of course, was the greatest cross Strindberg had to bear. But there
were hundreds of other little changing crosses, from persecution mania
to poverty, which supplanted each other from day to day on his back. He
suffered continually both from the way he was made and from the way the
world was made. His novels and plays are a literature of suffering. He
reveals himself there as a man pursued by furies, a man without rest. He
flies to a thousand distractions and hiding-places--drink and lust and
piano-playing, Chinese and chemistry, painting and acting, alchemy and
poison, and religion. Some of these, no doubt, he honestly turns to for
a living. But in his rush from one thing to another he shows the
restlessness of a man goaded to madness. Not that his life is to be
regarded as entirely miserable. He obviously gets a good deal of
pleasure even out of his acutest pain. "I find the joy of life in its
violent and cruel struggles," he tells us in the preface to _Miss
Julia_, "and my pleasure lies in knowing something and learning
something." He is always consumed with the greed of knowledge--a phase
of his greed of domination. It is this that enables him to turn his
inferno into a purgatory.

In his later period, indeed, he is optimist enough to believe that the
sufferings of life cleanse and ennoble. By tortuous ways of sin he at
last achieves the simple faith of a Christian. He originally revolted
from this faith more through irritation than from principle. One feels
that, with happier nerves and a happier environment, he might easily
have passed his boyhood as the model pupil in the Sunday-school. It is
significant that we find him in _The Confession of a Fool_ reciting
Longfellow's _Excelsior_ to the first and worst of his wives. Strindberg
may have been possessed of a devil; he undoubtedly liked to play the
part of a devil; but at heart he was constantly returning to the
Longfellow sentiment, though, of course, his hungry intellectual
curiosity was something that Longfellow never knew. In his volume of
fables, _In Midsummer Days_, we see how essentially good and simple were
his ideas when he could rid himself of sex mania and persecution mania.
Probably his love of children always kept him more or less in chains to
virtue. Ultimately he yielded himself a victim, not to the furies, but
to the still more remorseless pursuit of the Hound of Heaven. On his
death-bed, Miss Lind tells us, he held up the Bible and said: "This
a