is hardly to be censured for being curious about
the man before studying his works.

His stock stems from the very soil of Sweden.
In the seventeenth century his ancestors were
living in the little village of Strinne. Tremen-
dous in physique and intermingled with clerical
strains, Strindberg inherits both his big frame
and sensitive conscience from his mixed fore-
bears. His is the sanguine scepticism like that
of Renan, Anatole France, Barrès, Bernard
Shaw, as René Schickele has suggested. A
simple pagan he is not; nor would his particular
case have been so complicated. His lyric pes-
simism and his gift of distilling his bitter experi-
ences into a tale or a play are to-day merged
in the broad currents of his historical dramas
and socialistic novels. Even his misogyny has
become ameliorated,--those episodes in which
are crystallized the petty misery of a married
couple,--unpaid debts, unloved children, the
bailiff knocking at the back door!--let us
believe that they, too, were but a phase of his
development. Played in Germany and France,--
Zola hailed his play, Married, as remarkable,
and its author as a confrère,--popular in
Russia, recognized though not without many
years of unjust probation, Strindberg may be
said to have achieved what he set out to do,--
"to search for God and find the devil," and once
more to find his God.

Herr Emil Schering, the devoted German
translator of Strindberg, related to me this anec­

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