His brother had been praised for his drawings; August wanted to draw. During the Christmas holidays he copied all his brother's drawings, but on finding that he could do it without difficulty his interest waned and he gave it up. All his brothers and sisters could play some instrument. The house resounded with exercises on the piano, the violin and the 'cello. August wanted to play, but without practising scales. He taught himself to play the piano and learnt to read and copy music. He played badly, but it gave him pleasure. He learnt the names of composers and the number of opus of everything that was played in the house, so that he should have superior knowledge.
He was jealous of the accomplishments of others, but the jealousy was created by unsatisfied ambition, and the consciousness of illimitable capabilities. Every subject interested him, until he had mastered it. When he knew the plants, minerals, insects and birds in his neighbourhood, he turned to other fields of natural science. Physics and chemistry attracted him. He did not want to repeat the classical experiments in the text-books; he wanted to make new discoveries. The lack of money and apparatus restrained him. Ingenuity was necessary. During the summer holidays he tried to make an electric machine out of an old spinning-wheel and a window pane. An umbrella was broken and made to yield a whalebone, out of which, with the help of a violin string, he made a drill-borer. The square pane had been made circular through patient knocking with a key-bit. This labour had taken days. When the time came for boring a hole in the middle and his piece of quartz made no impression he lost patience, and attempted to force a hole. The pane was smashed and August's enthusiasm converted into hopeless fatigue.
Recovered, he decided to construct a perpetuum mobile. His father had told him that a prize was awaiting the inventor of the impossible. After formulating his theory, which included a waterfall driving a pump, he collected his material. A number of useful articles were sacrificed for the purpose: the coffee boiler provided a tube; the soda-water machine, reservoirs; the strong-box, plates; the chest of drawers, wood; the bird-cage, wire, etc. At the crucial moment the ubiquitous housekeeper interrupted him by asking if he would accompany his brothers and sisters to the mother's grave. Irritation broke the inventive spell, and in the anger of failure he dashed the artful apparatus to pieces on the floor.
Reproaches and ridicule did not deter him. He arranged experimental explosions and manufactured a Leyden jar. For this purpose he flayed a dead black cat which he found in the street. He anticipated "Jönköping's Säkerhetständstickor" by making safety matches which he declares were as good as the later, much-advertised patent.
His wilfulness and lack of mental discipline were necessarily distasteful to his surroundings. When he wanted to unlock a drawer and the key could not be found he seized a poker and broke open the lock with such force that the screws and the plate were tom out.
"Why did you break the lock?" he was asked.
"Because I wanted to get into the chest of drawers," was the laconic reply.
The father not unnaturally decided to do what lay in his power to curb the troublesome spirit of independence in his son. August disliked his stepmother and resented her usurpation of his mother's place. He was now gymnasist[1] and treated with respect in the school. The lessons took the form of lectures, and the teachers showed due regard for individual rights and tastes. At home everything was done to humiliate him. He attributed what he regarded as a systematic persecution to the mean and revengeful spirit of the stepmother. He was made to wear old clothes which did not fit him; his gymnasist-cap, which should have been the pride of his heart, was home-made and an object of ridicule; he was compelled to work in the stable between school hours, and commanded to take the groom's place during the holidays. His weekly allowance for the school lunch was 3 1/2 d., a sum which he found sufficient for tobacco but not for sandwiches. He had a healthy appetite and was always hungry. The parsimoniousness of the home régime subjected him to humiliating experiences at school. Once he accidentally broke the eye-glasses of a friend. In vain he exhausted all his inventive resources in attempts to mend them. They had to be mended by an expert at the cost of 7d. On the following Monday August brought his friend 3 1/2 d., and after another week discharged his debt of honour by shamefacedly paying another 3 1/2 d. His miserable poverty could no longer be kept a secret, and he hated the cause of his oppression.
At the age of fifteen he fell in love with a woman of thirty. The love was platonic, an attraction of souls—a contact of minds seeking spiritual enlightenment along the same path. She was a woman of the world, engaged to another who lived abroad, animated by religious emotionalism and half-conscious eroticism. They attended the same circle for French conversation and added the spice of Gallic expression to their correspondence, which treated of Jesus, the struggle against sin, life, death, God in nature, love, friendship and doubt. August became her conscience, and she was his spiritual mother. Strindberg publishes some of his French compositions from this period in his autobiography. All speculations were eventually smashed against the bedrock of Jesus. The parental authorities objected strongly to August's friendship, and especially to the atmosphere of French secrecy in which it was enveloped.
August became absorbed in the struggle for salvation. A puritanism which despised the cold formalism of the Lutheran State Church and claimed the free companionship of Jesus was fashionable in Sweden at this time. The joyful certainty of being among the sheep infected those susceptible to sudden "revivals" within all classes of society. What could be of greater importance than being amongst the elected of God, comforted by the knowledge of righteousness, borne aloft by complete detachment from the world, the flesh and the devil? August laid passionate siege to Heaven and clamoured for immediate inclusion among the children of God.