Page:Strindberg the Man (1920).djvu/49

However, we glided away from this topic on which we entertained such absolutely incompatible views. Already at my first meeting with Strindberg, I noticed how greatly it displeased him to be contradicted. He did not suffer the least little hobby, to which he himself clung, to be rudely manipulated.

This right he reserved for himself. It seemed as though the destruction of a truth which for a long time he had been imparting to all whom he met, the grinding of it to the finest powder between the heavy stones of his mental mill, and the scattering of it to the winds, gave to this indefatigable self-tormenter above all other things the most exquisite enjoyment. Hence his wrath against anyone who tried to anticipate him.

He was in his favorite mood when he could play the part of story teller. In his autobiography he repeatedly asserts that in this genre he has outrun others not a little, or to make a clean boast of it—an entire ell.

So we next spoke of movements down there in continental Europe. This topic warmed him up. The woman question he considered that he had exhausted and placed in its proper milieu as a speciality for unmarried society women alone. The labor question he had for a time lost interest in, because of the endeavors on the part of the industrial socialists to bring about a complete state of bankruptcy in contemporary society. But the agricultural question appealed to him, and he had tried to study it during a lengthy sojourn among the French peasantry. This class naturally makes up the main bulk