It requires no profound psychologic insight to divine in this odious chimera the deplorable abortion of a fine ideal. The distortion of truth emanates in Strindberg's work, as it does in any significant satire or caricature, from indignation over the contrast between a lofty conception and a disappointing reality. What, after all, can be the mission of this hard-featured gallery of females,--peevish, sullen, impudent, grasping, violent, lecherous, malignant, and vindictive,--if it is not to mark pravity and debasement with a stigma in the name of a pure and noble womanhood? * * * * * It should not be left unmentioned that we owe to August Strindberg some works of great perfection fairly free from the black obsession and with a constructive and consistently idealistic tendency: splendid descriptions of a quaint people and their habitat, tinged with a fine sense of humor, as in "The Hemsoe-Dwellers"; charming studies of landscape and of floral and animal life, in the "Portraits of Flowers and Animals"; the colossal work on the Swedish People, once before referred to, a history conceived and executed in a thoroughly modern scientific spirit; two volumes of "Swedish Fortunes and Adventures"; most of his historic dramas also are of superior order. But these works lie outside the scope of the more specific discussion of Strindberg as a mystic and an eccentric to which this sketch is devoted. We may conclude by briefly considering the final phases of Strindberg's checkered intellectual career, and by summing up his general significance for the age.