These facts are quoted from Strindberg’s many-volumed autobiography, _The Maid-Servant’s Son_, in which he lays down the law with inveterate bitterness against his origin, his childish impressions, the order of society, the system of education, and against all bonds and fetters, customs and duties, which chain a man down from his first days to his last. He knows from the very beginning that he has not the courage to break loose from them, and that is why he pursues them with such untiring and embittered vengeance. August Strindberg wrote _The Maid-Servant’s Son_ in his altruistic, socialistic period, when he believed in a social revolution that was to bring about the radical redress of his personal wrongs. Strindberg is in this instance the link of a chain which winds through central Germany, but has scarcely forced its way as yet to the North and the South, for the North and Bavaria are peasant districts, and are, therefore, almost inaccessible to socialism. The middle class with its overflow into the proletariat is the real fostering soil of socialism. From a home like the one that Strindberg describes, the more gifted sons must necessarily go forth as socialists, if they have brains to think and souls to feel; or if they have any aspiration in their blood which calls itself the “honest ambition” of the bourgeois, they as surely become “jobbers” and “snobs”--or if they are geniuses, they aspire to the “super-man,” and with a juggler’s _salto mortale_ flee past their misery into space. Strindberg’s nature was possessed of a considerable share of all three categories. Chiefly genius, which, among the many surprises of life, always prepares for itself the greatest, for geniuses live in a state of continual astonishment at the revelation of the great unknown in themselves, till at last, like Strindberg, they move about with an invisible crown on their heads, one might call it a crowned consciousness, for which they claim respect from all the world. The sure sign of a young bourgeois from a populous town is that he always requires a crowd of admirers. His self-confidence needs to be upheld by constant applause. Hence the striving for recognition, the love of advertising, and the longing to be puffed, which is the peculiarity of the newest literature proceeding from the middle class. Hence the prolonged cries of despair when this recognition or its material expression is lacking. The horizon of the bourgeois townsman is naturally bounded by the thin luminous line of those whom he sees in possession; the men who have enough, and more than enough, who inhabit the golden islands where enjoyment dwells; and whither he yearns to go, to take them by storm as a revolutionary, or enter them in triumph as a crowned genius. It is not their individuality merely which stamps these things with their personal value, they have a priceless, an imaginary worth, and only when they are his--the outward show of refinement, the elegant home,