Page:Strindberg the Man (1920).djvu/23

life a grinding Marathon, and instead sent us on our way in search of an ideal that we considered worthy and noble.

I once heard a prominent Swede declare that the whole trouble with Strindberg was that he had never enjoyed a good, secure family life. No, fortunately he did not; fate never permitted him to enjoy a calm for any length of time, and still less allowed his spirit to be stifled in that vicious atmosphere and in that insincere union of two individuals—who preferably should have shunned one another—which is known as “the good family.” On the contrary he did continue to be the same free Bohemian, whether he had a wife in the house or not, and he never enjoyed what we call “society.” He always had his knapsack packed and was ready to continue his wanderings.

The beginning of the eighties continually brought us surprises from the hands of Strindberg. We read with admiration The Secret of the Guild, Sir Bengt’s Wife, and In the Spring-Time, but we rejoiced even more at the works in which he continued the intellectual revolution that was the great achievement of his youth.

He revolutionized completely our conception of Swedish history by his work The Swedish People, in which he showed us that it was not alone the great names of kings that carried out the great deeds in which our history abounds, but that behind them there stood a people worthy of a much greater admiration.