The Road to Damascus | Page 3

Sellin, on the island of Rügen, after
having first been compelled to stop in Hamburg owing to lack of
money. Strindberg stayed on Rügen during the month of July, and then
left for the home of his parents-in-law at Mondsee, near Salzburg in
Austria, where he was to meet his wife. But when she was delayed a
few days on the journey from London, Strindberg impatiently departed
for Berlin, where Frida Uhl followed shortly after. About the same time
an action was brought for the suppression of the German version of Le
Plaidoyer d'un Fou as being immoral. This book gives an undisguised,
intensely personal picture of Strindberg's first marriage, and was
intended by him for publication only after his death as a defence
against accusations directed against him for his behaviour towards Siri
von Essen. Strindberg was acquitted after a time, but before that his

easily fired imagination had given him a thorough shake-up, which
could only hasten the crisis which seemed to be approaching. After a
trip to Brünn, where Strindberg wrote his scientific work Antibarbarus,
the couple arrived in November at the home of Frida Uhl's
grandparents in the little village of Dornach, by the Upper Danube;
here the wanderings of 1893 at last came to an end. For a few months
comparative peace reigned in the artists' little home, but the birth of a
daughter, Kerstin, in May, brought this tranquillity to a sudden end.
Strindberg, who had lived in a state of nervous depression since the
1880's, felt himself put on one side by the child, and felt ill at ease in an
environment of, as he put it in the autobiographical The Quarantine
Master, 'articles of food, excrements, wet-nurses treated like
milch-cows, cooks and decaying vegetables.' He longed for cleanliness
and peace, and in letters to an artist friend he spoke of entering a
monastery. He even thought of founding one himself in the Ardennes
and drew up detailed schemes for rules, dress, and food. The longing to
get away and common interests with his Parisian friend (a musician
named Leopold Littmansson) attracted Strindberg to Paris, where he
settled down in the beginning of the autumn 1894. His wife joined him,
but left again at the close of the autumn. In reality Strindberg was at
this time almost impossible to live with. Persecution mania and
hallucinations took possession of him and his morbid suspicions knew
no bounds. In spite of this he was half conscious that there was
something wrong with his mental faculties, and in the beginning of
1895, assisted by the Swedish Minister, he went by his own consent to
the St. Louis Hospital in Paris. During his chemical experiments, in
which among other things he tried to produce gold, he had burnt his
hands, so that he had to seek medical attention on that account also. He
wrote about this in a letter:
'I am going to hospital because I am ill, because my doctor has sent me
there, and because I need to be looked after like a child, because I am
ruined. ... And it torments me and grieves me, my nervous system is
rotten, paralytic, hysterical. ...'
Never before had Strindberg lived in such distress as at this period,
both physically and mentally. With shattered nerves, sometimes over

the verge of insanity, without any means of existence other than what
friends managed to scrape together, separated from his second wife,
who had opened proceedings for divorce, far from his native land and
without any prospects for the future, he was brought to a profound
religious crisis. With almost incredible fortitude he succeeded in
fighting his way through this difficult period, with the remarkable
result that the former Bohemian, atheist, and scoffer was gradually able
to emerge with the firm assurance of a prophet, and even enter a new
creative period, perhaps mightier than before. One cannot help
reflecting that a man capable of overcoming a crisis of such a
formidable character and of several years' duration, as this one of
Strindberg's had been, with reason intact and even with increased
creative power, in reality, in spite of his hypersensitive nervous system,
must have been an unusually strong man both physically and mentally.
Upon trying to define more closely what actual relation the play has to
those events of Strindberg's restless life, of which we have given a
rough outline, we find that for the most part the author has undoubtedly
made use of his own experiences, but has adapted, combined and added
to them still more, so that the result is a mixture of real experience and
imagination, all moulded into a carefully worked out artistic form.
If to begin with, we dwell for a while on
Part I it is evident that
the hurried wanderings of THE STRANGER and