Mistakes and bitter experiences prepared the way for the religious crisis of 1894. In 1887 he left Switzerland and France for Bavaria, where he wrote _The Father_ and The _People of Hemsö_. He lived in Denmark from the autumn of 1887 to the summer of 1889. The prosecution of _Married_ had inspired cautiousness in the hearts of Swedish publishers, and Strindberg had only with difficulty found a publisher for _The Father_ and _Lady Julie_. The plays were promptly attacked by Swedish critics, amongst them Professor Warburg, author of a history of literature, who thought their naturalism an unmistakable form of decadence. When Strindberg returned to his country in 1889 the hostility aroused by _Married_, and augmented by lively tales of the author's views on morality took an unexpectedly practical form. When yachting along the west coast for the purpose of collecting material for a great work on _The Scenery of Sweden_, he was actually refused permission to land in one of the fishing villages.[1] During the two years which he now spent in Sweden he became embittered by the enmity of his critics. He isolated himself on one of his beloved islands outside Stockholm, wrote and painted. In the autumn of 1892 an exhibition of his pictures was held in Stockholm. It was impressions of the sea which his brush had chosen--ice, mist, storm--and painted, not only with a tender feeling for island scenery, but disclosing considerable technical merit and accuracy of hand. The principal cause of suffering lay in Strindberg's eroticism, his interminable suspiciousness against his wife which made his divorce in 1892 a merciful end to a marriage of torment. There is much in the repulsive pages of _The Confession of a Fool_ which betrays its author's lack of mental balance; the incessant puling over the woman's wickedness, and the attendant self-appreciation are not apt to command the reader's sympathy. The same may be said of the second volume of _Married_, published in 1886. There are a carelessness of style, and a bluntness of accusation against womankind which make the book inartistic. The _ad captandum_ controversialist has overruled judgment; there is a tone of personal irritation in the stories which Strindberg tells us were written "in self-defence" against the attacks, made upon him by feminists. Like John Knox, when he wrote _The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regimen of Women_, Strindberg was actuated by a kind of religious fervour. Like John Knox he detested "this monstriferous empire of women," whilst his admiration for the dangerous sex repeatedly cast him in chains of bondage. Like Schopenhauer he mocked all womankind "long of hair and short of sense," and threw misogyny to the winds before the first pair of charming eyes or dainty feet.