Page:Strindberg the Man (1920).djvu/17

I knew Strindberg long before I met him. All of that generation which was young during the latter part of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties, was carried away by the poet who wrote Master Olof and who had raged in The Red Room.

To us he was the reawakening of the Swedish spirit of literature and art. We had been terrified at the greatness to which the two Norwegian giants Ibsen and Björnson had attained and we felt almost ashamed that Sweden at this time could not show a single great man.

Then Strindberg came. He had been among us for a long time, although we had not known of his presence. When he came, all the young blood that had any vitality, joined him. Already, at the age of twenty-three, he had produced such a great work as Master Olof, the first great masterpiece of Swedish dramatic art—rich in youthful fire and turbulent ideas—and besides, so Swedish through and through that we were justified in commencing to believe in old Sweden once more. For in spite of the fact that we were young, we had already had an opportunity to see through the empty bombast with which the older writers tried to entice us and thus condemn us to the same inactivity into which they themselves had fallen.