He had found in the depth of the human heart the seven deadly sins, and he traced their poison in every human relationship, under the cloak of respectability, in the qualities which lead to worldly success and honour. Oblique finance, dishonest company-promoting, show philanthropy, unctuous religiosity, servile journalism, create characters which are drawn in bold and dark outline with strongly concentrated colours, but without the exaggeration of which he was accused. The characters are so typical of human weakness and wickedness, the psychological analysis of motives and acts so accurate, that the indictment of the book remains true in spite of changes in social form and personal types. The pompous publisher who grows fat on the brains of young authors, whilst he intimidates them by depreciation; the editor who finds favour with his party and his employers by suppressing every unwelcome truth and spreading every useful party lie; the moneylender who builds up a banking business through exploitation of the financial ruin of others, are contrasted with the unsuccessful and the unworldly. Amongst the artists and intellectual _dilettanti_ who assembled in the Red Room of Berns Restaurant in the evening, and whose hard struggle for bread in the day formed such a sharp contrast to the comfort of the time-servers, Strindberg found the Dionysian madness, without which the sanity of the rest of the world would have been unbearable. There is still life in the making, goodness inviolable, a brotherhood that woos the joy and beauty of life, contemptuous of the badges and labels of Society! But the majority who writhed under his satirical portraiture did not find compensation in his exceptions. For the lightning of his satire had not only played upon the time-worn objects of ridicule--those from which they dissociated themselves with a smile of tolerant amusement--it had illuminated and rent the pillars of Society to which they clung with superstitious respect. Had he not shown how literary and dramatic reputations were made and unmade by the personal ill-will or good-humour of self-constituted critics? Had he not handled the activities of the ancient art-critic, who bestowed automatic praise on all his old friends, and chilly silence on all new painters with merciless severity? Did not his unseemly badinage with the civil service, and with the well-established routine in governmental departments, stamp him as an enemy of Society? Some method of silencing him had to be found.