LEGENDS

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES

BY

AUGUST STRINDBERG

LONDON: ANDREW MELROSE

3 YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN

1912

CONTENTS

Note

I

THE POSSESSED EXORCIST

Hunted by the furies, I found myself finally in December 1896 fixed fast in the little university town Lund, in Sweden. A conglomeration of small houses round a cathedral, a palace-like university building and a library, forming an oasis of civilisation in the great southern Swedish plain. I must admire the refinement of cruelty which has chosen this place as my prison. The University of Lund is much prized by the natives of Schonen, but for a man from the north like myself the fact that one stays here is a sign that one has come to an inclined plane and is rolling down. Moreover, for me who am well advanced in the forties, have been a married man for twenty years and am accustomed to a regular family life, it is a humiliation to be relegated to intercourse with students, bachelors who are given to a life of riot and carousing, and who are all more or less in ill odour with the fatherly authorities of the university because of their radical way of thinking.

Of the same age, and formerly a companion of the professors, who now no longer tolerate me, I am compelled to find my friends among the students, and so to take upon myself the rôle of an enemy of the seniors and of the social circles of solid respectability. Come down, indeed! That is just the right word, and why? Because I scorned to submit myself to the laws of social life and domestic slavery. I have regarded the conflict for the upholding of my personality as a sacred duty, quite irrespective of the fact of its being a good or bad one.

Excommunicated, regarded with suspicion, denounced by fathers and mothers as a corrupter of youth, I am placed in a situation which reminds one of a snake in an ant-heap, all the more as I cannot leave the town through pecuniary embarrassment.

Pecuniary embarrassment! That has now been my lot for three years, and I cannot explain how all my resources were dried up, as soon as my profits were exhausted. Four-and-twenty dramas of my composing are now laid up in a corner, and not a single one performed any more; an equal number of novels and tales, and not one in a second edition. All attempts to borrow a loan have failed and continue to fail. After I had sold all that I possessed, need compelled me at last to sell the letters which I had received in the course of years, i.e. other people's property.

This constant condition of poverty seems to me so clearly to depend upon some special purpose of Providence that I finally endure it willingly as a part of my penance and do not try to resist it any more. As regards myself, I want of means signifies nothing to me as an independent author, but it is disgraceful not to have the wherewithal to support my children. Very well! I make up my mind to bear the disgrace though it involve pains like hell. I will not yield to the temptation to pay for false honour with my life. Prepared for anything, I endure resolutely to the uttermost the most extraordinary humiliations and observe how my expiatory pangs commence. Well-educated youths of good family treat me one night to a serenade of caterwauling in my corridor. I take it as something I have deserved without disturbing myself. I try to hire a furnished lodging. The landlord refuses with transparent excuses, and the refusal is flung in my face. I pay visits and am not received. These are mere trifles. But what really wounds me is the sublime irony shown in the unconscious behaviour of my young friends when they try to encourage me by praising my literary works, "so fruitful in liberating ideas, etc." And this to me, who have just flung these so-called ideas on the dust-heap, so that those who entertain these views are now my opponents! I am at war with my former self, and while I oppose my friends and those once of the same mind with me, I lay myself prostrate in the dust.

This is irony indeed; and as a dramatist I must admire the composition of this tragi-comedy. In truth, the scenes are well-arranged.

Meanwhile people, taking into consideration the way in which old and new views become entangled with each other in a period of transition, do not reckon too rigidly with a veteran like myself. They do not prick up their ears so solemnly at my