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 Like Spencer before the old masters, he found the artistic perfection of the past centuries over-rated and superseded.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. But Strindberg defied the art-consciousness of the world by attacking Shakespeare. He knew all his plays, had read them in English, and was familiar with the commentators. He inveighed against the loose and disconnected composition in _Hamlet_, the commonplace characterisation, the weakness of the anti-climax. His sling wanted a Goliath. The blind worship of that which is old and famous roused him to battle. Friends who came from Upsala thought alike and talked alike. They had become parrots who repeated the same views on Raphael and Schiller, automata from which conventional imitation had plucked every idiosyncrasy.