the newest fashion in dress, the woman of the upper class as wife and worshipper--everything “first-class,” in fact, only then does he feel himself in the full possession of his ego. These characteristics show themselves early; they are the phenomena of the age. It is interesting to observe whether the strongest personal emotion in a child is the desire for affection or the longing to occupy the first place. With the boy in the autobiography the last was the case; he wanted to be the favourite in the upper court--in other words, with his father and mother. When he found that the place he coveted was already occupied by his brothers and sisters, he would not accept of his grandmother’s proffered affection, but despised it, for the simple reason that his grandmother was a person of no great importance in the household. This absence of spontaneous affection is a trait which meets us everywhere in Strindberg’s personal biography and his other literary works; it is a peculiarity that is extremely common in our day, although it is not often met with in geniuses, because genius is usually accompanied by a greater warmth of temperature. It is perhaps partly accounted for by the natural temperament of the people of northern Sweden, who are to the highest degree possessed of what the French call “la fougue,” which burns like a conflagration and not like the all-pervading heat of a continual flame. But there is a deeper reason still which is to be found in the isolation and excessive inadequacy of Strindberg’s nature, the restless, nomadic tendency, the savage impulse which impels him to obliterate his footmarks, to make himself inaccessible, mysterious, terrible, for all of which his autobiography presents many an authentic proof. It may be his inherited, restless, undomesticated Finnish-Lapp blood which feels itself imprisoned in a small bourgeois family, and gazes around distrustfully like a wild animal in a cage. It is the blood of a race that remains always apart, that does not allow itself to be fathomed, but with the true nomadic instinct seeks to wipe out all traces of its own existence. It does not give its whole affection, as a child it has no comrades, as a man no friends, only a few stray acquaintances and boon companions. It is the blood that scents the enemy everywhere, that dreads the enemy yet goes in search of him if only for the sake of the long lonely raids which it remembers in the past. What in other phenomena of the age would signify a dying, a complete withering of the expansive faculty, was in Strindberg a beginning, a youthfulness of culture, so that one can point to him with tolerable certainty as an atavism--a reversion that is driven forward by a tremendous force, a combination of atavism and genius.