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Updated: June 28, 2025
Miss Lind-af-Hageby, in her popular biography of Strindberg, is too intent upon saying what can be said in his defence to make a serious attempt to analyse the secret of genius which is implicit in those "115 plays, novels, collections of stories, essays, and poems" which will be gathered into the complete edition of his works shortly to be published in Sweden.
Love itself is with him, as with Strindberg and D'Annunzio, for the most part only a sort of rearrangement of hatred. Or, rather, both hatred and love are volcanic outbursts of the same passion. He does also portray an almost Christ-like love, a love that is outside the body and has the nature of a melting and exquisite charity. He sometimes even portrays the two kinds of love in the same person.
"You're a silly child," his countenance seemed to say. "But I could eat you, all the same." She dwelt on the virtues of Ibsen, Strindberg, Knut Hamsen, Hauptmann, and a number of others, mostly names I did not recollect ever having heard before, and she often used the word "decadent," which she pronounced in the French way and which I did not then understand.
Tolstoi, informed by something of the rage of the old ascetics, is too iconoclast; Maupassant's stories sometimes suggest a cynicism as profound as Chamfort's or that old French poet's who wrote: Femme, plaisir de demye heure, Et ennuy qui sans fin demeure. Ibsen is as idealistic as Strindberg is materialist.
That may well make him an extraordinarily interesting person, and, indeed, perhaps he is thereby an index of the world's vital movement, registering it by not moving with it. We have to read Strindberg, but to read him a rebours.
Among them were men of education, graduates of universities both in America and abroad; you might hear one of the group about these camp-fires telling about slave-revolts in ancient Egypt and Greece; or quoting Strindberg and Stirner, or reciting a scene from Synge, or narrating how he had astounded the family of some lonely farm-house by playing Rachmaninoff's "Prelude" on a badly out-of-tune piano.
So I experience some amusement when I see to-day the solemn statement in an American journal which claims I do not say with no reason to be portentously clever and superior, that Strindberg is destined to become in America the voice of the masculine reaction in favour of "the corrective influence of a matter-of-fact attitude towards woman."
Strindberg is too anxious to make tragedy out of discomforts instead of out of sorrows. When he is denouncing woman as a creature who loves above all things to deceive her husband, his supreme way of expressing his abhorrence is to declare: "If she can trick him into eating horse-flesh without noticing it, she is happy."
For no one can escape the common law of descent, whether physical or spiritual. Wedekind has had plenty of teachers, not excepting the most valuable of all, personal experience. The sinister shadow cast by Ibsen fell across the shoulders of the young poet, and he has read Max Stirner and Nietzsche not wisely, but too well. Furthermore, Strindberg played a marked rôle in his artistic development.
Marcia Van Wyck, her black damask boudoirs, her tinted finger tips, her Freud, Strindberg and all the rest of her modern trash there would come a day when Jerry would laugh at them! I think I must have dozed in my chair, for I seemed to hear voices, and, opening my eyes, beheld Jerry in my Soorway, a laughing group in the hall behind him.
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