Page:Prophets of dissent essays on Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Nietzsche and Tolstoy (1918).djvu/111

 of a fine ideal. The distortion of truth emanates in Strindberg's work, as it does in any significant satire or caricature, from indignation over the contrast between a lofty conception and a disappointing reality. What, after all, can be the mission of this hard-featured gallery of females, — peevish, sullen, impudent, grasping, violent, lecherous, malignant, and vindictive, — if it is not to mark pravity and debasement with a stigma in the name of a pure and noble womanhood?

It should not be left unmentioned that we owe to August Strindberg some works of great perfection fairly free from the black obsession and with a constructive and consistently idealistic tendency: splendid descriptions of a quaint people and their habitat, tinged with a fine sense of humor, as in "The Hemsoe-Dwellers"; charming studies of landscape and of floral and animal life, in the "Portraits of Flowers and Animals"; the colossal work on the Swedish People, once before referred to, a history conceived and executed in a thoroughly modern scientific spirit; two volumes of "Swedish Fortunes and Adventures"; most of his historic dramas also are of superior order. But these works lie outside the scope of the more specific