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You are able thus to save a life, but the result is a piece of patch-work with seams à tort et à travers.

That Strindberg and his contemporary adolescent generation had to submit to this, was not our fault. We would have preferred to continue in our belief in the old household-gods, but when we noticed that the state of impotent of the preceding generations had given a vigorous start to cancerous diseases in our breasts, what else could we do but put the knife to the abscesses and remove them while it was yet time?

Because Strindberg marched at the head of us as the incorruptibly honest and fearless champion of truth, we had the power to endure the torture of the operations. We had suffered from those afflictions for years, but they were necessary in order that coming generations might be saved. In our case the mental diseases were only in a primary stage at which an operation was still possible; in the next generation, they would perhaps become incurable.

Cutting down everything that he found decaying or withered, Strindberg continued to advance upon the path which ran like a spiral around the mountain up to its summit. When he arrived, he compared the temple structure situated there to Valhalla, and he found that he himself, once a beaming Balder, had been changed into a reviling Loke.^[1] It is in his Poems in Verse and Prose that we meet him in this guise.

The spirit of the age in general he symbolizes in the