There is one special feature of this poverty of feeling in the autobiography which is peculiarly striking and suggestive, it is namely this, that the boy is not only lonely with regard to his parents, his brothers and sisters and comrades, but he is also lonely in his first love. Strindberg has not omitted to give us a study on sex in his _Story of the Development of a Soul_, as the sub-title is called. Psychological and physiological studies on this subject are sufficiently plentiful in modern Scandinavian literature, and some of them are contributions of permanent value to culture, contributions towards a truer knowledge of mankind, casting a bold and honest light on the unknown territory of human existence, such as will only be understood and appreciated in a more subtle and less prudish future. With regard to Strindberg’s contribution on the subject, the circumstances are not quite the same. But one thing is certain, that whatever has been confided to publicity on this subject in the north, however far-fetched and plain-spoken as regards the history of the strongest natural impulse, it is but the first seedling of a future literature--a pan-Germanic literature which will come perhaps soon, perhaps not until after our time. In these confessions everything is natural, productive and honest; souls and bodies, physical and spiritual emotions are one. Not so with Strindberg. It would need a searching discussion, a full statement of every single point in his autobiography, in order to prove the apparent and hidden crookedness of the emotions, the poisonous hostility of his terrified gaze at the opposite sex. From the very beginning his relationship to woman is as insipid as is usually the case in the middle class, and as brutal as the wildness of the nomads. The German passion, expanding with the first emotion of love in the desire for a reciprocative affection on the part of the woman, is not to be found. And here it is important to remark that this peculiar trait in his character is the origin of the celebrated drama which bears the device: “Battle of the Sexes.” There is also another point of importance connected with it, and that is that Strindberg from the first represents the man as good, suffering, tender-hearted, normal. That is not psychology, but it is the same in his later works. While his psychology of the woman is very deep, the man who is the unhappy victim of this brute is always the same brave, honest and worthy fellow. There are two sides to that. In the first place it is mere sophistry, in the second it points to a distinctive racial feature.