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But we must, in fairness to Strindberg, remember that in his violences against women he merely gives us a new rendering of an indictment that goes back to the beginning of history. The world to him was a long lane of oglings, down which man must fly in terror with his eyes shut and his ears covered.
It really seems to me that that fantastic image is an excellent symbol of Strindberg himself. For his picture of the world fails to swing concordantly with the world. He has lagged behind in the cosmic rhythm, he has fallen out of the dance of the stars. So that the whole universe is to him an exquisitely keen jar of the nerves, and he hangs awry.
Long before I ever read a word by Schopenhauer, or even knew whether he was a philosopher or a chemist, the Socialist revival of the eighteen-eighties brought me into contact, both literary and personal, with Mr Ernest Belfort Bax, an English Socialist and philosophic essayist, whose handling of modern feminism would provoke romantic protests from Schopenhauer himself, or even Strindberg.
But his abiding view of woman was that of the plain man of the nineteenth century. He must either be praising her as a ministering angel or denouncing her as a ministering devil preferably the latter. It would be nonsense, however, to pretend that Strindberg did not see at least one class of women clearly and truly.
But half an hour afterwards, as she lay stretched in the chaise-longue by the window, reading Claudel, or Strindberg, or Rémy de Gourmont, she would suddenly find that she was not thinking of what was on the page, that she saw there only Marise's troubled eyes while she and Marsh talked about the inevitable and essential indifference of children to their parents and the healthiness of this instinct; about the foolishness of the parents' notion that they would be formative elements in the children's lives; or on the other hand, if the parents did succeed in forcing themselves into the children's lives, the danger of sexual mother-complexes.
Psychologic, in the true sense of that much-abused word, are his portraits; indeed, I am not sure that his portraits will play second fiddle to his purely imaginative work in the future. There is the Strindberg, certainly the most authoritative presentment of that strange, unhappy soul.
Born in Sweden, she studied in the School of Fine Arts in Stockholm. There she gained a prize which entitled her to study abroad during four years. She has exhibited her works in Paris, and to the Salon of Les Femmes Peintres et Sculpteurs, in February, 1903, she contributed a bust of Strindberg which was a delightful example of life-like portraiture.
With Strindberg he has been called "Shakespearian" fatal word but he is not; that in the vast domain of Shakespeare there is room for them both I do not doubt; room in the vicinity of the morbid swamps and dark forests, or hard by the house of them that are melancholy mad. The oftener I see or read Wedekind the more I admire his fund of humour. But I feel the tug of his theories.
Whenever my view strikes them as being at all outside the range of, say, an ordinary suburban churchwarden, they conclude that I am echoing Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Strindberg, Tolstoy, or some other heresiarch in northern or eastern Europe. I confess there is something flattering in this simple faith in my accomplishment as a linguist and my erudition as a philosopher.
But it appeared that she had never heard of Strindberg, Sudermann, or d'Annunzio; and even Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde were unfamiliar names. Yume no ai wa Kurushikari keri? Odorokite Kaki-saguredomo Te ni mo fureneba. When, waking up startled One gropes about And there is no contact to the hand.
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