The Same Enemies: Notes on Certain Similarities Between Yeats and Strindberg

THE SAME ENEMIES: NOTES ON CERT AIN SIMILARITIES BETWEEN YEATS AND STRINDBERG THE ONLY KNOWN MEETING BETWEEN August Strindberg and William Butler Yeats is recorded by the latter artist in "The Trembling of the Veil." He writes, "I am sitting in a cafe with two French Americans , a German poet Douchenday, and a silent man whom I discover to be Strindberg, and who is looking for the philosopher's stone."l Thirty years later Yeats had reason to recall this brief meeting. When the Irish poet-playwright was in Strindberg's native Sweden to receive the Nobel Prize, he was handed a pamphlet defending Strindberg and attacking the Swedish Academy. Yeats reflects, "I have always felt a sympathy for that tortured selftorturing man who offered himself to his own soul as Buddah offered himself to the famished tiger."2 It is in keeping with the strange set of similarities and differences which surround these two men that Yeats was in Sweden to accept a prize which the native-born author was never awarded and that when another Irishman, George Bernard Shaw, received the Nobel Prize he converted it into a trust fund "intended in part to ensure good English translations of Strindberg's work."s There is only one stage technique of Yeats which can be directly attributed to Strindberg. That is the impressionistic scene painting which Yeats uses in many of his plays prior to the Noh-influenced Four Plays for Dancers. Yeats felt that the too realistic scenery of the popular theater robs the theater-goer of his imagination and the playwright of the all-important distance from life that he needs to make credible the unreal beauty of his story and his words. "One often needs nothing more than a single colour," he wrote in Plays and Controversies~ "with perhaps a few shadowy forms to suggest a wood or mountain."4 In his introduction to "Miss Julie," Strindberg describes a similar technique. "As regards the scenery, I have borrowed from impressionist painting its asymmetry and its economy; thus, I think, strengthening the illusion, for the fact that one does not see the whole room I William Butler Yeats, The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats (Garden City, New York, 1958), p. 233. 2 Yeats, Autobiography, pp. 363-364. 310hn Gassner, The Theatre in Our Times (New York, 1960), p. 171. 4 William Butler Yeats, Plays and Controversies (London, 1923), p. 274. 146 1969 YEATS AND STRINDBERG 147 or all the furniture leaves scope for conjecture-that is to say imagination is roused and complements what is seen."5 The first knowledge of decorative stage scenery as a stimulus for the imagination is attributed to Strindberg's Paris Circle by Yeats who writes further, "I am pleased to imagine that the news of it may have come from Strindberg, whom I seem to remember as big and silent."6 One would be hard pressed to prove that Yeats owed more than this one technique to Strindberg, and yet the two had much in common . Both wished to establish an intimate theater, and within the framework of this theater both had many similar theories. Also, at one time or another, both used their national sagas as bases for plays, both were influenced by the orient and the occult, and both in varying degrees had in common such acquaintances and influences as Madame Blavatsky, Gordon Craig, and Maurice Maeterlinck. Before considering these points of similarity, though, it is important to note one of the major differences in the techniques of the two men. In 1892, the year of his first play, Yeats had formulated plans for the Irish theater. He knew then almost exactly what he wanted, and he worked toward a definite goal. Forty-two years later, when his early theories were published under a single cover as Letters to the New Island~ the editor, Horace Reynolds, concluded that Yeats had, for the most part, succeeded in shaping 'a large movement exactly to a prearranged pattern."'1 But the theater movement in Ireland never had to depend solely on the works of Yeats, whereas Strindberg's theater had no Synge, Lady Gregory, George Russell, or Edward Martyn to vary its...