The Road to Damascus | Page 2

is convincingly described, both
logically and psychologically--does not bear the character of a final and
irrevocable decision, but on the contrary is depicted with a certain
hesitancy and uncertainty. THE STRANGER'S entry into the
monastery consequently gives the impression of being a piece of
logical construction; the author's heart is not wholly in it. From
Strindberg's later works it also becomes evident that his severe crisis
had undoubtedly led to a complete reformation in that it definitely
caused him to turn from worldly things, of which indeed he had tasted
to the full, towards matters divine. But this did not mean that then and
there he accepted some specific religion, whether Christian or other.
One would undoubtedly come nearest to the author's own interpretation
in this respect by characterising The Road to Damascus not as a drama
of conversion, but as a drama of struggle, the story of a restless,
arduous pilgrimage through the chimeras of the world towards the
border beyond which eternity stretches in solemn peace, symbolised in
the drama by a mountain, the peaks of which reach high above the
clouds.
In this final settling of accounts one subject is of dominating
importance, recurring again and again throughout the trilogy; it is that
of woman. Strindberg him, of course, become famous as a writer about
women; he has ruthlessly described the hatreds of love, the hell that

marriage can be, he is the creator of Le Plaidoyer d'un Fou and The
Dance of Death, he had three divorces, yet was just as much a
worshipper of woman--and at the same time a diabolical hater of her
seducing qualities under which he suffered defeat after defeat. Each
time he fell in love afresh he would compare himself to Hercules, the
Titan, whose strength was vanquished by Queen Omphale, who clothed
herself in his lion's skin, while he had to sit at the spinning wheel
dressed in women's clothes. It can be readily understood that to a man
of Strindberg's self-conceit the problem of his relations with women
must become a vital issue on the solution of which the whole Damascus
pilgrimage depended.
In 1898, when Parts I and II of the trilogy were written, Strindberg had
been married twice; both marriages had ended unhappily. In the year
1901, when the wedding scenes of
Part III were written, Strindberg had
recently experienced the rapture of a
new love which, however, was soon to be clouded. It must not be
forgotten that in his entire emotional life Strindberg was an artist and as
such a man of impulse, with the spontaneity and naivity and intensity
of a child. For him love had nothing to do with respectability and
worldly calculations; he liked to think of it as a thunderbolt striking
mortals with a destructive force like the lightning hurled by the
almighty Zeus. It is easy to understand that a man of such temperament
would not be particularly suited for married life, where self-sacrifice
and strong-minded patience may be severely tested. In addition his
three wives were themselves artists, one an authoress, the other two
actresses, all of them pronounced characters, endowed with a degree of
will and self-assertion, which, although it could not be matched against
Strindberg's, yet would have been capable of producing friction with
rather more pliant natures than that of the Swedish dramatist.
In the trilogy Strindberg's first wife, Siri von Essen, his marriage to
whom was happiest and lasted longest (1877-1891), and more

especially his second wife, the Austrian authoress Frida Uhl (married to
him 1893-1897) have supplied the subject matter for his picture of THE
LADY. In the happy marriage scenes of
Part III we
recognise reminiscences from the wedding of Strindberg, then fifty-two,
and the twenty-three-year-old actress Harriet Bosse, whose marriage to
him lasted from 1901 until 1904.
The character of THE LADY in Parts I and II is chiefly drawn from
recollections--fairly recent when the drama was written--of Frida Uhl
and his life with her. From the very beginning her marriage to
Strindberg had been most troublous. In the autumn of 1892 Strindberg
moved from the Stockholm skerries to Berlin, where he lived a rather
hectic Bohemian life among the artists collecting in the little tavern
'Zum Schwarzen Ferkel.' He made the acquaintance of Frida Uhl in the
beginning of the year 1893, and after a good many difficulties was able
to arrange for a marriage on the 2nd May on Heligoland Island, where
English marriage laws, less rigorous than the German, applied.
Strindberg's nervous temperament would not tolerate a quiet and
peaceful honeymoon; quite soon the couple departed to Gravesend via
Hamburg. Strindberg was too restless to stay there and moved on to
London. There he left his wife to try to negotiate for the production of
his plays, and journeyed alone to