He restlessness of Genius is a sore trial to Mediocrity. Mediocrity in the Critic's chair, whose business it is to pass judgment upon the artist and his work, to affix a label to his back, and to place him on a particular shelf where the public can find him. The literary artist is expected to have a point of view which he has reached through certain early influences, to express himself in a certain form, and, when mature, to be measurable and easily recognisable in size and colour. If his personality and his writings make the critic's work easy he will be blessed by his contemporaries, or possibly condemned. But he will always be understood, and in the understanding there is solid comfort. You may sneer at the gods of society, you may shake your fist at law and authority, you may ridicule humanity, but you must, like Mr. George Bernard Shaw, always say the same thing. Voltaire is always expected to contemplate the world with a truly Voltairean smile of irony, Rousseau to cling innocently to Nature, Swift to see humanity only from the satirist's vantage-point. The man of genius who, conscious of the limitations of a single point of view, seeks another, who strides across the hilltops of past thought in rapid search of a higher one, who hugs philosophies and drops them, holds faiths and deserts them, is a phenomenon before which the critic feels uneasy. He calls in the doctor, and together they prepare the last label of madness--red, like a warning against poison--and hurl it at the extraordinary man when he happens to pass at a convenient distance. Believing that there is nothing further to be said, they return to their respective vocations. From the points of view of Mediocrity and Eugenics Strindberg presented the typical signs of degeneration, irrespectively of the traits and characteristics which are inadequately defined as the insanity of genius. He was a truth-seeker, and, consequently, a fault-finder. He knew peace and comfort like other men, and brief hours of sunshine, but spiritual discontent compelled him to be a nomad, a wanderer in many lands. Hence the critic's failure to classify him as a romanticist or realist, a socialist or individualist, a pessimist or humorist, a maniac or mystic, or to map out his life into periods and squares of thought. There was something of the eternal recurrence in him, an alchemical consciousness of all in all. He leaves beliefs, parts with influences, conquers new lands through violent crises of awakening which well-nigh wreck the body, and returns to the first camp, richer and yet the same. Through soul-sickness and hallucinations, through delirium and phrenopathic punishments he is led to the super-sanity of genius. He becomes the visionary of things hidden, the medium of spirits, the sinner on the road to Damascus, the prophet of divine justice.