Page:Poet Lore, volume 31, 1920.djvu/161

Rh statement will be plain to anyone who will take the trouble to read A Fool's Confession, which I have accepted as a fair and essentially trustworthy characterization of the woman, even if somewhat overdrawn here and there, perhaps throughout. And so it came to pass that Strindberg found in his much longed for complement an agent who continually revived in him the memories of the serious shortcomings of his own mother and caused him to transfer all his unconscious hatred of and contempt for her on his own wife and womankind at large in so far as it did not correspond to the idealized image of his mother. To what extent he identified himself with his father and the Baroness with his mother is impossible to say, but to an individual so utterly at the mercy of auto-suggestion as Strindberg was, such feats would not be difficult of execution.

At any rate his unceasing rhythmic vacillation between love and hate, hope and fear, the joy of life with its hard battles on the one hand and sickness, poverty, and thoughts of suicide on the other finally resulted in the severing of the conjugal bond.

I have already pointed out that the so-called Inferno crisis was the logical outcome of a life that could not run any longer in the old ruts. Shortly after his arrival in Berlin in 1892, he had come under the influence of Swedenborg and theosophy. The scientific studies which he then undertook, undoubtedly in order to stifle the small voice from within, soon convinced him of the limitations of the human mind and the vanity, the presumptuousness of wishing to arrive at positive proofs concerning the phenomena of life. Truth, that treasure of which he had been in quest since his childhood, was not to be found. The limitations of the human mind now for the first time became an irrefutable reality to him and at the same time a good and wholly justifiable excuse for beating that retreat which his pride and boundless ambition had postponed for years. In other words, his fictitious goal was unattainable and his safety at stake. In one way and in one only, could he burn the remaining bridges and turn a seemingly disastrous defeat into a glorious victory—the greatest one of which the human being is capable. This was by proclaiming to the world the Vanitas Vanitatum of Ecclesiastes. And he did it. His scientific studies had degenerated into alchemy and from out of this atmosphere there was but a single step into absolute mysticism and occultism. He took the step. And from out of "sorrow, despair, darkness and absolute skepticism," he began his Inferno wandering by way of Damascus to the Cross.