He shirked no trouble, avoided no obstacles to equip himself as a writer on gigantic subjects. His encyclopædic grasp of a many-sided subject is shown in this book, and in his numerous essays on sociological questions. It carries with it a certain superficiality, and readiness to theorise from insufficient data which may necessitate a graceful retraction of opinions, once loudly proclaimed. But there is ample compensation in the freshness and vigour of a mind which bears crop after crop without exhausting itself. Such a quickly grown crop, verdant and luxurious in ideas, is the essay, written in 1884, _On the General Discontent, its Causes and Remedies_, in which he inveighs against the evils of a false Culture, and within the space of a hundred pages lets Society pass in review before his critical pen in the types of the king, the bureaucrat, the physician, the teacher, the merchant, the sailor, the artisan, the manufacturer, the labourer, the servant, the scientist, the author, the journalist, and the artist, and finally prescribes the pills of self-help, self-government and limitation of useless luxuries, artfully mixed. There is much of Rousseau, Tolstoy, Spencer, Mill and de Quesnay in the social philosophy, with which he wished to build on the ruins, wrought by _The Red Room_ and _The New Kingdom_. The ideal peasant--in Tolstoyan garb--was then Strindberg's hope for humanity. When he wrote _At the Edge of the Sea_, in 1890, the horrors of unchecked democracy had been revealed to him. It is the story of a highly intelligent, refined and super-sensitive man who is forced to live amongst coarse and ignorant people, and who is gradually driven to insanity and suicide. This book is the apex of Strindberg's novelistic art. The scene is again laid on one of the islands outside Stockholm, the life of the fisherfolk is once more described. But the tone and the colour are changed. There is the same brilliancy in the description of scenery, and the psychological imagination is more lavish than ever, but the mists of Nietzscheanism lie heavily over the book. The distinction between "slave-morality" and "master-morality" is emphasised with truly Dionysian pessimism.