"The most beautiful thing I know," says The Stranger to The Lady in _To Damascus_, "is a woman bent over her needlework or her child." And The Lady crochets. The good women in his plays are all fitted for "the most beautiful thing": Gunlöd in _The Outlaw_, Margaretha in _The Secret of the Guild_, Karin in _Eric XIV_. The following passage throws light, not only on Strindberg's attitude towards women, but on the attitude of women towards him: "To return to woman was to me to come back to nature, and in a corner of my soul I made myself unconscious, instinctive, a child, and thus renewed my power to think, act and fight.... I have always worshipped women, these enchanting, criminal minxes whose worst crimes are not registered in criminal statistics. But I have had sufficiently bad--or good--taste to tell them the troth, and they have revenged themselves by calling me woman-hater. Just think, if these priestesses of revenge knew how many successes with the fair sex their revenge has brought me! Inquisitiveness, the original sin of Eve, drew the little ingénues to the monster, and the monster put no obstacles in the way for even the most inquisitive to satisfy their curiosity ... many thanks, my charming enemies." It is little wonder that a man so constituted should be appalled at the prospect of the New Woman with her independence, her clubs, her cigarettes, her politics, her sport. Monsieur Casimir Dudevant, the husband of George Sand, who was "just an ordinary man" was at first puzzled by his wife's extraordinary qualities, and then came to the conclusion that she was "idiotic." Poor Monsieur Dudevant! He was the forerunner of a long row of perplexed husbands, injured in their sense of the fitness of things. Strindberg merely made himself a spokesman for what the majority of masculine men feel in regard to intellectual women, even though they may not be capable of expressing it. Since he abandoned his early championship of woman's suffrage, he came to utter much bad and ill-tempered abuse of woman. Some of the things which he said of "lazy, stingy and cowardly woman," of her mental and physical inferiority to man, might well be included in Flaubert's _Dossier de la Sottise Humaine_. His arguments in favour of the theory that woman is an intermediary biological form, whose development has been arrested somewhere between man and youth, are interesting but unconvincing. The evidence he offers in support of his views on the general incapacity of woman--an incapacity which ranges from the handling of musical instruments to making coffee--bears the imprint of petulance rather than research. Sometimes there is a cross and quarrelsome tone in these utterances which reflects personal irritation, something of Alfred de Musset's words in _Nuit d'Octobre_: Honte à toi, qui la première M'a appris la trahison...!