This rage against woman is connected with his indignation at every bond, every pressure, every circumstance and relationship that threatens to become permanent. Everywhere we find the same longing to escape, to leave no mark behind, to isolate himself, to hide. Everywhere in his studies, his interests, his opinions, the same sudden change, the same hatred of his broken fetters, and every intellectual and spiritual stage of development that is past appears to him like a broken fetter. In all Strindberg’s writings we trace the struggle for the possession of his ever-changing ego; we continually observe an exaggerated self-consciousness, making vain and angry attempts to attain to his real self, reproving the whole of modern science for the sake of justifying and explaining the non-existence of a central point, a unity of the ego which is the missing centre of gravity in the unknown. Everything in him is temperament, nothing the result of coherent thought; he hates coherence as derogatory to himself, he is determined to be incomprehensible, understood by none, and he introduces a dummy as a sort of pattern man, like the unhappy “Father,” or like Axel, in _The Comrades_, who withdraws his own pictures from the Salon in order that his wife may exhibit hers--which he himself has painted; like the second man in _The Creditors_, who submits to being sucked to death by a female vampire; like the “Fool,” in _The Fool’s Confession_, who worships another man’s wife as though she were a pure Madonna. When he sees the steamer passing by, on which she is travelling to visit some relations, he goes further and further into the sea, magnetically drawn towards the ship in which she is, and afterwards becomes her husband only to discover by degrees incredible details of iniquity in her. But he does not part from her, he does not experience that unconquerable feeling of positive aversion after which parting is no longer an act of the will, but an almost unconscious proceeding. Who is there who is not acquainted with all these traits in Russian literature? Turgenev has already described the weak man who is held captive by a brutal and licentious woman, the man who is passive and allows himself to be ruined by her, while all the while he looks on as a spectator might, and despises himself.