Such were the first stages of Strindberg's union with the woman, who has been analysed, divided, multiplied and endowed with every variety of feminine crime in his writings. Eager to fly from "the repulsive heap of offal," to which he likens the whole tragedy of the divorce, he went to Paris in the company of a friend who enjoyed the sudden affluence of a legacy. This time he safely reached his destination, and experienced no uncontrollable impulse to abandon the journey. In Paris he received a letter from the Baroness, in which she told him that she was about to become a mother and begged him to save her from dishonour.
His love received a fresh stimulus; the shade of the Madonna resumed temporary physical form. Strindberg returned to Stockholm, willing to retrieve the past and mould the future by holy matrimony. The wedding took place in December, 1877. Shortly afterwards a little girl was prematurely born—a weakly infant who died two days later, thereby saving the parents the anxiety of keeping its existence secret.
The unfoldment of the story of Strindberg's first marriage, the tragi-comedy of its rhythm of love and hatred, shows not only incompatibility of temper and a profound spiritual alienation, but his unfitness to bear with equanimity prolonged period of domestic enslavement. The superficial reader of the unpleasant details of The Confession will close the book with Géronte's question on his lips: "Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galère?" The sexual psychology of the book, its profound, though brutal exposure of its author's emotional intemperance, can only be studied in conjunction with the whole of his autobiographical writings. A mood, a phase, a temper, appertaining to the woman-hater, are seething in The Confession, and produce pearls of literary power as well as comicalities, and bêtises which are reminiscent of a third-rate French novel.
The Author reveals the idealist in quest of true love, a man who can feel the purity and joy of generative creation, the natural pathos and sacredness of family life.
Of the psychic rearrangement which preceded the birth of the second child, Strindberg writes:
"He received the first certainty with fear. How could he receive and bring up a child, and how would the ideal marriage of his dreams now be realised? But he accustomed himself to the thought, and the unborn one soon became a personal acquaintance, a beloved guest who was expected, and for whose future he wanted to fight. The wife who hitherto had been a comrade was endowed with another value as mother, and the ugly side of their relationship, which already had been noticeable, disappeared. A great, high mutual interest ennobled the relationship, made it more intimate and roused dormant forces to activity. This time of waiting was more beautiful than the period of the engagement and the honeymoon, and the arrival of the child the most beautiful in his life."
Those who see in Strindberg's attitude towards marriage and women nothing but the ravings of a sacrilegious and obscene mind deliberately shut their eyes to aspirations, such as the above, which, however fleeting, were as much a part of the man's attitude as the profanities which even his warmest panegyrists cannot defend.
Strindberg continues: "When he held the new-born daughter in his arms he felt that the soul only achieves immortality through transformation in a younger body, and that a childless life is a carnivore which only eats others without being eaten. But he also experienced a strange feeling of having flowered and gone to seed. He was child again in his child, but he himself felt that he had grown old. He was deposed and there was already a successor in the house."
The feeling of being deposed did not prevent subsequent acts of unimpaired autocracy, but the record of the first rush of feelings of paternal solidarity is of interest in view of the anarchic hostility to the family which Strindberg's writings so often express.
The troubled course of love had not interfered with the rising wave of literary productivity. Before marriage he had continued to write short stories descriptive of coast life, and in addition to his labours as assistant librarian he had obtained fairly remunerative work as an art-critic. He had experienced so much disappointment as a dramatist that he decided to employ another literary form.