In Gerdt the printer, who urged the young Olof to become a Daniel and to speak the truth before kings, Strindberg saw the revolutionary who is the consistent enemy of compromise. In Olof's mother, who dies in the Catholic faith cursing her heretic son, he hears the eternal cry of the Old stabbed by the New; of the stagnant content that dwells in Woman when it is hurt by the passionate discontent that dwells in Man. The relativity of truth and its perpetual evolution, the inevitable clashing of faiths and convictions, invest the struggle between mother and son with tragic reality. She has refused to call his wife anything but a harlot; for is she not living with a priest? She has in vain exerted parental authority to turn her son from the path of perdition. To her, Olof is the apostle of Antichrist, the child in the meshes of Satan, whom passionately she strives to save. "Ask me not," cries Olof to the mother before delivering his heretical sermon. "A mother's prayer can tempt angels in heaven to apostasy." Two rascally priests pray by her deathbed, their thoughts intent on the bag of gold which tempts their cupidity. She dies comforted by their presence and shrinking from her son's defilement. But death smooths sharp differences, and when her eyes are closed Olof lights the holy candles, places a palm-branch in her hand, and prays for her forgiveness. The figure of Strindberg's Olaus Petri, burning with religious fervour, proclaiming the true creed of Christ to the people who reply by throwing stones, a reformer who does not perish by his faith but lives by acceptance of common sense, is a contribution to the world's deathless _dramatis personæ_. He is very remote from Shakespeare's Wolsey, and the psychological climax is reversed, but there is an ecclesiastical magnificence in the two characters which forces comparisons. There is an impressive simplicity in the language, and the author achieves the highest effects in portraiture with few rhetorical devices. The conflict of personalities makes the drama rich in contrasts, but they are softened by an atmosphere of fatalistic resignation before the irreconcilability of ideas. The characters are all right with the limited measure of rightness which is contained in each soul. They are all wrong with the wrongness which is inseparable from human form. In _Master Olof_ Strindberg spoke as Goethe had spoken in _Goetz von Berlichingen_. _Master Olof_ was written during one of those periods of simple life and isolation which Strindberg sought with the craving of the repentant monk. Debauch and drunkenness were eschewed, milk took the place of liquids of fermentation. Angling, swimming, fencing and mental gymnastics in the company of three sympathetic friends kept body and mind vigorous.