His self-psychology is full of contradictions, and it requires the reader’s critical attention to disentangle the undercurrent of personal confessions from the artistic super-structure. It is very interesting to watch how the absence of spontaneous affection changes to a painful yearning for tenderness; when, for example, as a child, he has the feeling of being dependent on his busy mother, a common woman who did not bestow much love on him. It is still more interesting to watch how, on the occasions when he fell in love, he seems always to have had a reason. There is his first love-affair as a boy of fifteen, when the object of his affections is a thirty-year-old girl, who is excitable and hysterical. She is engaged to be married, and forms a centre of attraction; young men and old men admire and rave about her, amongst others his father, and it is an immense gratification to be able to draw her away from them. Already a feeling of repugnance--so often described by him in his later works as though it were the usual accompaniment of love--pervades their amorous _tête-à-têtes_, when she evinces her motherly superiority and completely captivates him; it is always the same manœuvring that he describes in his later women. But when writing from memory he can never depict them ludicrously and repulsively enough, cannot sufficiently indulge in expressions of antipathy and repugnance with regard to them, and this same characteristic is very apparent in his last book, called _A Fool’s Confession_. Here also a former love and destined bride is described as an utterly worthless being, just as the noble lady whom he married was afterwards unmasked as an abyss of iniquity. The same is the case with the newly-married wife of the super-man in _By the Open Sea_. It is an abiding feature of Strindberg’s works to separate with a shudder of disgust or in a paroxysm of anger and hatred after having tasted love. It is a characteristic feature of the Slav, and may possibly be a heritage from the savage blood of the Mongolians. We find it invariably, although not so strongly expressed, in Tolstoy’s otherwise pleasing descriptions. There are only two possible ways of accounting for it in Strindberg’s literary productions; it must be due either to the author’s temperament, or else to his experience of women. For a long time I accepted the latter explanation, but after having learned to know him, and having often read his entire creative works, I am compelled to think that it would be too shallow an interpretation.