With two friends of the new life Strindberg talked out his melancholy questionings, and sketched the future of regenerated humanity. One was a painter of thirty who had been an agricultural labourer, and who, after some years' training, had found art an inadequate vehicle for thought, and who now "lived on nothing" but the stimulus of his eclectic philosophy.
The friend's name was "Måns," and he had a remarkable faculty for discovering faulty premises in the fabric of August's dichtung. The other friend possessed the steadiness of the well-established social unit, and contributed a dispassionate and polite scepticism to the review of ideas.
They introduced Strindberg to Buckle's theories. There he found support for his rebellion against the scholasticism of Upsala, and learnt that his disease of doubt was in reality the basis of health. Doubt and discontent were the pre-requisites of knowledge and progress—the sole paths towards true happiness.
He felt irritated with all that was old and antiquated. Newspapers worked for the hour only, with no thought for the future. He could not read them without spasms of impatience.
The third volume of the autobiography describes his mental tension in the following passages: "His philosophic friend comforted him and calmed him by La Bruyère's saying: 'Do not distress yourself over the stupidity and wickedness of human beings; you may just as well distress yourself over the falling stone; both are subservient to the same laws; to be stupid and to fall.'
"'Yes, it is all very well to say that. But to be a bird and compelled to live in a mine! Air, light, I cannot breathe; not see!' he burst out. 'I am dying of suffocation!'
"'Write,' said his friend.
"'Yes, but what?'"
Out of the mists of doubt, the volatility of convictions, there rose creatures clad in flesh and blood, the warring selves of his multiple personality. The thin silhouettes of history became instinct with life; and Strindberg's first great drama, The Heretic, afterwards named Master Olof, was conceived.
He wrote it during two summer months of quiet life on his island in the Baltic. It was necessary to act, for his newspaper had died and food was scarce. His kind friends, the fishermen, gave him credit, and he could concentrate on his task without the haunting anxiety for to-morrow's meals.