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NO one here in our cramped city can walk his way straight ahead in proud loneliness, as Strindberg has done, without arousing ill-will and anger among those whose fate it has been to dwell in the kind of spiritual atmosphere, where everything personal, everything that makes you a living being, has been blotted out.

During his long wanderings, Strindberg has, therefore, ever had a flock of those hungry wolves on his heels. In his early adolescence it was the literary “wise” old fogeys whose anger he aroused and who scorned and furiously lashed this overbearing youngster who, in The Outlaw did not shrink from confessing that his aspiration was to become a poet. This was the very worst offense, for none of the literary old fogeys had succeeded in spite of the fact that they had all written verse in their youth.

In the beginning Strindberg allowed the brutal fangs of all these attackers to tear away at his bleeding breast. How could one but be deeply stirred when reading in Strindberg's autobiography how one evening in Uppsala,