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 Strindberg's, yet would have been capable of producing friction with rather more pliant natures than that of the Swedish dramatist.

In the trilogy Strindberg's first wife, Siri von Essen, his marriage to whom was happiest and lasted longest (1877-1891), and more especially his second wife, the Austrian authoress Frida Uhl (married to him 1893-1897) have supplied the subject matter for his picture of THE LADY. In the happy marriage scenes of