We find here a resemblance which few people would have looked for in Strindberg, and which certainly no one among his countrymen has as yet perceived. It points to the east, to Russia. Not only to the Russia of Tolstoy and Dostoievsky, but further to the east and deeper into the secret history of the races. It points to Asia, to the barren plains where wandered the Mongolian hordes. Yellow faces with prominent cheek bones and projecting skulls, faces with an expression of cruelty and suffering, envy and greed, terrible conquerors who exterminated the ruling races of ancient Scandinavia and the old Norse blood in Russia, amalgamated the gentle, lyrical, Slav temperament with their own fierce blood, and left memorials of their victories in mounds of dead men’s skulls. Since those days every one who knows the Russian race discovers the same conflicting elements; on the one hand the gentle lyrical faculty, the melancholy sensibility, which makes the Russians born psychologists, makes them the only intuitively psychological people in the world, and on the other hand the brutality of the Mongolian blood which, after long intervals of peace, vents itself in deeds of horrible cruelty. Hence that profound untrustworthiness that lies at the background of the Russian character. And here we must seek the connecting link if we would understand Strindberg. For this same Mongolian blood, thinned, it is true, forms the ancestry of that nomadic race from whence the Finnish Lapps and Strindberg himself are descended. It also forms the lower class in Finland from whence his first wife, although of noble birth, originated. Her features bore traces of the Finnish type as distinctly as Strindberg’s own, and perhaps this accounts for the strong attraction that he felt towards her, for he doubtless felt the need of one of the same type in order to complete himself. The Finns in Finland are a people belonging to an ancient culture, they are a poetical people, whereas the Russian Mongolians and the Swedish Lapps are quite uncultured. The chief characteristic in Strindberg’s nature is the close proximity of genius and barbarism.