es, even
if occasionally he received a big fee, and that this very financial
insecurity was one of the chief reasons why Frida Uhl's father opposed
the marriage. Again, the country scenes which follow in Part I, shift
to the hilly country round the Danube, with their Catholic Calvaries
and expiation chapels, where Strindberg lived with his parents-in-law in
Mondsee and with his wife's grandparents in Dornach and the neighbouring
village Klam, with its mill, its smithy, and its gloomy ravine. The Rose
Room was the name he gave to the room in which he lived during his stay
with his mother-in-law and his daughter Kerstin in Klam in the autumn
of 1896, as he has himself related in one of his autobiographical books
_Inferno_. In this way we could go on, showing how the localities which
are to be met with in the drama often correspond in detail to the places
Strindberg had visited in the course of his pilgrimage during the years
1893-1898. Space prevents us, however, from entering on a more detailed
analysis in this respect.

That THE STRANGER represents Strindberg's _alter ego_ is evident in many
ways, even apart from the fact that THE STRANGER'S wanderings from place
to place, as we have already seen, bear a direct relation to those of
Strindberg himself. THE STRANGER is an author, like Strindberg; his
childhood of hate is Strindberg's own; other details--such as for
instance that THE STRANGER has refused to attend his father's funeral,
that the Parish Council has wanted to take his child away from him, that
on account of his writings he has suffered lawsuits, illness, poverty,
exile, divorce; that in the police description he is characterised as
a person without a permanent situation, with uncertain income; married,
but had deserted his wife and left his children; known as entertaining
subversive opinions on social questions (by _The Red Room_, _The New
Realm_ and other works Strindberg became the great standard-bearer
of the Swedish Radicals in their campaign against conventionalism
and bureaucracy); that he gives the impression of not being in full
possession of his senses; that he is sought by his children's guardian
because of unpaid maintenance allowance--everything corresponds to the
experiences of the unfortunate Strindberg himself, with all his bitter
defeats in life and his triumphs in the world of letters.

Those scenes where THE STRANGER is uncertain whether the people he sees
before him are real or not--he cat