Growth of a Soul

The history of John, in the Growth of a Soul, is the story of Strindberg himself, in the days when he, the ardent young poet and rebel, was rapturously reading Schiller's The Robbers, was rising above the disillusionments of life and rapidly growing in the invigorating atmosphere of learning. This is one of the few characters under consideration whose intellectual development we are privileged to watch, and we are reminded at every stage in the struggle that it is Strindberg himself who experienced this, and is experiencing it once more in the character of John. For Strindberg peeks over John's shoulder, as it were, seeing and commenting on every incident in John's career.

At the opening of the book, we find John, the student, on his way to the university at Upsala. He stayed there only three months; then, his meagre scholarship funds exhausted, he went back home. But during these three months one could recognize many decided traits in the discontented boy. In the first place although he was poor, too poor to buy books, he refused aid of any sort; unlike the universal student he even refused to borrow his roommate's coat. He was impatient of the routine, the formality, the slowness, the emptiness of the curriculum and its professors, uncompromising in his refusal to resort to the bowing and scraping necessary to gain entrance into classes and social clubs. He had a fine contempt for his roommate's hypocritical deference to the social group, and quarreled miserably with him.

He hated Upsala, loved nature, and had a vague desire to get a degree—but how and why he knew not. He was egotistic, narrow-minded, selfish, religious, crude, uncultured, unenterprising—he simply wasted away his days at the university because the accustomed routine did not drive him to his work. And yet withal there was hope for him. For he hated with an uncompromising hatred, all that was hollow and artificial. He was a hard, though not emancipated thinker; he longed with a youthful ardor to do something very great, and equally vague.

He was goaded onward by what seemed, from the very beginning, to obsess him; the struggle in his soul between the aristocrat and the plebeian. Although his intellectual sympathy was with the aristocrat, and although he hated the lower classes for their filthiness and disease, their unrefinement and ignorance, yet he was possessed with a sense of the wrong done them, and much of his youth was a constant struggle between his conscious sympathy for the aristocrat and his instinctive sympathy for the lower classes. The battle is fierce and long and real; it is the bitter battle that Strindberg himself fought between the heritage of his mother, and that of his father. He, like John, was the son of a waitress and a poor nobleman, raised from the depths by his father's nobility, but ever apprehensive that he would fall again, that he would be caught by the whirling maelstrom and carried down, down into the hated, abysmal depths.