Whilst waiting for the verdict Strindberg sought to "idiotise" himself, and to stifle thought by diligent painting during some weeks. One evening at a gathering of press-men, the late editor of the dead evening paper told him that the play had been rejected. He felt suddenly ill and had to leave the company.
The next day he heard the reason for the refusal. Gustavus Vasa and Olaus Petri were distorted and degraded. He knew that he had stripped them of their historical and patriotic aureole, and he had deliberately restored their human contours. But such restoration was not welcome, and he was warned that the public did not want it. A thorough revision of the play was recommended.
The bitterness of failure now worked havoc in his soul. He plunged into the study of social problems. He found human folly supreme in principles of government and in the judgment of majorities and minorities. The curse of nescience was upon all flesh.
"His thoughts struggled like fish in the net and ended in entangling themselves," he writes of this mood. He tried to dismiss such thoughts. But it was impossible. They returned "like a quiet, great sorrow, bringing despair because the world went its way—idiotically, majestically, inevitably—to the devil." A new rôle, that of sceptic, materialist, atheist, seemed to be his own part in the drama of mind. He strove to free himself from prejudices, social, religious, moral and practical, and ceased to read newspapers. For newspapers praised stupidity, mistook acts of egotism for love of humanity, and insulted intelligence.
"He had but one opinion: that everything was wrong; but one conviction: that nothing could be done to make things better at present; but one hope: that some day the time for interference would come, and that things would then improve."
There is something infinitely pathetic in Strindberg's life-long conflict with social injustice and fatuity. He was like a man digging deep for the straggling roots of a large tree. Sometimes he found one, but he could never put his foot on all at the same time. Social evolution, with its infinite variety of hidden forces, which burst into foliage on the tree of good and evil, yielded but few secrets to his spade. He besieged the soil in his hand with passionate questions and showered curses upon the matter under his muck-rake, but the elusive spirit which makes flowers out of dirt and green life out of black decay escaped him. The scepticism and impetus to transvalue all values which the rejection of Master Olof had accelerated were further developed by the company which Strindberg now found congenial. A coterie of artists, writers and dilettantish philosophers assembled in the evenings in the Red Room of "Berns Restaurant." The tone was free, the clamour for truth loud, and contemptuous of the treasures of the past. The company was heterogeneous and disputatious, but held together by an aggressive scepticism which was beautifully sincere. The axiom that the spring of human action is egoism, was the basis of argument, and hypocrisy was hunted down with relentless severity.
The old was to be destroyed and the new created.
"That is ancient," were words of reproach. As new human beings they must think new thoughts, and new thoughts required new language.
Anecdotes and old jokes were cut short. Phrases and borrowed expressions were rejected. One was allowed to be coarse and to call things by their proper names, but not to be vulgar, not to quote from the latest comic opera or to use witticisms which had appeared in the last number of the comic paper.
Everything was focussed to strictly personal and independent judgment. Strindberg led the way in destructive criticism. Like Spencer before the old masters, he found the artistic perfection of the past centuries over-rated and superseded. The historical Jesus had been exposed to speculative criticism by scholars, and every tyro in the Red Room had the courage to follow.