He rushed downstairs where another bed had been made up for him in case of need. He lay down, and tried to collect his thoughts. Could this be electricity? No, for he had used the compass as indicator, and the result had been negative. Whilst pondering on the mysterious force, another discharge of "electricity" struck him with the strength of a cyclone, and lifted him out of bed. He tried in vain to escape. His own graphic description of what followed shows the agony through which he passed. "I hide behind walls, I lie down by the thresholds, and in front of the stoves. Everywhere, everywhere the furies seek me out. My soul's anguish overpowers me. The panic terror of everything and nothing gets hold of me, and I flee from room to room, and end my flight on the balcony, where I remain crouching." At dawn he went into his friend's studio, where he lay down on a rug. Even here he was disturbed, but now by rats, and, fearing that he might be a victim of delirium, he fled to the hall, where the door-mat became his resting-place. He hurriedly left Dieppe for the south of Sweden, and sought refuge in the house of his friend, Dr. Eliasson, in Ystad.
Strindberg had rightly surmised that his friends in Dieppe were convinced of his insanity. His conduct during the first days of his stay in Ystad caused his medical friend to treat him with the firmness and authority necessary towards one who is mentally irresponsible. The result was that Strindberg suspected that the doctor intended to imprison him in a lunatic asylum, and to appropriate his secret of gold-making. The month which he spent at the doctor's house was devoted to a cold-water cure which did not assuage his misery. The shape and material of the bed in which he had to sleep suggested electrical devices of evil, the nightly assault by the vampire which sucked his heart was repeated, and brought him out of bed in terror of death; he heard voices, saw signs, feared he was being poisoned by hemlock, hashish, digitalis, or daturine. One night he heard the doctor handle a very heavy object and wind up a spring, and through the wall which separated them he felt the approach of the electric current. It reached his heart. Seizing his clothes he fled through the window into the street, and to the house of another physician who succeeded in calming him, and—so he believed—in intimidating his treacherous friend, and thus saved Strindberg's life.
These delusions of horror were suspended by a letter from his wife which breathed love and pity, and in which she invited him to come to Austria and see his little daughter. The thought of the child, of holding her in his arms, of begging her to forgive him, of making her happy by a father's tenderness, brought about a spiritual metamorphosis. He left Sweden, and arrived at his mother-in-law's country house on the Danube in September, 1896. During the months which he spent there he did not meet his wife-a separation which he bore with equanimity, in consequence of "an indefinable lack of harmony in our temperaments"—but he saw the child daily.
"Every man, if he is sincere, may tread again for himself the road to Damascus-a journey which must vary for each individual soul," wrote Victor Hugo. Here, in the presence of the child, Strindberg was brought face to face with his own sinfulness. He had set out to persecute, but the light from heaven had prostrated him and struck him with blindness. Before the scales could fall from his eyes his penance must be made complete. He had left an infant of six weeks. The little girl of two and a half years, who now met him, scrutinised his soul with eyes full of serious inquiry, and then allowed her father to clasp her to his breast. "This is Dr. Faust's resurrection to earthly life, but sweeter and purer," he writes. "I cannot cease carrying the little one in my arms, and feeling her little heart beat against mine. To love a child is for a man to become woman; it is to lay aside the manly, to experience the sexless love of the dwellers in heaven, as Swedenborg called it." But an incident soon occurred which disturbed his peace. At supper he gently touched the child's hand in order to help her. She cried out, and, drawing back her hand with a look full of horror, said, "He hurts me." Another evening he was humiliated by the mysterious conduct of the child. Pointing at an invisible person behind Strindberg's chair, she began to cry with fear, and said, "The sweep is standing there." Her grandmother who believed in clairvoyance in children made the sign of the cross over the child's head, and-a painful silence fell upon the company.
Whilst he accepted these trials as punitive messages and warnings, his scarified soul became receptive to Roman Catholic influences. His wife's mother and aunt were Catholics; his child had been brought up in that faith. He had seen human souls sanctified by a catholic mysticism which bore humility and fortitude. The symbols, the certainty, the rich imagery of the Catholic Church had appealed to him, when the poverty of philosophical speculation had made him despair of human intelligence. He had bought a rosary in Paris because it was beautiful, and because "the evil ones were afraid of the cross." One day an image of the Madonna, carried through the streets of Paris on a cart following a hearse, had strangely attracted him. Like Tasso's vision of the Virgin in the midst of his feverish torment by noises and tinkling bells, Strindberg's gaze on the image of all-merciful motherhood brought comfort. At first attracted to Catholic prayers, and to the ideal of the monastic life by the instinct which makes the man in pain seek an anodyne, he was gradually led to a deeper understanding of esoteric Christianity. Swedenborg continued to reveal the mysteries of symbols and correspondences to him; in the scenery around the Austrian village he found, not only an exact replica of a Swedenborgian hell, but the original of a landscape which had precipitated itself in the zinc bath used in his gold-making experiments in Paris.
August Strindberg—1902