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INFERNO
63

Fully corporeal visions Strindberg never pretends to have had. Of their nature we can judge by his diarian notes in Inferno. When they became numerous, he felt a desire to keep track of them, and from 1895 to 1909, he thus continued his diary of which the pages in Inferno are an abstract. As a rule he seems to have had auditory hallucinations, conversations with invisible persons, with Swedenborg and others.

He had to cut short his honey-moon in order to fight out his second literary lawsuit, because A Fool's Confession had been seized. Thereupon he accompanied his wife for the first time to her relatives in the little Catholic village on the Danube. After that he did not come in touch with his friends until March, 1894, when he returned to Friedrichshagen, where he put up at a hotel in order to read the proofs of his Antibarbarus I.

During the time he wrote this book, Strindberg had got into peculiar ways, and when his attention was called to the fact that here and there his argument was based on erroneous premises, he would not join issue on the subject. He became embittered and ceased to associate with his friends. He shut himself up within his own self and became impervious to reason.

After having returned to Austria for the summer, Strindberg left for Paris in August. There he no longer studied the sciences in the proper sense of the word; he had cast them all overboard because of the fact that he had met with a few incongruities in what, of course, should have been entirely flawless, and instead, with the wild desire of the passionate seeker after truth, he had