Page:Prophets of dissent essays on Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Nietzsche and Tolstoy (1918).djvu/100

 namely — how simple! — the total abolition of the industries, he resumes the preaching of Rousseauism in its simon-pure form, orders every man to be his maid-of-all-work and jack-of-all-trades, puts the world on a vegetarian diet, and then wonders why the socialists denounce and revile him as a turncoat and an apostate.

The biography throws an especially vivid light on Strindberg's relation to one of the most important factors of socialism, to wit, the question of woman's rights. His position on this issue is merely a phase of that extreme and practically isolated position in regard to woman in general that has more than any other single element determined the feeling of the public towards him and by consequence fixed his place in contemporary literature. That this should be so is hardly unfair, because no other element has entered so deeply into the structure and fibre of his thought and feeling.

Strindberg, as has been stated, was not from the outset, or perchance constitutionally, an anti-feminist. In "The Red Room" he preaches equality of the sexes even in marriage. The thesis of the book is that man and woman are not antagonistic