Page:Strindberg the Man (1920).djvu/24

Strindberg’s outline of a cultural history is a patriotic achievement of extraordinary importance. No other book that has come into my hands has awakened such a love for our people as that one book. And it is a love that embraces not only the nobility with the brilliant family names, but also the great nameless masses who in silence have fought all the battles of every day life with a heroism just as great as that which our countrymen developed on the world-famous fields of battle.

Originally Strindberg’s The Swedish People at Home, was projected on a much larger scale, but the publishers forced him to hurry in order to issue the work, which was published in installments, as soon as possible. Strindberg, therefore, found it necessary to condense it more and more, and in the end he was obliged to style the book An Outline. Swedish literature thus lost one of its most monumental works. The foundation is laid, however, and it is to be hoped that the near future may bring forth some historian of cultural progress who in a worthy manner will continue the work which Strindberg began.

The next epoch-making book by Strindberg was his great social satire The New Kingdom. It caused great rejoicing among the young, but wrung a cry of horror from all the old-timers.

The Swedish realm, our entire system of government, the all-constitutive bureaucracy, we had been accustomed from childhood on to regard as a kind of divine institution so flawlessly perfect that we had to admire it as a