THE LAWYER. And it is expensive.
THE DAUGHTER. This is worse than I thought it!
THE LAWYER (kindly). Yes, you see how hard it is.
And the symbolic representation of married life in terms of fish and cabbage is taken up again a little later:—
THE DAUGHTER. I fear I shall begin to hate you after this!
THE LAWYER. Woe to us, then! But let us forestall hatred. I promise never again to speak of any untidiness—although it is torture to me!
THE DAUGHTER. And I shall eat cabbage, though it means agony to me.
THE LAWYER. A life of common suffering, then! One's pleasure the other one's pain.
One feels that, however true to nature the drift of this may be, it is little more than bacilli of truth seen as immense through a microscope. The agonies and tortures arising from eating cabbage and such things may, no doubt, have tragic consequences enough, but somehow the men whom these things put on the rack refuse to come to life in the imagination on the same tragic plane where Prometheus lies on his crag and Oedipus strikes out his eyes that they may no longer look upon his shame. Strindberg is too anxious to make tragedy out of discomforts instead of out of sorrows. When he is denouncing woman as a creature who loves above all things to deceive her husband, his supreme way of expressing his abhorrence is to declare: "If she can trick him into eating horse-flesh without noticing it, she is happy." Here, and in a score of similar passages, we can see how physical were the demons that endlessly consumed Strindberg's peace of mind.
His attitude to women, as we find it expressed in The Confession of a Fool, The Dance of Death, and all through his work, is that of a man overwhelmed with the physical. He raves now with lust, now with disgust—two aspects of the same mood. He turns from love to hatred with a change of front as swift as a drunkard's. He is the Mad Mullah of all the sex-antagonism that has ever troubled men since they began to think of woman as a temptress. He was the most enthusiastic modern exponent of the point-of-view of that Adam who explained: "The woman tempted me." Strindberg deliberately wrote those words on his banner and held them aloft to his generation as the summary of an eternal gospel. Miss Lind-af-Hageby tells us that, at one period of his life, he was sufficiently free from the physical obsessions of sex to preach the equality of men and women and even to herald the coming of woman suffrage. 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. The accuracy with which he portrays woman the parasite, the man-eater, the siren, is quite terrible. No writer of his day was so shudderingly conscious of every gesture, movement, and intonation with which the spider-woman sets out to lure the mate she is going to devour. It may be that he prophesies against the sins of women rather than subtly analyses and describes them as a better artist would have done. The Confessions of a Fool is less a revelation of the soul of his first wife than an attack on her. 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. His foolishness as a prophet consists, not in his suspicions of woman regarded as an animal, but in his frothing at the mouth at the idea that she should claim to be treated as something higher than an animal. None the less, he denied to the end that he was a woman-hater. His denial, however, was grimly unflattering:—