August Strindberg is one of the most wonderful and perfect examples of a type which, in our vacillating age, frequently rises to the surface and endeavours to make its mark everywhere; a type full of aggressiveness and impatience, seldom made after a pattern and frequently full of imperfections, but with touches of real genius as well as barren wastes, full of lapses, but full of promises for the future. It is a mixed type. The strange combinations in his character, the seeming contradictions and the flaws in his education make it a very difficult study for the average person. It would require a genius, one to whom the many hostile elements appear microscopically enlarged. The mixture of races, that inseparable ingredient in human physiology, is as yet an unexplored region of investigation. The question is one with which Strindberg has been greatly troubled, and he has contributed abundant material for its solution. He has done more. The great literature that he has created is more priceless as raw material to the psychologist than as a work of art. In all his writings Strindberg occupies the reader’s mind in a twofold manner: first, with the psychological results to which he individually attains; secondly, with the psychological results to which the reader _malgré lui_ attains, and which often contradict the others on matters of chief importance. Whoever studies Strindberg finds himself in the presence of a double mirror; in the one he sees the world reflected in Strindberg’s mind, and in the other as an antidote, he sees the mind of Strindberg presenting its own solution in the moment of its birth and reflecting its psychology in the reader’s soul. Strindberg’s collected works are really only biographical contributions towards the solution of the riddle of his ego. He has never ceased to speculate on the mystery of his own being, and this speculation has always vented itself in indignant storming against outward enemies. What does he mean by his angry guesses at the riddle of the woman sphinx? You have but to turn this sphinx round and it is no longer a woman. It is the man sphinx--the riddle that is himself. No writings have ever been of a more personal character than those of Strindberg. But perhaps no writings have ever issued from an ego that was less complete. I should like to express it as follows: In a mixed type like Strindberg’s no unity has as yet been able to form itself beneath the threshold of consciousness, for there the instincts of different races and epochs rush helter skelter. All that he has written fell as an instantaneous reflection on his soul, and was thrown back in an impressionist picture. In Strindberg’s works we find no transitions, no coherence. And since he has always presented himself as a riddle to the passing crowd, it is quite fair to regard the riddle as common property, which any one may seek to solve if he is not afraid to do so. I