Page:Prophets of dissent essays on Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Nietzsche and Tolstoy (1918).djvu/97

 demoniacal transports, now prostrate with anguish! And if you want to know how I came to be what I am, consider my ancestry, my bringing up, my social environment, and be sure also to pocket your own due share of the blame for my destruction! — Certainly Strindberg's autobiography is not to be recommended as a graduation gift for convent-bred young ladies, or as a soothing (Aversion for convalescents, but if accepted in a proper sense, it will be found absorbing, informative, and even helpful.

Strindberg never forgave his father for having married below his station. He felt that the good blood of the Strindbergs, — respectable merchants and ministers and country gentlemen, — was worsened by the proletarian strain imported into it through a working girl named Eleonore Ulrike Norling, the mother of August Strindberg and his eleven brothers and sisters. During August's childhood the family lived in extremely straitened circumstances. When a dozen people live cooped up in three rooms, some of them are more than likely to have the joy of youth crushed out of them and crowded from the premises. Here was the first evil that darkened Strindberg's life: he simply was cheated out of his childhood.