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have had to endure so many privations, such poverty and ill-treatment 
since early childhood. These childish impressions had a lasting effect 
upon his development and crop out again and again in his literary pro¬ 
ductions. “I grew up in an atmosphere of hate. Hate! An eye for an 
eye! A blow for a blow! —I am an illegitimate child, born at the time 
the affairs of a bankrupt family were being liquidated and the family 
was in mourning for an uncle who had committed suicide. There you 
have the family. What fruit can you expect of such a tree?” We 
know that Strindberg was on the verge of ruin before he rose again by 
the sheer power of his genius. Then for years he was hounded as an 
oppositionist and scandalmonger. It was during these years that the 
foundation was laid for his ever increasing hatred and bitterness, his 
attitude of suspicion, and the delusion that he was being hounded. 
Ambition and a sense of justice were his dominating traits. He 
says that even as a child he anxiously weighed his own actions and those 
of others, and that a case of unfairness never failed to attract his atten¬ 
tion. This sense of fair play is the very backbone of his being, and 
may be considered typical of the nation. Nothing so stirs up Strind¬ 
berg’s wrath as a violation of his sense of justice. That is what has 
made him the ruthless revolutionist and satirist. 
He was spurred on to action no less by his ambition than by his 
sense of justice. He always sought to be in the lead. Therefore he 
never hesitated to lay bare his own soul or that of a friend, if he felt it 
was required in order to add an artistic touch to a certain soul analysis. 
In the latter part of the eighties he wrote in a letter that he did not want 
to be “in the rear” when he was “used to being in the lead.” It was this 
ability to blaze the way that particularly aroused his admiration in the 
case of Goethe. He cites a few lines from the latter’s Aus Meinem Le- 
hen : “And then I set out upon a course from which I could not 
deviate. I transformed into a poem or sketch everything that brought 
me joy or sorrow, or which simply occupied my thoughts, and then 
I mentally reviewed it, in order to set straight my conceptions and 
have peace and order within myself. . . All that I have written is 
therefore a part of my confessions, and this book makes them com¬ 
plete.” To this quotation Strindberg adds these characteristic reflec¬ 
tions: “In reading Goethe I find it is the lightness of his touch that I 
enjoy—Furthermore, the fearlessness with which he approaches the 
divine powers, with which he considers himself allied; his contempt for 
formality and convention; his lack of prejudice; and the fact that he 
is steadily growing not only bigger but younger, so that he is always 
the most youthful, always in the lead and ahead of his time.” This 
was exactly what Strindberg aspired to be—“in the lead and ahead of 
his time.” 
“Mine is not the keenest intellect, but the fire of my genius is the 
brightest in Sweden,” he said of himself. These words might fittingly 
