ches hold of THE BEGGAR'S arm to feel
whether he is a real, live person--or those occasions when he appears
as a visionary or thought-reader--he describes the kitchen in his wife's
parental home without ever having seen it, and knows her thoughts before
she has expressed them--have their deep foundation in Strindberg's
mental make-up, especially as it was during the period of tension in the
middle of the 1890's, termed the Inferno period, because at that time
Strindberg thought that he lived in hell. Our most prominent student
of Strindberg, Professor Martin Lamm, wrote about this in his work on
Strindberg's dramas:

'In order to understand the first part of _The Road to Damascus_ we
must take into consideration that the author had not yet shaken off his
terrifying visions and persecutionary hallucinations. He can play with
them artistically, sometimes he feels tempted to make a joke of them,
but they still retain for him their "terrifying semi-reality." It is
this which makes the drama so bewildering, but at the same time so
vigorous and affecting. Later, when depicting dream states, he creates
an artful blend of reality and poetry. He produces more exquisite works
of art, but he no longer gives the same anguished impression of a soul
striving to free itself from the meshes of his _idees fixes_.'

With his hypersensitive nervous system Strindberg, like THE STRANGER,
really gives the impression of having been a visionary. For instance,
his author friend Albert Engstroem, has told how one evening during
a stay far out in the Stockholm skerries, far from all civilisation,
Strindberg suddenly had a feeling that his little daughter was ill, and
wanted to return to town at once. True enough, it turned out that
the girl had fallen ill just at the time when Strindberg had felt the
warning. As regards thought-reading, it appears that at the slightest
change in expression and often for no perceptible reason at all,
Strindberg would draw the most definite conclusions, as definite as
from an uttered word or an action. This we have to keep in mind, for
instance, when judging Strindberg's accusations against his wife in _Le
Plaidoyer d'un Fou_, the book which THE LADY in _The Road to Damascus_
is tempted to read, in spite of having been forbidden by THE STRANGER,
with tragic results. In Part III of the drama Strindberg lets THE
STRANGER discuss this thought-reading problem with his first wife. THE
STRANGER says:

'We made a mista