Strindberg's first marriage was preceded by a divorce, for his wife Siri von Essen, daughter of Captain Carl Reinhold von Essen, was at the time when Strindberg made her acquaintance the wife of Baron Wrangel, Captain of the Life Guards. The reader of the fourth volume of Strindberg's autobiography, entitled The Author, and of The Confession of a Fool, receives very different impressions of the author's first experience of matrimony. In the former, which deals with the period 1877-87, there is scant reference to the matrimonial tragedy which is the sole and sordid theme of The Confession, which relates to the same period. The Author was published in 1887, The Confession was written in 1888, a German version published in 1893, and the original French edition in 1894. The reason for the omissions in The Author may mercifully be found in the desire to shield living persons in Sweden from the fate of being the central figures in a chronique scandaleuse. The Confession has never been published in book-form in Sweden, or in the Swedish language.[1] A pirated Swedish translation appeared in instalments in a disreputable paper in spite of the author's protest. Throughout his literary warfare Strindberg has shown scant regard for personal feeling, and when he withheld The Confession from Swedish readers he probably was conscious of the dire results which would follow upon the publication of his "worst" book. The law-suit following upon the publication of Married, in 1884, must have been a warning example. In a letter written from Paris, in 1884, Björnstjerne Björnson relates his impressions of a visit from Strindberg, and refers to the latter's inability to deal with principles and opinions apart from personality.
"He has been a pietist," he writes, "and so he is still, in spite of many experiences—not religiously, but morally. A cause is for him only persons, bring them out, whip them."[2]
In The Confession Strindberg's wife is certainly brought out and whipped. But the whipping was preceded by idolatrous adoration.
"He would and he must have a woman to worship," he writes of some innocent schwärmerei which was a prelude to the fugue of marriage. "To worship was his weakness, since the idea of God had been obscured. He was too weak to believe in himself, and his sense of reverence, which was given no nourishment as he had lost reverence for everything, found this expression. He had no friends, and he must, therefore, at any price worship, revere, love."
Of the troubled termination of another love episode, which was not so innocent but which served to arouse his yearnings for pure affection, he writes with true Strindbergian absence of erotic humour:
"If he had now been inclined to be a woman-hater he would, of course, not have looked at a woman again, and condemned the whole sex, but he was a woman-worshipper, and, therefore, he immediately found another."
The woman-worshipper in Strindberg was generally silenced by his inseparable twin—the woman-hater. The woman-worshipper fell in love with the pretty baroness, suffered the torture of the damned in being denied her presence, was enslaved by her "roguish curls, golden as a cornfield on which the sun is shining,"[3] her willowy figure, her movements full, of softness and grace, her elegance in dress, her aristocratic apparition. The woman-hater looked on the "fall" with a sneer, participated with joy-mingled disgust in the intrigue which led to divorce proceedings, hurried marriage, and the premature birth and death of a child, cursed the bondage of ten years of married "hell," and finally related the intimacies of the conjugal struggle in the public confessional in sibilant tones of revenge.
The friendship between the "Royal secretary" and the Baroness began under the happiest circumstances and without any fore-shadowing of coming evil. Strindberg was a welcome guest in the family, a trusted friend of husband and wife, a respectful admirer of the girlish mother who, seen by the side of her little girl of three, seemed Madonna-like in her chaste aloofness. The Baroness dreamt of going on the stage, of devoting herself to art, to a mission, and of thus gaining individual independence. The theatre became a bridge of union between her and Strindberg. The Baron was a sympathetic listener, a pleasant companion, a gallant soldier, who, though warmly interested in Strindberg's personality and career, could not always suppress a slight condescension in his manner towards him.
The aristocracy of birth and the aristocracy of brain presented themselves to Strindberg in a juxtaposition which threw the superiority of the former into pleasant relief. That class-consciousness, which was peculiarly sensitive in him, invested his friendship with the Baron with a special interest. When visiting him at the guard-house he was not altogether free from a sense of awe and admiration engendered by the atmosphere of military power and aristocratic rule. "A son of the people," he writes, "a descendant of the middle classes, cannot but be impressed by the insignia of the highest power of the land."