for we could not give a precise definition, either of religion or of God. It is still incomprehensible to us why the people of the Mediterranean should be allotted the role of civilising and dividing up the world. We have no idea why Christ should make an end of Zeus nor why Christianity should succeed classical antiquity in Europe. But we cannot deny the fact that it was the cathedral and not the synagogue or mosque that was built upon the Greek temple. We saw states arise, develop with difficulty and in conflict, only to be rapidly laid waste without our being able to fathom the purpose. We saw

220

Selected Essays

great spirits step forward with the call to preach new truths. After a difficult struggle the truth conquered, only for a later generation to refute it, and throw it on the scrap heap. The human race wandered in the desert among ruins without knowing where it was going. The signposts were many but no one knew the destination. One believed that he had discovered the east when he journeyed to the west; others thought they fostered their own power when they were actually undermining it. A priest was convinced that he was founding a new religion when he in fact established a new state. In short, human beings acted unconsciously in ignorance of the end, but a conscious will made use of all the conflicting forces, the upward flight of the spirit and the earthly striving of matter, good and evil, selfishness and sacrifice, division and unity. And sometimes the goal let itself be glimpsed at the limit of the horizon in order to disappear again and then once more to show itself. Not knowing what they are doing is the excuse people have, but this should also teach them to see that they are tools in someone's hand, someone whose intentions are incomprehensible to them, but who looks after their best interests. It has long been thought that the course of history has been governed by certain laws similar to those which prevail in the kingdom of nature. Traces of the law of the state of equilibrium have been observed in history (the European balance of power), the power of attraction (the inclination of larger states to assimilate the smaller), elective affinity, substitution and so on. And from the organic world men have adopted the notion of the splitting of cells, segmentation, struggle and selection, and the like. But the course of history shows such a combination of freedom and necessity that on the one hand one must to some degree recognise the freedom of the will, while on the other concede the existence of a necessity that restricts the efforts of the individual according to prevailing circumstances, and which thus brings about a synthesis. The great synthesist who unites the opposites, resolves the contradictions and maintains this balance, is no human being and can be no other than the invisible legislator who alters the laws in freedom according to altered circumstances: the creator, the dissolver and preserver, he may then be called — what you will. INSERTIONS AND ADDITIONS

Attila knew nothing of his origin or his fatherland, but gave his calling as God's scourge. Genserik, the Vandal, was a melancholiac, who acted without thinking. Once he embarked with his fleet but without a goal. The pilot asked in

'The Mysticism of World History

221

what direction he should steer and which people it concerned this time. — 'The people against whom God is angry', replied Genserik. Alarik marched upon Rome for the third time. A hermit wanted to stop him. CI cannot be stopped/ said Alarik, 'someone is forcing me to lay waste to Rome.' Diocletian sent to ask the advice of Apollo at Miletus concerning the persecution of the Christians (AD 303). Apollo replied that the righteous, dispersed about the earth, prevented him from saying the truth. The pythonness regretted that he had lost the spirit of prophecy. The haruspices explained that the righteous, who Apollo had mentioned, were the Christians. There are no doubt vague correspondences between the stories of the Bible and the Greek myths, but very weak ones. Deucalion builds an ark, of course, in order to save himself from a flood. Lucian says that he took his family and a pair of every kind of animal along with him. Deucalion's ark came to rest on Parnassus (or Etna or Athos or Athrys). The Argonauts release a dove from their ark to save themselves from the rocks of Symplagades. Perseus, the son of Zeus and Danae, was placed like Moses in a casket on the water; was adopted by King Polydectes. Heracles with Omphale no doubt resembles Samson with Delilah as regards minor details, but not where the main issue is concerned. In Maccabees, Book I, Chapter 12, verse 21, it says that: 'We find in our old writings that the Spartans and the Jews are brothers, since both people come of Abraham.' Genesis, of course, also states that Noah's son Japheth (who in olden times was regarded as identical with Hephaestus) had seven sons, among them Javan (= the Greek). But among Javan's children was also Kittim, who is sometimes regarded a Roman, sometimes a Macedonian. This therefore accords with the statement in Maccabees, so long as one is agreed about the starting-point, that is. Jerusalem was captured by Pompey in AD 64. The same year a conflagration broke out in Rome which was ascribed to Nero. There are historians who exonerate Nero. That the latter's suspicions fell upon the Jews or the Christians, which is one and the same thing, is hardly strange given that he at least believed in revenge, if not in Nemesis. Therefore he perhaps accused

222

Selected Essays

the Christians of causing the conflagration in good faith. When Jerusalem was destroyed in AD 70 and the Capitol caught fire at precisely the same moment suspicion has to take the same direction, but the author (of these articles) remains in the dark on this point. But, all the same, when Vesuvius laid waste Herculaneum and Pompeii in the same move (AD 63 and 79), the Nemesis-worshipping Romans had to exempt the Christians from suspicion, for they could hardly have been credited with setting light to Vesuvius. In all events, the fact is that the culture which now prevails and the people who bear it around the world resided in the countries of the Mediterranean. One cannot say precisely why, of course. But if one looks at a map of the world spread out so that one hemisphere embraces the largest land masses and the other hemisphere the great expanses of water, one can see that the countries of the Mediterranean are grouped around the pole, and the city of Rome, the mistress of the world, is at the centre of the circle. This map is to be found in Klein and Thome, The Globed and since the authors had no mystical subsidiary motives in their innocent game, it emerges at all events that the Mediterranean is a centre on terra firma. Piazzi Smyth,69 on the other hand, has amused himself with another map in his book on the Great Pyramid, which he found to be an astronomical instrument that was subsequently abused as a royal grave. On his map, where both the familiar hemispheres are spread out, he demonstrates that the pyramid of Cheops is in the middle of the earth, from which it may be deduced that the pyramid-builders knew where the middle was, and that they must have known America.* If the ancient Greeks knew as much about geography when they located Delphi as the mid-point of the earth, I would not like to say. That the Chinese called their country 'The Middle Kingdom' has nothing to do with the mid-point of the earth. CONCLUSION

These articles published here form the outline of a book and were therefore thrown together in haste in order that the context and the shape should not be lost in the course of detailed research. It is naturally full of faults, but they will be corrected on a future occasion. * The Great Pyramid must contain some astronomical secrets, since in 1780 a French scientist discovered that the base of the pyramid multiplied by 500 corresponded to a geographical longitude, which is more or less exactly the case.

'August Strindberg on Himself

What are your strongest childhood memories?

Everything that I experienced as a child made a powerful impression on me, for I was hypersensitive both to my own and other people's sufferings. For example, no one dared to punish my younger brothers and sisters in my sight or hearing, for had they done so I would have intervened and throttled the tormentors. I was so outraged by injuries and injustice that I wanted to take my own life at 7 or 8 (I don't remember exactly). I wept over everything, and was consequently given a horrid name; I sometimes wept 'for no reason', or from the sheer pain of being alive, anticipating my terrible fate perhaps. I was born loving truth and justice; but people called me jealous if I disapproved when someone less deserving was preferred before me; and I was called vengeful if I didn't immediately forget every injustice, while other people never forgave me. So as to have a guiding rule for my own behaviour I kept a sharp eye on other people. What others allowed themselves, I considered I was allowed, too, but that was not the case; it was always harder for me. But I was certainly not without fault; I lied on several occasions out of fear, cowardice and shame, but experienced such feelings of remorse that I didn't willingly do so again. I was tortured into telling my first big lie, when I had to take someone else's misdemeanour upon myself. But I once said something that wasn't true, simply from a devilish whim or impulse, which I can't explain. I stole fruit, too, of course (the apple tree again), but funnily enough the informer was my partner in crime; and for some reason I did not accuse him in order to escape the blame myself. Why, I don't know, for I wasn't that noble; I possibly felt ashamed at his behaviour, for I found his action so despicable, given that he had taken part in the theft. When my mother started to scold me and talk about the courts and the police, I was petrified with fear; but also surprised that the penalty could be so severe for the sake of a few plums. The incidental circumstances were briefly these. We lived in a house with 223

224

Selected Essays

grounds that extended between tobacco plantations and pasture land.1 Some way from the house, our neighbour had an orchard of plum trees, which adjoined our fence, so that the branches of these beautiful trees hung over it. This neighbour was an old man without children, who never visited his orchard, and let the yellow fruit lie where it fell, perhaps out of fear of cholera which had given plums a bad name when it raged in 1854, and it was forbidden to sell them at Munkbron.2 Anyway, the trees extended their branches over the fence and the plums fell on our land; we began picking on the ground and soon passed on to one of the trees, quite openly and not slyly, since no one was at all concerned about it. I now understand my mother's horror, for if we had been caught by a petty-minded owner, there was a risk of the police being called. However (being 60 I can now say this), when as a 20-year-old student I once again moved into that house, I found that just that plum tree had withered, and none of the others. This made a vivid but horrible impression on me, for it reminded me of the fig tree cursed by Christ.3 The strongest impressions from my childhood are naturally my mother's death and the appearance of my stepmother, before the year of mourning was over.4 It was indescribable! My mother had not liked me, she had other favourites among us children, but I mourned her, feeling as if with her departure I ceased to be related to my father and my brothers and sisters, yes, a stranger to the whole of humanity. My father I always saw as a hostile power, and he couldn't endure me either! It wasn't much fun being young! Enough said! How did you happen to choose to make your debut as a dramatist?

That is hard to say! But as an adolescent I had attempted unsuccessfully to write poetry; I entered the theatre to become an actor; failed myfinalaudition, took opium in order to kill myself but was discovered alive on my sofa (the opium had no effect on me), and taken out on the spree. The following day I was overcome by a strange fever; and in a couple of days I had written a two-act play. Within a couple of months I had written a threeacter, a five-acter in verse (Hermione), and begun a large-scale play about Christ, which was, however, burnt unfinished.5 I found it easiest to write plays; people and events took shape, wove themselves together, and I derived such pleasure from this work that I found life a sheer delight while the writing continued, and do so still. Only then do I feel alive!

'August Strindberg on Himself

225

Which writers (classical and modern), people you have met, etc., made the strongest impression on you at the time?

Of the classical writers I read in school I liked only Ovid. He was the poet, and I enjoyed the euphony even in a foreign language: 'Regia solis erat sublimibus alta columnis!'6 I shall never forget. Horace's short couplets showed to their advantage on the page, but it was only prose. Homer was boring, and Virgil barely more tolerable. In childhood I admired Andersen's fairy-tales, and in my old age I have called them 'astral', for they are inspired by another world than this one; miraculous, in short!7 Then, during my student years, it was Victor Hugo and his Toilers ofthe Sea, which I have recently re-read and worshipped as the most sublime of works, only to be compared with The Man Who Laughs and Les Miserablesl Hugo is my teacher! And Dickens! Among people in the narrow circle in which I was brought up, I learnt most from a 30-year-old educated woman, to whom I was bound in a romantic friendship.8 She was not without her faults, but she taught me only what was right and good; she wanted me 'to be better than her', and led me to pietism, which she admired, but could not follow herself. How is it that you came to be so attached to the landscape of the Stockholm Archipelago?

It was like a revelation when at (perhaps) 17 I saw the Archipelago for the first time. As a lance-corporal in the militia I arrived at Tyreso on manoeuvres. Early one morning we were deployed in the firing-line (sharpshooters), in a wood on a high hill; suddenly, where the ground gave way between the trees, I saw the sea - and the skerries. But it didn't dawn on me what I was looking at; the blue sea looked like the sky and the skerries clouds — cumuli — swimming in this bluefield!I was overcome with ecstasy and wept (I still do). This was not the earth, but something else! What? An ancestral memory? I don't know! But from then on I always yearned to be there, and still do, in spite of everything! Even three years ago the first great reaches made the same wonderful impression on me; something supernatural; they seemed to rise upwards, not keep to the water line! Isolation, the great silence and purity (the water), where a manor house, a cottage or any sign of cultivation simply disturbs and appears ugly! (See my books!)

226

Selected Essays

Who among the important men and women you have met do you remember with the greatest affection? Of my fellow countrymen I know so few celebrities because my karma (fate) has kept me down among the ordinary people. I met some important people in Idun, 9 of course, but they didn't like me; they probably thought I was a gypsy {boheme), and that I regarded them secretly as social compromisers. Professor Scholander,10 who had seen The Secret of the Guildy is supposed to have got me into Idun, and I remember him with respect. Professor Adolf Erik Nordenskiold,11 who was a simple and genuine person, I found very pleasant, and he once took me under his wing; Hans Hildebrand 12 I particularly liked for his friendly disposition; Frithiof Kjellberg,13 the sculptor (and his old mother), was a faithful companion of mine from 1868 until his death; I had nothing against Pelle Janzon, 14 because he sang for me, and was unquenchable. Among the younger generation Hjalmar Branting15 has put up with me the longest, and now that he has been tried by life I have found him more engaging than before. But there are two important figures who need distinguishing from the rest because they have had a very special influence on my fate. They are not such big names in the great world, but they were strong personalities. There was, first, the librarian Richard Bergstrom,16 and then the Royal Librarian, Gustaf Edvard Klemming. 17 In what seemed to me an inexplicable way I was 'prompted' by Dr Bergstrom to seek a position in the Royal Library. This I obtained after being granted an exemption because I had not taken my BA;18 I remained there six years. Bergstrom, who had been my teacher at Klara School (something he never wished to be reminded of), became my teacher once again for these six years. He was crotchety, read Nohrborg, 19 loved Goethe and Schiller, and Tieck and Novalis, as well as his Romans and Greeks (he translated Sophocles). He hated C. J. L. Almqvist20 and didn't really like Geijer.21 Women who wrote he persecuted systematically when he sat at the issue desk in the old Library. I didn't hide my new admiration for Schopenhauer and Hartmann, etc., and he treated me like a boy, even when I was married and had children. But the conversations that took place in his room were instructive; for he reviewed all the new books in Posttidningen,12 and his conservatism was a valuable brake upon my new French ideas. His enormous learning is evident in the annotations to Swedish Folksongs,^ which he has published in a new edition. Klemming and his influence on my career I have treated elsewhere, and with respect and gratitude (though indirectly)!

'August Strindberg on Himself

227

The foreigners that I remember with the greatest pleasure are Bjornson and Lie.24 Life, politics, and women divided me from Bjornson. One loved Jonas Lie because he was so worthy of love; and I frequently asked myself how a human being could possibly be so good. Life had, however, treated him harshly! If I name no more names now (and those who know will remark their absence), it is not because I could not mention more, for in general I have found people to be pleasant, even if I have nagged them about their faults; and I find it very hard to break a friendly relationship. Yes, my friendly feelings have often long survived the break, which was necessitated by life itself. ( C k la vie! Quoi?) Which of your plays do you consider have been produced most successfully and by whom? My first good period was of course with Ludvig Josephson,25 who dug me out of the sandpit of oblivion; the second was with Ranft26 under whom Gustav Vasa, Erik XIV, The Saga of the Folkungs, The Crown Bride and A Dream Play were done beautifully. But I also had some good days with Personne,27 with Crimes and Crimes, Damascus, Easter and Charles XII. And it's not for me to mention Falck,28 since I am an interested party. How do you write? Let him say who can! It begins with a fermentation or some sort of agreeable fever, which passes into ecstasy or intoxication. Sometimes it is like a seed, which grows, attracting all interest to itself, consuming all experiences, but still choosing and discarding. Sometimes I think I am some sort of medium, for it comes so easily, half unconsciously, hardly calculated at all! But it lasts at most 3 hours (from 9.0 to 12.0 usually). And when it is over, 'everything is as boring as ever!', until the next time. But it doesn't come to order, nor when I please. It comes when it pleases. But best and most after some great catastrophe! How does your day pass? Until quite recently my day was as follows. I got up at 7.0 (I may not lie any longer, for then there is a banging on the walls and my bed burns). Boiled my coffee (for no one else but I can do that, just like Balzac and Swedenborg). Then I went out for a walk. If I had not drunk any spirits the

228

Selected Essays

night before, then to be alive and walk like this was a positive pleasure. The morning possesses something that makes one feel young at heart, reborn, which evaporates with the dew. By lunch time the day is beginning to be the worse for wear; and the afternoon (at its worst about 6.0) is debauched, unshaven, dirty. If they only knew, those who lie in of a morning, what they lose! Anyway, after an hour or an hour and a half I am back home, and fully loaded. I have warned the servants in advance not to speak to me, for that can end in their misfortune. (After a short while they usually know to run and hide.) I am now wet with sweat, and loosen my clothes, all the way down to my belt. And so it begins: On yellow, uncut Lessebo Bikupa paper, with Sir Josuah Mason's 1001 nib and Antoine Fils's violette noire it breaks out, accompanied by continual cigarette smoking, until 12 o'clock. Then it is over, and I am extinguished; I go and lie down to sleep, wake up renewed, open letters, read, write letters, sleep, but am too tired to eat; I therefore fast until 3.0, but with design, too, so that my meal will taste good. Then I eat dinner: the odd hors d'ceuvres with one schnapps, soup, meat (or fish), a small beer. That's it, no coffee! On Sundays I drink wine, mostly for the holiday mood, for I am not fond of wine other than in company, and for the sake of the occasion. Then I take a good after-dinner nap (which I have done since I was 12); get up at 6.0, and now have to solve the terrible problem of how to pass the time alone until 10. o. As I didn't used to eat any supper, I had to have something else, i.e. a drink! And now I am going to tell the truth about that. I have never been an alcoholic or drinker, but I have drunk a fair amount; I have taken it as a gift, without which I could not have endured life. The Book of Proverbs says (without my therefore wishing to encourage tippling): 'It is not for kings to drink strong wine; nor for princes strong drink: Lest they drink, and forget the law, and pervert the judgement of any of the afflicted. Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more.'29 If the nation was as drowned in drink as in the days of Per Wieselgren,30 Anders Retzius31 and Samuel Owen,32 and I needed to set an example, then I would make the sacrifice. I have tried teetotalism, but it didn't make me a better person; I simply found life boring and an unnecessary burden, and my work didn't go any the more easily! In the evening I often play the piano, but could not be called a pianist, I merely tinkle after my own fashion! Of piano music I like Beethoven best, but not everything; Haydn and

'August Strindberg on Himself

229

Bach; I can't stand Mozart's tootlings (except for the G minor Symphony and bits of the Requiem). Grieg's Sonata in E minor. Simpler favourites are: Chopin (but only three pieces); Mendelssohn, particularly the B minor Caprice, Midsummer Nights Dream and the Hebrides; Weber's overtures to Oberon and Freischutz, Nicolai's Merry Wives overture; Rossini's Stabat Mater and William Telloverture; Mascagni's prelude to Cavalleria\ Boito's Mefistofele, Gounod's Faust and Romeo; David's Lalla Roukh {sous le feuillage sombre); Ganne's Marche Lorraine; Peterson-Berger's Frosoblomster,

etc.33 What do I read? I have recently reread Walter Scott with great pleasure, Victor Hugo with even greater and Dickens with no less.34 When I was heartily tired of Uberkultur35 2, couple of years ago I read all Marryat's36 novels, and got the impression that this man must have been very happy, with his childish belief in God, a life after this one and all that follows from that. Balzac I can read at any time. After I have played, I relax until 10.o, with or without a whisky, for I don't have a drink every evening. Then I take a footbath, drink a glass of ice-cold milk and go to bed, but never read fiction once I have done so, only an old devotional manual. And so it is night! (This regime has changed a little since last summer, but nothing worth mentioning.) I haven't seen a newspaper for eighteen months! And thanks to that life becomes more substantial; all the trivial things that disturb one are kept at arm's length; I don't lay myself open to this deluge of pinpricks, can remain in peace with my own thoughts and enjoy the tranquillity that I have struggled to attain. It is superstition to believe that one cannot live without newspapers; and I recommend abstinence, for the effect is like a sojourn in a sanatorium. I read about events of world importance once a week in Die Woche?1 and that is more than enough for me! I know no other pleasures, and only need an at home with Beethoven every now and then.38 To go out in public is now impossible since I am recognised so readily. I was born shy (like my father), and have taken fright; therefore I am happiest at home! I don't think very highly of people; I don't exactly love them, and they don't expect that, for we are not so lovable; I often feel sorry for them, but not always; I willingly forgive; and where those I am fond of are concerned, an infinite number of times; but a piece of calculated, aimless wickedness, premeditated lies and a refined delight in other people's misfortunes, those things I do react against; and so one should!

Notes and Commentary

Introduction 1 Inferno and From an Occult Diary, translated by Mary Sandbach (Harmondsworth, 1979), pp. 117-18. Henceforth Inferno and followed by the page reference in parenthesis after a quotation. For clarification of the conventions adopted for all references throughout this volume, see the 'Note on the text', p. xi. 2 Since the latter are accessible in English in a well-edited translation by Walter Johnson {Open Letters to the Intimate Theatre, Seattle, nd), they have not been included in the present selection. 3 Writing the following year to a prospective publisher, Claes Loostrom, Strindberg observed: 'These vivisections are literature in the modern style, you'll see. That they deal with me and persons still living is precisely what is so fine, and the title provides a justification or explanation; but I've thought up a subtitle which justifies some of the roles I assume! See how this looks: Vivisections. A Retired Doctor's Observations (Notes, Dossiers, Stories, Memories) Reported by Aug Sg', Letters 1, p. 262). One may gauge both the objectivity and authority that Strindberg was claiming for the writer of these texts as well as his need for justification if these remarks are read against Freud's celebrated insistence, in the Fragment ofan Analysis of a Case ofHysteria, when, in introducing the question of'Dora's' attraction to Frau K he remarks: 'I must now turn to consider a further complication to which I should certainly give no space if I were a man of letters engaged upon the creation of a mental state like this for a short story, instead of being a medical man engaged upon its dissection', Penguin Freud Library, 8 (Harmondsworth, 1977), p. 94. A medical man with a licence to dissect was precisely the fiction which Strindberg sought to sustain in what he called a vivisection. 4 Strindberg lived in France, Switzerland, Germany and Denmark between September 1883 and April 1889, and in Germany, Austria and France during the greater part of 1892 to 1898. 5 Edmond de Goncourt, Cherie (Paris, 1884), p. iii. 6 For an analysis of the vivisector, who was at this time an almost exclusively male figure applying his scalpel to the female body and soul, see Elaine Showalter's excellent account in Sexual Anarchy. Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle (London, 1991), pp. 127-39. 230

Notes to pages 8—25

231

7 For Strindberg's account, see Letters 1, p. 215. For an account of the writing of Among French Peasants, see Elie Poulenard, 'Among French Peasants', Carl Reinhold Smedmark, ed., Essays on Strindberg (Stockholm, 1966), pp. 109-28. 8 For an examination by various hands of Strindberg's often provokingly personal approach to numerous literary genres, see Michael Robinson, ed., Strindberg and Genre (Norwich, 1991). 9 'A First and Last Declaration', Concluding Unscientific Postscript, translated by David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton, 1941), p. 552. 10 Michel Foucault, 'What is an Author', Donald F. Bouchard, ed., Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Oxford, 1977), p. 123. 11 Strindberg och hans andra fru, 11 (Stockholm, 1934), p. 274. 12 Elsewhere, he claims that the book which he has in mind with this title was first conceived in 1883. See Letters 11, p. 536. 13 At one point he clearly intended to move as close to the Jardin des Plantes as possible. 'Have hired a room at [19] rue Linne by the Jardin des Plantes so as to research for a month for "the book"', he told Pehr Staaff, on 17 October 1895 (BrevXl, p. 88). However, he seems never to have taken possession of the room. 14 Gunnar Brandell's Strindbergs infernokris of1950 remains the best introduction to Strindberg's ideas during this period, especially in its revised English form, Strindberg in Lnferno, translated by Barry Jacobs (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1974)15 Strindberg in Lnferno, pp. 165-7. 16 Lars Dahlback, Strindbergiana vm (Stockholm, 1993), p. 33. 17 The standard works on Strindberg's paintings remain Torsten Matte Schmidt, ed., Strindbergs maleri (Stockholm, 1977) and Goran Stockenstrom, Strindberg och bildkonsten (Uddevalla, 1972; 2nd edn 1990). For a short exposition in English, see Michael Robinson, New Arts, New Worlds!': Strindberg and Painting (Birmingham, 1994). 'The Battle of the Brains' 'The Battle of the Brains' was first published in Swedish in 1888 in the March issue of the Danish journal Ny Jord, with the subtitle 'From Vivisections, a Doctor's Tales', having previously appeared in German in the prominent Viennese daily newspaper Neue Freie Presse, 12 and 13 July 1887. The German version concluded with the following brief addition: I finished my journey hale and hearty, and when I got home my wife was surprised to see me alive and well. When she heard that I had spent the last forty hours on the train, she shook her head, meaning that I would soon pay for it. But I felt nothing apart from an unusual sense of well-being. 'I was only an imaginary invalid,' I said, eight days after my return, 'but it was you who planted the idea into my head.' 'Have I made you believe that? Would I want 'No, my dearest, you have imagined for so long that I was ill that youfinallybelieved it, and have subsequently induced me to believe it too. It is no doubt because you are the

232

Notes to pages 25-8

stronger, or perhaps also because I laid my strength at your feet, so that you would love me, me, the weak and helpless one. But now you're not to fool me again, or else other less wellmotivated people could come and make fun of me, and I could be drawn into a battle of the brains, in which the white blood cells would flow as abundantly as the red.

For the background to this vivisection, see the general Introduction to this volume. 1 The neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot (1825—93), whose work at l'Hopital Salpetriere in Paris, using hypnotism in the study of dual personality, catalepsy and particularly hysteria, was widely known during the 1880s. His paper, 'Sur les divers etats nerveux determines par l'hypnotisation chez les hysteriques', which was presented at the Academie des Sciences in 1882, established hypnotism as a respectable subject of medical enquiry and practice while his regular Friday lectures at the Salpetriere, which were illustrated by his most gifted female patients displayed in somnambulistic and hysterical states, were attended by many prominent writers, artists and actors, including the Goncourts, Maupassant, Alphonse Daudet and Zola, although not by Strindberg. They were also documented visually in the 3-volume Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere (Paris, 1887—90). 2 Hippolyte Bernheim (1840—1919), appointed Professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Nancy in 1879. Unlike Charcot, who argued that hypnosis was a pathological condition peculiar to hysterics, Bernheim maintained that it was the effect of suggestion, which he defined as 'the aptitude to transform an idea into an act'. His two major contributions to the literature on the subject, De la suggestion dans Vetat hypnotique et dans Vetat de veille (Paris, 1884), and De la suggestion et de ses applications a la therapeutique (Paris, 1886), made

a profound impression on Strindberg, and examples of Bernheim's 'suggestion a l'etat de veille'figureprominently in the major naturalistic plays of the 1880s. The power that Laura assumes over the Captain in The Father, Jean's hypnotising of Julie in the final scene ofMiss Julie, Gustav's reduction of Adolf to epilepsy and death in Creditors and the ultimately fatal fascination exerted by the Arab girl Biskra over the Zouave lieutenant Guimard in Simoom, all testify to the enduring presence of Bernheim's theories in Strindberg's mind at this time. The list of those receptive to suggestion in this paragraph is a paraphrase of Bernheim, De la suggestion et de ses applications a la therapeutique, p. 6. 3 Following his trial for blasphemy in 1884, and in particular as a result of the increasingly virulent anti-feminism of the polemics on the Woman Question that succeeded the relatively affable stories in Getting Married, Strindberg lost much of the authority that he enjoyed during the early 1880s as the leading Swedish radical writer. His continued absence abroad also contributed to his being supplanted by lesser talents as a leader of the Young Sweden group. 4 Actually in the canton of Zurich. Strindberg, who had made Switzerland his base from January 1884 to March 1885, returned there in May 1886, staying successively at the village of Othmarsingen, some 20 kilometres west of Zurich, Weggis, on Lake Lucerne, and Gersau. 5 August Bebel (1840-1913), German socialist leader and theoretician whose Die

Notes to pages 28-36

233

Frau in der Vergangenheit, Gegenwart undZukunft (Woman in the Past, Present and Future, Zurich, 1883) had provoked an angry response in Strindberg by dealing sympathetically with the history and concept of matriarchy. On 19 May 1886 he wrote to Steffen from Switzerland: 'I am now living in Othmarsingen, Aargau, a perfect Arcadia . . . [and] I don't want to live in Dresden . . . because that's where Bebel lives . . . I detest Bebel because he is working for the reintroduction of a matriarchy, and I really do believe that man, having made all the capital, thought all the ideas, and done all the work, ought to have the right to rewrite society on his own, and bestow on those lazy carcasses called women whatever he thinks fit' {Letters 1, p. 199). That Strindberg could have left Steffen in no doubt of his position where Bebel and the socialist programme to which Steffen subscribed are concerned is evident from another letter, dated 5 August 1886, which clearly prefigures the polemics of'The Battle of the Brains': 'We'll see who was being stupid in the end! My intelligence was unable to stop short at the Berlin Programme, but you (and Branting) have come to a halt. You are therefore already conservative philistines, automatons, orthodoxists, theologians, clerics, damned blockheads! What's happening now that the author of Die Frau is in clink? Show a little energy, and let's get going' {Letters 1, p. 207). 6 Strindberg made Steffen's mother, Anna Maria von Reis, one of the models for a medium who features in the long narrative vivisection, 'Short Cuts'. 7 Strindberg has in mind his old friend, the opera singer Algot Lange (1850-1904). A notable Don Giovanni, Lange had married the Finnish pianist Ina Forsten, who was responsible for introducing Strindberg to his first wife, Siri von Essen (1850-1912). In 1903 Strindberg once again drew on what he perceived to be Lange's lack of character in the short story 'Jubal utan jag' (Jubal Without a Self). 8 A radical newspaper, edited by the ex-Communard Henri Rochefort (1830-1913). 9 Strindberg had expressed similar sentiments in a letter to Steffen (20 August 1886): 'The artisans already form an overclass which exploits the capitalist's machines by foisting their work on to them. They'll soon be sitting in their offices with white hands and clean cuffs, fiddling about with knobs and taps like any clerk with his pen . . . When the artisans have filched the machines, they'll become gentlemen and want farm labourers and maid-servants. Therefore revolution 5 = the farm labourers and maid servants! against the onetime artisans!' {Letters 1, p. 213). 10 In his novel What is to Be Done (1864), the radical Russian writer Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828—89) had portrayed an ideal modern marriage and described the 'new men' who were to build a new and just society. With his anarchist sympathies, the socially engaged Strindberg of the mid-i88os was, like Lenin, a great admirer of Chernyshevsky's novel, which he regarded as 'the urtext of the whole nihilist movement' {Letters1, p. 192). 11 An allusion to Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (1814) by Adalbert von Chamisso (1781-1838), the story of a man who, in return for earthly profit, sells his shadow to the Devil.

234

Notes to pages 39—50

12 The disappointment concerning Italy, that is attributed to Steffen here, reflects Strindberg's response, when he visited Genoa in 1884. 'God, what a disappointment! . . . Seeing oranges on trees and dockers smelling of garlic was all very fine, but the air in a monarchy is oppressive!' {Letters, 1, pp. 132-3). 13 Dredging the lake bottom for samples with a small anchor. 14 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), German philosopher. 15 The French historian and philosopher Hippolyte Taine (1828-93) analyses the ancien regime m part one of Les Origines de la France contemporaine (Paris, 1876). 16 The Irish physicist John Tyndall (1820-93), noted for his work on the radiation of heat by gases, the transmission of sound through the atmosphere, and the scattering of light. A materialist who disproved the hypothesis of spontaneous generation by showing experimentally that living particles in the air do not generate themselves ex nihilo, he was also a vigorous popular lecturer on science. The Edinburgh Review was a serious quarterly journal, published from 1803 to 1929. No contribution by Tyndall appeared there in the period covered by the events related here. 'Nemesis Divina' Originally published 7 June 1887 in the Danish newspaper Politiken, which was edited by Strindberg's friend Edvard Brandes (1847-1931), 'Nemesis Divina first appeared in Swedish in Tryckt och otryckt 111 (Published and Unpublished 111) in 1891. 1 Written as a kind of spiritual testament to his son Linnaeus' (Carl von Linne, 1707-78), numerous notes on nemesis were acquired by Uppsala University in 1844. A brief selection had been published in 1848 as an Inbjudningsskrift to the ceremony at which one of his successors to the Chair of Botany in Uppsala, Elias Fries (1794—1878), was awarded a doctorate, but it was not until 1878 that a more substantial edition appeared, edited by Elias and T. M. Fries. During the 1890s Linnaeus' concept of nemesis played an increasingly important role for Strindberg, who had always been inclined to assemble lists in which he noted the misfortunes of his enemies and acquaintances (see e.g. Letters \, p. 32), and in 1896 he defined himself as 'a naturalist-occultist like my great teacher, Linne' (Brevxi, p. 219). See also Letters 11, pp. 573, 593. 2 Since the 1620s the title given to the rector of St Nikolai Church (Storkyrkan) in Stockholm. 3 Strindberg's old student friend the zoologist Anton Stuxberg (1849-1902), who had accompanied the polar explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskiold on his pioneering navigation of the North-East Passage with the steamship Vega, in 1878-80. 4 An abbreviation of the Latin post hoc, ergo propter hoc. after this, therefore because of this, pointing up the fallacy that a sequence of events is always the result of cause and effect. 5 An allusion to the mysterious white horse associated, initially by the superstitious Mrs Helseth, with the estate of Rosmersholm in Ibsen's play of that name, published 1886.

Notes to pages 51-7

235

6 Refers to the approaches made by Osvald Alving to the young servant-girl Regine, who turns out to be his half-sister and the offspring of a relationship between his father and a previous servant in the house. 7 In April 1857 the Strindbergs moved from 14 Norrtullsgatan to the more remote, almost rural, 25 Grabergsgatan, known as Loviseberg. Both houses feature prominently in his personal history and his works, and the history of a house and the network of relationships it fosters remains a recurring theme as late as his Chamber Plays The Burned Site (1907) The Ghost Sonata (1907), and The Black Glove (1909). 8 See 'August Strindberg on Himself, pp. 223—4. 9 An allusion to the events surrounding Strindberg's trial for blasphemy for a reference to Holy Communion as 'a shameless hoax enacted with Hogstedt's Piccadon at 65 ore the half gallon and Letterstrom's wafers at 1 krona a. pound, which the parson passed off as the body and blood of the rabble-rouser Jesus of Nazareth' (SV16, p. 51) in Getting Married (1884). Among those Strindberg has in mind are the editors of the conservative Nya Dagligt Allehanda, Karl Adam Lindstrom (1816-85), and Figaro, Hugo Nisbeth (1837-87). They are included on a death-roll of twenty-two names in a letter to Verner von Heidenstam (22 August 1888), which also identifies Hans Henrik Hallback (1838-85) as the author of the satirical song and the dramaturg Karl Wetterhoff (1832-87) as among the authors of one of the scurrilous plays. 'Mysticism - For Now' Alone among the vivisections of 1887, 'Mysticism — For Now' was not originally published in a German or Danish periodical. It first appeared in Swedish in the third collection of miscellaneous pieces entitled Tryckt och otryckt 111 (Published and Unpublished i n ) , in 1891 and in German in Das Magazin fur die Literatur des In- und Auslandes, 14 September 1895. Strindberg's misgivings over the possible reception of this piece are apparent in an accompanying letter to the vivisections that he sent Isidor Bonnier on 25 April 1887, where he seeks to protect his reputation as a modern freethinking vivisector against what might appear to be a capitulation to superstition: 'As you can see, my aim has been to expose every trace of superstition in religion, art, science, democracy and socialism. The study "Mysticism" perhaps requires a bit of explanation. It's a "strategic lie", intended to destroy religion on its own high altar by giving a physiological and psychological account of prayer' {Letters \, p. 230). 1 See above, 'The Battle of the Brains', note 1. 2 Although Strindberg locates the miracle-worker in Frankfurt, he has in mind Fredrik August Boltzius (1836-1910), a Swedish faith-healer whose activities were the centre of a lively debate in Stockholm during the mid-i88os. 3 In his notes to this vivisection in SK29, p. 338, Hans Lindstrom observes that Strindberg may have had the German astronomer Johann Carl Friedrich Zollner (1834—82) in mind. Zollner speculated about the existence of a fourth dimension in order to explain spiritualistic phenomena.

236

Notes to pages 58-68

4 Possibly an allusion to the essay 'Vom Gebet' (On Prayer, c. 1788—91), in which the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724—1804) maintains that prayer has only natural effects, although he advances similar arguments in Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernuft (Religion Within the Limits of Mere Reason, 1793). 5 Strindberg gives another account of this evidently autobiographical experience in chapter three of The Son ofa Servant. 6 The date is wrong. Like the other vivisections, 'Mysticism - For Now' was written in 1887. L'Hypnotisme et les religions, ou la fin du merveilleux (Paris, 1888)

by the pseudonymous 'Skepto' was in Strindberg's second book collection, which was auctioned in 1892. 'Soul Murder (Apropos RosmersholmY

First published in the Danish newspaper Politiken, 30 May 1887, and in Swedish in Tryckt och otrycktw 1 (Published and Unpublished i n , 1891). A previous English translation by Walter Johnson in The Drama Review, 13:2 (1968), pp. 113—18 was made from a corrupt Swedish version that differs in numerous significant ways from Strindberg's original. Strindberg had not seen Ibsen's play, which was published in 1886 and first performed in Bergen on 17 January 1887. Later that year it was also performed in Christiania, Copenhagen, Berlin, Gothenburg, Stockholm and Helsinki. 1 An artificial language based primarily on English and German, invented in 1880 by an Austrian priest, Johan Schleyer (1831-1912). 2 Maurice Paul Legrain (1860-1939), who in his Du delire chez les degeneres. Observations prises a Vasile Sainte-Anne 1885—86 (Paris, 1886) identifies an

exaggerated love of animals, or what he terms 'folie des antivivisectionnistes', as a sign of inherited degeneration. 3 Strindberg greatly admired The Pathology of Mind (London, 1879) by the English psychologist Henry Maudsley (1835—1918), which he knew in French translation. Maudsley's account of hysteria was one of the models he had in mind while writing The Son of a Servant in 1886 when he told the Swedish writer Gustaf af Geijerstam, 'having read Maudsley's Maladies de Vesprit, I've a complete diagnosis of myself (Letters 1, p. 201). 4 The Pathology ofMind, p. 99. Maudsley's original reads, 'If an individual fails to bring himself into sympathetic relations, conscious or unconscious, with surrounding human nature, he becomes a sort of discord, and is on the road, though he may not reach the end of it, which leads to madness or to crime The discrepancies may be explained by the fact that Strindbrg was working with a French edition. 5 A trap-dungeon. 6 Strindberg believed that his Danish publisher, Gustav Philipsen (1853-1925), with whom he had recently signed a contract that gave him the rights to all his works, both previously published and newly written, forfiveyears, now refused

Notes to pages 68-73

237

to publish them. (Philipsen in fact brought out a Danish edition of Master Olofi The Secret of the Guild and Sir Bengts Wife, but not until 1889.) He also suspected the hand of his principal Swedish publisher, Bonniers, in this. Bonniers had bought but not published the polemical fourth volume of The Son of a Servant, which did not appear in Sweden until 1909, thus ensuring precisely the kind of break in communication that concerns Strindberg here. As he wrote in a letter to the journalist Pehr Staaff (1856—1903), '[Bonnier] has bought and suppressed Volume 4 [of The Son of a Servant], and renounced all contact with me, while simultaneously retaining the contracts from which he has redeemed me, and for which I've duly thanked him. In consequence, he's scared off all other publishers from approaching me. That is, he's trying to murder me in Sweden — and in Denmark, where the piratical Philipsen bought the rights to my works forfiveyears, and now refuses to publish them. This explains the "soul murder" in Politikeri (Letters \, p. 241). 7 An allusion to Gustaf Steffen, on whom Strindberg based the character of Schilf in 'The Battle of the Brains'. See the general Introduction to this volume. 8 Shakespeare's Othello, and the characterisation of Desdemona in particular, frequently preoccupied Strindberg. See Letters 1, pp. 245, 313. 9 In Schiller's play Die Ra'uber (1781). Karl Moor was the role in which Strindberg had sought to audition for the Royal Theatre in 1869. At the time he saw in Schiller's play his own 'hazy dreams set down in words; his revolutionary critique in print'. The Son ofa Servant, SVxo, p. 210. 10 'L'CEil invisible ou L'auberge des trois pendus' by Emile Erckmann (1822-99) and Alexandre Chatrian (1826-90), in Contes et romans populaires 11 (Paris, 1867). 11 Eduard von Hartmann (1842-1906), German philosopher, whose Philosophic des Unbewussten (Philosophy of the Unconscious, 1869) Strindberg knew well since first encountering it in the winter of 1872—3. He assisted his friend Anton Stuxberg on the Swedish translation, which appeared in 1877-8. 12 The idea that language was invented as an instrument for concealing thoughts was derived by Strindberg from an apergu attributed to Talleyrand, namely that 'La parole a ete donne a l'homme pour deguiser sa pensee'; it recurs frequently in his works, including 'The Reward of Virtue', in Getting Married (1884), 'Short Cuts' (1887) and The Ghost Sonata (1907). 13 A reference to the celebrated episode of the purloined ribbon in Book Two of Rousseau's Confessions. 14 Bismarck. 15 An allusion to the conflicts over domestic policy and the army's peace-time strength in Germany during the seven-year period 1881—7, which ended with Bismarck dissolving parliament and holding new elections in February 1887. 4

On Modern Drama and Modern Theatre'

First published in the Danish journal Nyjord, this was, with the exception of the Preface to Miss Julie, Strindberg's only major public comment on drama and the

238

Notes to pages 7 4 - 7

contemporary theatre before his Open Letters to the Intimate Theatre, in 1908. Like the Preface his reflections here were largely driven by practical considerations, arising from his attempt during 1888 and 1889 to found a Scandinavian Experimental Theatre in Copenhagen, on the lines of Antoine's Theatre Libre in Paris. The essay first appeared in Sweden in Tryckt och otryckt 1 (Published and Unpublished 1), in 1890. It appeared in German in Das Magazin fur die Literatur des In- und Auslandes, 7 January 1893. 1 Le Bossu by the French novelist and playwright Paul Henri Feval (1817-87), with its echoes of Victor Hugo's Le Rois'amuse, was written in 1858 not, as Strindberg suggests here, in 1852. 2 A play by the Danish dramatist Ludvig Holberg (1684-1754), dating from 1724. 3 Victorien Sardou (1831-1908), best known for the effectful and well-crafted vehicles such as Tosca (1887) that he composed for Sarah Bernhardt. The French dramatists Francois Ponsard (1814—67), Eugene Scribe (1791—1861) and Emile Augier (1820-89) a r e treated with uncharacteristic respect by Strindberg here. 4 According to Robert Baldick (Pages from the Goncourt Journals, Oxford, 1962, p. 112), the attack on Henriette Marechal, by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, was largely political in origin, and provoked by the brothers' friendship with the Princess Mathilde. 5 A drama in three acts by Zola, based on his novel published in 1867. 6 Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848—84), an academic painter of realistic subjects from the lives of the common people, popular at the official Salons. 7 Mihaly Munkaczy (1846-1900), Hungarian painter, whose most famous picture, Christ Before Pilate, is now in Philadelphia. After 1872 Munkaczy lived in Paris, where he enjoyed close contact with the Swedish painter Carl Frederick Hill (1849-1911). 8 Strindberg has in mind such plays as Augier's Les Lionnes pauvres (1858) and Dumas fils La Femme de Claude (1873). 9 Louis Desprez (1861—85) in his L'Evolution naturaliste, which Strindberg read immediately after its publication in 1884. In a letter to Zola (26 November 1887), Strindberg had offered to intercede on his behalf with the actor and theatre director William Engelbrecht (1855—1904), who was planning a Swedish production of Therese Raquin (see Letters 1, p. 256). 10 An adaptation by Zola of his novel La Curie (Paris, 1872), made in 1880 but first performed at the Vaudeville in 1887. 11 Henry Becque (1837—99), French dramatist. Though written in 1872—3 his masterpiece, the forceful study of human greed Les Corbeaux, was produced only in 1882. Strindberg seems to have responded more positively to La Parisienne (1885), an acerbic study of a menage-a-trois that became a frequent point of reference in his second marriage to Frida Uhl. Strindberg came to know Becque quite well during his stay in Paris in 1894—6 and expressed surprise that the latter was both positive in his praise of Creditors, and did not appear to hold these criticisms of Les Corbeaux against him. 'B[ecque] etait un gaillard, spirituel, amusant,' Strindberg wrote to Frida Uhl (29 August 1894), 'et m'a dit des

Notes to pages 77-80

239

choses charmantes sur Creanciers. II etait venu siffler les Scandinaves comme tout le monde et s'avouait vaincu. II connaissait tres bien ce que j'avais ecrit sur lui et y riaiat' (B was a merry fellow, witty and amusing, and said some charming things to me about Creditors. Like everyone else he had come to whistle at the Scandinavians and admitted he had been conquered. He was well aware that I had written about him and made a joke of it: Brevx, p. 243). 12 A paraphrase of Zola's celebrated formula, 'Un oeuvre d'art est un coin de nature vu a travers un temperament', which features in Mes hainesand the Salon de 1866 2& well as Le Naturalisme au theatre. 13 Zola's novels, which appeared in 1884—5 a n d 1887 respectively. 14 Andre Antoine (1858—1943) founded the Theatre Libre in 1887. Concentrating primarily on plays that dealt with contemporary issues in a naturalist vein, he introduced the work of the major modern German, Scandinavian and Russian dramatists to France, including Ibsen's Ghosts in 1890 and The Wild Duck in 1891, and Hauptmann's Die Weberm 1893. He also nurtured a number of more modest local talents and contributed to a revolution in acting and staging that has remained in some respects the dominant theatrical convention ever since. The Theatre Libre became the model for numerous experimental theatres, including the Berlin Freie Biihne, J. T. Grein's Independent Theatre in London and Strindberg's own short-lived Scandinavian Experimental Theatre in Copenhagen in 1889. The latter was inspired by Antoine's work, which Strindberg knew of through press reports, but he did not see any of Antoine's early productions. Strindberg began a correspondence with Antoine in 1887 but his letters have been lost. In 1893 the Theatre Libre performed Miss Julie. According to Antoine's Memoires, the event was 'a tremendous sensation', and marked Strindberg's appearance as a significant figure on the Parisian scene. 15 Edouard Pailleron (1834—99), whose comedy Le Monde oil Von sennui (1881) was widely played throughout Europe during the 1880s. 16 Constant-Benoit Coquelin (1841—1909), an outstanding actor in comic and romantic roles (e.g. as Tartuffe and in the title role of Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, which he created). He also wrote L'Art et le comedien (Paris, 1880). 17 Suzanne Reichenberg (1853—1924), societaire at the Comedie-Francaise. In 1882 she appeared there in the premiere of Henry Becque's Les Corbeaux, with Coquelin's brother, Ernest (1848-1909). 18 Although he later sought to interest her in the role of Margit in his early play Sir Bengts Wife (1882), Strindberg was generally dismissive of Bernhardt, whom he first saw in 1876 as Posthumia in Alexandre Parodi's Rome vaincue. Of her acting in a revival of Meilhac and Halevy's Frou-frou (1869), he observed: 'Just tricks and mannerisms!' (Letters 1, p. 117). Adelaide Ristori (1822-1906), the great Italian classical actress of the mid-nineteenth century. 19 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1768), translated Helen Zimmern (new edn, New York, 1962), p. 44. 20 The Goncourts' novel Sceur Philomene had been turned into a two-act play by Arthur Byl and Jules Vidal (1858—95). It was premiered at the Theatre Libre, 11 October 1887.

240

Notes to pages 80—5

21 'Un Monsieur de l'orchestre' by the French dramatist and man-of-letters Emile Blavet (1838-1924), Le Figaro, 10 October 1887. According to Strindberg's eldest daughter, Karin Smirnoff, the translation of Blavet s article that Strindberg includes here was done by Siri von Essen {Strindb ergs forsta hustru, Stockholm, 1925, p. 267). 22 Villiers de l'lsle-Adam (1840-89), French poet, best known today, however, for the play Axel (1890) and the Contes cruels (1883). 23 Louis Philippe Laforet, dramatist and journalist. 24 The sombre one-act slice of life Enfamilleby Oscar Metenier (1859-1913) and a verse comedy in three acts, La Nuit bergamasque, by Emile Bergerat (1845-1923), performed as a double bill at the Theatre Libre in 1887. 25 In Strindberg's Naturalistic Theatre (Copenhagen, 1962), p. 93, Borge Gedso Madsen points out that an extended passage of mimed action in Villiers de L'Isle Adam's La Revoke (1869), a play about a 'Nora' who fails to emancipate herself, may have been in Strindberg's mind when he wrote the mimed action for the servant Kristin in Miss Julie. 26 Quart d'heure— the generic name for a form of brief play in a single scene, pioneered at the Theatre Libre. From Les Quarts d'heure, two plays (Au mois de mai and Entre freres) by Gustave Guiches (i860—1935) and Henri Lavedan (1859-1940) which were first performed 23 March 1888. Adopting the brevity and concentration of these plays, but little else, Strindberg wrote three quart d'heure plays of his own during 1888-9, The Stronger, Pariah and Simoom. 27 Cf. Strindberg's comments on the art of drama in a letter to the Swedish author Gustaf af Geijerstam (1858-1909), while reading manuscripts submitted to his Scandinavian Experimental Theatre: 'Do you remember in France when you were given a lamb chop with 1/2 a pound of bone and two inches of fat. To the horror of old girl Chevillon, we left that muck and only ate the nut (it was called la noixf). — Give me the nut, and spare me those people who drivel on simply in order to come up with a full-length piece! I've now read 25 plays submitted here (Doll's Houses, the lot of them) and only found one worth putting on! It was a fine nut!' {Letters 1, p. 292). 28 The Theatre Libre premiered Tolstoy's dramatic masterpiece The Power of Darkness on 10 February 1888. 29 Carmontelle, pseudonym of Louis Carrogis (1717-1806), who transformed the proverbe as a genre from a light-hearted frolic into a genuine portrait of manners. 30 Michel Theodore Leclerq (1777-18 5 5), dramatist, author of Proverbes dramatiques (Paris, 1823-36). 31 Alfred de Musset (1810-57), who continued the tradition of Carmontelle in sharply observed proverbes like On ne badine pas avec Vamour (1834) and // ne fautjurerde rien (1836), and Octave Feuillet (1821-90), better known as a novelist. 32 Becque's extended one-acter, in which two of the characters remain on stage while a third listens in on the conversation in an adjoining room, may have influenced the structure of Strindberg's Creditors (1888). Becque certainly

N o t e s to pages 85—90

33

34

35 36

37

241

claimed that Strindberg had confided as much when the two became acquainted in 1894. The formula is one that Strindberg repeats in his letters, with specific reference to Creditors. O n 21 August 1888 he told Karl Otto Bonnier: 'In a week I shall be sending you a new naturalistic tragedy, even better than Miss Julie, with three characters, a table and two chairs, and no sunrise!' {Letters 1, p. 281). Strindberg has in mind the various pathological incarnations of the pierrot figure which appeared in France during the revival of interest in the pantomime during the 1880s, notably Pierrot assassin de safemme (1882), a tragic nightmare by Paul Margueritte, one of the founders of the Cercle funambulesque, in the manner of E. T. A. Hoffmann or Edgar Allan Poe, in which Pierrot causes his wife's death by tickling the soles of her feet, which was performed at the Theatre Libre in 1888. See above, 'The Battle of the Brains', note 1. The popular French clown and farce-player Antoine Girard Tabarin (c. 1584—1626), who set up a booth stage in the Place Dauphin. La Femme de Tabarin, 2. 'tragi-parade' in one act by Catulle Mendes, was performed at the Theatre Libre in November 1887. The original Haugians were adherents of a puritanical Norwegian pietist movement named after its leader, Hans Nielsen Hauge (1771—1824), which also had an impact elsewhere in Scandinavia in the early years of the nineteenth century.

Strindberg glosses this vivisection in one of the revealing series of thirty-five letters that he addressed to his old friend Leopold Littmansson (1847-1908) from Austria, between June and August 1894: 'The only thing that exists is the self (le culte du mot), and I know nothing about the world and "other people" except through my self. Every individual is the centre of his "od-circle", everyone sees their own rainbow, and two people cannot stand on the same longitude and latitude at once. "Have you noticed that when one sits down on a bench while out walking and begins to draw in the sand with one's stick, what finally emerges is a mass of concentric circles in which I (you) are the central point? That point is the self's first movement out into space: the desire to mark out one's territory . . . and above all make oneself the central point" (thus I recently began an essay on the self)' (Letters 11, p. 485). His description also recalls the opening scene of To Damascus in which The Stranger sits drawing in the dust with his stick (SK39, p. 26). Strindberg was evidently aware of Maurice Barres' trilogy of novels Le Culte du moi (Paris, 1888—91) while his allusion to 'od-circles' demonstrates his knowledge of the theories of Carl von Reichenbach (see below, 'Deranged Sensations', note 5). 1 En bok om Strindberg Swedish poet Gustaf come from the young with encouragement

(A Book About Strindberg, Karlstad, 1894), edited by the Froding (1860-1911). The initiative for the volume had Swedish writer and diplomat Birger Morner (1867-1930), from Strindberg himself. Alongside contributions from

242

Notes to pages 90—2

Georg Brandes, Bjornstjerne Bjornson and Jonas Lie, it included a partial translation of Justin Huntley McCarthy's pioneering English article on Strindberg, first published in the September 1892 issue of Fortnightly Review. 2 Laura Marholm, pseudonym for the German Baltic writer Laura Mohr (1854—1928), who married Strindberg's friend, the Scanian poet and novelist Ola Hansson (1860-1925), in 1889. Marholm had originally incurred Strindberg's displeasure for an article on The Father, 'Ein Dichter des Weiberhass', in Gegenwart (7 January 1888), in which she described him as 'a genius on the edge of madness'; although he stayed briefly with the Hanssons at Friedrichshagen, near Berlin, following his move to Germany in October 1892 (a move that had been made at least in part at their instigation), he soon fell out with them. 3 Brachycephalic short-headed; dolichocephalic, long-headed. Terms first introduced by the Swedish anatomist Anders Retzius (1796—1860). Contemporary racial theory argued that the latter was the superior form. 4 Elsewhere Strindberg maintains he is a Mongol himself. Birger Morner recalls that he 'was rather proud of his cheekbones. He once told me that they were an inheritance from Lappish ancestors. He was from the wilderness, a Mongol.' Den Strindberg jag kdnt (The Strindberg I Knew, Stockholm, 1924), p. 22. 5 Marholm claimed that Strindberg was drawn to polygamous women, and that his female characters were mostly of the sick and unhealthy type. 6 According to Marholm, the Captain succumbs to the women in his life because he is weak, naive and ignorant. 7 President Sadi Carnot of France had recently (24 June 1894) been assassinated by the young anarchist Santo-Jeronimo Caserio. 'The Making of an Aspasia' With minimal disguise Strindberg here portrays the bohemian circle of writers and artists with whom he associated in Berlin in 1893 at the tavern on the corner of Unter den Linden and Neue Wilhelmstrasse that he christened 'Zum schwarzen FerkeV (The Black Pig). In his letters he frequently refers to the Norwegian Dagny Juel (see below, note 10), with whom he had a brief affair, as Aspasia, and signals an intention to write a novel about her, but for a number of years this story was all he could manage, apart from a fragment in French, confusingly entitled Inferno like his later document humain of 1897, which is one of many attempts to find a literary form for his experiences between 1892 and 1898, when he wrote almost no fiction or plays. This period of his life is subsequently treated more extensively in the autobiographical fiction The Cloister (1898), which was partly transposed into 'The Quarantine Master's Second Story', and published in the collection Fagervik och Skamsund (Fairhaven and Foulstrand, 1902). The literary revenge that he designed for Dagny Juel in one of his letters, of having her taken for a prostitute while out walking (3 January 1894), is partly exacted upon the femme fatale Henrietta in his play Crimes and Crimes (1899). 1 As in Inferno, where Edvard Munch is portrayed as the Danish (rather than

Notes to pages 92-4

243

Norwegian) painter 'handsome Henrik', Strindberg employs a token masking procedure which entails marginally displacing the name and nationality of some of his characters. Denmark's most famous author Per Andersson is, of course, the Swedish August Strindberg. 2 Ola Hansson, who was living at Friedrichshagen near Berlin with his wife, Laura Marholm. See above, T, note 2. Strindberg spells his name with only one y here, partly as a rudimentary form of disguise, partly perhaps to cut the despised Hansson down to size. 3 Gustav Ttirke, the proprietor of Zum schwarzen Ferkel. 4 Stanislaw Przybyszewski (1868-1927), the Polish novelist and playwright who features in Inferno as the ominous Russian Popoffsky, portrayed Strindberg in the first part of his trilogy of novels Homo Sapiens (1894-96). 5 Edvard Munch (1863-1944), the Norwegian painter, who was responsible for introducing Dagny Juel (note 10 below) to the Ferkel. For Munch and Strindberg, see 'Edvard Munch's Exhibition', p. 261. 6 Carl Ludwig Schleich (1859-1922), a surgeon and innovator in thefieldof local anaesthesia. He published a memoir of Strindberg, Erinnerungen an Strindberg (Leipzig, 1917). 7 Richard Dehmel (1863-1920), German lyric poet, author of Weib und Welt (Woman and World, Berlin, 1896). 8 The Finland Swedish writer Adolf Paul (1863-1943), whose recent collection of short stories, The Ripper (1892), had been seized by the Finnish censor. For much of 1892-4 Paul served as a kind of literary amanuensis and errand-boy to Strindberg, whom he portrayed critically in the short story 'Med det falska och det arliga ogat' (With False and Honest Eye, 1895) and his StrindbergErinnerungen und Briefe (Recollections and Letters of Strindberg, Munich, 1914).

9 Frida Uhl (1872-1943), whose father was editor-in-chief of the official Habsburg court newspaper, the Amtliche Kaiserliche und Konigliche Wiener Zeitung, and whose mother came from a wealthy family with extensive estates on the Danube. Frida, who had recently embarked upon a career as a journalist, first met Strindberg in January 1893. They became engaged that March and married in May. After a brief and stormy marriage, which produced one daughter, Kerstin, they parted in October 1894, in Paris, outside the department store Printemps, as casually as Strindberg describes the scene in Inferno (p. 101). Frida subsequently wrote a two-volume account of her life with Strindberg, Strindberg och hans andra hustru (Strindberg and his Second Wife, Stockholm, 1933). 10 Dagny Juel (1867—1901), the daughter of a Norwegian doctor, who went to Berlin in 1893 to study music. She rapidly became the erotic and iconographic centre of the Ferkel circle (Munch painted her portrait and used her for other motifs, including both the Madonna and Woman in Three Stages of 1894), and by various accounts she passed (or was passed: see pp. 94—5) from Munch to Strindberg to Przybyszewski, whom she married in August 1893. A minor poet and dramatist in her own right, she died in Tiflis at the hands of another of her admirers, Wladyslaw Emeryk.

244

Notes to pages 95—7

11 Strindberg married Frida Uhl in Heligoland, with two local pilots as witnesses. Britain had ceded Heligoland to Germany in 1890 in exchange for Zanzibar, and under the British marriage laws which still obtained no banns were required. The honeymoon was spent in Gravesend and London, where Strindberg was hoping that J. T. Grein might mount a production of The Father at his Independent Theatre. 12 Probably Przybyszewski's pioneering study Das Werk des EdvardMunch (Berlin, 1894) in which Munch is seen as the creator of a new symbolist art that surpasses the naturalism with which Strindberg was at that time still associated. 13 In the poem 'Ein Ewiger', in Dehmel's collection Aber die Liebe (Munich, 1893), Strindberg is in fact celebrated as in his element at the Ferkel. Dehmel compared him to 'a sorrowful badger', and he adopted the description when writing to Frida Uhl on 16/17 April 1893 where he signs himself'Dein trauriger Dachs!' (Brevix, p. 176). 14 By the time of his exhibition in Berlin in 1894 the motifs of many of Munch's paintings incorporatedfiguresfrom the Ferkel circle. He had painted a portrait of Strindberg in 1893. 15 The Norwegian dramatist Gunnar Heiberg (1857—1929). His play Balkonen (The Balcony, 1894), which was based on Heiberg's triangular relationship with the Norwegian painter Christian Krogh and Krogh's wife, Oda, was sometimes thought by Strindberg to be derived either from his life or, at the very least, his plays. To Adolf Paul he wrote: 'Heiberg's play . . . seems to me to be my Weimar play. What do you think? It was according to my then formula . . . How could that prize idiot . . . have become such a genius all of a sudden?' (Brevx, p. 102). 16 Strindberg believed, quite wrongly, that Adolf Paul had portrayed him in Blind Mans Buff, published in Finnish in 1894, and Ein gefallener Prophet (A Fallen Prophet), published by Albert Langen in Germany in 1895. 'Nemesis Divina (Cont.)' Written July-August 1894 in Dornach. It was intended as a continuation of the 1887 vivisection with the same title, which was translated into French at this time, probably by Leopold Littmansson. 1 The previous vivisection called 'Nemesis Divina was written and first published in 1887, not 1886. 2 The merchant and lay preacher Carl Oscar Berg (1839-1903), who had been one of Strindberg's most outspoken opponents during the prosecution of Getting Married in 1884. Berg went bankrupt in 1893 and was sentenced to two months in prison for falsifying his accounts. 3 A letter to Littmansson, 1 August 1894, indicates that Strindberg had in mind the two most important Swedish women writers of the period, Ernst Ahlgren (pseudonym of Victoria Benedictsson), who committed suicide in 1888, and Anne-Charlotte Leffler (1849—92); the mathematician Sonja Kovalevsky

Notes to pages 97—102

245

(1850-91), a literary hostess, Fredrika Limnell (1816-92), Sophie Adlersparre (1823—95), who edited the leading Swedish feminist journal Tidskrift for hemmet, and Natalia Teresia Andersson-Meijerhelm (1846—1922), who had been one of the founders of the Swedish branch of the Federation for the Abolition of Prostitution. See Letters 11, p. 498. 4 The poet and critic Carl David af Wirsen (1842-1912), from 1883 the Secretary of the Swedish Academy, and one of Strindberg's bitterest foes. Wirsen had long hadfinancialdifficulties and was rumoured to be in the hands of a well-known money-lender. 5 Paul Reinhold Strandberg (1831-1903), editor of the official government organ Post- och inrikes tidningar, who had been found guilty of illegal transactions with the income the paper derived from advertising and resigned in 1894. Wirsen was thought to be implicated in these transactions. 6 Jules de Glouvet (pseudonym of J. Quesnay de Beaurepaire, 1838-1923). His play Le Perewas published*early in 1886, but to little acclaim. 7 'Le Matriarcat', by Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafargue (1842—1911), in La Nouvelle Revue, 15 March 1886. Lafargue argued that patriarchy was a relatively late institution, and had emerged only with difficulty out of matriarchy. Strindberg engaged with his ideas at length in the essay 'Sista ordet i kvinnofragan' (The Last Word on the Woman Question, 1887). 8 Ossian Ekbohrn (1837-1911), an eccentric customs inspector on the island of Sandhamn in the Stockholm archipelago, whom Strindberg first met in 1868. In April 1887, Ekbohrn had invited Strindberg back home from the continent to Sandhamn, an invitation that he accepted two years later, in April 1889, when he returned to Sweden from Denmark. The two rapidly fell out once Ekbohrn appeared to take Siri von Essen's side in her acrimonious divorce from Strindberg, and the latter was convinced that Ekbohrn was involved in a conspiracy to have him certified as insane. This scenario is replotted in Lnferno (pp. 169-71) and in a letter to Torsten Hedlund, 6 July 1896 {Letters 11, pp. 564-5). 9 A treacherous letter, pretending friendship but in reality a death-warrant. See 2 Sam. 11: 15. 10 Strindberg had portrayed life in the Stockholm archipelago in the novel The People ofHemso (1887) and a volume of short stories, Life in the Skerries (1888). 11 Strindberg moved to Nore on the island of Runmaro in May 1889, and was soon joined there by Siri von Essen and their three children. See Letters 1, pp. 318—19. 12 Strindberg is referring to his own divorce from Siri von Essen. Siri and the Strindberg's three children spent several weeks on Sandhamn along with a young Danish woman, Marie David (1865—98), with whom Strindberg had for some time been accusing Siri of having an affair. During this time they associated regularly with Ekbohrn. 13 Another of the 1894 vivisections, not translated here. 14 Albert Bonnier (1820-1900), whom Strindberg had recently accused of being 'in the gang which wanted to imprison me on Sandhamn. As mad!', adding: 'Eva's imprisonment! Nemesis humanaX (Brevx, p. 223). Bonnier's daughter, the painter Eva Bonnier (1857-1909), had suffered a serious depression following

246

Notes to pages 103—4

the recent death of Strindberg's great friend, the sculptor Per Hasselberg (1850—94), to whom she had been engaged. 4

The New Arts! or The Role of Chance in Artistic Creation'

Originally published in Revue des Revues, 15 November 1894, in a version edited by the French writer and dramatist Georges Loiseau (1864-1949), who between 1892 and 1895 translated, edited and revised a number of Strindberg's works, including the plays Creditors and Playing with Fire and the autobiographical fiction A Madman's Defence, for publication in France. This important statement of the aesthetic on which Strindberg came to base not only his painting but some of the features of his later theatre is mentioned in a letter to Leopold Littmansson (31 July 1894) which accompanied an enclosure in which he described seven of the canvases that he had recently painted in Austria, and which he now sent on to Paris, with a view to supporting himself on the profit that might be made from their sale when he arrived there himself later that summer. 'It is in fact a new (that's to say, old) kind of art which I've invented and call Lart fortuite. I've written an essay on my method. It is the most subjective of all art forms, so that in the first place only the painter himself can enjoy (= suffer) the work because he knows what he meant by it, as do the chosen few who know the painter's inner (= outer) a little (—a lot). Each picture is, so to speak, double-bottomed, with an exoteric aspect that everyone can make out, with a little effort, and an esoteric one for the painter and the chosen few . . . All the pictures are painted using only a knife and unmixed colours, whose combination has been half left to chance, like the motif as a whole' {Letters 11, p. 494). In time the implications of his reflections in this essay on the relationship between chance and design assumed a significance in Strindberg's mind that extended well beyond the domain of painting. (See Michael Robinson, 'New Arts, New Worlds!' Strindberg and Painting, University of Birmingham, 1994.) A previous version of this essay has appeared in English, in a translation by Albert Bermal, in Evert Sprinchorn, ed., Inferno, Alone, and Other Writings (New York, 1968). 1 A village near the artists' colony of Grez-sur-Loing, a few miles south of Fontainebleau, where Strindberg stayed on more than one occasion during the 1880s. Among the painters with whom he associated there were Carl Larsson (1853-1919) and Karl Nordstrom (1855-1923). 2 The one-acter Simoom, written in Denmark in 1889, first performed at Svenska Teatern, Stockholm, in March 1892. 3 The behaviour suggests Stanislaw Przybyszewski (see above, 'The Making of an Aspasia', note 4) who was a passionate pianist, but 'twenty years' suggests Strindberg's eldest brother Carl Axel (1845-1927). Besides working for the life insurance company Nordstjernan, the latter was a gifted musician, a cellist with the orchestra of the Royal Theatre in Stockholm and an able pianist with a particular enthusiasm for Beethoven. 4 In a letter to Littmansson, 13 August 1894, Strindberg claimed to have 'discov-

Notes to pages 104—7

2

47

ered a Musical Kaleidoscope which always presents such a variety of new motifs that one can select the beautiful ones (= ugly). You know that weavers sketch patterns from a Kaleidoscope which is why trouser materials are always different each spring. Why not come with a new musique fortuite every spring? The teleology of chance. Work like nature, not from nature' {Brevx, p. 215). 5 The widely read Illustrirtes Tierleben by the German popular scientist Alfred Edmund Brehm (1829-84), originally published in 115 parts, 1863-9. 6 'The Weeping Boy', a figure sculpted by Strindberg at Djursholm in 1891. He had come to regard it as an image of his 10-year-old son Hans, who was now living in Finland with Siri von Essen. 7 Strindberg had first voiced these theories two years earlier, in a letter to the painter Richard Bergh (1858—1919), where he coined the phrase skogsnufvismen (lit. 'wood-nymphism') to describe this new art form: 'I have a number of oil studies to show you, painted from the imagination. A "new direction" that I have discovered myself and call skogsnufvismen {Brevix, p. 40). 8 Strindberg is describing Underlandet (Wonder Land), painted at Dornach in Austria, in 1894. See Fargplansch v m in Torsten Matte Schmidt, ed., Strindbergs maleri (Malmo, 1972), facing p. 127. 9 At the moment Frida Uhl. 10 Strindbergs initial response to Maeterlinck was lukewarm. In another vivisection, 'The Origin of a Style' (1894), not translated here, he dismissed him for echoing other styles and writers, and described him in a letter to Birger Morner as 'a caprice, a bibelot [who] amuses me in a tired moment' {Letters 11, p. 513). However, he subsequently came to regard Maeterlinck as a major dramatist (see Letters 11, pp. 670-4), and translated part of his Le Tresor des humbles as a gift for his third wife, Harriet Bosse. 11 In Entartung (Degeneration, Berlin, 1892), the Hungarian author and physician Max Nordau (1849—1923) had linked symbolist art and literature, including Maeterlinck, with various states of mental disorder. Thus, 'The healthy mind suppresses the representations which are contradictory to, or not rationally connected with the first perception. This the weak-minded cannot do. The mere similarity of sound determines the current of his thought. He hears a word, and feels compelled to repeat it, once or oftener, sometimes to the extent of 'Echolalia; or it calls into his consciousness other words similar to it in sound, but not connected with it in meaning, whereupon he thinks and talks in a series of completely disconnected rhymes . . .', Degeneration, reprinted from the English-language edition of 1895 (University of Nebraska Press, 1993), p. 6. Strindberg's hostility towards Nordau here marks a shift from his earlier praise of the latter's previous books, Die conventionellen Liigen der Kulturmenschheit (The Conventional Lies of Civilisation, Leipzig, 1883) and Paradoxe (Paradoxes, Leipzig, 1885), which bordered at times upon idolatry. In 1884, he told his friend, the radical journalist Erik Thyselius: 'Having just finished Nordau['s The Conventional Lies of Civilisation], I must write to you as its future translator, and say "Hail. . . Nordau: It is the Bible, it is Holy Writ!"' {Letters 1, p. 119).

248

Notes to pages 107-14

12 Hence those tears. From Terence, Andria, 1, i, 99, meaning 'This was the real offence or source of the vexation'. 'Whence We Have Come' Originally entitled 'Esquisse sur la descendance de l'homme', written July—October 1894. This essay marks a further stage in Strindberg's move away from Darwin back towards his earlier admiration for Rousseau, and as Brandell remarks Strindberg in Inferno (p. 205), the concept of evolution in reverse that he advances here 'provides the basis for [his] sentimental portrayal of children in Advent [1899] and for his anti-Darwinian polemic in A Blue Book (1907) and its three sequels' (1908-12). 1 Probably the young Swedish botanist Bengt Lidforss (1868—1913), whom Strindberg first met in 1890. Lidforss was also a member of the Berlin Ferkel circle and deeply attached to Dagny Juel. See Letters 1, p. 348. A note among Strindberg's surviving papers (SgNM 33) records, 'The ice-ferns on large shop windows in Berlin, Christmas Day 1892', and observes: 'Plants are created under the influence of water's own creative force, for without water there are no plants.' 2 Ernst Heinrich Haeckel (1834-1919), German biologist and philosopher, who formulated the recapitulation theory of evolution and was an exponent of the philosophy of materialistic monism. This example of evolutionary retrogression is frequently quoted by Strindberg to reinforce his scepticism of evolutionary orthodoxy, often (as here) in the name of Rousseau. 3 The essay Anthropomorpha (1760). 'Character a Role?'

The final section of this vivisection was published in LEcho de Paris, 2 January 1895, and Das Magazin fiir die Literatur des In- und Auslandes, 64 (1895), and translated as 'Marionettes' for inclusion in volume 27 of Samlade Skrifter. Strindberg's reflections here on the instability of identity and the propensity of individuals to accommodate themselves to their surroundings via a variety of roles continue the discussion of character in The Son ofa Servant and the Preface to Miss ]ulie, and anticipate many later comments of a similar nature in A Blue Book (1907-12). 1 The once widely read pan-German manifesto Rembrandt als Erzieher. Von einem Deutschen (Rembrandt the Educator. By a German), published anonymously in 1890 by Julius Langbehn (1851-1907). 2 The German socialist leader Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-64). According to Hans Lindstrom {Strindbergoch bbckernaI(Uppsala, 1977), p. 13), Georg Brandes' 1881 study of Lassalle was one of only fourteen books to appear in all three of Strindberg's book collections. 3 Die Zukunfty a cultural weekly edited by Maximilian Harden (1861—1927), whom

Notes to pages 114—18

4 5

6

7

8

249

Strindberg got to know in Berlin in 1893, and a prestigious conservative daily, founded 18 61. Scene change. Strindberg's fellow student at Uppsala, Hugo (von) Philp (1844-1906), who went on to become a teacher. The two shared lodgings in 1871—2 and Philp, who belonged to an old Baltic family, restored the aristocratic Von' to his name at the end of the century. He married Strindberg's eldest sister, Anna, in 1875 and it is Strindberg's perception of this relationship that forms the basis of The Dance of Death (1900) and the background to both The Pelican and the dramatic fragment Toten-Insel (1907). The variousness of Philp's character was exploited by Strindberg in fictional form as early as the short story 'The Old and the New' in Town and Gown (1877). This paragraph was omitted in the extract published in Das Magazin fur die Literatur des In- und Auslandes, possibly because the original may have been among Strindberg's acquaintances in Austria, where he was then living on the estate of Frida Uhl's grandparents at Dornach, on the banks of the Danube, between Mauthausen and Grein. General Georges Boulanger (1837—91) who enjoyed great popularity in France during the 1880s and threatened a coup against the Third Republic. Forced to flee to Belgium in 1889, he committed suicide on the grave of his mistress, Mme de Bonnemain (hence the description of him as a man 'who follows his Ophelia and deserts the flag'). Edvard Swartz (1826-97), o n e of the major Swedish classical actors of the age, who made his debut at the Royal Theatre in Stockholm as Hamlet in 1853. He was henceforth always associated with the role although he was also a notable Iago, Richard II, Leontes andTimon of Athens. 'Cesarine'

This essay on Alexandre Dumas fits'play La Femme de Claude (1873) wasfirstpublished in Le Figaro litteraire, 30 September 1894. According to Frida Uhl (Strindbergs andra hustru 11, Stockholm, 1933—4, p. 33), it was written earlier that month. Strindberg had long been familiar with Dumas's play, which had now been revived at the Comedie-Francaise, with Sarah Bernhardt in the role of Cesarine. Indeed, when The Fatherwas presented at Lugne-Poe's Theatre de l'CEuvre in 1894 the eminent critic Jules Lemaitre (1853—1914) had accused him in the Journal des Debats of deriving the character of Laura from Dumas's Cesarine. However, Strindberg's article was as much an intervention in the current French debate on the Woman Question as a work of dramatic criticism, a debate to which he also contributed 'Mysogynie et gynolatrie' in Gil Bias (24 July 1895) and 'On the Inferiority of Woman to Man' in the symbolist Revue Blanche (Brev x, p. 313). According to Paul Ginisty (1852-1932) in Le XIX Siecle, the latter aroused 'more attention in Paris . . . [than] all his plays'. Dumas himself was no stranger to this debate. Apart from La Femme de Claude his virulent misogyny is evident in, for example, L'Ami des femmes (1869) and the philosophical LHomme-Femme (1872),

250

Notes to pages 118-29

whose title introduces a concept that Strindberg used as early as 1885, in the second part of Getting Married. Strindberg and Dumas appear to have met on only one occasion. See Michael Meyer, Strindberg A Biography (London, 1985), p. 312. 1 i.e. as opposed to a formal separation in terms of bed and board. 2 The Greek mathematician and physicist Archimedes (c. zSy—m BC) was killed at the capture of the city of Syracuse by the Roman general Marcellus. 3 One of the principal characters in La Femme de Claude, a notary. 'Deranged Sensations' First published in Le Figaro litteraire in three instalments (17 November 1894, 26 January, 9 February 1895) with the title 'Sensations detraquees', a term that normally means 'distracted' or 'half-mad' but which, as used in Parisianfin-de-siecleliterary circles, was an accolade, denoting extreme sensitivity and intellectual refinement. Writing to Richard Bergh (26 November 1894), Strindberg commented: 'Some time ago I sent you an article from Le Figaro: "Sensations detraquees", in which I tried, in a favourable mood I'd worked up, to anticipate the capacities of a future, more highly developed mental life, which we still lack, and which I can only conjure up momentarily — before falling back, exhausted by the effort, into my old frame of mind . . . In Paris . . . it silenced everyone! It was new, extraordinaire but mad. Since my talent wasn't in question, nor its originality, my madness only served as seasoning, and I'm now addressed as "Cher Maitre"' (Lettersn, p. 519). To Littmansson he observed that the opening section of the essay was a 'symbolistic, detraquistic compromise between science, poetry, and madness' (Brevx, p. 278). The essay was first published in Swedish in 1895, in the yearbook Vintergatan, and then in Tryckt och otrycktiv, 1897 (Published and Unpublished, iv), in a translation by Eugene Fahlstedt (1851-1935), an old student friend of Strindberg's from Uppsala who knew his style well and was often engaged to turn into Swedish the numerous works that he wrote in French, like Lnferno and the second part of Getting Married. 1 On his arrival in France from Austria on 17 August 1894 Strindberg stayed with Leopold Littmansson at 8 bis Boulevard Lesseps in Versailles. 2 Strindberg had first visited Paris in October 1876, together with the painter Johan Dahlbom (1850-86). 3 Strindberg's reflections on the wings of the palace of Versailles forming an auricle designed to capture the sounds of Paris have their point of departure in an ancient account of a system for spying on prisoners installed by the tyrant Dionysus the Elder (c. 430—367 BC) in his prison quarries at Syracuse. 4 Littmansson had gone to Aachen with his family and left Strindberg alone in Versailles, where he remained until 5 September. He then moved to Passy. 5 Strindberg's speculations here almost certainly derive from Carl von Reichenbach (1788-1869), a German chemist and disciple of Mesmer who coined the term 'od' for a hypothetical force (the 'odylic force') which was formerly thought to be responsible for many natural phenomena, such as magnetism, light

Notes to pages 129—35

251

and hypnotism (see e.g. Reichenbach's Untersuchungen tiber den Magnetismus, Heidelberg, 1845; Odisch-magnetische Briefe, Stuttgart, 1852; Der sensitive Mensch und sein Verhalten zum Ode, Stuttgart, 1854-5). According to Reichenbach, in order to obtain a good night's sleep the polarity of the human body required a bed to be placed on a north-south axis. Frida Uhl claims that Strindberg discussed Reichenberg's ideas intensively with her father (Strindbergs andra hustru 11, p. 113); certainly, they were in his mind when he composed the vivisection T (see the above introduction to this essay), and the speculations on the power of light in 'Deranged Sensations' may also be indebted to him. See, for example, an English version of Reichenbach's speculations by John Ashburner, PhysicoPhysiological Researches on the Dynamics of Magnetism, Electricity, Heat, Light, Crystallisation, and Chemism in their Relations to Vital Force (London, 1851), the second part of which deals with 'Magnetic or Odylic Light'. 6 Strindberg has in mind the three children from his first marriage, Karin, Greta and Hans, who were now living with their mother, Siri von Essen, in Finland. 7 Sir Isaac Newton's Observations on the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of Stjohn, published posthumously in 1733. 8 Angelo Secchi (1818-78), Italian Jesuit astronomer, author of LeSoleil(1880). He was the first to classify the stars according to a workable system of spectral types. 9 Conceivably Bernard Beaudonnet (1866- ?), whose Contribution a Vetude des manifestations oculaires dans Verytheme appeared in Paris, in 1894. 10 The Cave of Dogs in the vicinity of Lake Agnano outside Naples, so called because the local population used to demonstrate the existence of large quantities of carbonic acid gas on the floor of the cave by letting down dogs, which were promptly suffocated. The excessive amount of the gas was of volcanic origin. 11 Strindberg pursues this theme further in Jardin des Plantes, in the essay 'Where are the Nerves of Plants?', which is not translated in this selection. 12 Yellow Balsam, or Touch-me-not. 4

In the Cemetery'

Written in French as 'Etudes funebres' and originally published in Revue des Revues, 15 July 1896. First appeared in Swedish in the yearbook Vintergatan (1896) and then in Trycktoch otrycktiv, 1897 (Published and Unpublished iv), translated by Eugene Fahlstedt, but with one significant passage deleted. (See note 8 below.) 'Etudes funebres' was included as a chapter in the French edition of Inferno (1898), where this passage was again deleted, but omitted in its entirety from the Swedish translation of Strindberg's autobiographical fiction, which had been published the previous year, though the reader is referred there 'to my essay "In the Cemetery" . . . which shows how in solitude and in suffering I was brought back to a faltering apprehension of God and immortality' (Inferno, p. 127). 1 Theodore de Banville (1823-91), French Parnassian poet (notably Odes funambulesques, Paris, 1851) as well as a prolific writer of occasional prose and several comedies in verse.

252

Notes to pages 135-7

2 Mateo Jose Bonaventura Orfila (1787-1853), French physician of Spanish parentage, who founded the science of toxicology. He was the author of a standard work on medical jurisprudence and of a well-known textbook on the chemical elements, Elements de chimie, appliquee a la medecine etaux arts (Paris, 1831), which came to assume an almost supernatural authority for Strindberg when he discovered it, by all accounts accidentally, at a secondhand bookstall on the Boulevard Saint-Michel (see Inferno, p. 116 and Letters 11, pp. 568—9). Orfila became his guide and even more inextricably linked with the unfolding drama of his life when he moved into the Hotel Orfila, on 21 February 1896. 3 Jacques Nicolas Augustin Thierry (1795-1856), French historian, most notably the Histoire de la conquete de Vangleterrepar les normands, 3 vols. (Paris, 1825). 4 Jules Sebastian Cesar Dumont d'Urville (1790—1842), French admiral and explorer. He made his first round-the-world voyage in 1822—5 and explored the Pacific in both 1826-9 and 1837-40. Strindberg was familiar with a Swedish account of his voyages, Verldsomseglaren, 8 vols. (Stockholm, 1836-40). 5 Antoine Jacques Boulay de la Meurthe (1761-1840), French politician who allied himself with Napoleon I at an early stage. He took part in the 18th Brumaire and became one of Napoleon's most efficient civil servants. 6 Oh cross, hail you our only hope! This inscription, to be found on many of the gravestones in the cemetery of Montparnasse, is also the inscription on the black-tarred wooden cross over Strindberg's grave in Norra Kyrkogarden, Stockholm. 7 A comedy in prose by Theodore de Banville, first performed at the ComedieFran^aise in 1866, with C.-B. Coquelin in the title role. Based loosely on the life of the French poet Pierre Gringoire (c. 1475—c. 1538), it proclaimed that the poet suffers the griefs of others and gives them a voice. 8 The six paragraphs beginning 'For eight months . . .' were omitted by Strindberg from the Swedish translation. Thanks to the perceptive investigations of Sverker Hallen ('Vem forfoljde Strindberg?', Ystads Allehanda, 19 September 1970), what appears to be a passage of fashionable but bad writing in the detraque style turns out to be one of Strindberg's most carefully wrought pieces of prose. The following account of what is certainly one of the most bizarre episodes, even in Strindberg's richly dramatic life, is heavily indebted to Hallen. Shortly after arriving in Paris in August 1894, Strindberg fell in with a group of young men which included the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun (1859-1952), the as yet unknown dramatist Frank Wedekind (1864-1918), the German publisher Albert Langen (1869-1909), who at one stage was interested in publishing Strindberg's A Madman's Defence and was later renowned for his association with the satirical journal Simplicissimus, and Langen's friend, the Danish confidence trickster Willy Pedersen (alias Gretor, 1868-1923), on whom Wedekind would model the protagonist of his play Der Marquis von Keith (1901). It was Gretor who, in September 1894, had set Strindberg up in an atelier in Passy normally occupied by his (Gretor's) mistress, the painter Rosa Pfaeffinger. He undertook to sell any paintings that Strindberg pro-

Note to page 137

253

duced, but to the latter's alarm it shortly emerged that Gretor was involved in a racket dealing in forged paintings (see Letters11, p. 511, to Frida, 9 September 1894, and pp. 557—8, to Torsten Hedlund, 26 June 1896, listing a number of recently discovered forgeries in European art galleries that might be linked to Gretor). The impressionable Strindberg feared for his own safety and what compounded the problem in his mind was the involvement of Frida Uhl in all this. During a brief visit to Paris in 1894 her contacts with both Gretor and Langen had been one of the immediate points of conflict between her and Strindberg, who suspected that her affairs with them were not purely business. (In fact it was with Frank Wedekind that she eventually had a child, although Strindberg knew nothing of this relationship.) Moreover, his nerves were also on edge because he felt that his life might be threatened not only by Langen and Gretor, who would want to remove a dangerous witness, but also by his old Berlin friend Stanislaw Przybyszewski, now married to Dagny Juel (see T above, p. 243): the Polish Przybyszewski appears with murderous intent in Inferno in the guise of the Russian Popoffsky. At the very least, as he told the Norwegian painter Frits Thaulow (1849—1906), if that business is raked up I'll be arrested because the concierge in Passy can confirm that I've painted and sold canvases for Herr Gretor' (Brevxi, p. 286), while on 1 August 1896, after he had returned to Sweden, he informed Hedlund that, 'What happened to me in Paris will probably remain a riddle; and ought not to be investigated. One thing is certain, I was wrestling with death' (Brevxi, p. 293). To protect himself against the threat he believed that Langen and Gretor posed, however, he had included the omitted paragraphs in the essay that was published in Revues des Revues as 'Etudes funebres'. As Hallen demonstrates, the apparent modernist confusion of the text at this point is a cipher in which he accuses Gretor and Langen not only of forgery but also, it seems, of murder, a coded message which is intended to be understood by them, but by no one else. Starting with a street named after a French lawyer during the Revolution of 1789 (Claude Francois Chaveau-Lagarde (1756—1841), who defended both Marie Antoinette and Charlotte Corday), in which he maintains that a murder has been recently committed, the association is with another lawyer, Chretien de Malesherbes (1721—94), who defended Louis XVI, because another of Gretor's establishments, where Strindberg had stayed briefly in September 1894, was 112 Boulevard Malesherbes. The young mother with a little girl beside a river is Frida Uhl at Dornach beside the Danube with their daughter, Kerstin, while Velasquez and Rembrandt were among the painters in whose work Gretor had speculated. Sarzeau is the birthplace of Alain-Rene Lesage (1668-1747), the author of Le Diable boiteux (1708), another of whose heroes, in the picaresque novel Gil Bias (1715-35), had fallen into the hands of a robber band and been rescued by a young woman. Gil Bias was also the title of the journal in which Strindberg had published 'Misogynie et gynolatrie' (24 July 1895) and 'Le Barbare a Paris' (8 August 1895), while he had once stayed at a Hotel Lesage in Sarzeau in 1886, during his field work with Steffen for Among

254

Notes to pages 138-9

French Peasants. According to Hallen, there may also be an allusion here to the discovery of a forged Murillo which had recently come to light in Brittany (see Letters 11, p. 557), while the stress on 'Polish edition' refers to a forged Rubens in Poland, which is mentioned in the same letter. The title of Lesage's novel is also a way of fingering Gretor since he had a partially lame leg. The Hotel Bristol was Berlin's foremost hotel and thus an excellent base (as well as front) for the flamboyant Langen, the Cafe de la Regence was a centre for expatriate Scandinavians in Paris and Cologne Cathedral in unrefined sugar another allusion to Langen, whose father owned a sugar factory in Cologne. Rosa Pfaeffinger's apartment where Gretor had housed Strindberg in 1894 was at 51 rue de Ranelagh while Gretor himself was now living in the Boulevard Berthier. Although there was no known murder in the rue Chaveau-Lagarde, Hallen lists a number of events related to Gretor, one or several of which may have influenced Strindberg in his suggestion, as well as providing further evidence that the passage as a whole is a challenge designed to provoke his invisible enemies into betraying themselves. However, publication, even in so enigmatic a fashion, placed Strindberg, too, in a difficult position. 'My incognito is revealed and hence my tranquillity disturbed', he informed Hedlund in a further letter (Brevxi, p. 288) in which he identifies 'the picture forgers' as the most dangerous of his various enemies because so much money was riding on their operations. Indeed, shortly after 'Deranged Sensations' appeared in Revue des Revues Strindberg was overwhelmed by the crisis described in chapters six and seven of Inferno. He fled the Hotel Orfila where he had been staying and after stopping for a few days at another pension in the rue de la Clef, near the Jardin des Plantes, he found refuge first in Dieppe with Frits Thaulow and then back in Ystad with his friend Dr Anders Eliasson. This visit to Sweden is portrayed with considerable licence in chapter seven of Inferno. 9 The woman portrayed here waiting for a lover who never arrives also occupies Strindberg's imagination in the opening scene of Crimes and Crimes (1899), which is set in the Cemetery of Montparnasse. However, the web of guilt and crime explored in the play establishes a link between her forlorn figure and his own distant relationship with Frida Uhl who remained, for all but a brief period of his stay in Paris, with their child in Austria. 10 Strindberg also spentfiveweeks at Ystad in Southern Sweden in June and July 189511 A statue by Frederic Bartholdi (1834—1904), commemorating the siege withstood by the fortress of Belfort in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870—1. Otherwise Bartholdi's best-known monument is the Statue of Liberty. 12 Strindberg quotes these verses on several occasions in both his works and his letters where, with his absent son Hans in mind, they are endowed with personal significance. His source is 'The Saga of Little Rosa and Long Leda', a fairy-tale from the Swedish province of Smalandfirstpublished in Gunnar Olof Hylten-Cavallius and George Stephens, Svenska folk-sagor och dventyr (Swedish Folk Tales and Adventures, Stockholm, 1844, p. 119).

Notes to pages 140-9

255

13 Always flourishing. 14 Jean Pierre Rambosson (1827—86), Histoire et legendes des plantes utiles et curieuses (Paris, 1868). 15 St Vincent de Paul (1580—1660), French Roman Catholic priest, who founded two charitable orders, the Lazarists (1625) and the Sisters of Charity (1634). 16 'Now were flowing streams of milk, now streams of nectar, and goldencoloured honey dripped from the green oak.' Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 1, lines 111-12. 'Introduction' Jardin des Plantes was published in two parts in Gothenburg by the theosophist Torsten Hedlund (1855-1935), who was also the printing manager of Goteborgs Handels- och Sjofarts Tidning, the eminent Gothenburg liberal daily newspaper. Between October 1895 and November 1896 Strindberg addressed some eightythree letters to Hedlund which are, alongside these essays, the crucible in which his post-Inferno outlook was forged. Much of the material in this collection, including 'The Sighing of the Stones', 'Where Do Plants Have their Nerves?', and 'The Cyclamen', which have not been translated in this selection, had appeared earlier the same year (1896) in French, in Sylva Sylvarum, which was published in Paris by G. Bailly and distributed by Knut Nilsson's Librairie Scandinave. The 'Introduction', however, was first published with associated material by Francois Jollivet-Castelot's journal LHyperchimie, revue mensuelle d'Alchimie, d'Heretisme et de Medecine Spagyrique, under the general title Hortus Merlini. 1 Refers to an orderly pattern of intersecting bands to be seen on some meteorites and steels when a polished section is etched. The pattern, which was first recorded by the Austrian scientist Alojs Joseph Widmannstatten (1754-1849), is 'attributed to the crystallisation or precipitation of a new solid phase along the crystal planes of a parent solid phase' (OED). For the full significance of this patterning in Strindberg's eyes, see Letters11, p. 595, where he observes (12 October 1896): 'When I saw the meteorite in the Jardin des Plantes from the AlpesMaritimes I said to myself right away: these figures were handmade. (I mean the Widmannstatten figures.) Then I saw some bowl-shaped indentations as if made by a hammer, and was amazed. But read afterwards on the notice that the village smiths had extracted iron from the boulder. And stood corrected. But now I have reproductions of other meteorites which haven't been exposed to smiths, and they also bear these bowl-shaped indentations. Is it writing? Yes!' 2 Strindberg probably derives this idea from A. E. Badaire, Lajoie de mourir (Paris, 1894). Cf. Inferno, p. 172. T h e Death's Head Moth' Written late autumn 1895 and first published in French in Sylva Sylvarum (Paris, 1896). It appeared in Swedish the same year in Jardin des Plantes 11 (Gothenburg,

256

Notes to pages 149-53

1896). Like 'In the Cemetery' it was included in the French edition of Inferno (1898). The essay did not exhaust Strindberg's interest in the subject: the following October he told Torsten Hedlund, 'I've a Death's Head Moth on my table behind a shoemaker's glass. Anyone who wants to see a ghost can see one there' {Letters 11, p. 596, but see pp. 594-8 passim). 1 In the process of creation. 2 Claude Marie Francois Niepce de Saint-Victor (1805-70), French photographer. Strindberg may, however, be confusing him with his great-uncle, Joseph Nicephore Niepce (1765—1833), one of photography's major pioneers, who succeeded in fixing what he called a heliograph on glass, and devised a method of capturing an external image even though it required an exposure time of about 8 hours in good sunlight. Strindberg mentions him in a letter to Torsten Hedlund, 24 March 1896 (Brevxi, p. 150). 3 See above, 'Indigo', p. 156. 4 Rene Antoine de Reaumur (1683—1757), French physicist and zoologist, who gave his name to the Reaumur scale. 5 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737—1814), French naturalist who, according to Strindberg in 'The Sighing of the Stones' (55*27 p. 214), 'also had the misfortune to write Paul et Virginie (1787). A friend and disciple of Rousseau, he was placed in charge of the Jardin des Plantes in 1792. His Harmonies de la nature (1815) are characterised by acute if idiosyncratic powers of observation, and also appealed to the likewise endowed Strindberg because of the similarity he could discern between Bernardin's 'harmonies' and Swedenborg's 'correspondences'. See Brandell, Strindberg in Inferno, pp. 2i4ff. 6 Metamorphoses, Book 13, where at the death of Ajax, 'the earth, crimsoned with his gore, produced from the green turf that purpleflowerwhich had previously sprung up from Hyacinthus's blood. In the heart of its petals letters are traced, which apply to the boy and the hero alike, for they record the sound of the hero's name, and of the boy's cry of distress.' The Metamorphoses of Ovid, translated Mary M. Innes (Harmondsworth, 1955), pp. 321—2. 7 Anna Katarina Emmerich (1774—1824), German nun whofirstdisplayed signs of stigmata in both her hands and feet, in 1812. Accompanied by spectacular visions, they remained with her until 1819, and continued intermittently until her death. 8 The normal degeneration and death of cells. Cf. Brev xi, p. 114, passim, and Letters 11, p. 545, to Torsten Hedlund: 'The butterfly larva creeps around and eats like we animals. One fine day it falls ill, its powers decline, its body is consumed, but in afinaleffort it weaves its own shroud and builds its grave. Then it decomposes - necrobiosis! Death-Life! Life-Death! Because there is no difference between life and death! I've opened chrysalides and put them under a microscope! There is nothing there but a white, unformed, inchoate substance which resembles the saponification of a corpse, and smells like one. Out of this slime, from "adventitious points", the butterfly grows and leaves its grave. This is more than a symbol, and yet as such it reveals the creator to be an artist who amuses

Notes to pages 153—5

2

57

himself by speaking in beautiful signs to people who only partly comprehend.' 9 The leaden colour of death. 'Indigo' Originally published in French in Sylva Sylvarum (1896) and in Swedish the same year in the Gothenburg edition ofjardin des Plantes. One of Strindberg's letters to Anders Eliasson (24 April 1896) offers a similar vignette to the portrait in the opening paragraph here of Strindberg at large in Paris, in pursuit of comparable scientific data. 'Yesterday morning in the Luxembourg Gardens I found a scoop of rusty, tin-coated sheet iron hanging by a fountain. It bore signs of gilding. This morning I took my gear along, since I didn't dare steal the scoop. The patches of gilding did not react to nitric acid or hydrochloric acid, but did to the two together. It is gold!' (Brevxiy p. 174). 1 Baron Jons Jakob Berzelius (1779-1848), the largely self-taught Swedish chemist, who invented the present system of chemical symbols and formulae, discovered several elements and established the atomic and molecular weights of many substances. Strindberg had already discussed Berzelius at some length in Antibarbarus (1893), and in 'The Sighing of the Stones' he noted Berzelius' belief 'that under certain circumstances carbon could be transformed into silicon, as he was likewise convinced that ammonia and chlorine contained oxygen, until he was shouted down' (55 27, pp. 213-14). Meanwhile, in the essay 'A Recollection from the Sorbonne' (1896), where in 1895 he had been granted permission by Professor Jean Riban to conduct research into the composition of sulphur and iodine, Strindberg would maintain that Berzelius 'feared to probe too deeply into nature's secrets' (5527, p. 658). In spite of this, in 1898 he wrote and published Typer ochprototyper inom mineralkemien (Types and Prototypes in Mineral Chemistry) to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Berzelius' death, and the latter's six-volume Ldrbok i kemien (Textbook in Chemistry, 1808—30) remained one of his regular sources of reference, in both its Swedish and French (1835) editions. In A Blue Book Strindberg extends his praise of Berzelius to medicine: 'Anyone who wishes to know how little is actually known about the body, illnesses and medicines should read Berzelius' masterpiece Animal Chemistry, for Berzelius was at once a doctor, chemist, pharmaceutist and botanist, but he was a great deal more besides . . . His other masterpiece is called Vegetable Chemistry. I am prepared to defend the following statement: that since Berzelius and his pupils scarcely a sensible word has been said concerning medicine, merely balderdash, but pretentious balderdash' (5547, p. 479). 2 Francois Vincent Raspail (1791—1878), French scientist and Jacobin politician, author of Nouveau systeme de physiologie vegetale et de botanique, 3 vols. (Paris, 1837), a n d Histoire naturelle de la sante et de la maladie chez les vegetaux et chez les animaux en general et en particulier chez I'homme, 2 vols. (Paris, 1843). 3 See 'In the Cemetery', note 2.

258

Notes to pages 156-9

4 Nicolas Lemery (1645-1715), French chemist, author of a Cours de chymie (Paris, 1675) in which he treated the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms in such a way as to anticipate the modern separation into organic and inorganic chemistry. 5 Strindberg regularly criticised prevailing chemical methods. He regarded the qualitative analysis of the elements as 'completely worthless' and in an essay in LInitiation he presented 'a series of observations concerning the spectroscope that are designed to demonstrate "the worthlessness of all spectral analysis"' (Brandell, Strindberg in Inferno, pp. 170-1). 6 Baron Louis Jacques Thenard (1777—1857), Professor of Chemistry at the Ecole Polytechnique and the College de France, Chancellor of the University of Paris and author of a Traite de chimie elementaire'm 5 volumes, 6th edn (Paris, 1834—6). Together with Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac (1778—1850) he isolated boron. He also discovered cobalt blue, which is sometimes called Thenard s blue. 7 Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe (1833-1915), Professor of Chemistry in Manchester and Vice-Chancellor of London University. Roscoe left the first exact account of the chemical effects of light and together with the developer of spectrum analysis, Robert Wilhelm Bunsen (1811-99), he also helped found photochemistry. With the Professor of Organic Chemistry at Manchester, Carl Schorlemmer (1834-92), he wrote a A Treatise on Chemistry, 3 vols. (London, 1877-84), but it is Roscoe and Schorlemmer s German textbook, Kurtzes Lehrbuch der Chimie (6th edn, Braunschweig, 1878), from which Strindberg generally quotes, although he also knew Roscoe s more specialised work, Die Spektralanalyse, in its third German edition (Braunschweig, 1890). 8 Jean Baptiste Alphonse Chevallier (1793—1879), French pharmacologist, author of a Dictionnaire des alterations et falsifications des substances alimentaires, medicamenteuses et commercialese 4th edn (Paris, 1875). 9 Alexander Crum Brown (1838-1922), Scottish chemist, Professor in Edinburgh. Also cited as an authority by Strindberg, with reference to a French translation of Berzelius' Ldrbok i kemi, in Antibarbarus (SS27, p. 199). T o the Heckler' Originally called Ad Zoilum' and first published with other material by the alchemical journal LHyperchimie under the general title Hortus Merlini. 1 Herbert Spencer (1820—1903), English philosopher, who applied evolutionary theory to the study of society. 2 See above, 'Indigo and the Line of Copper', note 7. 3 According to Brandell, Strindberg may have found this quotation from the Irish physicist John Tyndall in Exploration du ciel theocentrique (Paris, 1890) by the Catholic engineer and writer, Pierre Francois Paul Delestre. 'Delestre's basic idea is that the earth and the sun both gravitate around a common center; in other words, his conception is neither geocentric nor heliocentric, but "theocentric"' (Brandell, Strindberg in Inferno, p. 202).

Notes to pages 160-1

259

'On the Action of Light in Photography' Dated Paris, 20 February 1896 andfirstpublished in Goteborgs Handels- och Sjofarts Tidning, 11 March 1896. As with his painting, photography was always more than an occasional refuge for Strindberg during those periods when he found the writing of imaginative literature problematic. The majority of Strindberg's celestographs that he writes of here were made at Dornach in 1894, sometimes not only without either a camera or a lens but with the photographic plates immersed in developing fluid and exposed directly to the sun, moon and stars. 1 The German physicist Wilhelm Rontgen (1845-1923) had discovered X-rays in 1895. Writing to Torsten Hedlund (24 January 1896), with Rontgen in mind, Strindberg remarked: 'Rejoice even in the discoveries that "science" makes! They serve us! - Two years ago I was to be locked up in a madhouse - by madmen for taking photographs of the celestial bodies without a camera or lens — and now people are taking photographs through planks! - without a camera or lens!' {Letters 11, p. 545). However, when Goteborgs Handels- och Sjofarts Tidning first

introduced Strindberg's theories to its readers on 5 March 1896 with a reference to the 'interesting experiments that Strindberg has made with Rontgen rays before their discovery by the German scientist', he was alarmed, and feared that the claim might destroy his reputation. 'That I took the opportunity afforded by the favourable circumstances of the X-rays to report on my findings and to illuminate my theories is forgivable and customary opportunism, but to wish to claim undeserved credit is well-merited dishonour' (Brevxi, p. 139). 2 Rule of three. 3 Sir William Crookes (1832-1919), English chemist and physicist who investigated the properties of cathode rays and invented the Crookes tube to which Strindberg refers here, a type of cathode ray tube in which the electrons are produced by a glow discharge in a low-pressure gas. He also invented a type of radiometer as well as the lens named after him, made from glass containing cerium. Strindberg was further excited by The Genesis of the Elements (1887), in which Crookes believed that he had isolated the primordial element, which he called 'protyl'. He was also attracted by Crookes' committed interest in spiritism. 4 Identified in a later article ('Was ist Radium?' in A Blue Book 11, SS 47, pp. 450—56) as Gustave Le Bon. By then (1908—9) Strindberg was much more sceptical: 'When Rontgen had noticed that the rays from Crookes' Geissler tube (!!!) passed through certain solid bodies, the learned world believed that a new light had put in an appearance and the new rays were greeted as some kind of special rays. Then Gustave Le Bon stepped forward and showed that one could perform the same conjuring trick with a paraffin lamp, and demonstrated that it was not a question of any new rays, but that opaque bodies were transparent, even though poor observers had not noticed it' (pp. 450-1). Le Bon (1841-1931) is now remembered as the author of an influential study of the mentality of crowds, the Psychologie des Foules (1896), but he was also an amateur scientist of

260

Notes to pages 162-5

some contemporary renown whose reputed discovery of'le lumiere noir' in 1896 was widely discussed in the French Academy of Sciences alongside Rontgen's Xrays and the work of Henri Becquerel on uranium salts in pitchblende, which led to the isolation of radium. According to Mary Jo Nye ('Gustave LeBon's Black Light: A Study in Physics and Philosophy in France at the Turn of the Century', Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 1974, pp. 163-95), Le Bon 'claimed to have found that ordinary light from an oil lamp produces invisible radiations as it impinges upon a closed metal box and that these radiations affect a photographic plate inside the box, producing an image of another plate in the box. He called this new radiation "black light", deeming it some sort of extraordinary vibration capable of penetrating opaque objects and intermediate in nature between light and electricity' (p. 173). In Tal till svenska nationen (Speeches to the Swedish Nation, 1910), Strindberg later applied the notion to Le Bon's literary contemporaries, the symbolists, whom he described as employing 'an obscure language, which abandoned all content and sought to work solely through the resources of language, awakening perceptions of colour and sound, in short to conceal what should be seen, hide light under a bushel and operate with dark rays [morka stralar] of light' (SV6$> p. 88). 5 Together with the sculptor Per Hasselberg, Strindberg had spent part of 1891 trying to solve what he called 'thefin-de-siecleproblem of colour photography'. See Letters 1, pp. 366—8. He published an essay, 'Sur la photographie en couleurs directes' in Llnitiation, May 1896, and wrote a detailed letter toTorsten Hedlund on the subject, 24 March 1896 (Brevxi, pp. 148—50). 6 In the condition of birth, coming into being. 7 Hermann Wilhelm Vogel (1834—98), German photochemist, author of a Handbuch der Photographie, 4 vols. (4th edn, Berlin, 1890—9), which Strindberg evidently had to hand in November 1896 (Brevxi, p. 391). Vogel also wrote a Handbuch der praktischen Spektralanalyse iridischer Stoffe (Berlin, 1878), which Strindberg borrowed from Richard Dehmel in 1893. 8 Cf. a letter from Strindberg to his friend Birger Morner, 6 December 1894, in which he describes a flattering meeting with the eminent French astronomer Camille Flammarion (1842-1925), during which he discovered that a number of the experimental astronomical photographs that he had made in Austria earlier that year had been presented to the Societe Astronomique de France, of which he was now a member: 'Met Camille Flammarion. And found that the celestographs I'd sent (photographs of the Sun, Moon and stars [taken] without camera or lens) had been presented to the Societe Astronomique and already discussed there in April this year as well as mentioned in the Proceedings. He invited me to lecture to the Society, but I declined' (Brevx, p. 321). 'A Glance into Space' First published in French in Llnitiation, April 1896, as 'Un Regard vers le Ciel'; in Swedish in Tryckt och otryckt iv, 1897 (Published and Unpublished iv). Strindberg's Schopenhauerian concern with the subjectivity of perception is evident in the title of an unpublished text from 1893, 'The World in Itself and the

Notes to pages 165-7

2 1

^

World for Us', which he regarded as the fifth 'Fasciculus' of Antibarbarus, but as early as 1886 he was writing to Gustaf Steffen, 'Why does the bee construct a hexagonal cell? Because he is a subjective little devil and sees everything as six-sided with his hexagonal eye. Why do people see the planets and Kanholm Bay as round? Because the subjective beggars have round eyes' {Letters 1, p. 212). Other essays on astronomy from this period include 'Les Etoilesfixes','L'Horizon et l'deil', 'Le Ciel et l'oeir, and 'La Distance du soleil de la terre', all published in Llnitiation. 1 A park to the north of Stockholm, developed during the 1780s by Gustav III. 2 Strindberg read Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1819) in 1876 and his thinking was informed by Schopenhauer's ideas throughout his life. 3 An extended note by 'the Buddhist Guymiot', in which the eye is described as a reduction of Brahma's egg, is appended to later editions of the article (SS 27, PP- 355-7)'Edvard Munch's Exhibition'

Originally published in Revue Blanche, 1 June 1896, this poetic commentary on Munch and his paintings was not included by Landquist in Samlade Skrifter. It was written near the height of Strindberg's Inferno crisis to awaken interest in an exhibition of Munch's paintings at the Galerie de l'Art Nouveau in Paris where, unlike Strindberg, Munch was then virtually unknown. The two had first met in Berlin in late 1892, when Munch had painted Strindberg's portrait in oils, and following the closure of Munch's exhibition at the premises of the Berlin Kiinstlerverein they subsequently exhibited together. Meeting again in Paris, Munch now produced the well-known lithograph of Strindberg with a caption that reduced his name to its title, 'Stindberg'. The most prominent figure in another of Munch's lithographs from this period, 'At the Clinic' (1895), also bears Strindberg's features, which was again hardly flattering since the clinic was one for the treatment of venereal diseases. It was, however, Strindberg's interpretation of Munch's behaviour in what he saw as a plot on Przybyszewski's part to murder him in Paris, in 1896, that led to their final estrangement (see Letters 11, pp. 561, 562, 581, and Lnferno, pp. 151—5), although Munch did provide the illustrations that accompanied some of Strindberg's works in the January 1899 issue of the German journal Quickborn. Munch plays an important role in Lnferno as the Danish painter 'handsome Henrik', and Strindberg refers there to the 'article I had written about the feminist pictures painted by my woman-worshipping friend the Dane' (p. 242), and even attributes his later maladies to the hatred it aroused. The works that Strindberg discusses in this essay are now generally known by other titles than the ones he uses, but the motifs of these paintings in the 'Frieze of Life' series remain those with which he was familiar from Berlin in 1893, when he and Munch associated with Dagny Juel and Stanislaw Przybyszewski. See 'The Making of an Aspasia. 1 Strindberg read Balzac's Swedenborgian novel with great enthusiasm in 1896 (see Lettersu, p. 553). It was very much one of the fashionable works of the symbolist period.

262

Notes to pages 167—70

2 Delicia sapientia de amove conjugiali, post quas sequuntur voluptates insania de amove scovtatovio (Amsterdam, 1768). 3 The Kiss (1892). 4 Now generally known as The Vampive (c. 1893). 5 Jealousy (1895). 6 Now better known as Madonna (1894). 7 The Scveam (1893). 8 Now known as Evening on Kavljohan (1893-94). 9 Woman in Thvee Stages (1894). 'Trimurti' = the triad of Hindu Gods Brahma, Vishnu and Siva but was adopted by Strindberg as the name for a tripartite pun or rhyming witticism. Often untranslatable, such 'trimurtis' were a prominent feature of his correspondence with Leopold Littmansson during 1894. 10 The Beach (1892). The Synthesis of Gold' Originally published as a brochure with Torsten Hedlund's assistance in Gothenburg, 1896. Strindberg also published a pamphlet with the same title but a different text in German, ' Guld-Synthese (Grein, 1896), and an essay in French, 'Synthese d'ov\ in LHypevchimie, December 1896. According to a letter to Hedlund that accompanied the original manuscript, the essay marked a stage in his experiments: 'I am therefore giving up my scientific studies on a trial basis, but as a memento, I beg you to print these three pages I'm sending you, in 100 copies, so that I may escape having to write 100 letters on the same subject in response to inquiries, and because I would like proof that I haven't been mad in believing I had made gold' (Lettevs 11, p. 588). This is one of the briefest but, in its ability to make these apparently neutral chemical formulae add up to his satisfaction, most characteristic of Strindberg's speculations on gold-making. Encouraged by his reading of Swedenborg and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, he was naturally sensitive to the potential for correspondences and harmonies in both the natural world and his everyday life. Thus, in a celebrated passage from Infevno, he describes a day-trip from Paris to Meudon, made, he insists, Tor no particular purpose'. Walking down a street, he catches sight of the statue of'a Roman knight wearing iron grey armour, half buried in the ground . . . The knight is regarding the adjacent wall and guided by his gaze I am able to see an inscription in charcoal on its white-washed surface. The intertwined letters F and S lead me to think of the initials in my wife's name [Frida Strindberg]. She loves me still! A second later the thought of the chemical symbols for iron and sulphur Fe and S suddenly flashes upon me and before my very eyes the secret of gold is revealed' (SV37, p.69). As in the essay, it all coheres. Intriguingly, however, both the autobiographical fiction and these essays overlook what may appear obvious to a contemporary reader, schooled in the symptomatic reading of psychoanalysis, and alert to the symbolical interpretation that such mundane residues invite, namely that in chemical nomenclature, the substance for which he is seeking shares the initial letters of his own authorial first name, Au.

Notes to pages 170—3

263

1 The formula for cuprous chloride.. 2 The French chemists Edmond Fremy (1814-94) and Theophile Jules Pelouze (1807-67), authors of a Traitede chimie generate (1854-7) a s weU a s a n Abrege de chimie, the sixth edition of which (Paris, 1869) was in Strindberg's final book collection. 3 See above, 'In the Cemetery', note 2. 'Contemporary Gold-Making' Published as a brochure in Stockholm (Johan Bjorkman, 1896). The manuscript is dated 'Klam [in Austria], 26 October 1896', when Strindberg was staying there as the guest of Frida Uhl's family. According to a report published in Svensk kemist tidskrift, 17 December 1896, this essay was presented at a meeting of the Chemical Society in Stockholm on 19 November 1896. Strindberg was not in attendance. 1 See above, 'On the Action of Light in Photography', note 3. 2 Joseph Norman Lockyer (1836-1920), English astronomer. A pioneer of spectral analysis, he was the first to observe helium in the sun's atmosphere. His paper 'Experiments Tending to Show the Non-Elementary Character of Phosphorus' was read at the Academie des Sciences in Paris in 1879. See Inferno, p. 108. 3 Precisely who Strindberg has in mind must remain uncertain. Most probably he is thinking of Alexander Gerhard Kriiss (1859—95), Professor of Chemistry in Munich. 4 Theodor Gross (1846—1913), German chemist, whom Strindberg also cites in Antibarbarus, SSzy, p. 135. 5 Pierre Eugene Marcellin Berthelot (1827-1907), Professor of Chemistry at the College de France and politician (he was Minister of Public Instruction in 1886-7 a n d Foreign Minister in 1895-6). Strindberg corresponded briefly with Berthelot following the publication of an article in Le petit temps (30 January 1895) entitled 'Le Soufre est-il un corps simple?', which offered what Strindberg considered a bowdlerised version of his attempts to analyse the composition of sulphur and linked his name with Berthelot s in passing. See Brevx, pp. 387-9. Among Strindberg's unpublished papers there is also an 'Open Letter to Berthelot on Sulphur', dated 28 February 1895. Berthelot had written Les Origines de Valchimie (Paris, 1885) and also approached the relationship between chemistry and alchemy in La Chimie au moyen dge, 3 vols. (Paris, 1893). According to J. R. Partington (A History of Chemistry, vol. iv (London, 1964), p. 466), Berthelot was a close friend of Ernest Renan, and extended his scepticism to include atomic theory. 6 Jean Baptiste Dumas (1800—84), Professor of Chemistry at the Ecole Polytechnique and the Sorbonne, the author of a Traite de chimie appliquee aux arts (1828) and, according to Partington, A History of Chemistry, vol. iv, p. 338, 'the outstanding French chemist of his time'. An article in Le Figaro in 1895 had given Strindberg the idea that he was Dumas's natural successor (Brevxi, p. 90).

264

Notes to page 173

7 Joseph Louis Proust (1754-1826), French chemist who formulated the law of constant proportions. However, as elsewhere, Strindberg mistakes him for the English chemist, William Prout (178 5-18 50), who championed the idea of the unity of matter and advanced the hypothesis that hydrogen was the primordial element, of which all the other chemical elements were concentrates. Their atomic weights were multiples of the atomic weight of hydrogen. 8 Christian Wilhelm Blomstrand (1826-97), Swedish chemist, from 1862 Professor in Lund. Strindberg is referring to Naturens grunddmnen i deras inbbrdes stdllning till hvarandra (The Elements of Nature in Their Mutual Relationship to One Other, 1875). In October 1895 Strindberg sent Blomstrand a copy of his 'Introduction a une chimie unitaire', which had been published by Mercure de France (27 September 1895): 'It would be curious to hear what Blomstrand has to say! These are chips off his block' (Brevxi, p. 82). Strindberg also considered sending him a favourable comment on his article 'L'lode comme un derive de houilles' in Le Temps (14 May 1895) that had appeared in Moniteur industriel, 8 June 1895. 'What do you say to Blomstrand in Lund?', he asked Anders Eliasson (23 August 1895). 'He should be my natural ally, for it was he who first awakened me to monism!' (Brevxi, p. 56). 9 Cyprien Theodore Tiffereau (1819-?), chemist, metallurgist and alchemist for whom Strindberg had great respect. Author of LOr et la transmutation des metaux (Paris, 1889) and LArt defaire de For (Paris, 1892). Strindberg gives his address as 130 rue du Theatre, Paris (Brevxi, p. 236). Tiffereau is also discussed at some length in 'The Sighing of the Stones', where Strindberg relates: It is no secret that under the leadership of Berthelot, modern French chemistry rejects the individuality of the basic elements, and positive opinions have been expressed about the possibility of making gold from other metals. There is every expection that at the next World Exhibition, Tiffereau will display the gold ingot that he is working on now, here in Montparnasse. While studying the gold mines of Mexico in the early 1850s, Tiffereau had noticed the successive transition of the vein stones to gold, and had thus got on to the track of nature's procedure. In August 1854 he presented the Academy of Sciences in Paris with an excellent treatise on the compound nature of metals, and his methods of making gold. He then got the Mint to analyse the small quantity of gold that he had produced by treating a copper and silver alloy with nitric acid. The Mint did not deny the presence of gold, but conjured the whole matter away with the fateful formula, 'impurities'! Tiffereau vanished, and was believed for a time to be dead, but he is currently living in Paris, has been interviewed and is taken so seriously that, in short, he is the one who is expected to solve the problem of gold-making - quite seriously! To ask why Tiffereau did not pursue his researches on a grander scale amounts perhaps to the same thing as asking nature why it does not produce gold in greater quantities, so that its value would be lost. The high true weight of gold suggests a level of concentration that demands a great deal of work, not to mention care, and that is probably why it is so expensive even for alchemists to produce gold. {SS 27, pp. 223-24)

10 Louis Charles Emile Vial, (al)chemist who sent Strindberg his LAttraction moleculairem 1895. Strindberg gives his address as 81, rue Jouffroy, Paris (Brev, xi, p. 236). 11 The work by the mining engineer Le Brun Le Virloy that caught Strindberg's

Notes to pages 173—8

265

attention was a 32-page pamphlet, L'Accroissement de la matiere minerale, et la transmutation des metaux; production artificielle de Vor par Theodore Tiffereau (Paris, 1893), which he recommends to Torsten Hedlund in a letter dated 10 July 1896: 'The man is not an alchemist, but he gets more from the ores by treating them with certain reagents. He has got copper to yield 50% more. Just think what a prospect [the iron ore mines at] Falun would be!' (Brevxi, p. 257). 12 L'Hyperchimie, the Parisian alchemical journal edited by Francois JollivetCastelot, to which Strindberg contributed several articles between 1896 and 1898. 13 Karl Wilhelm Scheele (1742-86), Swedish chemist, who discovered oxygen independently of, and prior to, Joseph Priestley. 14 See above, 'Indigo and the Line of Copper', note 1. 15 Strindberg's source is LOr et le diamant au Transvaal et au cap (Paris, 1896), by the French engineer Jules Gamier (1839—1904), who discovered the nickel garnierite. 16 A mixture of nitric acid and hydrochloric acid, prized in alchemy for its ability to dissolve gold. 17 See the previous essay. 18 Matthew Carey Lea (1823-97), American scientist, author of a number of Papers on the Photochemistry ofthe Silver Haloids (1887) and on allotropic silver and silver compounds (1889; 1892), as well as A Manual ofPhotography (1868). According to a letter to Torsten Hedlund (20 October 1896), it was Lea's ability to transmute silver that excited Strindberg's interest (Brevxi, p. 361). 'The Sunflower' According to an undated letter to Torsten Hedlund, Strindberg completed this essay in early November 1896. It was first published in French in Ulnitiation and in Swedish in Tryckt och otrycktiv, 1897 (Published and Unpublished iv). 1 The same Guymiot whose comments on the eye as Brahma's egg had been appended to 'A Glance into Space'. See above, p. 261, note 3. 2 The same phrase is quoted on page 1 of the Occult Diary that Strindberg began to keep after moving into the Hotel Orfila in February 1896. See, too, Letters 11, pp. 594ff, where Strindberg glosses several of the themes of this essay. 3 Elias Fries (1794-1878), the eminent Swedish botanist who maintained the Linnean tradition in Uppsala, where he became professor in 1834. Fries' Botaniska utflygter in three volumes (1843-64) was a widely read work of the period. 4 Emanuel Swedenborg (1688—1772), Swedish scientist and mystic, whose theory of correspondences provided Strindberg with both an explanation for natural phenomena and his experience of the world in general, and helped establish a basis for his return to playwriting in 1898. The aesthetic underlying the most important of his later works in which he achieved the transition from naturalism to modernism in the theatre is sustained by a world view derived in part at least from Swedenborg, whom Strindberg first read seriously in 1896.

266

Notes to pages 178—81

5 See 'The Death's Head Moth', note 5. 6 Phoebus Apollo, the god of light and identified with the sun; Diana, or Artemis, the sister of Apollo, the virgin huntress identified with the moon. 7 See 'Edvard Munch's Exhibition', note 9. The square brackets are Strindberg's. 8 The alchemical sign for the sun and for gold. 9 See 'Contemporary Gold-Making', note 9. 10 Claude Louis Berthollet (1749-1822), French chemist, who accompanied Napoleon on his Egyptian campaign. He discovered the bleaching power of chlorine, prepared potassium chlorate and helped establish the present system of chemical nomenclature. Sir Humphrey Davy (1778—1829), English chemist who isolated sodium, magnesium, chlorine and other elements, and suggested the electrical nature of chemical combination. Strindberg habitually associated Berthollet and Davy. Thus, in Inferno, he declares: 'Davy and Berthollet had demonstrated the presence of oxygen and hydrogen [in sulphur], I of carbon. It had fallen to me therefore to provide the formula of sulphur' (p. 117). The source of this association was a reference in Orfila's Elements de chimie, appliquee a la medecine et aux arts, which had by now assumed a talismanic role in his life. See Letters 11, pp. 568-9, where he records the fortuitous discovery of this book, which 'always helps me in my hour of need': 'One morning I awoke having dreamt. . . went at random, but directly, to a secondhand bookshop on the Boulevard St-Michel, took a volume from the stall outside, opened it at page 124 and read [about Berthollet, Davy, and sulphur]'. 11 The French manuscript (SgNM 25) differs here, giving '40 8/25 grains d'or' from '1 quintal'. A letter to the French engineer Andre Dubosc (27 October 1895) suggests that the latter figure is derived from Berthollet, who obtained '40 8/25 grains d'Or, d'un quintal de cendres [vegetales communes]' (Brevxi, p. 94). 12 See 'To the Heckler', note 3. 13 In place of the final paragraph translated here from the first Swedish edition, the original French manuscript (SgNM 25) concludes: cJefiniraipar une denonciation renouvellie de moi-meme en rendant l'honneur a mon pedagogue, toujours Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, occultiste scientifique avant Foccultisme moderne. Et je laisse parler ce grand initie dont les Harmonies de la Nature et la Theorie de l'univers n'ont servi comme point de depart dans mes investigations encore rudimentaires. (CEuvres posthumes, Paris 1838, p. 29.)' 4

The Mysticism of World History'

This essay was originally published as a series of articles in Svenska Dagbladet between 20 February and 30 May 1903. It represents an example of Strindberg's post-Inferno associative way of thinking applied now to the humanities rather than the sciences, and is partly glossed in a letter to Emil Schering (1 December 1902), in which he describes how, after the collection of largely autobiographical stories Fairhaven and Foulstrand (1902), he 'perceived that there had to be a pause in my writing, and as a way of killing time, I read right through world history. This strange Geschichte [tale], which has always seemed to me like a picaresque

Notes to pages 181—4

267

novel, now revealed itself as the creation of a Conscious Will, and I discovered Logic in its Antinomies, a Consequence of its conflicting Components' {Letters 11, p. 699). As in nature, so in history Strindberg discovered a pattern in what appeared to be chance events. The Swedish title, 'Varldshistoriens mystik', carries the sense of the English 'mysteries' as well as 'mysticism', and in its urgent fascination with what Strindberg came to see as the synchronicity operating throughout history (an urgency that sometimes becomes apparent in the laconic, almost breathless dispatch of the essay), one may discern the imaginative delight of the experienced dramatist who had only recently completed several of the major works in the important cycle of plays that he based on subjects from Swedish history, and who would shortly go on to write two collections of short stories, Historical Miniatures (1905) and Memories of the Chieftains (1906), a drama about Luther {The Nightingale ofWittenberg, 1903), and three dramas of a projected cycle in forty-five acts, covering 'world history', in which these 'mysteries' would be explored in greater detail. If neither the one-time student of Buckle and Taine, who wrote the controversial two-volume history The Swedish People (1882) and the essays collected in Studies in Cultural History (1881), nor the young radical of the early tales in Swedish Destinies and Adventures (1882—91), is much in evidence in this synoptic survey of world history from Moses to Marx and beyond, the presence of Hegel, who likewise conceived the 'plot' of world history as a drama, is sometimes to be felt here, as is (by analogy) the kind of diagrammatic overview of the past that Yeats was shortly to present in A Vision (1925) where, as in so much occult and symbolist thinking, synchronicity emerges as the key to the mysteries. In the notes that follow, I have not sought to identify every reference in the text (major players in the drama of history that Strindberg comes to regard as a carefully balanced game of chess, e.g. Luther or Columbus, are left to identify themselves), and I have not flagged up every occasion on which Strindberg bends the synchronic to his bidding. I have, however, sometimes noted a date, where one might serve to focus the argument, or to clarify precisely where Strindberg finds himself in this rapid excursion through time. Extracts amounting to approximately half of an earlier version of this translation appeared in Comparative Criticism, 3 (1981), pp. 237—56, where they were accompanied by an essay by Goran PrintzPahlson, Allegories of Trivialisation: Strindberg's View of History'. 1 A legendary ancestor who is represented as serpent-shaped below the waist, Cecrops is sometimes regarded as first king of the Athenians. 2 A collection of 305 ancient Chinese songs, composed between c. 1000 BC and 700 B c. Their sacred association derives from a belief, recorded by the annalist Ssu-ma-Ch'ien (145-c. 86 BC), that the present collection comprises a selection made by Confucius from more than 3,000 originals. 3 Or Zarathustra, ?628-?55i BC. Persian prophet, founder of Zoroastrianism. 4 Last of the legendary kings of Athens, Codrus is said to have sacrificed himself for his country when it was threatened by an invasion from the Peloponnese. Marcus Curtius, who leaped, armed and on his horse, into a chasm which is

268

Notes to pages 185-91

said to have opened up in the Forum in Rome, after the soothsayers had declared that the chief strength of Rome had to be sacrificed before the chasm would close. 5 Aeschlyus, Prometheus Bound, lines 755-68, translated David Grene (Chicago, 1942). 6 Known to Strindberg in the French translation by E. Amelineau, Pistis Sopha. Ouvrage gnostique de Valentin (Paris, 1895). 7 Mithridates, King of Pontus and an indefatigable enemy of Rome, against which he campaigned both in the Near East and in Europe; driven out of Europe by Sulla (138—78 BC), who captured Athens in 86 BC. 8 A collection of the sacred writings of Zoroastrianism (the Avesta), together with the traditional interpretative commentary, known as the Zend. 9 The Vasantasena, a Sanskrit drama in ten acts, attributed to King Sudraka, active during the fifth century AD . The play enjoyed a vogue in Europe around the turn of the century. It was staged at the Theatre de l'CEuvre by Aurelien Lugne-Poe during his 1894-5 season, while Strindberg was staying in Paris and had recently been involved with Lugne-Poe in the latter's production of Creditors. Strindberg strains synchronicity in a similar fashion in a letter to his German translator, Emil Schering (1 December 1902): 'The Vasantasena? Yes, that dates from the same year as Christ and embodies the Christianity of India: Atonement through suffering. The Spirit of Christianity, without any knowledge of Christ!' {Letters 11, p. 699). 10 Zipangu, Marco Polo's name for Cipango, according to medieval legend an island to the east of Asia, later sought by Columbus. 11 Guillaume Pauthier (1801—73), French sinologist. The reference is to his Chine ou description historique, geographique et litteraire de ce vaste empire, d'apres des documents chinois (Paris, 1837). Strindberg's relatively specialised knowledge of Chinese history dates back to 1877 when, as an amanuensis at the Royal Library in Stockholm, he gained a rudimentary knowledge of the language, and published a number of essays on Chinese subjects. In 1879 he was elected to La Societe des Etudes Japonaises, Chinoises, Tartares et Indo-chinoises, and one of his papers, 'Relations de la Suede avec la Chine et les Pays Tartares', was read at the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris that June. 12 Gregory the Great (540-604). Saint who strengthened papal authority, centralized its administration, and revised the liturgy. 13 Constantin V (718-75), Emperor of Byzantium 740-75. 14 Pepin III, 'the Short' (c. 715—68), who, in leading an army into Italy in 754 and compelling the Longobard Aistulf to become his vassal, laid the foundation of the temporal sovereignty of the popes. 15 Originally the chief representative in religious matters of the ancient kings of Rome, the title was later adopted by Julius Caesar and all the later emperors. 16 Leovigild (d. 586), subdued much of the Iberian peninsula; succeeded by his son Reccared I. 17 T'angTaizong (600—49). One of the most heroic emperors in Chinese history, he is generally credited with founding the T'ang Dynasty, of which he was the

Notes to pages 191—9

269

second emperor. He unified the country, extended its frontiers and gained a reputation for benevolent rule, with religious toleration. 18 Vladimir I, 'the Great' (d. 1015), Grand Prince of Kiev, who consolidated the state and was converted to Christianity in 988. He was later canonised. 19 Germany acquired the imperial crown with Otto I (912-73), known as 'Otto the Great'; his grandson, the theocratic Otto III (980-1002) was less a German king than a Holy Roman emperor. He lived most of his life in Rome and attempted to make it the capital of the empire, but was driven out by the hostility of the people in 1002. 20 Leif Eriksson (d. AD 1021). His accidental discovery of Vinland (America) in 1000, after being blown off course on a journey from Norway to Greenland, is recorded in the Vinland Saga. 21 Mahmud af Ghazni (971—1030), Muslim Afghan conqueror of India. He invaded India seventeen times between 1001 and 1026, and created an empire that included Punjab and much of Persia. 22 Rodrigo Borgia (1431-1503). 23 Basileios II (?958-iO25). 24 Curtius Rufus, active c. AD 50 under Claudius and Vespasian, wrote a romantic history of Alexander the Great in ten books, of which the first two are lost. 25 Ivan I died in 1341. Strindberg is probably thinking of the union between the Greek and Roman churches of 1439, which emancipated Russia (then ruled by Vasilj II (1425-62)) from the Patriarchate of Constantinople. 26 Tyrannical emperor of Byzantium from AD 602 to 610. 27 Julius II (1443—1513) formed the Holy League against Louis XII of France in 1510 with the assistance of Spain and England. 28 Francis I, King of France 1515—47. 29 Or Baber (1483—1530), founder of the Mughal Empire, who conquered India in 1526. 30 Cuba gained independence after the Spanish-American War of 1898. 31 Holy Roman Emperor between 1519 and 1556. 32 I.e. a foreigner. 33 Hugh Capet (AD? 938-96), King of France 987-96, founder of the Capetian dynasty which ruled France 987-1328. Pepin of Heristal, King of the Franks (687-714). In the Divina commedia, Dante places Hugh Capet in Purgatory (Canto x x ) , and subjects him and the Capetian House to a powerful critique of worldly pride and ambition. As Strindberg states, Capet claims to have been sired by a Paris butcher. 34 Karlstadt, originally Andreas Bodenstein (1480-1541). 35 Originally Jan Bockelsen (?I5O9—36), Dutch Anabaptist leader who established a theocracy in Miinster in 1534; tortured to death after the city was recaptured two years later. 36 After the town of Schmalkalden in Hesse-Nassau, site of the Gothic town hall where the Protestant League of Schmalkalden was concluded in 1531 and of the house in which the articles of Schmalkalden were drawn up in 1537 by Luther, Melanchthon and other Protestant reformers.

270

N o t e s to pages 199-208

37 Though a Protestant, Maurice of Saxony (1521-53) sided with the Catholic Emperor Charles V and refused to join the Schmalkaldic League; the Swedish Protestant king, Gustav II Adolf (1594—1632), entered into an alliance with the Catholic Cardinal Richelieu (1585—1642); and though she initially tried to pursue a course of toleration, the Catholic French queen, Catherine de' Medici (1519—89) was drawn into complicity in the massacre of the Huguenots on St Bartholomew's Day, in 1572. 38 Philipp Melanchthon (1497—1560), German theologian and educational reformer. His Loci Communes (1521) contains the first systematic presentation of Protestant theology. 39 Gaspard II de Coligny (1519-72), French Huguenot leader, murdered in the St Bartholomew's Day Massace, 1572. 40 Maximilien de Bethune, Due de Sully (1560-1641). Henri IV s principal minister, he restored the finances of France following the Wars of Religion, and after Henri (1553—1610) had obtained toleration for the Huguenots with the Edict of Nantes, in 1598. 41 Ferdinand I (1503—64), Holy Roman Emperor. 42 Paul IV (1476-1559). 43 Maximilian II (1527—76), who so alarmed his family by his Protestant leanings that he was obliged in 1562 to swear to live and die within the Catholic Church. 44 Count Johan von Tilly (1559—1632), commanded the army of the Catholic League and the Imperial forces in the Thirty Years War. 45 Akbar the Great (1542-1605), Mughal Emperor of India 1556-1605. 46 With which the Thirty Years War concluded in 1648. 47 Protection. 48 Although he had recently drawn a compelling psychological portrait of the renowned military leader in his play Charles XII (1901) > Strindberg was generally hostile to Charles XII, whom he regarded as a short-sighted, self-destructive force in Swedish history, acting consistently to the detriment of his nation. 49 Sigismund II Augustus (1520—72), King of Poland 1548—72. Following the death in 1875 of his successor, Stefan Barthory, the Swedish-born Sigismund III (1566—1632) was chosen king of Poland in competition with Russian Tsar Fiodor and the Austrian Archduke Maximilian. 50 John III, surnamed Sobieski (1624—96), who raised the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683. King of Poland 1674-96. 51 T h e monarchs of Prussia, Austria, Russia and Sweden respectively. 52 T h e Encyclopedic, begun in 1746 under the editorship of the French philosophe Denis Diderot (1713-84), who spent 1773-4 in St Petersburg at the invitation of Catherine the Great. 53 Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin (1766-1826), Russian writer and historian. Strindberg is referring to his Letters of a Russian Traveller (1789-90), in which he describes his visit to Germany, Switzerland, France and England in 1789. 54 Arthur Young (1741-1820), whose Travels in France (1792), a record of his three journeys in France during 1787-90, was one of Strindberg's points of reference for his own travel narrative, Among French Peasants (1886).

N o t e s to pages 2 0 8 - 2 2

271

55 Jacques Necker (1732-1804), French financier and statesman, whose dismissal in 1789 was one of the causes of the storming of the Bastille. 56 Thutmose III, the ruler of Egypt c. 1500 B C , and generally considered one of the greatest of the Pharaohs. Under his command, Egypt was established as a leading power, with an empire stretching from the Euphrates to the 4th Cataract on the Nile in the Sudan. 57 Psamtik II, King of Egypt 595-589 B C . 58 In Greek mythology a descendant, with his brother Aegyptus, of Io. When they quarrelled, Danaus fled from their home in Egypt to Argos, of which Danaus became king. For Cecrops, see note 1. 59 Ansgar or Anskar (801—65), Saint, Frankish prelate and missionary to Scandinavia, known as the 'Apostle of the North'. Consecrated archbishop of Hamburg in 831, he had previously begun the conversion of Denmark in 826 and Sweden in 829. 60 Of Prussia. 61 I.e. the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. 62 In the Villa Borghese on the Pincio, in Rome. 63 Roman household gods. 64 Napoleon II (1811—32), the son of Napoleon Bonaparte and Marie Louise, known as the King of Rome during the first French empire and entitled Napoleon II by the Bonapartists after Napoleon I's death in 1821. 65 Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800—59), historian and essayist. 66 Edward George Bulwer-Lytton (1803—73), English writer and politician. Strindberg was impressed by his crime novel, Eugene Aram (1832), and his occult fiction, Zanoni (1842), where the tale of the magician Zanoni caught between two women he at one time regarded as an account of his own experiences with Frida Uhl and Dagny Juel. See Letters 11, p. 862. 67 The English philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), whose adaptation of the Darwinian theory of evolution impressed Strindberg when he first encountered it in 1878, in The Study of Sociology (1873). Although he had long rejected Darwinism, Spencer's formula of homogeneity leading to heterogeneity clearly remained a force in Strindberg's thinking. 68 A popular exposition of geography, Jordklotet och dess naturunder. En geografisk familjebok efter H. ]. Klein och O. W. Thome. Ofuers. och bearb. afD. A. Kruhs, 2 vols. (Stockholm, 1881-2). 69 Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid (4th edn, London, 1880) by the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, Charles Piazzi Smyth (1819-1900) contained the results of the latter's investigations into the claim that the Great Pyramid had been built by Noah and provided a perfect system of weights and measures. Smyth's conclusion, that the Pyramid was indeed an observatory and part of a divine plan that vindicated the ways of God to man, brought about his resignation from the Royal Society. Strindberg had frequent recourse to Smyth's book in his various investigations into both (super-) natural and man-made phenomena.

272

Notes to pages 223—6 'August Strindberg on Himself

This interview with Strindberg was published in Bonniers Mdnadshdftet, January 1909, in honour of his sixtieth birthday. 1 Loviseberg, or 25 Stora Grabergsgatan, on the (then) outskirts of Stockholm, where the Strindbergs lived from April 1857 to April i860. The family lived there again from April 1869 to October 1871, but by then Strindberg was a student at Uppsala University. 2 An open-air market on the Riddarholm Canal in Gamla Stan, Stockholm. 3 Matthew 21:19: 'And when he saw a fig tree in the way, he came to it, and found nothing thereon, but leaves only, and said unto it, Let no fruit grow on thee henceforth for ever. And presently the fig tree withered away.' 4 Strindberg's mother died in 18 61, when he was 13. His father married the children's 'mademoiselle', or governess, Emilia Charlotta Petersson (1841-87) within a year. 5 Strindberg's first play, A Namesday Gift, written in 1869, has not survived. His first extant play is The Freethinker (1869), in three sections, rather than acts. Hermione (1870) was a revised version of an earlier play, Greece in Decline (1869). His early intention to write a large-scale play about Christ wasfinallyrealised in the third of the World Historical Dramas, Kristus (1903). 6 'The palace of the sun was lofty with towering columns.' Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 2, line 1. 7 Strindberg had recently written an essay on Andersen, in celebration of the centenary of Andersen's birth. It was published in the Danish paper Politiken, 2 April 1905, and concluded, 'I have had many teachers, Schiller and Goethe, Victor Hugo and Dickens, Zola and Peladan, but I nevertheless wish to sign this [essay] "H. C. Andersen's pupil August Strindberg"' (SS54, p. 445). 8 Edla Heijkorn (1838-76), the daughter of the landlord at 14 Norrtullsgatan, Stockholm, where the Strindbergs lived on three occasions between 1856 and 1869. By his own account in The Son ofa Servant, Strindberg fell in love with her at 15, and when, in 1864, his family moved to the adjoining house, they carried on a correspondence, partly in secret, which is now lost. According to The Son ofa Servant, it dealt with 'Everything. Jesus, the fight against sin, life, death, love, friendship, and despair' (SVzo, p. 106). 9 A prestigious learned society in Stockholm. 10 Frederik Wilhelm Scholander (1816—81), architect, Professor at the Swedish Academy of Arts. 11 Baron Nils Adolf Erik Nordenskiold (1832-1901), Swedish Arctic explorer and scientist, with whom Strindberg corresponded briefly on scientific topics during the 1890s. They had met in 1880 following Nordenskiold's successful navigation of the north-east passage, and there was some discussion of the young writer and librarian assisting Nordenskiold with the materials he had gathered on the voyage. The collaboration failed to materialise, however. 12 Hans Hildebrand (1842-1913), archeologist, historian and director-general of the Central Board of Antiquities. Member of the Swedish Academy.

Notes to pages 2 2 6 - 7

2

73

13 Frithiof Kjellberg (1836-85), sculptor and a professor at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts. 14 Per Adolf (Pelle) Janzon (1844-99), opera singer and convivial friend of the Strindbergs during the early 1880s. Among his most successful roles were Figaro, Bartolo and Leporello. 15 Hjalmar Branting (i860—1925), politician and publicist. One of the founder members of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, he was elected to the Riksdag in 1896, and under his leadership the party became a major force in Swedish politics. In 1920 he formed Sweden's first Socialist government. Strindberg and Branting were first acquainted in the early 1880s, when they shared an interest in radical politics. Although they largely lost touch with one another during the 1890s, Branting remained an admirer of Strindbergs early works, and, following the latter's return to Stockholm in 1899, they resumed a firm friendship. 16 Richard Bergstrom (1828-93), teacher, librarian, literary critic and folklorist. 17 Gustaf Edvard Klemming (1823-93), Head of the Royal Library in Stockholm, where Strindberg worked as an assistant from 1874 until (with long periods of inactivity) 1882. With what Strindberg described as his 'Zeus head', Klemming was a patriarchal figure for whom he always retained a great respect. 18 Strindberg went down from Uppsala in 1872 without completing his degree. 19 Anders Nohrborg (1725—67), clergyman. A collection of his annual sermons, which his brother published in 1771 as Den fallna menniskans salighetsordning (The Fallen's Way to Bliss), enjoyed great popularity as a devotional manual, and by 1926 it had been reprinted nineteen times. 20 Carl Jonas Love Almqvist (1793—1866), the major Swedish Romantic-realist poet, novelist, dramatist and pamphleteer, of whom Strindberg rarely had anything positive to say. 21 Erik Gustaf Geijer (1783-1847), Swedish poet and historian. Strindbergs controversial two-volume Svenska folket (The Swedish People, 1882), in which he set out to describe ordinary people 'in the modest circumstances of their humble lives', was partly written as a challenge to Geijer's widely respected Svenska folkets historia (History of the Swedish People, 1832—6), where by Geijer's own account the emphasis was on the history of the Swedish kings. 22 The official government organ and Sweden's oldest newspaper, Post- och inrikes tidningar, founded 1645. 23 Svenska folkvisor, a celebrated collection of Swedish folk songs, originally published in 1814—18 by Erik Gustaf Geijer (see note 21) and Arvid August Afzelius (1785—1871). Together with Johan Hoijer (1815—85), Bergstrom was responsible for a new, enlarged edition, published in 1880. 24 The Norwegian writers Bjornstjerne Bjornson (1832—1910) and Jonas Lie (1833-1908), whom Strindberg first met in Paris, in 1884. He embarked upon an impressive correspondence with both of them but it was the more tolerant Lie, who turned to writing after he had gone bankrupt in 1868, with whom he retained the more lasting friendship (Lie became one of the initiative-takers in the appeal made from Paris on Strindbergs behalf in 1895). Bjornson and Strindberg fell out over the prosecution of Getting Married. See Letters 1, pp. 119-20, 157-63-

274

Notes to pages 227—9

25 Ludvig Oscar Josephson (1832—99), who staged Strindberg's early masterpiece Master Olofzt the New Theatre in Stockholm, 30 December 1881, after it had been rejected for almost ten years by other theatres and directors. This was Strindberg's first great success as a dramatist, and in 1883 Josephson, who also directed the premiere of Ibsen's Peer Gynt in Christiania in 1876, followed it, again at the New Theatre, with Sir Bengt's Wife (1882) and Lucky Peters Journey (1882). 26 Albert Ranft (1858-1938), actor and theatre manager. Known as 'Stockholm's theatre king' for the number of theatres that he controlled there, it was at Svenska Teatern that some fifteen of Strindberg's plays were performed, including the premieres of Gustav Vasa and Erik XIV, directed by Harald Molander, in 1899, and A Dream Play, directed by Victor Castegren, in 1907. 27 Nils Edvard Personne (1850—1928), a leading actor and subsequently theatre director at the Royal Theatre, where he assumed control at the head of an actors' consortium in 1898. Under his regime productions of Crimes and Crimes and To Damascus / i n 1900 were followed by Easter and Caspers Shrove Tuesday in 1901 and Simoom and CharlesXII'm 1902. However, Personne refused both The Dance of Death and Gustav III. 28 August Falck (1882-1938), the actor and theatre manager with whom Strindberg ran the Intimate Theatre from 1907 to 1910. Twenty-four of Strindberg's plays were staged there and Falck, who was a notable Captain in both The Fatherand The Dance of Death, and an impressive Jean in Miss Julie, performed in many of them. 29 Proverbs 31: 3-7. 30 Peter Wieselgren (1880—77), clergyman, literary historian and keen advocate of temperance. His son, Harald (1835—1906), was a librarian at the Royal Library during Strindberg's period of service there. 31 Anders Adolph Retzius (1796-1860), Professor of Anatomy. 32 Samuel Owen (1774—1854), English inventor and industrialist, who had married Strindberg's aunt, Elisabeth Strindberg. Owen had gone to Sweden from Birmingham to install steam engines and settled there in 1806. He built his first paddle-steamer for traffic on Lake Malaren in 1817, and when he went bankrupt his shipping operations were combined with the spice business run by Strindberg's father. 33 Alongside the standard repertoire of works by Mozart, Mendelssohn, Weber, Nicolai, Rossini, Gounod and Mascagni (the prelude to his verismo opera Cavalleria rusticana (1890)), Strindberg assembles a heterogeneous collection, including the romantic opera Mefistofele (1868), based on Goethe's Faust by Verdi's librettist in Otello and Falstajf, Arrigo Boito (1842-1918), the oriental exoticism of the opera Lalla Roukh (1862) by Felicien David (1810—76), and three collections of piano pieces, Frosoblomster (1898-1914) by the late Romantic Swedish composer Wilhelm Peterson-Berger (1867—1942), particularly 'Sommarsang' (Summer Song) and 'Vigor mot stranden' (Waves on the Shore). The Marche Lorraine (1875) was one of two patriotic marches (the other is Le Pere de la victoire, 1888) by the French composer and conductor Gustave

Notes to page 229

34 35 36

37

38

275

Louis Ganne (1862-1923), who was for many years music director at the Casino in Monte Carlo. The Sonata in E minor by Grieg was for piano solo and held associations for Strindberg with his third marriage to Harriet Bosse. Which three pieces by Chopin he has in mind is unclear: in his correspondence and elsewhere he particularly singles out the Polonaise Op. 40, no. 2, the Study Op. 25, no. 7, to which he once asked his brother Axel to set one of the poems in the collection Ordalek och smdkonst (Word Play and Minor Art, 1902), the Nocturnes Op. 48, no. 1 in C minor and Op. 37, no. 2 in G major, and the posthumous Fantasy Impromptu Op. 66, which features prominently in his chamber play The Pelican (1907). Hugo and Dickens were among Strindberg's abiding enthusiasms. See e.g. Letters 1, pp. 97-8; 11, p. 798. High culture. Frederick Marryat (1792—1848), English novelist and naval officer; wrote novels of sea life (Mr. Midshipman Easy, 1836) and children's stories (The Children of the New Forest, 1847). Die Woche, illustrated German weekly paper, founded 1899. That he did not read newspapers was one of Strindberg's recurring affectations; in fact, for most of his life, he read a variety with some attention. After his return to Stockholm in 1899, Strindberg's admiration for Beethoven led him to form what he called 'Beethovengubbarna' (The Beethoven Boys), an informal group of friends, including his brother Axel, his old painter friends Richard Bergh (1858-1919) and Karl Nordstrom (1855-1923), the actors Ivar Nilsson (1877—1929) a n < l August Palme (1856—1924), the composer Tor Aulin (1866—1914), and the astronomer and physicist Vilhelm Carlheim-Gyllenskold (1859—1934), who became his literary executor. At Strindberg's invitation, two or three of them would gather at a time, wherever he happened to be living, to play and listen to music mostly (but by no means exclusively) by Beethoven.

Index

Given my comments in the introduction on the way in which Strindberg customarily shuttles back and forth between fact and fiction, these texts sometimes pose particular problems for the indexer. Aware of how in Strindberg 'characters split, double, multiply, evaporate, condense, disperse, and assemble' {A Dream Play, SV 46, p. 7), I have nevertheless reduced all such cases to a single identity. Thus, the Edvard Munch of 'The Exposition of Edvard Munch' and the 'Swedish painter' of 'The Making of an Aspasia' share a single entry and although there are surely theoretical objections, I have identified Gustaf Steffen with Herr Schilf in 'The Battle of the Brains' and Siri von Essen or Frida Uhl with the author's wife. Likewise, the passage in code in 'In the Cemetrery' poses intriguing questions of the indexer which can hardly be resolved to everyone's satisfaction. To prevent any misunderstanding, I have also given the original Swedish and Norwegian titles of works by Strindberg and Ibsen in parenthesis after the English version. The Swedish letters a and a are listed under a, and o under o. Adam, Villiers de lisle: L'Evasion, 81, 83; La Revoke, 83, 240 Adelbert, 191 Adlersparre, Sophie, 97, 245 Aeschylus, 184; Prometheus Unbound, 184 Aesop, 214 Afzelius, Arvid August, 273 Akbar the Great, 203, 270 Alaric, 189, 221 Alcibiades, 210 Alexander the Great, 195, 209, 214 Alexander VI, Pope, 193, 269 Almqvist, C. J. L., 226, 273 Amtliche Kaiserliche und Kbnigliche Wiener Zeitung, 243 Andersen, Hans Christian, 225, 272

Andersson-Meijerhelm, Natalia Teresia, 97, 245 Ansgar, 210, 271 Antoine, Andre, 11, 79, 80-6, 239; Memoires, 239 Antoinette, Marie, 253 Archimedes, 91,120, 250 Aristotle, 188, 189, 210, 214 Ashburner, John: Physico-Physiological Researches on the Dynamics ofMagnetism, Electricity, Heat, Light, Crystallisation and Chemism in their Relations to Vital Force, 251 Attila, 187, 188-9, 2 2 ° Augier, Emile, 76, 77; Les Lionnes pauvres, 238 Augustine, Saint, 184 Augustus, 109, 212, 216 Aulin, Tor, 275 Babur (or Baber), 195, 269 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 229 Bacon, Francis, 15 Badaire, A. E.: Lajoie de mourir, 255 Balboa, Vasco Nunez de, 196 Balzac, Honore de, 167, 227, 229, 261; Seraphita, 167, 261 Banville, Theodore de, 135, 136, 140, 251, 252; Gringoire, 252 Barres, Maurice: Le Culte du moi, 241 Bartholdi, Frederic, 254; Lion ofBelfort, 139 Basil (Basileios) II, of Byzantium, 194 Bastien-Lepage, Jules, 76, 238 Beaudonnet, Bernard, 131; Contribution a I'etude des manifestations oculaires dans I'erytheme, 251

Beaumarchais, Pierre August de, 76 Bebel, August, 7, 28, 32, 232; Die Frau in der Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft, 232 Becque, Henry: Les Corbeaux 77-8, 238-9; La NavetteSy, La Parisienne 238 Becquerel, Henri, 260 Beethoven, Ludvig van, 228, 275; 'Pathetique' sonata 104 Benedictsson, Victoria, 97, 244

276

Index Berg, Carl Oscar, 97, 244 Bergerat, Emile, 240; La Nuit bergamasque, 82, 240 Bergh, Richard, 247, 250, 275 Bergstrom, Richard, 226, 273; Svenska folkvisor, 226, 273 Bernhardt, Sarah, 78, 238, 239, 249 Bernheim, Hippolyte, 5, 25; De la suggestion dans I'etat hypnotique et dans Vetat de veille, 232; De la suggestion et de ses applications a la therapeutique, 232 Bertens, Rosa, 11 Berthellot, Pierre Eugene Marcellin, 173, 263; La Chimie au moyen age, z6y, Les Origines de Valchimie, 263

Berthollet, Claude Louis, 179, 266 Berthier, Alexandre, 137 Berzelius, Jons Jakob, 18, 155, 158,174, 257; Ldrbok i kemien, 257, 258

Bismarck, Count Otto von, 70, 113-14, 237 Bjornson, Bjornstjerne, 227, 242, 273 Blavet, Emile, 80, 240 Blok, Aleksandr, 19 Blomstrand, Christian William: Naturens grunddmnen i deras inbordes stdllning till hvarandra, 173, 264 Bockelsen, Jan (John of Leyden), 198, 269 Bodenstein, Andreas (Karlstadt), 198, 269 Boito, Arrigo, 229, 274; Mefistofele, 229 Boltzius, Fredrik August, 56, 235 Bonaparte, Joseph, 217 Bonaparte, Princess Mathilde, 238 Bonnemain, Mme de, 249 Bonnier, Albert, 4, 102, 237, 246 Bonnier, Eva, 102, 245-6 Bonnier, Isidor, 235 Bonnier, Karl Otto, 241 Bonniers Mdnadshdftet, 272 Borgia, Cesare, 193 Borgia, Lucrezia, 193 Boulanger, Georges, 117, 249 Boulay de la Meurthe, Antoine Jacques, 135, 136, 139, 140, 252 Bourget, Paul, 5 Brandes, Edvard, 234 Brandes, Georg, 6, 242, 248 Branting, Hjalmar, 226, 233, 273 Brehm, Alfred Edmund: Illustrirtes Tierleben, 104, 247 Breuer, Joseph, 1 Brown, Alexander Crum, 158, 258 Buckle, Henry Thomas, 267 Buddha, 182, 186-7 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward George, 218; Eugene Aram, 271; Zanoni, zyi

277

Bunsen, Robert Wilhelm, 258 Byl, Arthur, 81, 82, 239 Byron, Lord George Gordon, 71 Caesar, Julius, 186, 187, 212, 216, 218, 268 Caligula, 109 Capet, Hugh, 197, 205, 269 Carlheim-Gyllenskold, Vilhelm, 275 Carnot, Sadi, 91, 242 Carrogis, Louis (Carmontelle), 85, 240; Proverbes dramatiques 85

Caserio, Santo-Jeronimo, 91, 242 Castegren, Victor, 274 Catherine II (of Russia), 207, 270 Catherine de' Medici, 199 Cecrops, 182, 209, 267 Chamisso, Adalbert von, 233; Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte, 233

Charcot, Jean-Martin, 5, 25, 56, 86, 232; 'Sur les divers etats nerveux determines par l'hypnotisation chez les hysteriques', 232

Charlemagne, 189, 191, 197, 217 Charles I (of England), 203 Charles III, 'the Fat' (of Swabia), 205 Charles III, 'the Simple' (King of the Franks), 205

Charles V (of Spain), 197, 203, 219, 269 Charles X (of Sweden), 206 Charles XII (of Sweden), 205-6, 270 Chatrian, Alexandre, 68, 237; Contes et romans populaires, 237

Chaveau-Lagarde, Claude Francois, 137, 253 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 3, 35; What is to be Done?, 3, 233

Chevallier, Jean Baptiste Alphonse: Dictionnaire des alterations et falsifications des substances alimentaires, medicamenteuses et commerciales, 158, 258

Chopin, Frederic, 229; Fantasy Impromptu Op. 66, 275; Nocturne Op. 37, no. 2, 275; Nocturne Op. 48, no. 1, 275; Polonaise Op. 40, no. 2, 275; Study Op. 25, no. 7, 275 Cibber, Colley, 80 Claudius, 216 Cleon, 210 Clovis 1,197 Codrus, 184, 267 Coligny, Gaspard II de, 200, 270 Columbus, 131, 195-6, 268 Commodus, 216 Confucius, 188, 191 Constantin V (Constantin Copronymos, Emperor of Byzantium), 189, 268 Copernicus, 131

278

Index

Coquelin, Constant-Benoit, 78, 239, 252; L'Art et le comedien, 239 Coquelin, Ernst, 239 Corday, Charlotte, 253 Cortes, Hernando, 196 Crookes, Sir William, 160,161, 173, 259; The Genesis of the Elements, 259 Curtius, Marcus, 184, 267 Curtius Rufus, 195, 269 Dahlback, Lars, 18 Dahlbom, Johan, 250 Danaus, 209, 271 Dante Alighieri, 13, 197, 198, 269 Danton, Georges, 207 Darwin, Charles, 5, 28, 50,109, 141,150, 158, 159, 248 Daudet, Alphonse, 232 David, Felicien: Lalla Roukh, 229, 274 David, Marie, 245 Davy, Sir Humphrey, 266 Dehmel, Richard, 93, 95, 243; Aber die Liebe, 244; Weib und Welt, 243 Delestre, Pierre Francois, 180, 258; Exploration du ciel theocentrique, 180, 258 Deneuilly, Mile, 82 Desprez, Louis, 77; L'Evolution naturaliste, 238 Dickens, Charles, 218, 225, 229, 272, 275 Diderot, Denis, 76, 270; Encyclopedic, 207, 270 Diocletian, 221 Dionysus the Elder, 250 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Mikhaylovich, 141 Dubosc, Andre, 266 Dumas, Alexandre^z/j, 74, 77, 78,118, 249-50; L'Ami desfemme, 249; La Femme de Claude, 118-21, 238, 249; L'Homme-Femme 249 Dumas, Jean Baptiste, 173, 263; Traite de chimie appliquee aux arts, 263 Dumont d'Urville, Jules Sebastien Cesar, 135, 136, 140, 252 L'Echo de Paris, 11, 248 L'Eclair, 11 Edinburgh Review, 41, 234 Ekbohrn, Ossian, 98-102, 245 Eliasson, Anders, 14, 254, 257, 264 Elizabeth I (of England), 200 Emeryk, Wladyslaw, 243 Emmerich, Anna Katarina, 153, 256 En bok om Strindberg, 90, 241 Encausse, Gerard (Papus), 2 Engelbrecht, William, 77, 238 Erckmann, Emile, 68, 237; Contes et romans populaires, 237

Eriksson, Leif, 192, 269 Essen, Siri von, 7, 9, 27, 29, 38, 57-8, 62, 98, 101, 233, 240, 245, 251 Euripides, 186 L'Evenement, 6 Fahlstedt, Eugene, 9, 250, 251 Falck, August, 227, 274 Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor, 202 Feuillet, Octave, 85, 240 Feval, Paul Henri: Le Bossu, 74-5, 238 Figaro (Stockholm), 53, 235 Figaro, Le (Paris), 80, 240, 263 Figaro litteraire, Le, 249, 250 Flammarion, Camille, 260 Forsten, Ina, 233 Fortnightly Review, 242 Foucault, Michel, 10 Francis I (of France), 200, 217, 269 Frederick II, 'the Great', 207, 212 Frederick Augustus of Saxony, 197 Frederick the Wise (of Saxony), 197 Fremy, Edmond, 170; Abrege de chimie, 263; Traite de chimie generale, 263 Freud, Sigmund, 1, 15,19, 230; Interpretation of Dreams, 16; Studies on Hysteria, 1 Fries, Elias, 178, 234; Botaniska utflygter, 178, 265 Froding, Gustaf, 241 Galilei, Galileo, 64, 131 Ganne, Gustave Louis: Marche Lorraine, 229, 274; Le Pere de la victoire,27A Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 217 Gamier, Jules: L'Or et le diamant au Transvaal et au cap, 265 Gauguin, Paul, 19 Gay-Lussac, Joseph Louis, 258 Geijer, Erik Gustaf, 226; Svenska folkets historia, 273; Svenska folkvisor, 273 Geijerstam, Gustaf af, 236, 240 Genghis Khan, 194,195 Genserik, 220 Gil Bias, 2, 249, 253 Ginisty, Paul, 249 Glouvet, Jules de (pseudonym of J. Quesnay de Beaurepaire): Le Pere 97, 245 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 209, 216, 226, 272, 274 Goncourt, Edmond de, 1, 5, 232; La Cherie, 6; Henriette MarechaljG, 238; Sceur Philomene 80-3, 239 Goncourt, Jules de, 1, 5, 232, Henriette Marechal 76, 238; Sceur Philomene 80-3, 239 Gossin, Mile, 80

Index Goteborgs Handels- och Sjofarts Tidning, 255, 259 Gounod, Charles: Faust, 229; Romeo et Juliette, 229

Gregory the Great, 190, 195, 268 Grein, J. T., 239, 244 Grieg, Edvard: Sonata in E minor, 229, 275 Gringoire, Pierre, 252 Gross, Theodor, 173, 263 Guiches, Gustave: Au mois de mai, 240; Entre freres, 84, 240

Gustav II Adolf (of Sweden), 199, 201, 206, 270 Gustav III (of Sweden), 97, 207, 261 Guymiot, 'the Buddhist', 178, 261, 265 Hadrian, 216 Haeckel, Ernst, 5,109, 159, 248 Halevy, Ludovic: Frou-Frou, 239 Hallback, Hans Henrik, 53, 235 Hamsun, Knut, 252 Hansson, Ola, 92, 242, 243 Harden, Maximilian, 248 Hartmann, Eduard von, 69, 226; Philosophie des Unbewussten, 237

Hasselberg, Per, 246, 260 Hauge, Hans Nielsen, 241 Hauptmann, Gerhard: Die Weber, 239 Haydn, Joseph, 228 Hedlund, Torsten, 12,15, 253, 254, 255, 256, 259, 260, 262, 265 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 40, 234, 267 Heiberg, Gunnar, 95; Balkonen, 244 Heidenstam, Verner von, 4, 235 Heijkorn, Edla, 225 272 Henri I (of France), 205 Henri II (of France), 199 Henri IV (of France), 200, 201, 219, 270 Henry I (the Fowler), 197 Henry VIII (of England), 203, 217 Herodotus, 209 Hiao P'ing Ti, 186 Hildebrand, Hans, 226, 272 Hill, Carl Frederick, 238 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 241 Hoijer, Johan, 273 Holberg, Ludvig: Ulysses von Ithaca, 74, 238 Homer, 184, 210, 225 Horace, 225 Hugo, Victor, 225, 229, 238, 272, 275; Cromwell, 75; Hernani, 75; L'Homme qui rit, 225; Les Miserables, 225; Le Roi s'amuse, 238; Les Travailleurs de la mer, 225 Huguet, Rene, 16; Chimie Medicale et Pharmaceutique, 16

Humboldt, Alexander von, 216

279

Huysmans, Joris-Karl: A Rebours 6 Hylten-Cavallius, Gunnar Olof: Svenska folksagor och dventyr, 254 Hyperchimie, L\ 2,173, 255, 262, 265 Ibsen, Henrik, 1, 64-70, 239; Ghosts (Gengangere), 50, 85, 235, 239; Peer Gynt, 274; Rosmersholm, 50, 64-70, 85, 234, 236; The Wild Duck (Vildanden), 239 Initiation, L', 2, 258, 260, 265

Innocent III, Pope, 193 Innocent VIII, Pope, 193 Intransigeant, L\ 31 Ivan I (of Russia), 195, 269 Janzon, Per Adolf (Pelle), 226, 273 Jarno, Josef, 11 Jarry, Alfred, 19 Jollivet-Castelot, Francois, 2, 255, 265 Joseph II (of Austria), 207 Josephson, Ernst, 1 Josephson, Ludvig, 227, 274 Journal, Le, 11 Journal des Debats, 249 Joyce, James, 19 Juel, Dagny, 94-6, 242, 243, 248, 253, 261 Julian the Apostate, 198, 216 Julius II, Pope, 193,195, 198, 269 Kandinsky, Wassily, 19 Kant, Immanuel, 17, 58; 'Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernuft', 236; 'Vom Gebet', 236 Karamzin, Nikolai Mikhaylovich, 208; Letters of a Russian Traveller, 270

Kasimir, Johan (of Poland), 200, 206, 270 Kierkegaard, Soren, 9 Kjellberg, Frithiof, 226, 273 Klemming, Gustaf Edvard, 8, 226, 273 Kovalevsky, Sonja, 97, 244 Krogh, Christian, 244 Krogh, Oda, 244 Kriiss, Alexander Gerhard, 173, 263 Kung-Tse, 187 Lao-Tzu, 188 Lafargue, Paul, 'Le Matriarcat', 245 Laforet, Louis Phillippe, 82, 240 Langbehn, Julius, Rembrandt als Erzieher, 113, 248 Lange, Algot, 29, 233 Langen, Albert, 137, 252-4 Laplace, Pierre Simon, 17 Larsson, Carl, 246 Lassalle, Ferdinand, 114, 248

28O

Index

Lavedan, Henri, Au mois de mai, 240; Entre freres, 84, 240

Lea, Matthew Carey, 177; A Manual of Photography, 265; Papers on the Photochemistry of the Silver Haloids, 265 Le Bon, Gustave, 161, 259-60; Psychologie des Foules, 259 Le Brun Le Virloy, 173, 174, 264; LAccroissement de la matiere et la transmutation de metaux, 265 Leclerq, Michel Theodore: Proverbes dramatiques, 85, 240 Leffler, Anne-Charlotte, 97, 244 Legrain, Maurice Paul: Du delire chez les degeneres, 65, 236 Lemaitre, Jules, 249 Lemery, Nicolas, 156, 258; Cours de chymie, 258 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 233 Leo X, Pope, 193, 198 Leovigild, 190, 268 Lesage, Alain-Rene: Le Diable boiteux, 137, 253; Gil Bias, 253

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 79, 239; Hamburgische Dramaturgie, 79, 239 Lidforss, Bengt, 108, 248 Lie, Jonas, 227, 242, 273 Limnell, Fredrika, 97, 245 Lindstrom, Karl Adam, 53, 235 Linnaeus, Carl, 3, 47, 109, 178, 234; Anthropomorpha, 248 Littmansson, Leopold, 10, 128, 241, 244, 246, 250, 262 Livy (Titus Livius), 190 Lockyer, Joseph Norman, 173, 263; 'Experiments Tending to Show the Non-Elementary Character of Phosphorus', 263 Loiseau, Georges, 246 Lombroso, Cesare, 5 Loostrom, Claes, 6, 230 Louis II, 'the Stammerer', 205 Louis IX (of France), 217 Louis XI (of France), 195, 212 Louis XIII (of France), 86, 123 Louis XIV (of France), 124, 127, 207, 212 Louis XVI (of France), 40, 137, 197, 208, 253 Lucian, 221 Lugne-Poe, Aurelien, 11, 249, 268 Luther, Martin, 196, 197-200, 202, 203, 267 Lycurgus, 209 McCarthy, Justin Huntley, 242 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 218, 271 Macrinus, 216 Maecenas, 216 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 2, 107, 247; Le Tresor des humbles, 247

Das Magazinfiir die Literatur des In- und Auslandes, 235, 238, 248, 249 Mahabharata, 181 Mahmud af Ghazni, 192, 269 Malesherbes, Chretien de, 253 Marat, Jean Paul, 216 Marco Polo, 268 Marcus Aurelius, 216 Margueritte, Paul: Pierrot assassin de sa femme, 241

Marholm, Laura, (pseudonym of Laura Mohr), 90—1, 242, 243 Marius, Gaius, 216 Marryat, Frederick, 229, 275 Marx, Karl, 28, 32, 33, 267 Mascagni, Pietro: Cavalleria Rusticana, 229, 274 Maudsley, Henry, 5, 65, 236; Pathology of Mind, 5, 236 Maupassant, Guy de, 5, 232 Maurice of Saxony, 199, 270 Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor, 202, 270 Maximus, 216 Meilhac, Henri: Frou-Frou, 239 Melanchthon, Philipp, 200, 202, 270 Mencius, 188 Mendelssohn, Felix: Caprice in B minor, 229; Hebrides Overture, 229; Midsummer Nights Dream, 229 Mendes, Catulle: La Femme de Tabarin, 241 Mercure de France, 264 Mesmer, Franz Anton, 250 Metenier, Oscar, 240; En famille, 82, 83, 240 Mevisto, Monsieur, 83 Michelangelo Buonarroti, 193 Milton, John, 218 MingTi, 186 Mirabeau, Honore Gabriel, 207 Mithridates, 186, 268 Molander, Harald, 274 Moliere, Jean-Baptiste, 75, 79; Les Fourberies de Scapin, 82; Tartujfe, 75, 82, 239 Morner, Birger, 241, 242, 260 Moses, 182, 192, 221, 267 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 229, 274 Muhammad, 188—91 Munch, Edvard, 92-3, 95, 167-9, 2 4 2 ~3 Munkaczy, Mihaly: Christ Before Pilate, 76, 238 Murillo, Bartolome Esteban, 254 Musset, Alfred de, 71, 85; II ne faut jurer de rien, 240; On ne badine pas avec I'amour, 240 Napoleon I, 135, 212, 215, 217, 219, 252, 271 Napoleon II, 215, 271 Napoleon III, 212, 217 Necker, Jacques, 208, 271 Nero, 216, 221

Index Nerva, 216 Neue Freie Presse, 4, 7, 231 Newton, Sir Isaac, 131; Observations on the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse ofSt John, 251 Nicolai, Otto: Merry Wives of Windsor, 229 Niepce de Saint-Victor, Claude Marie Francois, H 9 ' 256 Niepce, Joseph Nicephore, 256 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 6 Nilsson, Ivar, 275 Nisbeth, Hugo, 53, 235 Nohrborg, Anders, 226; Denfallna menniskans salighetsordning, 273 Nordau, Max, 5, 107, 247; Die conventionellen Liigen der Kulturmenscheit, 5, 247; Entartung, 247; Paradoxe, 247 Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 114, 249 Nordenskiold, Adolf Erik, 226, 234, 272 Nordstrom, Karl, 246, 275 Nouvelle Revue, La, 97, 245 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), 226 Nyjord, 231, 237 Nya Dagligt Allehanda, 235 Orfila, Mateo Jose Bonaventura, 18, 135, 155; Elements de chimie, appliquee a la medecine et aux arts, 252, 266 Otto I, 269 Otto II, 194 Otto III, 191, 269 Ovid, 105,142, 152, 225, 255, 256 Owen, Samuel, 228, 274

281

Pertinex, 216 Peter I, 'the Great', 205 Peterson-Berger, Wilhelm, Frosoblomster, 229, 274 Petersson, Emilia Charlotta, 272 Petit temps, Le, 263 Pfaeffinger, Rose, 252, 254 Philip I (of France), 205 Philip II (of France), 212 Philip Arabus, 216 Philipsen, Gustav, 236-7 Philp, Hugo, 114-15, 249 Phocas, 195 Pistis Sophia, 185 Plato, 209 Pliny, 189 Poe, Edgar Allan, 5, 241 Politiken, 234, 236, 237, 272 Pompey, 221 Ponsard, Francois, 76, 238 Post- och inrikes tidningar, 97, 226, 245, 273 Prel, Carl du: Die Philosophic der Mystik, 5 Preussiche Jahrbiicher, 8 Priestley, Joseph, 265 Prout, William, 264 Proust, Joseph Louis, 173, 264 Przybyszewski, Stanislaw, 92-5, 243, 244, 246, 253, 261; Homo Sapiens, 243; Das Werk des Edvard Munch, 244 Psamtik II, 209, 271 Pythagoras, 188, 209 Quick born, 261

Pailleron, Edouard, 78; Le Monde ou Von s'ennui, 239 Palme, August, 275 Parodi, Alexandre: Rome vaincue, 239 Paul the Apostle, 209 Paul IV, Pope, 202 Paul, Adolf, 93, 95, 243, 244; Blind Mans Buff, 244; Ein gefallener Prophet, 244; 'Med det falska och det arliga ogat', 243; The Ripper, 243; Strindberg-Erinnerungen und Briefe, 2-43 Paul, Saint Vincent de, 141, 255 Pauthier, Guillaume, 188; Chine ou description historique, ge'ographique et litteraire de ce vaste empire, d'apres des documents chinois, 268 Pedersen, Willy (alias Gretor), 252-4 Peladan, Joseph (Josephin), 272 Pelouze, Jules, 170, 263 Pepin II, 'of Heristal', 197 Pepin III, 'the short', 189, 268 Personne, Nils Edvard, 227, 274

Rabelais, Francois, 72 Racine, Jean, 75 Rameses III, 209 Rambosson, Jean Pierre: Histoire et legendes des plantes utiles et curieuses, 140, 255 Ranelagh, 137 Ranft, Albert, 227, 274 Raphael, 193, 196 Raspail, Francois Vincent, 155; Histoire naturelle, 257; Nouveau systeme de physiodogie vegetale et de botanique, 257 Reaumur, Rene Antoine de, 151, 256 Reccared I, 190 Rehoboam, 209 Reichenbach, Carl von, 241, 250-1; Odischmagnetische Briefe, 251; Der sensitive Mensch undsein Verhalten zum Ode, 251; Untersuchungen u'ber den Magnetismus, 251

Reichenberg, Suzanne, 78, 239 Reis, Anna Maria von, 26, 233

282

Index

Rembrandt van Rijn, 253 Renan, Ernst, 263 Retzius, Anders, 228, 242, 274 Revue blanche, La, 2, 249, 261 Revue des Revues, 246, 251, 253, 254 Riban, Jean, 257 Ribot, Theodule, 5 Richelieu, Cardinal, 199, 201, 211, 270 Rig-Veda, 182 Ristori, Adelaide, 78, 239 Rittner, Rudolf, 11 Rochefort, Henri, 233 Rontgen, Wilhelm, 160, 259 Roscoe, Sir Henry Enfield, 158, 159; Kurtzes Lehrbuch der Chimie, 358; Die Spektralanalyse, 258; A Treatise on Chemistry, 258 Rossini, Gioacchino; Stabat Mater, 229; William Tell, 229 Rostand, Edmond: Cyrano de Bergerac, 239 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 3, 70, 109, n o , 237, 248; Confessions, 237 Rubens, Peter Paul, 254 Rudiger, Otto, 8 Saint-Pierre, Bernardin de, 152, 178-9, 256, 262, 266; Harmonies de la nature, 256; Paul et Virginie, 178, 256 Saladin, sultan of Egypt and Syria, 193 Sardou, Victorien, 76; Tosca, 238 Scheele, Karl Wilhelm, 174, 265 Schering, Emil, 266, 268 Schiller, Friedrich, 226, 272; Die Rduber, 68, 237 Schleich, Carl Ludwig, 93, 94, 243; Erinnerungen an Strindberg, 243 Schleyer, Johann, 236 Scholander, Frederik Wilhelm, 226, 272 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 166, 226; Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 261 Schorlemmer, Carl, 158, 258; Kurtzes Lehrbuch der Chimie, 258; A Treatise on Chemistry, 258 Scott, Walter, 229 Scriabin, Alexander, 19 Scribe, Eugene, y6, 238 Seccho, Angelo, 131; Le Soleil, 251 Semiramis, 181 Septimus Severus, 216 Shakespeare, William, 75, 79, 218, 237; Hamlet, 71-2,117; Othello, 68, 237 Shen-tsung, 192 Shih Ching, 183, 267 Showalter, Elaine, 230 Sigismund II (of Poland), 206, 270 Simplicissimus, 252

Sisak, 209 Sixtus IV, Pope, 193 Skanberg, Carl, 1 [Skepto]: Hypnotisme et les religions, ou la fin du merveilleux, 63, 236 Smirnoff, Karin (Strindberg), 57-8, 240, 251

Smyth, Piazzi, 222, 271; Our Lnheritance in the Great Pyramid, 271 Socrates, 80, 141, 186, 188, 210, 214 Solomon, 212 Solon, 209, 215 Spencer, Herbert, 159, 219, 258, 271; The Study of Sociology, 271 Ssu-ma-Ch'ien, 267 Staaff, Pehr, 7, 231, 237 Steffen, Gustaf, 7-8, 26-46, 68, 233, 234, 237, 253, 260 Stephen III, Pope, 189 Stephens, George, 254; Svenska folk-sagor och dventyr, 254 Strandberg, Paul Reinhold, 97, 245 Strindberg, Anna (sister), 115, 249 Strindberg, Carl Axel (brother), n , 246 Strindberg, Carl Oscar (father), 48, 224, 272 Strindberg, Elisabeth (aunt), 274 Strindberg, Greta (daughter), 251 Strindberg, Hans (son), 247, 251, 254 Strindberg, Johan August, works: Advent, 248; Among French Peasants (Bland franska bonder), 3, 4, 7, 254; Antibarbarus, 12, 257, 261, 263; August Strindberg's Little Catechism for the Underclass' (August Strindbergs lilla katekes for underklassen), 3; 'Barbare a Paris, Le', 253; Black Banners (Svarta fanor), 20; Black Glove, The (Svarta handsken), 235; Blue Book, A (En bla bok), 20, 248, 257; Burned Site, The (Branda tomten), 235; Casper's Shrove Tuesday (Kaspers fet-tisdag), 274; 'Ciel et l'ceil, Le', 260; Charles XLI (Karl XII), 227, 270, 274; Christ (KnstusJ, 272; Cloister, The (Klostret), 13, 242; 'Corps simples, Chimie simpliste' 2; Creditors (Fordringsagare), 1, 4, 8, 11, 232, 239, 240, 246, 268; Crimes and Crimes (Brott och brott), 227, 242, 254, 274; Crown Bride, The (Kronbruden), 227; 'Cyclamen, or the Great Disorder and the Infinite Coherence, The' (Alpviolen, belysande den stora oordningen och det oandliga sammanhanget), 2, 255; Dance of Death, The (Dodsdansen), 249, 274; 'Distance du soleil de la terre, La, 261; Dream Play, A (Ett drdmspel), 4, 16, 20, 227, 274; Easter (Pask), 227, 274; Erik XIV,

Index 227, 274; 'Etoiles fixes, Les', 261; Fables (Fabler) 10; Fairhaven and Foulstrand (Fagervik och Skamsund), 242, 266; Father, The (Fadren), 1, 5, 8, 91, 97-8, 232, 242, 244, 249, 274; Getting Married (Giftas), 10, 232, 235, 237, 244, 250, 273; Ghost Sonata, The (Spoksonaten), 4, 235, 237; 'Great, The' (De stora) 1; Gustav III, 274; Gustav Vasa, 227, 274; 'Hallucinations' (Hallucinationer), 1; Hermione, 114, 272; Historical Miniatures (Historiska miniatyrer), 267; 'Holly' (Jarneken) 2; 'Horizon et 1'oeil', L', 261; Inferno, 2, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 242, 245, 250, 251, 252, 254, 256, 261, 262, 266; 'Introduction a une chimie unitaire', 264; 'lode comme un derive de houilles, L', 264; Jardin des Plantes, 1, 2, 13, 14, 251, 255, 257; 'Jubal Without a Self (Jubal utan jag), 233; 'Last Word on the Woman Question, The' (Sista ordet i kvinnofragan), 245; Lucky Peter s Journey (Lycko-Pers resa), 274; Madman's Defence, A (En dares forsvarstal), 7, 10,146, 252; Master O/#/(Master Olof)> 2.37, 274; Memories of the Chieftains (Hovdingaminnen), 267; 'Misogynie et gynolatrie', 249, 253; Miss Julie (Froken Julie), 1, 3, 4, 5, 11, 232, 237, 239, 240, 241, 248, 274; Namesday Gift, A (En namndagsgava), 272; Nightingale of Wittenberg, The (Naktergalen i Wittenberg), 267; Occult Diary (Ockulta dagboken), 265; 'On the General Discontent' (Om det allmanna missnojet), 3; 'On the Inferiority of Woman to Man' (Kvinnans underlagsenhet under mannen), 249; 'Open Letter to Berthelot on Sulphur' (Oppet brev till Berthelot om svavlet), 263; Open Letters to the Intimate Theatre (Oppna brev till Intima teatern), 3, 238; 'Paralipomena and Repetitions' 2; Pariah (Paria), 240; Pelican, The (Pelikanen), 249; Playing with Fire (Leka med elden), 246; Published and Unpublished (Tryckt och otryckt), 234, 235, 236, 238, 250, 251; 'Quarantine Master's Second Story, The' (Karantanmastarns andra berattelse), 242; 'Recollection from the Sorbonne, A' (Ett minne fran Sorbonne), 257; Saga of the Folkungs, 77^(Folkungasagan), 227; 'Scanian Nature' (Skanska landskap med utvikningar), 3; Secret of the Guild, The (Gillets hemlighet), 226, 237; 'Short Cuts' (Genvagar) 1, 233, 237; 'Sighing of the Stones, The' (Stenarnes suckan) 2, 13, 15,

283

16-17, 255, 256, 257, 264; Simoom (Samum), 104, 232, 240, 246, 274; Sir Bengt's Wife (Herr Bengts hustru), 4, 237, 239, 274; 'Small, The' (De sma), 1; Son of a Servant, The (Tjanstekvinnans son), 4, 5, 7, 13, 236, 237, 248, 272; 'Soufre est-il un corps simple?, Le', 263; Speeches to the Swedish Nation (Tal till svenska nationen), 260; Stronger, The (Den starkare), 240; Studies in Cultural History (Kulturhistoriska studier), 3, 267; 'Sur la photographie en couleurs directes', 260; Swedish Destinies and Adventures (Svenska oden och aventyr), 2, 267; Swedish People, The (Svenska folket), 267, 273; Sylva Sylvarum, 2, 12, 15,19, 255, 257; To Damascus (Till Damaskus), 1, 14, 20, 227, 241; Toten-Insel, 249; Town and Gown (Fran Fjardingen och Svartbacken), 249; Types and Prototypes in Mineral Chemistry (Typer och prototyper inom mineralkemien), 257; Utopias in Reality (Utopier i verkligheten), 4; Vivisections (Vivisektioner, 1887) 1, 5-11, 18, 230; Vivisections (Vivisektioner, 1894), 1, 10-11,18; 'Where are the Nerves of Plants?' (Var aro vaxternas nerver?), 2, 251, 255; 'Witch, A' (En haxa), 1; 'The World in Itself and the World for Us' (Varlden for sig och varlden for oss), 260; Word Play and Minor Art (Ordalek och smakonst), 275 Strindberg, Kerstin (daughter), 137, 243, 253 Strindberg, Ulrica Eleonora (mother), 48, 59, 129, 224, 272 Stuxberg, Anton, 50, 234, 237 Sudraka, King, 268 Sulla, Lucius Cornelius, 186, 268 Sully, Maximilien de Bethune, Duke of, 200, 270 Svenska Dagbladet, 266 Swartz, Edvard, 117, 249 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 20,178, 227, 256, 262, 265; Delights of Wisdom Concerning Conjugal Love, The, 167; Pleasures of Insanity Concerning Scortatory Love, The, 167 Sylvester II, Pope, 192 Sylviac, Mile, 82 Tabarin, Antoine Girard, 86, 241 Taine, Hippolyte, 40,141, 234, 267; Origines de la France contemporaine, Les, 40 T'ai-tsung, 191 Talleyrand-Perigord, Charles Maurice de, 237 Tarquinius Priscus, 215

Index

284 Temps, Le, 264

Terence, 248 Terentilius Arsa, 215 Thales, 188, 209 Thaulow, Frits, 253, 254 Thenard, Louis Jacques, 158; Traite de chimie

Vladimir (of Russia), 191, 269 Vogel, Hermann Wilhelm, 163; Handbuch der Photographie, 260; Handbuch der praktischen Spektralanalyse iridischer Stoffe,

260 Voltaire, 143; Zaire 79-80

elementaire, 258

Theodosius, II, 209 Thierry, Jacques Nicolas Augustin, 135; Histoire de la conquete de I'angleterre par les normands, 252

Thutmose III, 209, 271 Thyselius, Erik, 10, 247 Tidskrift for hemmet, 245

Wang Mang, 186 Weber, Carl Maria von, Overtures to Oberon and Der Freischiitz, 229

Wedekind, Frank, 252; Der Marquis von Keith, 252

Wetterhoff, Karl, 53, 235 Widmannstatten, Alojs Joseph, 147, 255 Wieselgren, Harald, 274 Wieselgren, Peter (Per), 228, 274 William of Orange, 204 Wirsen, Carl David af, 97, 102, 245 Witekind, 197

Tieck Ludwig, 226 Tiffereau, Cyprien Theeodore, 173-5, l7&' J79> 264; Art de faire de I'or, L', 264.; Or et la transmutation des metaux, V, 264 Tilly, Count Johan von, 202, 270 Tolstoy, Count Leo, 141; Power ofDarkness, The, Woche, Die, 229, 275 85, 240 Wu-ting, 182 Trajan, 216 Troost, Louis Joseph, 2 XlXSiecle, Le, 249 Tiirke, Gustav, 92, 243 Xenophon, 188 Tyndall, John, 41, 159, 234, 258 Yeats, William Butler, 19; A Vision, 267 Uhl, Frida, 10, 11, 94, 106, 137, 238, 243, 244, Young, Arthur, 208; Travels in France, 270 249, 251, 253, 254, 262 Ystads Allehanda, 252 Vanozza, Rosa, 193 Vasantasena (Little Clay Cart), 187,188, 268 Velasquez, Diego de Sylva, i, 137, 253 Vespasian, 216 Vial, Louis Charles Emile, 173,174; L'Attraction moleculaire, 264 Vidal, Jules, 81, 82, 239 Vintergatan, 250, 251 Virgil, 216, 225 Vitellius, 216

Zend-Avesta, 187, 268 Zola, Emile, 2, 6, 76-8, 109, 232, 238, 272; Assommoir, L', 83; Curie, La, 238; Germinal, 78, 83; Mes haines, 239; Naturalisme au theatre, Le, 239; Rene, 77, 78; Salon de 1866, 239; Terre, La, 8; Therese Raquin, 76, 77-8,

83, 238 Zollner, Johann Carl Friedrich, 235 Zoroaster (Zarathustra), 183, 267 Zukunft, Die, 114, 248