Page:Strindberg the Man (1920).djvu/53

IN his endeavor to obtain more knowledge and new forms of artistic expression, Strindberg always followed the highest precedents.

The name which he most often pronounced when people spoke to him about art and learning, was that of Goethe. To judge by what he said about the German Olympian, it seems that secretly he had chosen him as his special ideal and that he always endeavored to test himself and to judge himself through a comparison with Goethe.

Whenever there was a period in Strindberg's life when for one reason or another he could not busy his restless brain with writing, impetuously and with great energy he delved into studies of various kinds. As a young library clerk he studied Swedish history and the Chinese language. During his sojourn in Switzerland he was occupied principally with modern sociology. At the beginning of his second long exile, when he stayed with Ola Hansson^[1] in Friedrichshagen and later on in Berlin, the exact sciences and modern natural sciences claimed his attention.

When I found Strindberg in a dark, half-furnished studio in Ola Hansson's little cottage in Friedrichshagen