The Red Room - August Strindberg (best summer reads TXT) 📗

him his profound repugnance, but he had even treated him with kindness and sympathy; what would he think of him?

There was no merit in this good nature, as it prevented him from coming to a firm decision; it was nothing but moral laxity, making him incapable of taking up a fight which seemed more and more beyond him. He realized that he must extinguish the fire under the boilers; they would not be able to stand the pressure, as no steam was being used. He pondered over Struve’s advice, and brooded until his mind was chaos in which truth and lies, right and wrong, danced together in complete harmony; his brain in which, owing to his academic training, all conceptions had been so neatly pigeonholed, would soon resemble a pack of well-shuffled cards.

He succeeded beyond expectation in working himself into a state of complete indifference; he looked for fine motives in the actions of his enemies, and gradually it appeared to him that he had all along been in the wrong; he felt reconciled to the existing order of things, and ultimately came to the fine conclusion that it was quite immaterial whether the whole was black or white. Whatever was, had to be; he was not entitled to criticize it. He found this mood pleasant, it gave him a feeling of restfulness to which he had been a stranger all those years during which he had made the troubles of humanity his own.

He was enjoying this calm and a pipe of strong tobacco, when a maid servant brought him a letter just delivered by the postman. It was from Olle Montanus and very long. Parts of it seemed to impress Falk greatly.

My dear fellow, [it ran,]

Although Lundell and I have now finished our work and will soon be back in Stockholm, I yet feel the need of writing down my impressions, because they have been of great importance to myself and my spiritual development. I have come to a conclusion, and I am as full of amazement as a chicken which has just been hatched, and stares at the world with its newly opened eyes, trampling on the eggshell which had shut out the light for so long. The conclusion, of course, is not a new one; Plato propounded it before Christianity was: the world, the visible world, is but a delusion, the reflection of the ideas; that is to say, reality is something low, insignificant, secondary and accidental. Yes! but I will proceed synthetically, begin with the particular and pass on from it to the general.

I will speak of my work first, in which both government and Parliament have been interested. On the altar of the church at Träskola two wooden figures used to stand; one of them was broken, but the other one was whole. The whole one, the figure of a woman, held a cross in her hand; two sacks of fragments of the broken one were preserved in the sacristy. A learned archæologist had examined the contents of the two sacks, in order to determine the appearance of the broken figure, but the result had been mere conjecture.

But he had been very thorough. He had taken a specimen of the white paint with which the figure had been grounded, and sent it to the Pharmaceutical Institute; the latter had reported that it contained lead and not zinc; therefore, the figure must date from before 1844, because zinc-white did not come into use until after that date. (What can one say to such a conclusion, seeing that the figure might have been painted over!) Next he sent a sample of the wood to the Stockholm timber office; he was informed that it was birch. The figure was therefore made of birchwood and dated from before 1844.

But that was not all he was striving for. He had a reason (!) in plain words, he wished for his own aggrandisement, that the carved figures should be proved to date from the sixteenth century; and he would have preferred that they should be the work of the great⁠—of course great, because his name had been so deeply carved in oak that it has been preserved to our time⁠—Burchard von Schiedenhanne, who had carved the seats in the choir of the Cathedral of Västeros.

The learned research was carried on. The professor stole a little plaster from the figures in Västeros and sent it, together with a specimen from the sacristy of Träskola to the Ekole Pollytechnik (I can’t spell it). The reply completely crushed the scoffers; the analysis proved that the two specimens of plaster were identical; both contained seventy-seven percent of chalk and thirty-five of sulphuric acid; therefore (!) the figures must date from the same period.

The age of the figures had now been settled; a sketch was made of the whole one and “sent in” (what a terrible passion these learned men have for “sending things in”) to the Academy; the only thing which remained to be done was to determine and reconstruct the broken one. For two whole years the two sacks travelled up and down between Upsala and Lund; the two professors differed and carried on a lively dispute. The professor of Lund, who had just been made rector, took the figure as the subject of his inaugural address and crushed the professor of Upsala. The latter replied in a brochure. Fortunately at the very moment a professor of the Stockholm Academy of Art appeared with a totally new opinion; then Herod and Pilate “compromised,” as is always the case, and attacked the man from the capital, rending him with the unbridled fury of provincials.

This was their compromise: the broken figure had represented Unbelief, because the other one must have been meant for Faith, whose symbol is the cross. The supposition (advanced by the professor of Lund) that the broken figure had been intended to represent Hope, arrived at because one of the sacks contained an anchor, was rejected, because that would have postulated