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the whole fabric of lies with a violence which can be modified only in the course of years and which later on develops—on the part of the Philistine head of the family—into a complete satisfaction with everything that exists.

This Strindberg, the poet, who was forced to give up his journey to Parnassus in order to identify himself with a pioneer movement, we loved. Continually we saw him before us in the symbolic picture which Carl Larsson^[1] had furnished as a title-page vignette to Strindberg’s collected juvenile works: In the Spring-Time. In it there is a young Titan with sorrowful eyes, painfully drawn mouth, a lion’s mane above the mighty brow, and a large thorn pointing towards the aching head.

The poet of the sharp thorn—pointing as it were from a crown of thorns directly towards his creative brain—that was the juvenile image of Strindberg which etched itself more indelibly than all others on the minds of those who were young at that time. All the contemporaries to whom I have spoken of this, once had the same visual sensation of him who aroused us out of our slumber.

Yes, he had brought life to us. For we had all gone astray in the desert where we had got sand into our throats instead of water and were on the point of dying with thirst. About fifteen years earlier, Strindberg had passed through the throes of adolescence in which we now were, and his strong intuition had guided him out of the desert, and when we saw him for the first time, he was standing at the boundary of the ever verdant