There was nothing of the light-hearted immoralist of the comic stage, or the poetic profligacy of Robert Bums, about Strindberg; he acted throughout the heavy tragedian in the inexorable drama of sex-antagonism. The exemplary husband and the faithful lover are not, as a rule, found among the torchbearers of literature, though few elect to outrage literary decency by minute public dissections of their past loves. _The Confessions of a Fool_, which Strindberg himself called "a terrible book," is a nauseating record of his first marriage, in which love and lust, hatred and disgust, adoration and contempt, exultation and misery, are set forth in their psychological relation to a sexual love, the disappointment of which lashed the artist in Strindberg into fury against woman. The ghost of Strindberg's first wife never left his side. In the _Confession_ she is portrayed as a beautiful siren with golden hair, adorably small feet and a false heart--a fiend in female form, with the soul of a prostitute and the worst vices of a loathsome debauchée. She reappears in his dramas _The Father, Comrades, The Link_; in his stories and essays; in different characters, drawn with a pen dipped in gall, retouched and seen in different perspective, but always the cause of man's degradation or downfall. Strindberg's first marriage was preceded by a divorce, for his wife Siri von Essen, daughter of Captain Carl Reinhold von Essen, was at the time when Strindberg made her acquaintance the wife of Baron Wrangel, Captain of the Life Guards. The reader of the fourth volume of Strindberg's autobiography, entitled _The Author_, and of _The Confession of a Fool_, receives very different impressions of the author's first experience of matrimony. In the former, which deals with the period 1877-87, there is scant reference to the matrimonial tragedy which is the sole and sordid theme of _The Confession_, which relates to the same period. _The Author_ was published in 1887, _The Confession_ was written in 1888, a German version published in 1893, and the original French edition in 1894. The reason for the omissions in _The Author_ may mercifully be found in the desire to shield living persons in Sweden from the fate of being the central figures in a _chronique scandaleuse_. _The Confession_ has never been published in book-form in Sweden, or in the Swedish language.[1] A pirated Swedish translation appeared in instalments in a disreputable paper in spite of the author's protest. Throughout his literary warfare Strindberg has shown scant regard for personal feeling, and when he withheld _The Confession_ from Swedish readers he probably was conscious of the dire results which would follow upon the publication of his "worst" book. The law-suit following upon the publication of _Married_, in 1884, must have been a warning example. In a letter written from Paris, in 1884, Björnstjerne Björnson relates his impressions of a visit