st to the author's
own interpretation in this respect by characterising _The Road to
Damascus_ not as a drama of conversion, but as a drama of struggle,
the story of a restless, arduous pilgrimage through the chimeras of
the world towards the border beyond which eternity stretches in solemn
peace, symbolised in the drama by a mountain, the peaks of which reach
high above the clouds.

In this final settling of accounts one subject is of dominating
importance, recurring again and again throughout the trilogy; it is that
of woman. Strindberg him, of course, become famous as a writer about
women; he has ruthlessly described the hatreds of love, the hell that
marriage can be, he is the creator of _Le Plaidoyer d'un Fou_ and
_The Dance of Death_, he had three divorces, yet was just as much a
worshipper of woman--and at the same time a diabolical hater of her
seducing qualities under which he suffered defeat after defeat. Each
time he fell in love afresh he would compare himself to Hercules, the
Titan, whose strength was vanquished by Queen Omphale, who clothed
herself in his lion's skin, while he had to sit at the spinning wheel
dressed in women's clothes. It can be readily understood that to a man
of Strindberg's self-conceit the problem of his relations with women
must become a vital issue on the solution of which the whole Damascus
pilgrimage depended.

In 1898, when Parts I and II of the trilogy were written, Strindberg
had been married twice; both marriages had ended unhappily. In the year
1901, when the wedding scenes of Part III were written, Strindberg had
recently experienced the rapture of a new love which, however, was soon
to be clouded. It must not be forgotten that in his entire emotional
life Strindberg was an artist and as such a man of impulse, with the
spontaneity and naivity and intensity of a child. For him love had
nothing to do with respectability and worldly calculations; he liked to
think of it as a thunderbolt striking mortals with a destructive force
like the lightning hurled by the almighty Zeus. It is easy to understand
that a man of such temperament would not be particularly suited for
married life, where self-sacrifice and strong-minded patience may be
severely tested. In addition his three wives were themselves artists,
one an authoress, the other two actresses, all of them pronounced
characters, endowed with a degree of will and self-assertion, which,
although it could not be matched against