THE LAWYER.  Why didn’t you say so?

     THE DAUGHTER.  Because I loved you.  I wanted to sacrifice my own
     taste.

     THE LAWYER.  Then I must sacrifice my taste for cabbage to you—­for
     sacrifices must be mutual.

     THE DAUGHTER.  What are we to eat then?  Fish?  But you hate fish?

     THE LAWYER.  And it is expensive.

     THE DAUGHTER.  This is worse than I thought it!

     THE LAWYER (kindly). Yes, you see how hard it is.

And the symbolic representation of married life in terms of fish and cabbage is taken up again a little later:—­

     THE DAUGHTER.  I fear I shall begin to hate you after this!

     THE LAWYER.  Woe to us, then!  But let us forestall hatred.  I promise
     never again to speak of any untidiness—­although it is torture to
     me!

     THE DAUGHTER.  And I shall eat cabbage, though it means agony to me.

     THE LAWYER.  A life of common suffering, then!  One’s pleasure the
     other one’s pain.

One feels that, however true to nature the drift of this may be, it is little more than bacilli of truth seen as immense through a microscope.  The agonies and tortures arising from eating cabbage and such things may, no doubt, have tragic consequences enough, but somehow the men whom these things put on the rack refuse to come to life in the imagination on the same tragic plane where Prometheus lies on his crag and Oedipus strikes out his eyes that they may no longer look upon his shame.  Strindberg is too anxious to make tragedy out of discomforts instead of out of sorrows.  When he is denouncing woman as a creature who loves above all things to deceive her husband, his supreme way of expressing his abhorrence is to declare:  “If she can trick him into eating horse-flesh without noticing it, she is happy.”  Here, and in a score of similar passages, we can see how physical were the demons that endlessly consumed Strindberg’s peace of mind.

His attitude to women, as we find it expressed in The Confession of a Fool, The Dance of Death, and all through his work, is that of a man overwhelmed with the physical.  He raves now with lust, now with disgust—­two aspects of the same mood.  He turns from love to hatred with a change of front as swift as a drunkard’s.  He is the Mad Mullah of all the sex-antagonism that has ever troubled men since they began to think of woman as a temptress.  He was the most enthusiastic modern exponent of the point-of-view of that Adam who explained:  “The woman tempted me.”  Strindberg deliberately wrote those words on his banner and held them aloft to his generation as the summary of an eternal gospel.  Miss Lind-af-Hageby tells us that, at one period of his life, he was sufficiently free from the physical obsessions of sex to preach the equality of men and women and even to herald the coming of woman suffrage.