Friends recognised him, and saluted him like one who, having been sick and foolish, had tired of his folly, and returned to normal life.
[CHAPTER V]
MARRIED AND BLASPHEMOUS
Strindberg's relations to women and his three unhappy marriages were the fountain of soul-racking experience from which he emerged, possibly not wiser, but certainly more powerful as an interpreter of himself and of humanity. The women he loved were injured by him, inasmuch as he made their real and imagined failings the subject of brutal biographical romance. The fact that the blame fell upon him, not upon the victims of his conjugal experimentation, would scarcely compensate for the painful publicity with which he punished the women and unburdened himself.
Worthy people have agitated themselves over the question whether Strindberg was a real evil-liver or not. He was certainly an evil-liver in the sense of conventional morality. In giving free play to the impulses of his ever-expanding personality, he played the colossal egotist and sinned against the laws of God and man. If by evil-liver we understand a craven sensualist or a man beset with Don Juanesque frivolities, he was not one.
There was nothing of the light-hearted immoralist of the comic stage, or the poetic profligacy of Robert Bums, about Strindberg; he acted throughout the heavy tragedian in the inexorable drama of sex-antagonism.
The exemplary husband and the faithful lover are not, as a rule, found among the torchbearers of literature, though few elect to outrage literary decency by minute public dissections of their past loves. The Confessions of a Fool, which Strindberg himself called "a terrible book," is a nauseating record of his first marriage, in which love and lust, hatred and disgust, adoration and contempt, exultation and misery, are set forth in their psychological relation to a sexual love, the disappointment of which lashed the artist in Strindberg into fury against woman. The ghost of Strindberg's first wife never left his side. In the Confession she is portrayed as a beautiful siren with golden hair, adorably small feet and a false heart—a fiend in female form, with the soul of a prostitute and the worst vices of a loathsome debauchée. She reappears in his dramas The Father, Comrades, The Link; in his stories and essays; in different characters, drawn with a pen dipped in gall, retouched and seen in different perspective, but always the cause of man's degradation or downfall.