I should like to take Strindberg’s women one by one and examine them in connection with his personality and temperament, as it originally was, and as it became when accentuated by friction with his social surroundings and influenced by the atmosphere of the age in which he lived. His women are a set of dismal, mischievous, heartless creatures, only fascinating so long as the man is young and easily duped; afterwards, when he develops into the great mind who sees through the small mind and mimics it, they become ever more and more shrewish, less attractive, more perverse, till at last the day comes when the man with the great mind has grown sufficiently old and wise not to allow himself to be led by the nose any longer, and the woman, whose name is baseness, is finally dismissed. The woman? Yes, for there is only one woman, the same woman whom he has described in all his principal works during the fourteen years of his authorship. It is a type that never varies, but grows more exaggerated each time, and he clings to it as though it were the only sounding-board for his cutting discords. Strindberg is already to the fore in his first book, _The Red Room_. The hero, Arvid Falk, is himself. He is a man who has not yet found his own self, who does not venture to believe in himself, and who hopes in no future; a poor, penniless fellow who allows himself to be overawed by every bragging, self-confident person--in a word, a peculiar, unhappy, harum-scarum individual who is not yet awake to the consciousness of the ego. There is only one woman in this book; she is Arvid Falk’s sister-in-law, and has married above herself, she is a lazy and indolent person, coarse-minded and untruthful, stupid and vulgar. This bashful man, who is like a timid savage, and the vulgar woman have as yet nothing to do with one another, they are types upon which the gaze of the young genius first fell--they represent his ego and his type of woman.