Although, speaking generally, Strindberg achieved his masterpieces during the period of his atheism, many of his later works have indisputable value. The play Intoxication (1900), for instance (though the killing through sheer unconscious force of will, by the hero, of the child of one mistress, in order to gratify the caprice of another, may strike the unimaginative critic as slightly melodramatic, and his eventual retirement into a Catholic monastery as somewhat of an anti-climax), is a work of extraordinary power.
So also is the Death Dance (1900), in which the middle-aged captain and his passée wife grind each other to ruin and despair beneath the mutual mill-stones of their hate, "that most unreasonable hate, without ground, without object, but also without end." Does not the author plumb the extreme depths of human malevolence in the passage in which the wife in company with her cousin is expecting her paralytic husband to fall down dead?
KARL. What are you looking at over there, dear, by the wall?
ALICE. I'm seeing if he's tumbled down.
KARL. Has he tumbled down?
ALICE. No, more's the pity. He deceives me in everything.
We would also mention the Maeterlinckian beauty of the Crown Bride and Swan White (1900), the heroine of which is an idealisation of the author's third wife, the actress, Harriet Bosse; the delicate fantasy of Tales (1908); and the Swedish Miniatures, of which the Sacrifice Dance in particular is a positive masterpiece of swift bloodiness.
Cruelty, moreover, is an integral element in at any rate primitive religion. This may conceivably explain why, faithfully fulfilling what he personally professed to have found a joyless duty, Strindberg successfully performed in Black Flags, his celebrated roman à clef, the intellectual flaying and dismemberment of all Stockholm Bohemia. It is amusing to remember that he successfully consulted the oracle of the Book of Job before he published the work in 1905, to face the protesting shrieks of his victims with all the devout conscience of some early priest of Thor who gravely officiates at some blood-stained human sacrifice.
It is outside the purpose of this essay to discuss whether these descriptions of the intellectual and sexual clique of the Swedish capital constitute a fair portrait or a monstrous defamation, or whether, for instance, Hanna Paj is a malignant travesty or a euphemistic delineation of that lady whom all who have the slightest acquaintance with the Continental Feminist Movement will immediately recognise.
As a sheer piece of satire the book waves its black flag unchallenged amid all the fluttering multicoloured pennons of modern European literature. What matter if the characterisation be true or false? So far, at any rate, as the non-Swedish reader is concerned, the illusion is complete. Kilo, "the little bookseller, with the suffering eyes of a sick dog"; Falkenstrom, the idealist, whose wife is induced by her bosom friend to join some alleged monstrous cosmopolitan masonic sisterhood; Hanna Paj, the feminist lecturer, the fury with the flag of hate on which was written the device, "Revenge on Man"; Smartman, the debonair intriguing editor with his two sets of rooms—all these pictures of "the galley-slaves of ambition linked together in the fetters of interest, these murderers and thieves who steal each other's thoughts, addresses, friends, and personalities," are perfectly convincing. Above all there stands out the delineation of Lars Peter Zachrisson, "the intellectual cannibal," the "broker of literature, the promoter of mutual admiration societies, the speculator in reputations, the founder of syndicates for the manufacture of celebrities," the morphia maniac, the tippler "who laughs humorously in his moustache and weeps tears of whisky from his eyes," the father of "that resurrected corpse, that wandering shame, whose face was known to all, and who was branded with his own name." And how devilish is the description of this domestic hell of human hate, where he mocks his wife on her failing charms and encourages her gluttony with the specific object of spoiling her figure, where the mother in her turn brings up her children like a breed of dachshunds whom she sets to bait their father, and where the two spouses yet feel some inexplicable need of being together in the same room for the purpose of that mutual nagging and mutual reviling which constituted the chief interest in their miserable existence.
To sum up, we have seen how throughout his life the persecution mania of Strindberg expressed itself in his attitude to sex, religion, and society, as like at once some veritable Rhadamanthine recorder, and some cowering victim of divine vengeance, he dispenses and fears those words of doom in his black adamant of diction. Yet it is impossible casually to brush the man aside as some mere paranoiac. The very torments of his soul fructified in the stupendous genius of his intellectual production. With all his perversities, with all his aberrations, Strindberg remains the blackest, and in his own particular spheres the most drastic, intelligence in the whole of our European literature.