Page:Prophets of dissent essays on Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Nietzsche and Tolstoy (1918).djvu/96

 theory and method, to account for his temperamental peculiarities on the basis of heredity and the milieu and to describe the gradual transformation of his character through education and the external pressure of contemporary intellectual movements. This remarkable work is like a picture book of ideals undermined, hollowed, and shattered; a perverse compound of cynicism and passion, it is unspeakably loathsome to the sense of beauty and yet, in the last artistic reckoning, not without great beauty of its own. It divides the story of Strindberg's life into these consecutive parts: The Son of the Servant; The Author; The Evolution of a Soul; The Confession of a Fool; Inferno; Legends; The Rupture; Alone. The very titles signalize the brutal frankness, or, shall we say, terrible sincerity of a tale that rummages without piety among the most sacred privacies, and drags forth from intimate nooks and corners sorrow and squalor and shame enough to have wrecked a dozen average existences. There is no mistaking or evading the challenge hurled by this story: See me as I am, stripped of conventional lies and pretensions! Look upon my naked soul, covered with scars and open sores. Behold me in my spasms of love and hate, now in