Page:Strindberg the Man (1920).djvu/31

Strindberg once made the following statement to me: "In Switzerland, where I stayed during the period when Married was a burning question, I never felt fully at home. The wives there, as in France, were perfectly free, just like the men, and could choose their lovers according to their own wishes. The wife-cocotte is an irrational combination which I never could tolerate. I felt that I was—in an entirely different atmosphere when I came to Bavaria, where the men are the determining element in wedlock and the women are obedient and true. Just the return to these old fashioned patriarchal conditions was enough to arouse in me my poetic inspiration which during the latter part of my stay in Switzerland had been nearly dormant.”

The fact is that Strindberg had strayed away from himself during the latter part of his sojourn in Switzerland. He published a large number of novels and essays in Swiss and particularly in Austrian dailies and magazines, but they were altogether impersonal and without a sign of the Swedish trait which is so characteristic of everything else he has written. The Strindberg who wrote those novels and articles was a cosmopolitan in whom the Swedish heart had broken down entirely. Neither in contents nor in phraseology is there anything that recalls the poet Strindberg. But as soon as he had settled in Bavaria and found himself in a setting corresponding to the old fashioned Swedish conditions, he rediscovered himself, became just as Swedish as ever before and his productiveness rose so as to form one of the greatest and