R. This is worse than I dreamed!

THE LAWYER. We are not the worst off by far. There is still food in
the pot.

THE DAUGHTER. But what sort of food?

THE LAWYER. Cabbage is cheap, nourishing, and good to eat.

THE DAUGHTER. For those who like cabbage--to me it is repulsive.

THE LAWYER. Why didn't you say so?

THE DAUGHTER. Because I loved you. I wanted to sacrifice my own
taste.

THE LAWYER. Then I must sacrifice my taste for cabbage to you--for
sacrifices must be mutual.

THE DAUGHTER. What are we to eat then? Fish? But you hate fish?

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 mo