We may agree with Höffding that "every important individuality is a point of view for the human race, from which men catch sight of possibilities and aspects of existence which would otherwise have escaped them." But we must also acknowledge that the strongest individuality is i malleable in the hands of experience, and that contact with humanity wrenches away the mind from cherished points of view. Though Strindberg was born with defiance of the Decalogue upon his lips, though he lived in perpetual revolt against restraint and intellectual formalism, though he sought above all to think and not to copy, he could not escape that constant pressure of others which is the essential of collective existence. The University, with its rigid forms of instruction, its standards of learning, had been the cage on the bars of which he had exercised his muscles of independence. He had craved for freedom; his chronic disgust at the established order had made him fail through paralysis of will, where he might have excelled through natural superiority. And yet he felt strangely _en rapport_ with the tradition of the University, when in the spring of 1872 he embarked upon journalism in Stockholm. He went into humble lodgings on borrowed money, and obtained an ill-paid post on a Radical evening paper. The journalists with whom he now mingled lacked the culture which the University imposes even on its most rebellious alumni. They talked in ready-made phrases and wrote on subjects over which they had no mental mastery. They could harm or help fellow-creatures by the exercise of a power for which they were totally unfitted. Loose-witted and garrulous, they missed central questions and mistook the gossip of the news-hunter for judicial wisdom. The journalistic profession of that time did not command general respect, and the _littérateurs_ of the Radical press were often treated as a species of social brigands. They were nameless and their activities subterraneous, but they wrote "_We_" and held the mole's power of being able to upset the tilled fields of man. Strindberg plunged into art-criticism, and exposed Count George von Rosen's famous picture "Erik XIV and Karin Månsdotter," in the National Museum of Stockholm, to the fire of his discontent. The ashes of his own drama on "Erik XIV," which he had burnt, lay over his judgment, and the feeling of identity with the oppressed classes, now revived through associations, made him resent Rosen's conception of Göran Persson, the favourite and evil genius of the mad king. Rosen had painted the sly and intriguing counsellor with a fidelity which was opposed to Strindberg's view of Persson, as an enemy of the nobility and a friend of the people. Rosen's standpoint was therefore condemned in Strindberg's articles, which appeared after some editorial trimming of their literary ornamentation.