comes in contact with, it sucks a drop, just as the bee gathers its
honey from a million flowers giving it forth eventually as its
own."

Strindberg went to Stockholm to become a literateur and, if
possible, a creative artist. He gleaned a living from newspaper
work for a few months, but in the summer went to a fishing village
on a remote island in Bothnia Bay where, in his twenty-third year,
he wrote his great historical drama, "Master Olof." Breaking away
from traditions and making flesh and blood creations instead of
historical skeletons in this play, it was refused by all the
managers of the theatres, who assured Strindberg that the public
would not tolerate any such unfamiliar methods. Strindberg
protested, and defended and tried to elucidate his realistic
handling of the almost sacred historical personages, but in vain,
for "Master Olof" was not produced until seven years later, when it
was put on at the Swedish Theatre at Stockholm in 1880, the year
Ibsen was writing "Ghosts" at Sorrento.

In 1874, after a year or two of unsuccessful effort to make a
living in various employments, he became assistant at the Court
library, which was indeed a haven of refuge, a position providing
both leisure for study and an assured income. Finding in the
library some Chinese parchments which had not been catalogued; he
plunged into the study of that language. A treatise which he wrote
on the subject won him medals from various learned societies at
home, as well as recognition from the French Institute. This
success induced the many other treatises that followed, for which
he received a variety of decorations, and along with the honors
nearly brought upon himself "a salubrious idiocy," to use his own