The most marvellous thing, however, about this grim lust of life is that it is absolutely insatiate, absolutely infinite. According to the theory of the Eternal Return, the events of this life will repeat and repeat with the tireless inevitability of a recurring decimal. Taken literally, no doubt this theory is simply the mystical dance of a Titanic mind striving to scale infinity. But the psychological significance is none the less profound. Is it not turning the tables with a vengeance on the Christian idea of a prospective non-earthly existence, compared with which this existence is a mere shadowy preparation, to pile future life on future life on future life, and every one of them a repetition of man's life on earth? It is impossible for the affirmation of human existence to be carried further. And this human existence, what is its solution, None, or rather itself! Existence is its own sanction, its own _raison d'être_, and he who coldly ravishes the sphinx of life has found a drastic solution far excelling that of any Oedipus.
[Footnote 1: transcriber's note: "Ella" (sic). Should be "Ellen" Key. (M.D.)]
"My hate is boundless as the wastes, burning as the sun, and stronger than my love."
The above quotations give some idea of that black pessimism which is, at any rate, the most patent characteristic of Strindberg. Yet neither quotation, motto, nor catch-word can do justice to the multifarious life and character of this man. For Strindberg, more than any other European author of our age, has boxed the whole compass of our modernity with its tumults, its aspirations, its perversities; its glaring searchlights of science, its pallid flames of mysticism, and its needle ever pointing to the two opposite though connected poles of sex. He is in turns the most rabid of atheists, the most devout of Catholics, the most esoteric of occultists; now the most Utopian of Socialists, now the most uncompromising of individualists. Running the gauntlet of three unhappy and dissolved marriages, he has become the European specialist in conjugal infelicity, to say nothing of being credited with innumerable conquests, which he himself would doubtless have designated as captures. His novels, his autobiographies, and his equally subjective dramas all exhale the most sulphurous hate against the distorted anomaly of the new woman, yet he is an Orpheus who, scorning the prosaic joys of some normal and uninteresting Eurydice, surrenders himself with almost pathological gusto to be torn to pieces by the monstrous mænads of modernity. The paroxysms of his hate alternate with moods of the most sentimental idealism, and the harsh impetus of his onslaught is only equalled by the, at times, abject meekness of his romantic devotion.