Page:Strindberg the Man (1920).djvu/40

WHEN Strindberg left Sweden on the 18th of November, 1884, after the legal proceedings with reference to Married were brought to a close, his name became wrapped up almost immediately in a strange silence.

We young people could not but believe that the victory which Strindberg had won when he was acquitted of the charge of blasphemy, would turn all minds towards him and that he would finally be given justice as poet and reformer.

But instead of that he practically disappeared from our view. His literary activity was dormant during the next few years; or if he wrote anything, it did not reach us.

When we again met Strindberg as the unique poet, he was an entirely different man. He had become a skillful dramatist who had written a couple of short hypermodern dramas, The Father and Lady Julia, which no publisher in all Sweden had cared to print but of which a publisher in Hälsingborg^[1] was the financial backer. Despite the fact that Zola had written the preface to The Father and partly approved of the play, the public at home rejected it. Strindberg's former friends and protectors, Georg