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IN spite of the fact that so many wise and good words have already been said by others—e.g. by Hermann Esswein and John Landquist—about the pretended woman-hater Strindberg, I, too, am obliged to touch on the subject, not in order to produce more evidence to show that Strindberg's hatred of women is a misunderstanding, but because I need this factor also in order to make the characterization of the poet and the man, which I am endeavoring to present by means of these lines, as complete as possible.

Besides questions pertaining to art, religion, and sociology, in which Strindberg had been the spokesman for the young, there was a field in which we all stood face to face with a chaotic confusion i.e. things erotic.

At first, like Strindberg himself, we had had to fight clear of the maelstrom of misunderstanding upon which the traditional so-called moral conception is based. After we had succeeded by degrees in arriving at our own conclusion in this matter, always with reference to individual characteristics, we suddenly collided with two great icebergs which checked us and became the cause of new confusion.

These were the contributions to the question by the two great Norwegians Ibsen and Björnson. Ibsen was