There is undoubtedly a gulf between the personality responsible for the preface to _Lady Julie_ with its crude materialism, and the sensitised consciousness of the man who pours out his soul in the _Blue Books_ and in _Alone_. Nietzscheanism was but a cloak, with which Strindberg covered the _cor laceratum_, which always suffered acutely through the misfortunes of others. The cloak did not fit him. In _Alone_, the dulcet autobiographical finale to the agitato of _Inferno_, we find him in self-imposed and vicarious suffering for the sins of a neighbouring grocer who has failed in business through incompetence and dishonesty. "I went through all his agony," he writes; "thought of his wife, of the approaching quarter-day, of the rent, of the cheques." Strindberg now lived in open enmity with the theories of the survival of the fittest and natural selection; his conception of the evolution idea led him to repudiate the current belief in the descent of man as a glorification of brute-nature, and to cry: "What a shame to have paid homage to the Ape-King, the seducer of my youth!"
To the natural capacity for suffering was added that imposed on him through the development of his psychic powers. He did not only live the lives of others "telepathically"; his sensibility became so exteriorised as to receive impressions at a great distance. Thus he used to feel, when one of his plays was being performed for the first time in some part of Europe, though he had received no information in regard to the performance. In 1907 he told Uddgren that, after going to bed at ten in the evening, he was sometimes awakened by the sound of loud applause which caused him to sit up in bed, wondering if he was at a theatre. Such a telepathic ovation was invariably followed by the news of some dramatic success. In the first _Blue Book_, "the Disciple" relates the following: "In a company I interrupted myself with a smile in the middle of an animated conversation. 'What are you smiling at?' somebody asked. 'The southern express pulled up at the Central Station just now,' was the reply. Another time something similar happened, and I said: 'The curtain has now fallen on the last act in Helsingfors, and I heard the applause after my first night.' I perceive the talk of the people in restaurants after the performance as ringing in the ears. I can hear this all the way from Germany when I have a first performance, though I have no previous knowledge of being played."
