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Modernities

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Title: Modernities

Author: Horace Barnett Samuel


        
Release date: February 15, 2014 [eBook #44916]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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MODERNITIES

by

HORACE B. SAMUEL

Author of "The Land and Yourself," "The Insurance Act
and Yourself," etc.







New York
E. P. Dutton and Co.
681, Fifth Avenue
1914




DEDICATED

TO

MRS. GEORGE JOSEPH




PREFACE


The ten studies which constitute this volume are devoted to individuals
who are held out as being reasonably characteristic of that modern
movement of the last and present century which started with the French
Revolution. At any rate, they were all modern once. For the spirit of
modernity enjoys, like the priest-god of the ancient grove, only a
temporary reign, and is speedily killed by its inevitable successor.

It is somewhat difficult to find any common denominator for the
subjects of these studies. The essays must be left largely to speak for
themselves. If, however, an attempt were to be made to pronounce of
what the spirit of modernity really consists, one might suggest that it
is a spirit of energy, of fearlessness in analysis, whose sole _raison
d'être_ and whose sole ideal is actual life itself.

The studies on Miss Marie Corelli and Herr Wedekind are here published
for the first time. Those on Disraeli, Heine, Stendhal, Schnitzler,
Strindberg, the Futurists, and Verhaeren have appeared as articles in
the _Fortnightly Review_; while the essay on Nietzsche's "Genealogy
of Morals" was first published in the _English Review_. I have
consequently pleasure in expressing my thanks and acknowledgments
to Mr. W. L. Courtney and Mr. Austin Harrison for their courtesy in
allowing these articles to be reproduced in their present form. I have
also to thank the editor of the _New Statesman_ for permission to
republish my translation from Marinetti's, "The Pope's Monoplane."

I have made additions to the essays on Schnitzler and the Futurists
with a view to incorporating some reference to the more recent works of
Dr. Schnitzler and M. Marinetti.

                                                      HORACE B. SAMUEL.

   Temple, _October_ 1913.



CONTENTS

STENDHAL: THE COMPLEAT INTELLECTUAL
HEINRICH HEINE
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DISRAELI
NIETZSCHE'S "GENEALOGY OF MORALS"
AUGUST STRINDBERG
THE WELTANSCHAUUNG OF MISS MARIE CORELLI
FRANK WEDEKIND
ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
ÉMILE VERHAEREN
THE FUTURE OF FUTURISM

INDEX




MODERNITIES

STENDHAL

THE COMPLEAT INTELLECTUAL


"I only write for a hundred readers, and of those unhappy, amiable,
charming creatures without either hypocrisy or morality whom I should
like to please, I only know one or two."

On the assumption that with the natural growth of the population, "the
happy few" for whom Stendhal wrote have sufficiently multiplied in this
country to render it likely that a reasonable number of readers will
possess these requisite qualifications, it becomes relevant to give
both some analysis and some appreciation of a man who is perhaps the
most perfect type of the "intellectual" that Europe has yet produced.

For Stendhal was an intellectual in the fullest sense of the term.
Neither a recluse scholar nor a rabid doctrinaire, but a man of the
world and of action, of brain, heart, and sensibility, he sought and to
a large extent found in the intellect an energetic servant, by whose
faithful escort he could sally forth on that "hunt of happiness," which
led him in his variegated career from the field of battle to the bowers
of love, and from the high plateaux of reverie to the meticulous _terre
à terre_ observations of psychological science.

Henri Beyle was born in 1783, in Grenoble in Dauphiné, a town whose
hidebound provincialism he hated consistently from his childhood to his
death.

"His childhood," to quote from his own autobiography, "was a continual
period of unhappiness and of hate and of the sweets of a vengeance
which was always helpless." Loving his mother, according to his
somewhat pathetic boast, with a man's passion, he lost her at the age
of seven. On being told that God had taken her away, he conceived
with immediate logic an implacable hatred against that Deity who had
deprived him of the being whom he loved most in the world, a hatred
which, turning into momentary gratitude on the occasion of the death
of his _bête noire_, his Aunt Séraphie, was finally merged in the
chilly negation of the honest atheist. Inasmuch as to the quality
of logic Stendhal added those of rebelliousness and imagination, it
is not surprising that even in childhood his relations should have
been inharmonious with his father, a royalist lawyer situated on the
borderland between the bourgeoisie and the gentry. The royalism of
his father immediately sufficed to turn Henri into the reddest of
republicans. The execution of Louis XVI filled his childish heart with
holy glee, and the guillotining of two royalist priests at Grenoble
affected him with an elation which, if solitary, was for that very
reason all the more genuine. So hot indeed was his republican ardour
that he even forged an official order requiring his enlistment in a
body of cadets. But although he was unappreciative of his father,
whom he would refer to in his diaries and letters by the almost
equally offensive synonyms of "bastard" and "Jesuit," he none the
less manifested the deepest affection for his maternal grandfather,
M. Gagnon, a Voltairean doctor of lively intellect and genial
disposition, and for the cook and the butler of the paternal house.

The child soon began to stimulate by books his naturally precocious
imagination, stealing in his thirst for knowledge those volumes which
the solicitude or conventionalism of his father deemed it inexpedient
for him to read. From _La Nouvelle Héloïse_ in particular he would
appear to have derived imaginative transports far transcending the
joys of a prosaic reality. But he had conceived an early aversion to
poetry by reason of an awful poem by some Jesuit about a fly that got
drowned in a cup of milk. The reading of Molière, however, dispelled
the unpleasant association, and his early ambition became crystallised
into going to Paris and writing a comedy. For apart from the magnetic
attraction of the metropolis itself, Grenoble exacerbated his nerves.
Unappreciated at home, he found himself, with the exception of one or
two genuine friendships, solitary and unpopular at school among those
masters and schoolfellows whom he already despised. It is interesting
to remember, parenthetically, that even when a schoolboy he fought a
duel, and boldly faced the fire of what subsequently turned out to
have been an unloaded pistol by concentrating his gaze on a distant
rock. His intellectual ability carried all before him, and he found in
mathematics a loophole of escape from his provincial prison. Coming out
top in the examinations he obtained a bourse at the École Polytechnique
at the age of sixteen, and was sent to Paris with instructions to place
himself under the protection of M. Daru, a relative of the family
and the holder of a ministerial appointment. By this time his erotic
ambitions were beginning to formulate themselves with comparative
definiteness. He had already experienced a passion for a Mdlle. Kably,
a local actress, which while never attaining a more advanced stage
than that of inquiring the way to her lodgings, was none the less
violent. Anyway, when the boy went to Paris he had finally decided to
live up to the best of his ability to the Don Juan ideal.

His first sojourn at Paris, however, surprised both himself and
his parents. With considerable obstinacy he refused to attend the
Polytechnique and set himself to study privately in his own rooms. But
the first essay at the single life proved a fiasco. No dashing romances
coloured his solitary existence, while he was either too nervous or
too refined to sully his soul with mere mercenary pleasure. He became
dreamy and ill, and was eventually taken charge of by the Darus. In the
pompous officialdom of this family his health recovered, but his spirit
rebelled. He complains bitterly that he not only had to sleep in the
house but also to dine with the family. He none the less knit a firm
friendship with his cousin Martial Daru, a brainless and amiable youth
who subsequently at Milan and at Brunswick taught him the elementary
rules of amoristic etiquette.

The Marengo campaign gave him an opportunity of practising that
Napoleonic worship which was his one and only religion. The influence
of the Darus procured him a commission, and the passage of the St.
Bernard was one of the landmarks of his life. He drank to the full
the intoxication of victory which attended the entry into Milan of
the youthful army, and conceived for the Countess Angela Pietragrua,
"a sublime wanton a la Lucrezia Borgia," a passion which ten years
subsequently was duly rewarded. The Milan period was, according to that
epitaph which he penned himself, "the finest in his life." "He adored
music and literary renown, set great store by the art of giving a good
blow with the sabre and was wounded in the foot by a thrust received
in a duel. He was aide-de-camp to Lieutenant-General Michaud. He
distinguished himself. He was the happiest and probably the maddest of
men when on the conclusion of the peace the minister of war ordered the
subaltern aides-de-camp to return to their regiments."

Returning to Grenoble on furlough, he fell in love with Mdlle.
Victorine Bigillon, the sister of one of his best friends, whom he
suddenly followed to Paris, although his leave would appear to have
been limited to Grenoble. Reprimanded by the authorities he sent in
his resignation, and "madder than ever started to study with the view
of becoming a great man." His experiences, subjective and objective,
during this period are described in his journal with a detail, a
lucidity, an honesty which are worthy of some mention. For we see now
officially scheduled and officially annotated all those heterogeneous
qualities which made up the sum of this man's psychology; his rigid
intellectualism, his sentimentality, his ambition, his artistic
enthusiasm, his constant flow of analytical energy (directed now
against the external world, now against himself, yet scarcely for
a single moment losing itself in a complete abandon), his love of
witty conversation, whether his own or that of others, the sweep of
his intellectual ideals, his intolerance of bores and fools, that
apprehensive self-consciousness which so often made him the dupe of the
fear of being duped, his exuberant _joie de vivre_, and "that love of
glory and sensibility which are only for the _intimes_ friends."

And extraordinarily stimulating are the reflections, charmingly
interspersed with English phrases, in this breviary of intellectual
egoism, where the _I_ and the _Me_ enter into a Holy Alliance in their
heroic conspiracy against the rest of the world. It was mainly this
self-consciousness which induced Beyle deliberately to set himself to
become a psychologist. "Nearly all the misfortunes of life," writes
our twenty-year-old philosopher, "come from the false notions we have
concerning that which happens to us. Must know men thoroughly." And how
he scolds himself when he fails to live up to his ideal, and when "his
accursed mania for being brilliant results in his being more occupied
in making a deep impression than in guessing others." And so it is that
he reflects, "what a fool I am not to have the knack of drawing out
each man to tell his story, which might prove so useful to me," and
that the man, who was subsequently to style himself by profession "an
observer of the human heart" developed that "universal desire to know
all that passes within a man." Though, however, his love of psychology
was thus, as we have seen, to some extent a case of reaction from his
own nervousness and of externalised introspection, it is impossible to
deny the purity of his intellectual enthusiasm. At an age when even the
chastest of prose writers may well be pardoned for wallowing in the
debauchery of purple patches, he inscribes in his journal that the sole
quality in style is lucidity. It was this deeply rooted abhorrence of
floridity and ostentation that on a subsequent occasion nearly induced
him to fight a duel with a man who had praised unduly the well known
"la cime indéterminable des arbres" of Chateaubriand, that _bête noire_
of Stendhal's of whom he prophesies in English, "This man shall not
outlive his century." In the sphere of philosophy, characteristically
enough his logical and mathematical turn of mind embraced with natural
love and facility the materialism of the French sceptics.

"Helvetius opened wide to him the doors of the world," and he became
on terms of affectionate friendship with the aged philosopher Destutt
Tracy. So radical indeed was Stendhal's philosophic bias, that on one
occasion, feeling presumably more studious than amorous, he neglects
an assignation with the lady whom he was pursuing, to plunge with even
greater gusto into a hundred pages of Adam Smith. Though, too, he
habitually worked twelve hours a day, he would appear to have cut a
frequent figure in both those formal and Bohemian sets of the capital
which offered such refreshing contrasts and facilities to artistic
young men.

His love for Victorine proved unreciprocated. There followed innocuous
passages with a respectable demi-vierge, referred to in the journal as
Adèle of the Gate. But Stendhal found his chief distraction in that
society of authors, men of the world, and actresses whom he met at the
house of Dugazon, a celebrated teacher of theatrical elocution. In this
variegated set, where the mutual relations and complications of the
various members provided a chronic source of interest and speculation,
Stendhal met a young mother, named Mélanie Guilbert (the Louason of
the journal), "a charming actress who had the most refined sentiments
and to whom I never gave a son." To this lady Stendhal set himself to
lay a siege, which was eventually successful after a quite unnecessary
duration.

The demeanour of Stendhal in society is highly instructive. A man of
such abnormal sensitiveness that "the least thing moved him and made
the tears come to his eyes," he encased himself in an "irony which
was imperceptible to the vulgar," and, posing with marked success as
both a cynic and a roué, notes with interest "the terrifying effect
which his particular kind of wit produced on society." But if his
deliberate brilliancies won him respect rather than popularity, they
certainly consolidated his own selfestimation. "Maximum of wit in my
life--Je me suis toujours vu aller mais sans gêne pour cela," runs
one of these honest confidences which he made to himself, "without
lying, without deceiving himself, with pleasure, like a letter to
a friend." He needed, however, the audience of a salon to put him
on his mettle, and would appear, at any rate during this period, to
have been somewhat ineffective in _tête-à-tête_. His journal records
a lamentable succession of muddled opportunities, of occasions when
he was too natural to observe his companion with sufficient acumen,
and of occasions when he was not natural enough. It was the latter
characteristic, however, which predominated, and even though the
emotion of his love was genuine, its expression was a bookish and
theatrical formulation of an already rehearsed ideal, directed quite
as much to the critical approbation of his own consciousness as to
the actual object of his wooing. Yet the full gusto of a rich _joie
de vivre_ palpitates in this incessant cerebration. Time after time
do we come upon the entry that such and such a day was the happiest
in his life. And if at times "his only distraction was to observe his
own state, it was none the less a great one." His very sensibility
becomes a source of gratification, and he will congratulate himself
that he has perhaps lived more in a day than many of his more stolid
friends will live in the whole of their life. The financial problem
pressed irksomely upon him at this period, and, combining business
and sentiment, he obtained a position in a house at Marseilles, in
which town Louason had obtained an engagement. Whether however because
of parental pressure or because the distractions of business had
cured him of his passion, he soon left Marseilles for Grenoble, and
subsequently returned to Paris.

The campaigns of 1806 to 1809 offered new scope to the ambition of
Beyle, who always rose successfully to practical emergencies and was,
as he tells us himself, "most simple and most natural in the greatest
dangers." He was present at the battle of Jena, came several times into
personal contact with Napoleon, and discharged with singular efficiency
the fiscal administration of the state of Brunswick.

The next landmark in his life, however, is his passion for the wife of
his relative, the punctilious but aged M. Daru, a passion the various
nuances of which are faithfully recorded in those sections of his
journal headed "The Life and Sentiments of Silencious Harry," "Memoirs
of my life during my amour for the Gräfin P----y," the narrative of
the intrigue between Julien and Mathilde in _Le Rouge et le Noir,_
and the posthumous fragment entitled "Le Consultation de Banti," a
piece of methodical deliberation on the pressing question, "_Dois-je
ou ne dois-je pas avoir la duchesse?_" which, it is believed, is quite
unparalleled in the whole history of eroticism. For with his peculiar
faculty of driving his intellect and his heart in double harness,
he analyses the pros and cons of the erotic and ethical situation,
the qualifications and defects of the lady with all the documentary
coldness of a Government report. His diary during this period is so
delightfully honest as to justify quotations: "Tuesday, 18th April
1810, 1st day of Longchamps. On the whole I think that I love the
Countess P----y a little." "10th August, I have proved by an evidence
the truth of my principles about rousing love in the heart of a woman."
"The 4th August. I was reading the excellent essay of Hume upon the
feudal government from two till half-past four o'clock; during this
time she wanted my presence; _au retour_ she cannot say a word without
speaking of me or to me. J'eus le tort de ne pas hasarder quelque
entreprise. Mais je le répète j'ai trop de sensibility pour avoir
jamais du talent dans l'art de Lovelace!"

Stendhal would appear to have treated this particular liaison rather
as a polite routine of social amenities than as a serious passion. How
refreshing is his account of the tedium of the relationship: "At Paris
I have no time for working to Letellier [a mediocre comedy in verse
which was never finished], I have here nothing but my passion for C.
Palfy; 'tis a month that I reproach to myself the money that I spent
without pleasure of mind into those walls."

Towards the autumn of 1811 Stendhal journeyed to Milan, his favourite
town in Europe whose citizenship he arrogated in his self-written
epitaph. Renewing his acquaintance with the Countess Pietragrua, for
whom he had languished in dumb nervousness on his first visit to
Milan ten years past, he took an especial joy in compensating for his
previous clumsiness by displaying the easy brilliancy of the man of
the world. And then on the eve of his departure from Milan he writes
in English--"I was, I believe, in love." "Après un combat moral fort
sérieux où j'ai joué le malheur et jusque le désespoir, elle est à
moi onze heures et demi. Je pars de Milan à une heure et demie le 22
septembre 1811."

In 1812 Beyle served in the Moscow campaign, having obtained a position
in the commissariat department. It is characteristic that he should
have kept his nerve during the whole of that panic-stricken retreat,
shaving every day, and repelling with considerable sangfroid and
bravery an attack by the enemy on a hospital of wounded. Disgusted by
the Restoration, he settled in Milan in 1814, resumed his relationship
with Mme. Angelina Pietragrua, who would appear to have systematically
deceived him, and lived generally the life of the dilettante and the
man of letters.

In 1814 he published his first work, _The Lives of Haydn and Mozart_
par Louis Alexander Bombet. This pseudonym is partly due to Beyle's
habitual mania for anonymity and partly to the consciousness that
the substantial portion of the work had been coolly plagiarised from
Carpani. Nor do any morbid pangs of conscience appear to have ruffled
the serenity of the author, who found a precedent for his action in the
plagiarisms of Molière and a subsequent justification in the money that
he obtained. Emboldened indeed by his success he published in London,
in 1817, a series of travel sketches, _Rome, Naples, and Florence_,
which owed in some places an unacknowledged debt to the _Italian
Travels_ of Goethe. Yet even so, viewed as a whole the book possesses a
richness of material, a raciness of observation, a joy of journeying,
a spontaneity of verve which give it a high rank among travel
literature and make it eminently readable even at the present day.
Less a guide-book than a personal narrative, it describes the actual
life of the period as actually lived by a man who plumed himself at
thirty on still retaining all the folly of his youth. The author was an
enthusiast for the theatre, a devotee of the ballet, and a keen wagerer
of those exquisite ices which formed one of the chief allurements of
the Scala Theatre. An enthusiastic anti-clerical and an eager reader
of forbidden political plays at midnight côteries, he yet feels on
visiting the Church of the Jesuits "a little of that respect which even
the most criminal power inspires when it has done great things." And
how simply natural is the following confession of a traveller's faith:
"I experience a sensation of happiness on my journeys which I have
found nowhere else, even in the most happy days of my ambition." In the
same year, 1817, Stendhal published his _History of Painting in Italy_.
This book is remarkable, not so much by its purely æsthetic criticism
as by the application to the sphere of artistic criticism of those
theories of heredity, climate, and environment which were afterwards to
be so brilliantly exploited at the hands of Taine. Some mention should
also be made of that simplicity of lyric fervour which distinguishes
the extremely fine dedication to Napoleon.

In 1821 much to his disgust, Stendhal, accused, and apparently quite
unjustly, of being a French spy, was forced to leave Milan. This exile
was all the more irksome as Stendhal's amoristic history had now
reached its great climax. If Louason had constituted the initiation
of his youth, Mme. Daru the acme of his social achievement, and the
Countess Pietragrua the incarnate realisation of his adventurous search
for ideal beauty, it was in Mèthilde, Countess Dembowska, that his
mature heart found a passion which though always ungratified remained
none the less grand. It is instructive to observe how honest was the
love, how deep the devotion of this official rake for "une femme
que j'adorais, qui m'aimait et qui ne s'est jamais donnée a moi."
Particularly significant is it that this man, whose cynicism had gained
for him the sobriquet of Don Juan, should have condemned himself to a
three years' fidelity that thereby he might become more worthy of that
"âme angélique cachée dans un si beau corps qui quittait la vie en
1825." But it is even more interesting to notice how there mingles with
this perfectly genuine attachment the most morbid self-consciousness
and fear of ridicule:

        "Le pire des malheurs, m'écriais-je, serait que ces
        hommes si secs, mes amis au milieu desquels je vais
        vivre, devinissent ma passion pour une femme que je n'ai
        pas eue. Cette peur mille fois répétée a été dans le
        fait la principe dirigeante de ma vie pendant dix ans.
        C'est par là que je suis venu à avoir de l'esprit, chose
        qui était la butte de mes mépris à Milan en 1818 quand
        j'aimais Mèthilde."

In 1822 Stendhal published in Paris that book _De l'Amour_ which he had
composed at odd moments during his sojourn at Milan. Thought by the
author to be his most important work, and deemed worthy by the public
of a total purchase of seventeen copies, the work possesses even at the
present day considerable claims upon the attention. For it possesses
the unique characteristic of being a treatise on the sexual emotion
written by an author who was at the same time an acute psychologist
and a brilliant man of the world, who could test abstract theories by
concrete practice, and could co-ordinate what he had felt in himself
and observed in others into broad general principles. While we do not
propose to enter into a detailed analysis of this work, which occupies
more than four hundred pages of close print, we may perhaps mention the
author's fourfold division of love into "amour-passion, amour-goût,
amour physique, amour de vanité."

We would also refer to just a few of the innumerable maxims with which
the book is studded, as typical of that naïvely subtle simplicity which
is so characteristic of our author:

"L'amour c'est avoir du plaisir à voir, toucher, sentir par tous
les sens et d'aussi près que possible un objet aimable et qui nous
aime"--"l'amant erre sans cesse entre ces idées: 1. Elle a toutes les
perfections. 2. Elle m'aime. 3. Comment faire pour obtenir d'elle la
plus grande preuve d'amour possible?" "Tout l'art d'aimer se réduit,
ça me semble, à dire exactement à quels degrés d'ivresse le moment
comporte, c'est-à-dire en d'autres termes à écouter son âme."

And how curious is the following phrase where the point of view of
this cynical roué seems for once quite in accord with that of the more
ladylike of our lady novelists: "Le plus grand bonheur qui puisse
donner l'amour c'est le premier serrement de main d'une femme qu'on
aime."

But the philosophical breadth of the author is perhaps best manifested
by that spirit of comparative erotology, which induces him to analyse
the various nuances of love all over the world from Boston to
Constantinople, while he traces the connection between each particular
variation and the climate of the country and the character of the
people.

With the habitual cleverness of his tongue exacerbated by the
misfortune of his love affair, Stendhal became a distinguished but
unpopular figure with the Parisians. Most in his element "in a salon
of eight or ten persons where all the women have had lovers, where the
conversation is gay and flavoured with anecdote, and when light punch
is served at half-past twelve," he was merciless to the philistine and
the bore, would rally with tactless truth a highly respectable lady
on her liaison with the Archbishop of Paris, and would snub unwelcome
declarations with artistic repartee.

Plunging vigorously into the controversy between the Classicism and
the Romanticists, Stendhal published in 1825 his celebrated pamphlet
_Racine and Shakespeare_, which denounced the Alexandrine as a
_cache-sottise_ and vindicated the live modernity of a present age
against the dead orthodoxy of a past generation. This little work,
rushed off in a few hours, is one of Stendhal's happiest efforts. The
style is bright with a lucid enthusiasm and sharp with a malicious
logic. How crisp for instance is the truth of the following:

"Le Viellard--'Continuons.'"

"Le jeune Homme--'Examinons.'"

"Voilà tout le dix-neuvieme siècle."

_Shakespeare and Racine_ was followed by the _Life of Rossini_, whom
Stendhal had known personally at Milan, and by _Armance_ (1827), the
first of that series of novels on which the literary fame of Stendhal
substantially rests. This work possesses all the essential Stendhalian
qualities; the vein of Byronism, the contempt for the bourgeois, the
lucid style, and above all the detailed description of what takes place
in the interior of the mind. The plot consists of the sentimental
complications resultant on the consciousness of the hero, who is one of
those souls made to feel with energy, of his natural disqualification
for efficient marriage. Yet with a subtlety which is Jamesian in
everything but the clearness of the style, the actual difficulty is
never explicitly mentioned, though every nuance of sensitiveness is
delicately delineated. And with what delicate simplicity does Stendhal
narrate the suicide of Octave, who has simply married his adored cousin
in order to leave her the prestige of a rich and honourable widowhood.
Shortly after the marriage Octave has left his wife and set sail for
Greece.

"Never had Octave been so under the spell of the most tender love as
in this supreme moment. He granted to himself the luxury of telling
everything to Armance except the nature of his death. A cabin boy from
the top of the mast cried out 'land.' It was the soil of Greece and
the mountains of the Morea which were to be perceived on the horizon.
A fresh wind carried on the vessel rapidly. The name of Greece
reawakened the courage of Octave. I salute you, he said to himself,
oh land of heroes. And at midnight on the third of March, as the moon
was rising behind Mount Kalos, a self-prepared mixture of opium and
digitalis softly delivered Octave from that life of his which had been
so agitated. He was found at dawn motionless on the bridge, resting on
some cordage. A smile was on his lips, and his rare beauty struck even
the sailors charged with his burial."

Stendhal's next work was the well-known _Promenades en Rome_, an
admirable book entirely free from the taint of the conscientious
sightseer, but replete with the original observations of an acute
cosmopolitan who never shrinks from following his fancy along some
amiable digression. It was however in _Le Rouge et le Noir_, 1830,
that Stendhal gave to the world his real masterpiece. This work, which
has become since the end of the last century the revered object of the
cult of the Rougistes, among whom it is a point of honour to know the
whole book by heart, and which occupies an equal rank with that of the
_Comédie Humaine_ or _Madame Bovary_, is remarkable both by reason of
the intrinsic character of the hero and the psychological technique
with which the story is told.

The hero, like Stendhal himself, possesses a subjective and sensitive
mind, rendered tough and virile by the savage energy of the Revolution.
In fact some previous knowledge both of Stendhal's life and Stendhal's
character are requisite for the full appreciation of a book which,
in spite of the fact that the hero is not only a seducer but also an
attempted murderer, has yet some claim to be regarded as the dignified
confession of a robust faith.

Julien Sorel is the son of a carpenter in a small provincial town.
Proved guilty from his infancy of the unpardonable crime of being
different from the average child, he is harshly treated by his father.
The Napoleonic legend inflames his imagination, but he lives in the
time of the Restoration, when it is the Church and not the Army which
opens a career to the ambitious parvenu. By a stroke of fortune Julien
obtains when nineteen the post of tutor to the children of the local
mayor, M. de Rênal. Feeling acutely the degradation of his menial
position, he violently rebels against his own sensitiveness, as he
deliberately forges the natural softness of his heart into the most
brutal iron. Formulating the ideals of pride and success, he determines
to live up to them at whatever cost either to himself or others. When
consequently the charming though ordinary Mme. de Rênal begins to
manifest towards him a somewhat personal interest, he sets himself
to force the pace, as a matter neither of sensuality nor even of
politeness, but of sheer self-respect. What for instance are Julien's
feelings during the first assignation?

"Instead of being attentive to the transports which he was bringing
into existence, and to those feelings of remorse which somewhat dulled
their vivacity, the idea of his duty never ceased to be present
to his eyes. He was afraid of an awful remorse and of an eternal
stultification if he should deviate from that ideal model which he
proposed to follow." From being, however, the mere instrument of his
ethical self-discipline, Mme. de Rênal becomes the sincere object of
his romantic devotion. But the intrigue is discovered and Julien is
packed off to a theological seminary. Though a devout freethinker,
he sacrifices his beliefs to his ambition. His deviation from the
mediocre pattern renders him unpopular, but his very unpopularity
only serves to stiffen his perverse obstinacy for success. After
an agonising struggle he succeeds in winning the due of abilities,
and goes to Paris to become secretary to the Marquis de la Môle, an
influential nobleman, drawn after the model of the author's relative,
Comte Daru. He gains the confidence of his employer, which he rewards
by an intrigue with his daughter Mathilde (Mme. Daru). Here again it
is stern devotion to principle, not natural love, which is the motive.
It is in fact on purely ethical and idealistic considerations that he
goes to the nocturnal rendezvous in the same spirit that a soldier
goes to the field of battle or a martyr to the stake. And as Banti in
that variation of Hamlet's soliloquy of "To be or not to be," which we
have already considered, clinched the question by the consideration
that if he did not embrace the opportunity he would regret it all his
life, so did Julien exclaim: "Au fond il y a de la lâcheté à ne pas y
aller, ce mot décide tout." Note also the masterly delineation of the
girl herself, who, yielding originally by reason neither of her love
nor her weakness, but simply through her romantic desire to emulate
an illustrious ancestress, falls completely in love and manifests a
courage which in spite of some affectation is none the less genuine.
The Marquis de la Môle is compelled to promise to recognise Julien as
his son-in-law and procures for him a commission in the army. But now
just when the hero's ambitions are beginning to realise themselves,
Mme. de Rênal writes, under priestly instigation, a slanderous letter
to his prospective father-in-law, who withdraws his consent to the
marriage. Julien in a fit of rage shoots at Mme. de Rênal, gives
himself up, and dies "poetically" on the scaffold.

It is not surprising that in view of these facts critics lacking
in subtlety have found the character of Julien the wildest of
impossibilities, the most monstrous of distortions. It is, however, a
reasonably safe maxim to assume that those characters in novels which
are thought to be too bizarre to exist are taken from actual life. In
this case the actual framework of fact is drawn from the history of
a young student of Besançon named Berthet, while as we have already
seen his mental attitude is that of Stendhal himself. While no doubt a
villain from the ethical standpoint of a modern serial, Julien is none
the less, viewed more deeply, the Nietzschean knight-errant of energy
and efficiency, the successful pursuer of a subjective ideal, and a
perfect example of the Aristotelian virtue of _ἐγκράτεια_.
Of all the discontented young idealists of the literature of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, who find themselves thrown
into collision with conventional society, the Werthers, the Renés, the
Don Juans, the Karl Moors, and the Vivian Greys, Julien Sorel is by far
the most interesting and intellectually by far the most respectable. He
has no hysterical and visionary aspirations, no mawkish Weltschmerz.
A phenomenal power of analysis renders his aim direct and simple.
He proposes to open the oyster of the world with the sword of his
intellect. _Le Rouge et le Noir_ is the tragedy of energy and ambition,
the epic of the struggle for existence.

Reverting from the emotional content of the book to its more technical
characteristics, it may be claimed that it was the first novel in the
history of European literature to portray with successful consistency
a series of characters alternately complex and simple, in a style
which, whatever might be the personal sympathies and aversions of the
author, subordinated all picturesque flourishes to his cardinal aim
of psychological truth. For on the principle that the external life
is but the mere mechanical expression of the life carried on within
the mind, Stendhal portrays his characters by describing their mental
processes. This method is of course most palpable in Julien, who lives
in a chronic state of soliloquy which fails, however, to blunt the edge
of his drastic action, and who keeps inside his brain a register which
tickets every process with the most copious annotations. But even such
comparatively simple characters as M. Rênal, the purse-proud mayor of
a petty provincial town; Mme. de Rênal, the conventionally adulterous
wife; abbé Pirard, the Jansenist priest, all think too according to
their dimmer lights and their limited intelligences, and their thoughts
also are duly recorded with scientific precision.

The same year in which _Le Rouge et le Noir_ was published, Stendhal
wrote his other great work _La Chartreuse de Parme_, which while
thought by Taine and Balzac, though not by Goethe, to have been his
masterpiece, certainly lacks the original outlook and concentrated
force of the earlier work. In this book, which describes all the
ramifying intrigues of that Italian court life which Stendhal knew and
loved so well, the rich tapestry of romance is successfully embroidered
by the needle of the psychologist. The rapid succession of adventure
is not an end in itself, but simply a means to the setting in motion
of this numerous array of characters whose cerebral interiors are so
faithfully portrayed; Fabrice del Dougo, the hero, no Ishmael of the
intellect like Julien, but a _jeune premier_ with a soul, who runs a
wild career of military ardour, amoristic extravagance, justifiable
homicide, and political persecution, only finally to fall in love with
his gaoler's daughter and die in the self-chosen exile of a Trappist
monastery; the Duchess of Sanseverina (a reincarnation of Stendhal's
mistress, Countess Pietragrua), his dashing and magnanimous aunt who
loves him with an ardour which the reader thinks must at any rate have
needed a papal dispensation; Count Mosca, the hardened minister and
man of the world who is yet capable of all the devotion of a grand
passion; his enemy, the grotesque and plebeian Raversi; the loyal
and sonneteering coachman, Ludovici; the pretty and amiable little
actress Marietta with her obstreperous lover and her avaricious duenna;
Ranuce Ernest of Parma studiously living up to his majestic rôle; and
most romantic if not most interesting of all, Clèlia Conti, with her
pathetic clash of amoristic devotion and filial duty.

In 1830 the monetary embarrassments of Stendhal forced him to leave
Paris and take up the post of consul at Trieste. The Ultramontanes,
however, with a not unnatural desire to be revenged on a man whose
attitude to the Church is well crystallised in the phrase that "the
priests were the true enemies of all civilisation," drove him from
his position, and he was transferred to Civita Vecchia where he
remained till 1835, solacing his ennui by the compilation of his
autobiography and thinking seriously of marriage with the rich and
highly respectable daughter of his laundress. Returning to Paris,
Stendhal completed _Lucien Leuwen_, that long posthumous romance of the
financial, literary, and political life of the age of Louis Philippe,
a work which, though lacking something of the high vital quality of
_La Chartreuse_ and _Le Rouge et le Noir_, does ample justice to the
encyclopædic powers of the author's observation. For here too we
trace the personal Stendhalian characteristics, the sympathy with
the isolated intellectual, the contempt for the bourgeois and the
philistine, the idealisation of an efficiency that is not always
achieved. We may perhaps give a quotation which well illustrates the
friendly malice with which this detached novelist treats even his most
favoured heroes:

"He talked for the sake of talking, he bandied the pro and the con, he
exaggerated and altered the circumstances of every story which he told,
and he told a great many and at great length. In a word he talked like
a young man of parts from the provinces; and consequently his success
was immense."

And how neat in the subtle simplicity of its irony is the following:

"He was received in this house with that stiffness resulting from
baulked hopes of matrimony which has the knack of making itself felt in
such a variety of ways and in so amiable a manner in a family composed
of six young ladies who are particularly pretty."

Returning to Paris, Stendhal commenced in 1838 the last of his novels,
the posthumous and unfinished _Lamiel_. Influenced, though by no means
discouraged by the lack of success of his other novels, he determined
to write "in a wittier style on a more intelligible subject," and
with regard to each incident to ask himself the question, "Should it
be described philosophically or described narratively according to
the doctrine of Ariosto?" Hence Lamiel, the most fascinating feminine
character in the whole of the Stendhalian literature. For Lamiel is a
young woman possessed simultaneously of a brisk intellectual honesty,
a lively humour, a charming _naïveté,_ and a Nietzschean outlook on
a tumultuous world. "Her character was based on a profound disgust
for pusillanimity," and "where there was no danger there she found no
pleasure." The whole book is crisp with the true comic spirit. The
scene in particular in which Lamiel purchases her first lesson in the
essential element of human knowledge, as a mere matter of intellectual
curiosity, is a masterpiece of racy delicacy. Yet acuteness of
psychology is never sacrificed to airiness of style. Sansfin the
malicious hump-backed doctor, Comte D'Aubigné Nerwinde the snob, "a
serious, prudent, and melancholy paragon always preoccupied with public
opinion," the plebeian parents of Lamiel, the pompous duchess, the
conventional young lord, are all portrayed with a delightful malice
whose satire is never too extravagant to be otherwise than convincing.

But it is Lamiel herself who dominates the book, Lamiel with that
mixture of high flippancy and deep seriousness which is so essentially
attractive, ever developing fresh phases in response to her repeated
change of environment, yet ever retaining a fundamental consistency
with her original character. It can only be regretted that Stendhal
should have left unfinished what might well have been possibly the
greatest, and certainly the most amusing of all his novels, and that
having traced the adventures of his heroine from her plebeian origin to
the aristocratic château, and from the aristocratic château to Paris,
he should finally leave her floating jauntily amid all the rich welter
of Parisian life with only a synopsis of those subsequent experiences
which if undergone would have entitled her to rank as one of the most
truly romantic characters in the whole of fiction.

In 1842, Stendhal, with his physical and intellectual faculties still
unimpaired, died suddenly at the age of fifty-nine. Like his hero
Julien, he was "game" to the last, and "I have struck nothingness" was
his self-given substitute for the more orthodox viaticum.

In endeavouring to adjudicate finally the value of Stendhal, it is
difficult not to yield to the fascination of his cock-sure prophecy of
his eventual fame. For as Stendhal the man, in his autobiographical
writings, _La Vie de Henri Brulard, Le Journal_, and _Souvenirs
d'Egotisme_, would project his ego some years forward and as it
were shake hands with himself across the gulf of time, so, one can
almost say, Stendhal, the incarnation of the early nineteenth-century
Zeitgeist, with his genial greeting, "Je serai compris vers 1880,"
shakes hands with those modern men of the world who rightly or wrongly
have imagined themselves to be incarnations of the Zeitgeist of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as they look back with
appreciative camaraderie at this earlier manifestation of their own
selves. And this no doubt is why Stendhal, viewed of course with a not
unnatural Ultramontane frigidity by such critics as Sainte-Beuve or
Émile Faguet, has become the spoilt darling of Nietzsche, Taine, and
Bourget, and indeed all the more intellectual spirits in modern French
and German literature.

The life of Stendhal no doubt may not have been as ideally satisfactory
as his theories may have warranted. A man, who professed to find his
chief interest in life in the erotic emotion, he played as often as
not the rôle of the unhappy lover. His spasmodic fits of political and
military ambition spluttered out in the self-complacent consciousness
of their own intensity. He suffered throughout his life from being a
dilettante with a financial competence. Yet it is no small achievement
to have chased happiness so consistently and with so male an energy, to
have kept unjaded to the last his intellectual gusto and the appetite
of his _joie de vivre_, and to have been the first man in European
literature to have put into efficient practice, without thereby in
any way detracting from the clearness of his own personal note, the
important principle that the elaborate delineation of character is even
more the function of the novel than adventurous action or picturesque
description. And so it is that we entitle Stendhal the patentee of
psychology, the inventor of introspection, and take our leave of him
with his own epitaph:

                Qui giace
           ARRIGO BEYLE MILANESE
            isse, scrisse, amo.




HEINRICH HEINE


Heine seems, viewed superficially, the most baffling, elusive, and
inconsistent of all writers, the veritable Proteus of poetry. He has
so many shapes, that at the first blush it seems almost impossible to
grasp finally and definitely the one genuine Heine. What is really
this man who is now a gamin and now an angel, whose face seems almost
simultaneously to wear the sardonic grin of a Mephistopheles and the
wistful smile of a Christ, this flaunting Bohemian who has written
some of the tenderest love songs in literature, this cosmopolitan who
cherished the deepest feelings for his fatherland, this incarnate
paradox who almost at one and the same moment is swashbuckler and
martyr, French and German, Hebrew and Greek, revolutionary and
aristocrat, optimist and pessimist, idealist and mocker, believer and
infidel?

Yet it is even because of this surface inconsistency, this
psychological many-sidedness that Heine is a great poet and the one
who, mirroring in his own mind the complexity that he saw without, is
typically representative of the varied phases of the early nineteenth
century. Heine looks at life from every conceivable aspect: he sees
the gladness of life and rejoices therein; he sees the tears of life
and weeps; he sees the tragedy of life and cannot control his sobs; he
sees the farce of life and finds equal difficulty in controlling his
laughter. "Ah, dear reader," says Heine, "if you want to complain that
the poet is torn both ways, complain rather that the world is torn in
two. The poet's heart is the core of the world, and in this present
time it must of necessity be grievously rent. The great world-rift
clove right through my heart, and even thereby do I know that the great
gods have given me of their grace and preference and deemed me worthy
of the poet's martyrdom."

The first half of the nineteenth century, in fact, in which Heine
lived, is, like any transition period, disturbed, unsettled,
paradoxical. The most diverse tendencies boil and bubble together
in the crucible; the Revolution and the Reaction, Romanticism and
Hellenism, materialism and mysticism, democracy and aristocracy, poetry
and science, all ferment apace in the psychological Witches' Cauldron
of the age.

Heine simply represented the illusions and disillusions of this age, or
to put it with greater precision, he represented the clash and contrast
between these illusions and disillusions. To arrive then at a correct
appreciation of Heine it will be necessary to glance first at the main
currents of the contemporary events, the political movements of the
Revolution and the Reaction, and the literary movements of Romanticism
and Æstheticism.

All these currents flow either directly or indirectly from the French
Revolution. To the more sanguine and poetical minds of the time the
Revolution had manifested itself as a species of Armageddon, a gigantic
cataclysm, which, sweeping away all existing institutions with one
great shock, was to leave to mankind an untrammelled existence of
natural and idyllic perfection. These dreamers were destined to be
rudely disappointed. The Holy Alliance temporarily suppressed the
Revolution at Waterloo, and an efficient Reaction reigned both in
France and in Germany. A great religious revival set in in Prussia,
culminating in the Concordat with the Pope in 1821. The Press was
gagged by a rigid censorship, while the students at the universities
were subjected to the most rigorous police espionage. From the point of
view of the German idealists who hoped for liberty and progress, the
Revolution had ended in the most dismal of fiascos.

Parallel with the Revolution ran Romanticism, which eventually
merged in orthodoxy, or, to put it more accurately, in a mystical
Catholicism. The cardinal characteristic of Romanticism was the
revolt of the individual against the stereotyped prosaic life of the
classical eighteenth century. This revolt manifested itself in the
most untrammelled freedom of the ego, which either took to rioting in
an elaborate self-analysis, as did Hofmann and Jean Paul Richter, or
else simply abandoning ordinary life gave itself up to the cult of
the bizarre, the mystic, the mediæval, and the exotic, and fell in
love with the Infinite, or, to use the terminology of the school, the
Blue Flower. Though, however, Heine was in his poetic youth largely
influenced by the Romanticists (he was, in fact, dubbed by a Frenchman
with tolerable reason an "unfrocked Romantic"), the essence of his
maturer outlook on life is far from being romantic. The life-outlook of
the Romanticists consisted in a vague yearning for the ideal without
any reference to this earthly life; the life-outlook of Heine on the
other hand was made up largely of the almost brutal contrast between
the ideal and the real, between life as it was dreamed and life as it
actually was.

Another current of thought which it is necessary to mention, though
of course it exercised rather less influence on Heine than did
Romanticism, was the æsthetic neo-Hellenic movement represented by
Winckelmann, Lessing, and to a certain extent by Goethe.

Heine, however, though a lover of the beautiful, lacked almost entirely
the plastic genius and marble serenity of Hellas, and is, as will be
shown later, only a Greek in the exuberance of his _joie de vivre._
To summarise then the main tendencies of the age in which Heine was
born, we can see these four distinct currents--the glorious ideals of
the French Revolution, the official reaction against these ideals, the
cult of the bizarre and the infinite yearning of Romanticism, and the
Hellenism of the æsthetic movement. Let us now turn to the poet's life,
and examine the part played by environment, race, and parentage in
moulding his character.

Heine was born in Düsseldorf on December 1797, and not as is currently
supposed in 1799.

The Catholic Rhineland, in which Düsseldorf is situated, rebelled more
than almost any other district in Germany against the despotism of the
Prussian bureaucracy; it possessed an almost southern _joie de vivre_,
and only naturally exhibited a distinct inclination to the Catholicism
of the Romanticists, all of which characteristics in a greater or less
degree are to be found in Heine.

Further, Heine was a Jew, possessing, in consequence, an hereditary
tendency to gravitate to the extreme left wing both of thought and of
politics, while the inborn _Judenschmerz_ in his heart was aggravated
by the anti-Semitic reaction which followed the benevolent tolerance of
Napoleon.

The poet's father, Samson Heine, was an easy-going, æsthetic nonentity
in moderate circumstances, who does not appear to have exercised any
serious influence on the child's development. This was accomplished by
the mother, _née_ von Geldern, a cultured and strong-minded woman, and
a Voltairean by belief, who did her best to foster and stimulate her
son's youthful intelligence. The favourite authors of the young Heine
were Cervantes, Sterne, and Swift. Of contemporaries, the two men who
exercised any real influence were the Emperor Napoleon, and Byron, "the
kingly man" and the aristocratic revolutionary. Napoleon in particular
was the god of his boyish adoration. This Napoleonic enthusiasm was
largely fostered by Heine's friendship with a grenadier drummer of the
French army named Le Grand, while it reached its climax when he beheld
with his own eyes the beatific vision of the Emperor himself riding on
his beautiful white palfrey through the Hofgarten Allee at Düsseldorf,
in splendid defiance of the police regulations, which forbade such
riding under a penalty of five thalers.

This worship of the Emperor, moreover, resulted in the wonderful poem
called "The Grenadiers," written at the age of eighteen. The swing and
power of the poem have made it classic, especially the great final
stanza beginning:

    "Denn reitet mein Kaiser wohl über mein Grab."

Heine received his early education at a Jesuit monastery. The first
event of any moment in his life, however, is his calf-love for Josepha,
or Sefchen, the executioner's daughter, a weird fantastic beauty of
fifteen, with large dark eyes and blood-red hair. Josepha was the
inspiration of the juvenile _Dream Pictures_ incorporated subsequently
in the _Book of Songs_, and exhibiting a genuine power and an even more
genuine promise.

In 1816 Heine was sent into the office of Solomon Heine, his
millionaire uncle of Hamburg.

He seems to have been singularly destitute of the financial genius of
his race, and the business career proved from the outset a fiasco. The
real key, however, to the three years spent in Hamburg is supplied not
by Money, but by Love. Having served his apprenticeship in Düsseldorf
with his calf-attachment to the executioner's daughter, Heine proceeded
straightway to a _grande passion_ for his uncle's pretty daughter
Amalie. His love was not reciprocated, and in 1821 the beauteous Amalie
married a wealthy landowner of Königsberg. This Amalie incident was one
of the most important in Heine's life, and is largely responsible for
his early cynicism. He was disillusioned with a vengeance, and could
now with his own eyes inspect the flimsy material of which "Love's
Young Dream" is wove. Though, however, a great personal blow, this
abortive passion is also to be regarded as an invaluable æsthetic
asset. The poet of necessity is bound to write of his own personal
impressions and experiences; and it is obvious that the intenser are
these experiences, the more vital will be his poetry. If Heine's love
for Amalie was the accursed flame that seared his soul, it was also the
sacred fire that kindled his inspiration, and it is to Amalie that we
owe not only a great part of the _Book of Songs_, but also much which
is characteristic of Heine's subsequent life-outlook.

In 1819, probably because Heine had given convincing proofs of his
business inefficiency, it was decided that he should go to Bonn to
study law. He neglected his studies, and it was not long before he fell
foul of the authorities, owing to his anticipation in the proceedings
of the Burschenschaften or student political unions.

In 1820 Heine left Bonn for Göttingen. At Göttingen his career was
brief but thrilling, and he was rusticated after a few months on
account of a proposed duel with an impertinent _junker_.

Transferring his quarters to Berlin, he now spent by far the most
enjoyable period of his university career. The intellectual atmosphere
of Berlin was quicker and less pedantic than that of Göttingen, and he
plunged into his studies with considerable energy.

In 1821 Heine published the first volume of his poems, containing the
_Dream Pictures_, some miscellaneous juvenile poems, and the _Lyrisches
Intermezzo,_ which was inspired by the banker's, in the same way that
the _Dream Pictures_ had been inspired by the executioner's, daughter.

The book was an immediate success, how great may be gauged by the
numerous parodies and imitations which it almost instantaneously
evoked. It was at this period that he wrote the two romantic tragedies
of _Ratcliff_ and _Almansor_. Both failures and devoid of much merit,
they served none the less useful purpose of advertising his fame.

In 1823 we see an echo of his passion for Amalie in his love for his
younger cousin Therese, who seems in many respects to have been a
replica of her elder sister. Therese, however, refused to be anything
more than a cousin to him, and his heart was still further embittered
as is shown by the poem:

      "Wer zum erstenmale liebt
      Sei's auch glücklos ist ein Gott
      Aber wer zum zweitenmale
      Glücklos liebt, er ist ein Narr
      Ich, ein solcher Narr, ich liebe
      Wieder ohne Gegenliebe;
      Sonne, Mond und Sterne lachen
      Und ich lache mit und sterbe."

In 1824 he decided to prosecute his studies for his doctorial degree
with greater seriousness, and leaving behind him the distractions
of the capital, went back once more to the more staid and prosaic
Göttingen.

Heine intended not merely to take a degree for the sake of ornament,
but also to practise seriously as a lawyer. How serious were these
intentions may be seen from the fact that he went to the length of
paying in advance the heavy entrance fee which the legal profession
then exacted from Jews, and became baptized "as a Protestant and a
Lutheran to boot" on June 28, 1825.

Heine's conversion has frequently been criticised with superfluous
harshness. Let him, however, explain his position for himself:

       "At that time I myself was still a god, and none of the
       positive religions had more value for me than another; I
       could only wear their uniforms as a matter of courtesy,
       on the same principle that the Emperor of Russia dresses
       himself up as an officer of the Prussian Guard when he
       honours his imperial cousin with a visit to Potsdam."

After all, his apostasy brought with it its own punishment, not only
in its deep-felt shame, but in the fact that he eventually threw up
law for literature, and thus rendered so great a sacrifice of racial
loyalty and his own self-respect consummately futile. After selling
his birthright he found that he had absolutely no use for the mess of
pottage which he had purchased.

In the summer of 1825, Heine, having just succeeded in passing his
degree, proceeded to the little island of Norderney, off the coast of
Holland, to recuperate. Living ardently the simple life and indulging
to the full his passion for the sea, he now wrote not only the second
part of the _Reisebilder,_ entitled _Norderney_, but the far greater
_Nordsee Cyklus,_ which in its irregular swinging metre expresses with
such marvellous efficiency the whole roar and grandeur of the ocean.
Speaking generally, of course, Heine was too subjective to be a real
nature poet. No writer, it is true, fills up so freely and with so
fantastic an elegance the blank cheques of nightingales and violets,
lilies and roses, stars and moonshine, yet none the less these rather
served to grace his measure than as his real flame. His one genuine
love was the sea. With the sea he felt a deep psychological affinity.
The sea was the symbol of his own infinite restlessness, of his own
divine discontent, and mirrored in the sea's ever-changing waters he
beheld the incessant smiles and storms of his own soul.

        "I love the sea, even as my own soul," he writes. "Often
        do I fancy that the sea is in truth my very soul; and
        as in the sea there are hidden water-plants that only
        swim up to the surface at the moment of their bloom and
        sink down again at the moment of their decay, even so
        do wondrous flower-pictures swim up out of the depths
        of my soul, spread their light and fragrance, and again
        vanish."

In 1826 Heine published the _Heimkehr_, the _Nordsee Cyklus_, the airy
and sparkling _Harzreise_, and the first part of the _Reisebilder_.

From Norderney Heine moved to Hamburg, avowedly to practise, though
it does not appear that he took his profession with much seriousness.
At any rate, until 1831, when he migrated to Paris, his career is
excessively erratic. At one moment he is paying a flying visit to
England, "the land of roast beef and Yorkshire plum-pudding, where
the machines behave like men and the men like machines"; at another
he is on the staff of the _Allgemeinen Politischen Annalen_ and the
_Morgenblatt_ of Munich; he is now in Hamburg, now in Frankfurt, and
now in Italy, where his sojourn inspired the racy and brilliant _Italy_
and _Baths of Lucca_, both of which works obtained the gratuitous and
well-merited state advertisement of prohibition, and achieved a most
undeniable _succès de scandale_.

The departure to Paris marks an entirely new epoch in Heine's life, and
offers a convenient stopping-place at which to give some account of his
early poetry and prose, as exemplified in the _Book of Songs_, which
was published in 1827, and the _Reisebilder_, the last part of which,
the _Baths of Lucca_, was published in 1831.

Though neither the _Book of Songs_ nor the _Reisebilder_ is as great
or as characteristic as the _Romanzero_ and _Poetische Nachlese_ on
the one hand, or the _Salon_ on the other, they are yet by far the
most popular of his works and contain some of his most delightful
writing. One of the first traits that strikes us in the _Book of
Songs_ is the Romantic tendency to bizarre and exotic themes. In the
_Junge Leiden_ and _Lyrisches Intermezzo_ in particular we move in a
ghostly atmosphere of apparitions, sea-maidens, skeletons, and midnight
churchyards. Another interesting characteristic of these poems is his
deep love of the East, a love which is to be probably ascribed more to
the general eastward gravitation of the Romantic school than to the
poet's Oriental blood. This tendency is responsible for two of the most
charming poems in the book, the exquisite lyric starting:

    "Auf Flügeln des Gesanges
    Herzliebchen trag ich dich fort
    Fort nach den Fluren des Ganges
    Dort weiss ich den schönsten Ort."

    "Dort liegt ein rotblühender Garten
    Im stillen Mondenschein;
    Die Lotosblumen erwarten
    Ihr trautes Schwesterlein."

And--

    "Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam
    Im Norden auf kabler Höh',
    Ihn schläfert; mit weisser Decke
    Umhüllen ihn Eis und Schnee.
    Er traumt von einer Palme,
    Die fern im Morgenland
    Einsam und schweigend trauert
    Auf brennender Felsenwand."

This latter poem in particular illustrates admirably the vague melting,
infinite yearning which Heine at first experienced as deeply as did any
of the Romanticists. There are not wanting, however, and especially
towards the end of the book, examples of his later manner, of that note
of rebellion which he was afterwards to strike with such inimitable
precision. Occasionally his wistful pessimism suddenly changes into
cynicism, and in reaction from his morbid sensitiveness he derives a
sardonic satisfaction from probing his own wounds as in the already
quoted "Wer zum erstenmale liebt," while in the mock-heroic _Donna
Clara_ and in the _Frieden_ we see that artistic use of the anti-climax
of which he was afterwards to acquire an even greater mastery. Even in
the comparatively early _Lyrisches Intermezzo_ we see him constantly
playing on that contrast between the Real and the Ideal, between Dream
Life and Waking Life, which formed so integral a part of his subsequent
life-outlook. Speaking generally, however, the _Book of Songs_ exhibits
the sentimental rather than the cynical side of Heine's mind. It
possesses moreover those qualities which remained in Heine throughout
his life, the light, airy touch, the intimate personal note, the
delicate lyric sweetness, and that concision which is found in poetry
with such extreme rarity.

Let us turn now to the _Reisebilder_. Its most dominant characteristics
are its inimitable swing and the absolute irresponsibility of its
transitions. The grave, the gay; the lively, the severe; the sublime,
the ridiculous; the reverent, the frivolous; the refined, the crude;
the poetic, the obscene, all jostle pell-mell against each other
in this most fascinating of literary kaleidoscopes. It is no mere
guide-book, this record of his wanderings in the Harz, in Norderney, in
England, and in Italy, but rather a description of those reflections
on men and things which were suggested by his various adventures. In
style the _Reisebilder_ marks a new epoch in German prose, or, as has
been said, showed for the first time since Lessing and Goethe that such
a thing as German prose really did exist. Heine was the first to show
convincingly that a Gallic grace and flexibility could be imparted into
the cumbrous and heavy-footed Teutonic language.

Psychologically the most interesting part of the _Reisebilder_ is the
fervent Napoleonic worship which, combined with his love of liberty and
revolt against reaction, largely contributed to mould his life. The
general tone, moreover, of political, sexual, and religious freedom
that characterises the latter part of the _Reisebilder_ rendered
Heine not a little obnoxious to official Germany, not only because of
the intrinsic heresy of the sentiments themselves, but of the joyous
rollicking insolence with which they were paraded.

It is small wonder, then, that the Paris July Revolution of 1830 made
the poet feel "as if he could set the whole ocean up to the very North
Pole on fire with the red-heat of enthusiasm and mad joy that worked in
him," and that in the spring of 1831 he migrated finally and definitely
from Germany to Paris.

This migration to Paris marks the turning-point in Heine's life. His
career in Germany had throughout been erratic, unsatisfactory, and
hampered by political restrictions. In Paris he settled down, felt
that now at last he was in a congenial element, and--found himself.
It was at Paris that he wrote his most brilliant prose and found
inspiration for his highest poetry, that he experienced his wildest
joys and his intensest sufferings. The first ten years of his sojourn
were probably the happiest in his life. His increased literary and
journalistic earnings helped to solve the financial problem, while
socially he was, as always, a pronounced success. He soon found his
way into the centre of the artistic set of the capital, and was on a
footing of intimacy with such writers as Lafayette, Balzac, Victor
Hugo, Georges Sand, Théophile Gautier, Michelet, Dumas, Gérard de
Nerval, Hector Berlioz, Ludwig Borne, Schlegel, and Humboldt. In
social life Heine's most characteristic feature was wit--a wit so
irrepressible as to burst forth impartially on practically all
occasions, and to resemble that of the Romans of the early Empire,
who preferred to lose their heads rather than their epigrams. Yet
in private life he was a devoted son and brother, an ideal husband.
The correspondence which he maintained up to his death with his
sister Lotte and his mother show conclusively what stores of German
_Gemut_ he treasured in his heart. Particularly significant is the
fact that during the whole eight years in which he languished in his
mattress-grave he assiduously concealed from his mother the real state
of his health. Yet none the less "he could hate deeply and grimly
with an energy which I have never yet met in any other man, but only
because he could love with equal intensity," writes the poet's friend,
Meissner. Heine disapproved on principle of swallowing an injury; when
he was hit, he hit back. Not infrequently, as in his rather scandalous
attack on Börne, he would _riposte_ with somewhat superfluous
efficiency, though according to his own theories it must have been
after all only a mistake on the safe side.

"Yes," writes Heine, "one must forgive one's enemies, but not until
they have been hanged."

Heine's quarrel with Börne originally arose out of the abomination with
which Börne, who was Radical to the point of fanaticism, regarded the
somewhat poetic and elastic Liberalism of his fellow-Jew, and it is
instructive to enter into an examination of the depth and strength of
those views which supplied the real motive power which drove him from
Germany to France. There can be no doubt that Heine himself took his
Liberalism with perfect seriousness. "In truth I know not," he writes,
"if I merit that my coffin should be decorated with a laurel wreath.
However much I loved Poesy, she was ever to me only a holy toy or a
consecrated means for heavenly ends. It is rather a sword that they
should lay on my coffin, for I was a brave soldier in the Liberation
War of Humanity." It should be observed, however, that this Liberal had
the most aristocratic contempt for the uncultured _δημος_,
as is shown by passages such as the following: "The horny hands of the
Socialists who will unpityingly break all the marble statues which are
so dear to my heart"; and, "If Democracy really triumphs, it is all up
with poetry."

Yet there can be no gainsaying that Heine's political orthodoxy was
perfectly unimpeachable on that anti-clericalism which has always been
one of the most cardinal points of Continental Liberalism.

He is rarely tired of tilting at Catholicism, and while he regarded
ascetic mediæval Catholicism as the vampire which sucked the blood
and light out of the hearts of men, he dubbed the modern Catholic
reactionaries in Germany "the Party of lies, the ruffians of
Despotism, the restorers of all the folly and abomination of the Past."

Yet, if his beliefs were too wide to admit of the narrowness of a
consistent partisanship, his enthusiasm was deep and sincere for the
joy, light, and liberty of a new era that was to sweep away all the
unhealthy and plaguy humours of that blind, delirious, and anæmic
mediævaldom, which, to use his own phrase, has spread over the
countries like an infectious disease, till Europe was but one huge
hospital. Politically, in fine, Heine is a brilliant freelance, who,
too proud to wear the uniform of party, none the less fought valiantly
for the army of Progress and Humanity, a forlorn outpost in the War of
Freedom.[1]

Heine's polemical modernity manifested itself most efficiently in
the _Deutschland_, which, together with its sequel, _The Romantic
School_, was issued as a counter-blast to Madame de Staël's work of the
same name. This history of the religion, literature, and philosophy
of Germany is the masterpiece of Heine's extant prose. An academic
philosophic treatise, of course, it neither is nor professes to be.
As a description half-serious, half-flippant, however, of the main
currents of modern and mediæval Germany by a writer who sees life from
the bird's-eye view of the combined poet, journalist, thinker, and man
of the world, it is unrivalled. It contains some of Heine's loftiest
and most sublime flights, some of his most brilliant and trenchant
epigrams.

Particularly happy is the comparison drawn between the furious
onslaughts made by the French Revolutionists under Robespierre and the
German philosophers under Kant on respectively the divine rights of
kings and the divine rights of God.

How delicious is the conclusion of the parallel between the two men:
"Each eminently represents the ideal middle-class type--Nature had
decreed that they should weigh out coffee and sugar, but Fate willed
that they should weigh out other things, and in the scales of the one
did she lay a King and in the scales of the other a God....

"And they both gave exact weight."

As, however, has been previously pointed out, Heine's chief
characteristic as a prose writer is that marvellous elasticity which
can rebound from the frivolous to the sublime with the most consummate
ease and celerity. Interspersed with the bright flash-light of the
epigrammatic pyrotechnics lie really great passages, and pieces in
particular like those on Luther and Goethe possess the clear golden
ring of the grand style.

Heine's political ideals were subjected to the inevitable
disillusionment. The Revolution of July, which he had fondly hoped
would complete the work of the great movement of 1793, merely resulted
in the anti-climax of the establishment of a bourgeois constitution
under a bourgeois monarch. He tended to become generally embittered.
Money matters, too, began to irritate him, and his health to give
him trouble, and though he found a devoted sick-nurse in Matilde
Crescenzia Mirat, a grisette whom he married in 1841, the lady with
whom "he quarrelled daily for six years in that life-long duel at
the termination of which only one of the combatants would be left
alive," yet none the less his condition began to deteriorate. "The
damp cold days and black long nights of his exile" oppressed him, and
he began to yearn for the old German soil. He gratified his _Heimweh_
by a flying and surreptitious visit to Germany that inspired the
well-known _Germany_ or a _Winter Tale_, which, together with the
somewhat similar _Atta Troll_, constitutes his most sustained poetic
achievement. These two poems are about as characteristic as anything
which he wrote. They represent admirably his wild classic Dionysiac
fantasy, his sudden dips from the most extravagant Romanticism to the
harsh, crude facts of reality, the marvellous swing and sweep of his
Aristophanic humour.

Very typical is the following satire on the intimate relation between
anthropo- and arctomorphism.

    "Up above in star-pavilion,
    On his golden throne of lordship,
    Ruling worlds with sway majestic,
    Sits a Polar bear colossal."

    "Stainless, snow-white shines the glamour
    Of his skin, his head is wreathed
    With a diadem of diamonds,
    Flashing light through all the heavens."

    "Harmony rests in his visage,
    And the silent deeds of thought,
    Just a whit he bends his sceptre,
    And the spheres they ring and sing."

The above quotation shows excellently the essentially poetic quality
by which Heine's wit is illumined. A satirist as keen and vivid as
Voltaire, he possesses all the logical aptness of the Frenchman without
his dryness. His chief characteristic, in fact, is the method by which
in his imaginative flights he combines the maximum of this logical
aptness with the maximum of humorous incongruity. No humorist dives
for his metaphors into stranger water or brings up from the deep more
bizarre and fantastic gems. A charming example of Heinean humour is
the following passage from one of his prefaces: "A pious Quaker once
sacrificed his whole fortune in buying up the most beautiful of the
mythological pictures of Giulio Romano in order to consign them to the
flames--verily he merits thereby to go to heaven and be whipped with
birches regularly every day."

One of the most cardinal traits of Heine's wit and humour is a
phenomenal freedom of tone and language, a freedom that is occasionally
not always in the most unimpeachable taste. Heine, in fact, is a
writer who admits the public gratis to his psychological toilette,
where he exposes with studied recklessness his most private thoughts.
This question cuts too deep into Heine's life-outlook to be lightly
passed over, and necessitates some examination. In the first place
even Heine's most enthusiastic admirer will admit that a great deal of
this licence is sheer gaminerie; Heine is the mischievous schoolboy
of literature who thoroughly revels in being naughty, grimacing by an
almost mechanical instinct, so soon as he catches a glimpse of the
sacred figures of religion and sex. Like Baudelaire, he loves, almost
indeed as a matter of conscientious principle, to make the hairs of
the philistines stand on end. His one excuse, however, is that even
when he causes the hairs of the philistines almost to spring from their
roots, as indeed he does not infrequently, he conducts the operation
with so light a touch, so exquisite a grace, that the offence is almost
redeemed. Let him speak in his own defence, in the lines from the great
Jewish poem, "Jehudah Halevy":

    "As in Life so too in poetry
    Grace is aye Man's highest Good;
    Who has grace, he never sinneth
    Not in verse nor e'en in prose."

    "And by God's grace such a poet
    Genius we do entitle,
    King supreme and uncontrolled
    In the great desmesne of thought."

Not unnaturally his coarseness grew apace with the virulence of his
disease, and he himself explains his cause to his friend "La Mouche":
"Vois-tu c'est la faute de la mort qui arrive à grands pas, et quand
je la sens ainsi tout près de moi comme à present j'ai besoin de me
cramponner la vie ne fût ce par une poutre pourrie." This final phase
in fact was simply a reaction against his fate, and is not altogether
without analogy to that same psychological principle which dictated
much of the crude buffoonery of Swift and Carlyle by way of an heroic
protest against their own helplessness.

Far more important, however, is the fact that this particular trait
of Heine is profoundly symbolic of his outlook on life, especially
where an obscene jest marks the climax of a genuinely poetical flight.
Circumstance turned him into a cynic, who saw frequently in Liberty but
the uprising of a squalid proletariate, who heard in the "sweet lies
of the nightingale, the flatterer of spring," merely the "harbingers
of the decay of its queenliness," and who beheld in love but a mere
illusion of the senses that vanishes so soon as the beloved one utters
a syllable. Held fast in the grip of the great World-paradox, Heine
is forced to look at life as a glaring phantasmagoria of blacks and
whites, in which the sublime and the ridiculous, the pathetic and the
grotesque, the refined and the crude, dance along hand in hand till
they become so confused that it is impossible for the observer to
distinguish the individual partners, and he is reduced to describing,
in pairs, the giddy, whirling couples that make up the fantastic medley.

This incessant antithesis makes Heine one of the most complete of
modern writers.

The poet's world is composed of two hemispheres: one is the abode of
the beautiful, the grand, the tragic; the other of the ugly, the petty,
the comic. Most poets confine their efforts to only a small portion
of one of these hemispheres. Heine, however, is the Atlas of poetry,
who supports both of the half-spheres of the world, and who, by way of
proving how easily his burden sits upon him, suddenly turns juggler,
and after showing his audience one side of the magic globe, will, _hey
presto_! whisk the whole world round, and before they know where they
are smilingly confront them with the other.

In 1848 the spinal affection from which he suffered became so acute
that Heine was compelled to take to that mattress-grave where,
paralytic and half-blind and racked intermittently by the most
agonising spasms, he dragged out the eight most ghastly years of his
life. At first the death-chamber was one of the favourite rendezvous
of fashionable Paris, but as the novelty wore off, his circle of
friends grew narrower and narrower, until eventually a visit from
Berlioz seemed only the crowning proof of the musician's inveterate
eccentricity.

Heine, however, rose manfully to the occasion, and did all that
he could under the circumstances. Always a passionate lover of
the paradoxical, he now began to appreciate with an intense and
unprecedented relish the infinite humour of the great Life-farce, one
of the most effective scenes of which was even now being enacted in the
person of the poet of _joie de vivre_, who, enduring all the agonies of
the damned, lay dying in La Rue d'Amsterdam to the quick music of the
piano on the story underneath, while only a few feet away shone all the
glow and glitter of Parisian life.

The chief occupation and solace of the dying man was the writing of his
Memoirs, the great _Apologia pro vitâ suâ_ which was to square his
accounts with the world, and win for him the future as his own.

Yet at times the greatness of his sufferings would soften his heart.
He would find in the Bible the magic book which had power to dispel
his earthly torments; the "_Heimweh_ for heaven" would fall upon him,
and again would he know his God. It would seem, however, that Heine's
death-bed reconversion is simply to be regarded as one of the numerous
instances of the Prince of Darkness exhibiting monastic proclivities
under the stress of severe physical _malaise_. For eight years Heine
lay a-dying, and with the skeleton of Death assiduously serving the
few bitter crumbs that yet remained of his feast of life, he was, as a
simple matter of pathology, almost bound to believe once more, even if
he had been the most hardened infidel in existence. Heine, however, was
no cynical atheist. The current religions, it is true, he considered
pretty poetry, but bad logic, yet none the less he was genuinely imbued
with the ethical idea.

"I am too proud," he writes, "to be influenced by greed for the
heavenly wages of virtue or by fear of hellish torments. I strive after
the good because it is beautiful and attracts me irresistibly, and I
abominate the bad because it is hateful and repugnant to me."

What, in fact, served Heine in the stead of a theology was his fervid
enthusiasm for Progress and Humanity. His real religion was the
religion of Freedom, the religion of the poor people, the new creed
of which Jean Rousseau was the John the Baptist and Voltaire the
chief apostle; Heine's Madonna was the red goddess of Revolution, who
exacted from her worshippers innumerable hecatombs of human victims;
the Man-god whom he revered as the Saviour of Society was Napoleon,
the Son of the Revolution, the drastic reorganiser of the world, who,
unappreciated by the pharisees and reactionaries of his time, and
finding his Golgotha on the "martyr-cliffs of St. Helena," endured for
more than five years all the agonies of a moral crucifixion; while to
complete our version of the Heinesque theology, his _Heilige Geist_
was the Holy Spirit of the Human Intellect which he says "is seen in
its greatest glory in Light and Laughter," and the Revelation which
inspired him most deeply was, to use once more his own phrase, "the
sacred mystic Revelation that we name poesy."

It is interesting to trace the influence of these last ghastly years
on Heine's writings. His almost complete physical prostration brought
with it its own compensation in the shape of a marvellous psychic
exaltation, and the _Romanzero_ and the _Poetische Nachlese_ contain
some of his greatest and most moving poems. Nowhere do we see more
clearly his most characteristic excellences, his delicacy, his power of
antithesis, his concision.

It is Heine's compression, in fact, which is one of the most pronounced
features of his poetic style. The whole quintessence of joy and pain,
of love and sorrow, is frequently distilled into one short poem. This
Heinesque condensation is a variant of the same theory that can be
traced in the old Impressionist school of painters which is concerned
with the outline and the proper light and shading of the outline to the
exclusion of minor details, and in the journalistic cult of the "story"
in which the ideal aimed at is "the point, the whole point, and nothing
but the point." Heine, in fact, is unique among the poets for narrating
a tale with the minimum of space and the maximum of effect, for
narrating it in such a way that each line serves to heighten the level
of intensity, till at length the edifice is crowned by the climax. This
feature of his style is well illustrated by the end of the frequently
quoted poem, "The Asra," in the _Romanzero_:

    "And the slave spake, I am called
    Mohammed, I am from Yemen,
    And my stock is from those Asras,
    _They who die whene'er they love_."

Though, moreover, he protested to the last against his fate, his tone
in the _Romanzero_ and the earlier _Poetische Nachlese_ is more mellow
than in his earlier writings. His cry from the heart is not the cry
of defiance but rather of the pathetic wistfulness of impotence. Yet
before the candle of his life became extinguished it leapt up in one
final flicker, the most marvellous of all. A characteristic caprice
of fate made him acquainted during the last months of his life with
his one true soul-affinity, the charming woman who is known under the
pseudonym of Camille Selden or La Mouche.

Is it then to be wondered at that when the rich feast of a perfect
love, for which he had craved Tantalus-like all his life, was offered
to him almost at the very minute that his lips were being sealed
by the cold kiss of death, the whole soul of the man should leap
up in indignant protest, and that such poems as "Lass die heiligen
Parabolen," and the even more wonderful series of stanzas with the
refrain, "O schöne Welt du bist abscheulich," should exhibit the cold
insolent shrug of the man convinced of the righteousness of his plea
that of all the places in the universe this human earth "where the just
man drags himself along beneath the blood-stained burden of his cross,
while the wicked man rides in triumph on his high steed," is the most
iniquitous?

Heine died at four o'clock in the morning of February 17, 1856. He was
buried by his own directions in Montmartre, "in order to avoid being
disturbed by the crowd and bustle of Père Lachaise."

His writings form an incessant stream of paradoxes, but his life is the
greatest paradox of all. The prophet of the new religion of liberty, he
was repudiated by his country, and his happiest days were spent in the
land of exile; throughout his life he sought for love, to live years
of the most healthy prosaic domesticity with his mistress, and to find
his one true romance on his death-bed; he imagined that he was a great
political force, but it is rather as a poet that he survives; as a poet
his chief theme was the Joy and Light of Life, and he drew his truest
inspiration from the darkest depths of his agony; even as a great
writer he has been chiefly known by the comparatively inferior _Book
of Songs_ and _Reisebilder,_ while his masterpiece, the _Memoirs_, the
great highly barbed Parthian arrow shot from the grave to transfix his
enemies for all eternity, lay mouldering for many years amid the dusty
archives of the Vienna Library.

His message, too, the core and kernel of his philosophy, is again
a paradox. To the sphinx-like riddle with which every thinker is
confronted, "Is Life poetry or prose, tragedy or farce?" Heine made
answer that the pathos and poetry of life were contained in the fact
that life was so essentially grim and unpoetical, and that the real
tragedy of the world lay in the ghastly farce of it all.


[Footnote 1: _Cf._ the poem "Enfant perdu," beginning "Verlorner Posten
in dem Freiheits Kriege."]




THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DISRAELI


The recent centenary of the birth of Benjamin Disraeli renewed our
interest in the most striking figure in the English history of the last
century. Throughout his life Disraeli made it an important part of his
_métier_ to be interesting, and it is certainly a convincing proof
both of his great natural fascination and of the adroitness with which
he worked his pose, that even beyond the grave his character should
still exercise our curiosity and blind us with the various facets of
its brilliancy. He fairly bristles with paradoxes, this cynic, who
was also a sentimentalist, this Oriental mystic, who was one of the
most finished dandies in London, this shameless adventurer, with his
pathetic and chivalrous devotion to his sovereign, this political
Don Juan, who provided a classic example of conjugal affection.
Many have essayed to solve the riddle of the "Primrose Sphinx"; but
the best testimony to their almost universal failure is that nearly
every biographer has produced a completely different version of his
character. Mr. Hitchman, "one of the helpless, somnambulised cattle
whom he led by the nose," to use Carlyle's phrase, portrays him
(in _The Public Life of the late Lord Beaconsfield_) with charming
_naïveté_ as the "disinterested and patriotic statesman." Mr. T. P.
O'Connor, on the other hand, who, when still sowing his literary
wild oats, painted Disraeli even blacker than the Prince of Darkness
himself, in a book unworthy of any serious biographer, simply
overshoots the mark. Froude, in his _Life_, comes nearer to the truth,
but is hampered by being forced to compress the history of a crowded
life and the psychology of a complex character into a narrow and
inadequate compass. Both Froude, however, and Mr. Sichel, who has given
us an interesting volume on Disraeli's personality, lay too much stress
on his imaginative and idealistic features.

The reason for this inability to comprehend a character, in many
respects singularly typical of his age, lies not so much in the
alleged inadequacy of the materials as in the incapacity of most
English writers for handling general ideas. The English mind is too
concrete for social psychology; it delights in the almost mechanical
work of classifying animals, but fails to produce any classification
of characters worth the name. The Disraeli problem is admittedly
difficult; the secrecy which until recently kept us from all knowledge
of the greater portion of his papers and correspondence is undoubtedly
a handicap, but the difficulty is by no means insuperable, nor the
material so scanty as is usually supposed. Let us take Disraeli in
relation to his age, his environment, his ancestry, then what would
otherwise have struck us as strange, not to say impossible, stands out
clear and inevitable. Another valuable source of information is to be
found in his novels, though it is always difficult to discriminate
between what is and what is not autobiographical in these works.

A vigorous and imaginative mind, when writing about its own history,
will naturally not stint itself in its licences; it will abandon
itself to all kinds of hypotheses; it will take a certain phase of
itself, frame circumstances to suit its development, and proceed on the
fictitious assumption; it will indulge freely both in caricature and
idealisation. In _Vivian Grey_, for instance, Disraeli has slightly
exaggerated the more cynical side of his nature; _Sidonia_, on the
other hand, is an idealised version of Disraeli; it is Disraeli raised
to a higher power; it is what he would have liked to have been, but
was not, any more than the actual Byron was as brave, as romantic, and
as fascinating as the ideal Byron who is portrayed in _Conrad, Childe
Harold_, and _Don Juan_.

Yet, none the less, _Sidonia, Fakredeen, Vivian Grey,_ and _Contarini
Fleming_ possess a strong family likeness, and strike a genuine
autobiographical note. With regard to the two latter, Mr. Sichel, in
his study of Disraeli, is unwarranted in his attempted depreciation of
their evidence, on the theory that they represent merely a distorted
and transient phase of Disraeli's development, to be ascribed to
ill-health and immaturity. On the contrary, the contortions of great
men in adolescence are peculiarly instructive. It is then that the
very elements of the future man are fermenting in the crucible; and
is not growth more significant than maturity? It is not a paradox,
but a fundamental truth, to say that a man is never more himself than
when he is not himself; it is in periods of violent upheaval that the
conventional superstructure is destroyed and the innermost foundations
of character are laid bare. It is far easier to tone down than to touch
up, and the unrestrained sincerity of these early novels, written under
the impetus of intense emotion, throws far more light on Disraeli's
real character than a book like _Endymion_, the official pronouncement
of his maturer years. A prudent use, then, of the novels, and an
examination of his relations to his age, environment, and ancestry
should enable us to construct a psychology of Disraeli that should be
at once convincing and consistent, and adequate to shed light on many
of the obscure points of his character.

The _Sturm und Drang_ age of the Revolution in which Disraeli was
born marked the passing of Europe from childhood to manhood, from
mediævalism to modernity. Like all transition periods, it was
peculiarly complex; the tendencies being so varied, and were so
frequently accompanied by the reactions against themselves, that it
requires considerable care to disentangle the principal threads.

It was an age of progress where reaction was frequently to be seen at
work; it was an age significant for a violent outburst of scientific
materialism, and the consequently inevitable mysticism of a religious
revival. It was an age at once scientific and romantic, individual
and cosmopolitan. It was an age where circumstances produced strange
mixtures, so that in England we are brought face to face with the
paradox that Gladstone, the founder of democratic idealism, obtained
his seat under the old system of close boroughs, while Disraeli, the
most brilliant example of the new democratic theory of _la carrière
ouverte aux talentes_, found his way to power as the head of the
aristocratic and conservative party. The predominant note, however, was
one of democratic individualism. With the French Revolution the yoke
of responsibility, political and religious, was violently thrown off;
new and wide fields had been opened out to commerce by the extended
communications and the new mechanical inventions. A quickened life
broke in upon the lethargy of the previous century. The struggle for
existence entered on a sharper and intenser phase. Ambitious men
vehemently dashed themselves against the social barrier, which day by
day became more easy to climb. In every department it was the age of
the clever and ambitious parvenu. In war and in politics Napoleon, in
poetry Burns, in fiction Balzac, give convincing testimony to the power
of the new régime. It was the age of the French Revolution and of the
Holy Alliance, of Condillac and of Chateaubriand, of Laplace and of
Shelley, of Godwin and of Tom Paine.

But equality is a medal with two faces: on the one side is written,
"I am as good as, if not better than, everyone else"; on the other,
"Everyone else is as good as, if not better than, myself." The first
was the motto of the rampant individualism and vigorous national
policy of Disraeli, the latter of the hesitating Christian spirit
and sentimental cosmopolitanism of Gladstone. Gladstone, indeed, is
such an excellent foil to Disraeli that we may well be permitted the
following quotations, where the rift in Gladstone's lute, between
the churchman and the politician, stands in pointed contrast to the
unity of purpose that from his earliest years actuated his rival.
Gladstone, torn between his missionary impulse and yearning for
apostolic destination on the one hand, and healthy ambition on the
other, writes to his father: "I am willing to persuade myself that in
spite of other longings, which I often feel, my heart is prepared to
yield other hopes and other desires for this: of being permitted to
be the humblest of those who may be commissioned to set before the
eyes of man the magnanimity and glory of Christian truth. Politics are
fascinating to me, perhaps too fascinating. My temper is so excitable
that I should fear giving up my mind to other subjects, which have ever
proved sufficiently alluring to me, and which I fear would make my life
a series of unsatisfied longings and expectations." Disraeli is less
undecided, as is clear from the following quotation from _Contarini
Fleming_: "I should have killed myself if I had not been supported by
my ambition, which now each day became more quickening, so that the
desire of distinction and of astounding action raged in my soul, and
when I realised that so many years must elapse before I could realise
my ideal, I gnashed my teeth in silent rage and cursed my existence,"
Disraeli will give up anything rather than his chance of being a great
man. At a time when most clever young men of his age were thinking of a
scholarship he had finally decided to go in for a premiership. He has
planned his campaign, he will fool the world to the top of its bent.
When yet a boy Disraeli says, as Vivian Grey: "We must mix with the
herd, we must sympathise with the sorrow that we do not feel and share
the merriment of fools. To rule men we must be men, to prove that we
are strong we must be weak. Our wisdom must be concealed under folly,
our constancy under caprice."

None the less, Disraeli had too vivid an imagination, too keen a
sense of the picturesque, not to be affected to a certain extent
by the current Romanticism. We see this in the Eastern novels of
_Tancred_ and _Alroy_, also in _Contarini Fleming_, the English
Wilhelm Meister, which exhibits the weaker and more morbid side of the
author's character, and is a useful supplement to Vivian Grey. But it
is the latter, however, who represents most accurately the ideals and
aspirations of the young Disraeli, and, taken generally, is a broad
adumbration of his subsequent career. But the Disraeli of Vivian Grey
was not so unique as is usually considered, and an analogy between
him and the celebrated Frenchman, who wrote a novel about the same
period, and one, moreover, singularly typical of his age, proves
instructive. Benjamin Disraeli and Henri Beyle were in all superficial
details so absolutely different that one might well hesitate before
making the comparison, yet they were radically similar in many of their
larger outlines, and in particular their characters, as revealed in
the heroes of two novels, _Vivian Grey_ and _Le Rouge et le Noir_,
show an extraordinary resemblance. Both Julien Sorel and Vivian Grey
are impelled by a violent and overwhelming ambition; both, originally
excluded by their status from participation in the great prizes of the
world, set out undaunted to conquer, the one as a priest, the other as
a politician. Cynical, with that extreme and savage species of cynicism
which is the reaction from intense sensitiveness, they both wage war
on society in their passion for success, while the nobler and more
generous instincts with which nature had endowed them perish in the
struggle.

But this Time-Spirit of individualism was no mere cold-blooded
philosophy of egoism. It was, after all, an age of genuine poetry, of
fresh ideals. The halo of romance played around the most abandoned
sinners. Individualism found, in addition, an æsthetic sanction, as
was seen in the prodigious vogue of Byron, where the picturesque pose
of the one man pitted against society appealed strongly to the popular
imagination. How deeply Disraeli was imbued with Byronism is evidenced
not only by the whole tone and manner of his early life, but by his
resuscitation of the Byronic legend in _Venetia_.

This spirit of combined idealism and intense practical energy is met
with again in Disraeli's race and ancestry. The Jewish race is a
compound of materialism and idealism. The Jew is the dreamer in action,
combining fluid imagination with adamantine purpose. These two phases
of the Jewish character are seen excellently in Disraeli's father and
paternal grandfather. The latter, an Italian Jew, came over to England
about the middle of the eighteenth century, and quickly made a fortune
by dint of his shrewd business talent and fixity. His son Isaac was
gifted with an unfortunate superfluity of the poetic temperament. His
youth was erratic and unhappy, but when close on thirty he found a
secure refuge in the quiet waters of literature. To his Semitic blood
is also to be traced Disraeli's prodigious tenacity of purpose. He
came of a stiff-necked people, so that opposition stimulated him, and
his early failures served but to render sweeter his eventual success.
He had, too, the calculating foresight of the Jew, and could pierce
the future, if not with prophetic vision, at any rate, with marvellous
intuition. His Oriental strain of mysticism served him in good stead.
He never forgot that he was a scion of the Chosen People, and came of
a race which had never sullied its purity of lineage by changing its
blood. Was he not the chosen man of the chosen race? Could he not read
his future, if not in the stars, "which are the brain of heaven," yet
in his own brilliant and meteoric brain? He had a full measure of the
pride of race, and plumed himself to the last on what he may well have
called "the Oriental ichor in his veins." If his enemies dubbed him a
parvenu he would fling the wretched taunt back in their faces, bidding
them realise that they came from a parvenu and hybrid race, while he
himself was sprung from the purest blood in Europe. How keen was this
genealogical Judaism we can see from the classic letter to O'Connell,
where he wrote that "the hereditary bondsman had forgotten the clank of
his fetters," and from his masterpiece of character-drawing, Sidonia,
who, with wealth, intellect, and power at his command, yet found his
chief "source of interest in his descent and in the fortunes of his
race." Disraeli's Judaism, however, did not extend to the religious
tenets of the creed. Few, no doubt, are the instances of a converted
Jew proving a genuine Christian, but Disraeli had too much of the
mystic in him to be an atheist, and if we take into account the
elasticity of his imagination, there is little reason to doubt that he
was at any rate reasonably sincere in his belief that Christianity was
merely completed Judaism, Calvary but the logical corollary of Sinai;
he would also, no doubt, find a malicious joy in reminding those who
taunted him with his origin, that "one half of Christendom worships
a Jew and the other half a Jewess." Anyway, the Christian religion
played nothing approaching an integral part in his life; while an
amiable acquiescence in its dogmas was, at the best, as it has been
with so many, but an intellectual habit. His Jewish origin helped him,
moreover, in that he approached the problems of politics with a mind
free from conventional British prejudices. He was never a thorough
Englishman, and was proud of the fact, instead of thanking God "that he
was born an Englishman," as do many of his race, who betray in their
every word and action their Jewish nationality. His admirable expert
knowledge of the English character was throughout professional, not
sympathetic.

When we turn to Disraeli's early environment, we find that it was one
calculated to foster both ambition and a literary imagination. He
breathed from his earliest days the atmosphere of books, and almost
from the cradle imbibed avidly the many volumes of Voltaire. Nothing
is so stimulating to the youthful mind as the unchecked run of a
library, with its delightful excursions into the unexplored country of
literature. His natural sensitiveness was hardened by his experiences
at school, where his nationality and cleverness rendered him unpopular.
The reaction intensified his already precocious ambition, and gave him
that consciousness of semi-isolation which formed one of the chief
parts of his strength. His ambition was further heightened by the smart
literary set which he met constantly at his father's house, and his
early glimpses of the great world. Disraeli is palpably exaggerating
when he says, _apropos_ of Vivian Grey, that "he was a tender plant in
a moral hot-house," but the following passage is significant:

        "He became habituated to the idea that everything could
        be achieved by dexterity, that there was no test of
        conduct except success; to be ready to advance any
        opinion, to possess none; to look upon every man as a
        tool, and never to do anything which had not a definite
        though circuitous purpose."

It is this trait of doing things with an object which supplied the true
clue to Disraeli as a man of letters. We admit, of course, the _verve_
and brilliancy of the novels, their claim to rank as classic, but it is
impossible to arrive at a correct appreciation of them unless they be
taken in the closest conjunction with their author's political career.
_Vivian Grey_, for instance, no doubt afforded an excellent outlet for
the fermenting passion of Disraeli's youth; it was itself one of the
best society novels ever written, but it was something more. Before
that time the future Premier had been hiding his light. How could
he obtain a free field for the exercise of his gifts? His father's
Bohemian clique scarcely answered his purpose. How could he burst open
the doors of society? The bombshell was supplied by _Vivian Grey_. It
was a case of self-advertisement raised to the level of a fine art, and
Disraeli introduced himself to the public with a bow of most elaborate
flourishes. _Contarini Fleming_ strikes a slightly different note,
exhibiting the more poetic side of its author's character; but we must
not forget that at the time when it was published Disraeli's long
absence in the East had temporarily obscured his fame in London, and
that it was the success of _Contarini Fleming_ which secured for him
once more the _entrée_ into society. Similarly, _Coningsby, Sybil_,
and _Tancred_ were, in the main, but the gospels in which, in the rôle
of a political saviour, he propagated the new creed of Young England.
_Lothair_ and _Endymion_ were partly written to replenish his empty
exchequer. The protagonists, moreover, in all his chief novels were
fashioned in the image of himself, and even Lord Cadurcis in _Venetia_,
who is theoretically Byron, is portrayed with the physical features of
the author, so as to ensure a vivid impression on the public mind of
his own personality. Not that Disraeli did not experience a genuine
joy in the wielding of the pen. He could soar high in his flights of
mysticism and romance; could describe the picturesque and the beautiful
in passages of inspired rhetoric, though it was in the dash and
brilliancy of his satire which at its best equalled that of Heine, or
Voltaire, or Byron, that he was most himself. His style is redolent of
his race. It possesses the genuine Oriental glamour, the Oriental love
of gorgeous and grandiose magnificence, the Oriental lack of symmetry
and proportion. His prodigious genius for sarcasm was also Semitic,
if we are to believe Mr. Bryce, who considers that gift a peculiar
property of the race, instancing, as examples, Lucian and Heine, the
greatest satirists of ancient and modern times.

This same combination of temperament and policy which explains
Disraeli, the man of letters, explains Disraeli, the dandy. Living
as he did in an age which revolted, under the leadership of Count
D'Orsay, against the chaste and classic traditions of Brummel,
and which offered in the elaborate picturesqueness of its dress an
excellent medium for the expression of personality, is it to be
wondered at that so ambitious a nature as Disraeli's should, apart
from other reasons, enter gaily into the sartorial arena? These early
years remind us of Alcibiades, who, in his youth, his genius, his
precocious political ambitions, his aristocratic lineage and superb
insolence, his extravagance and irresponsibility, offers a fairly close
analogy. Disraeli, however, was an Alcibiades with ballast, and his
most erratic phases were governed by a consistent purpose. He had,
it is true, the regular Hebrew love for the picturesque, the racial
craving for flamboyant display; but the unique characteristic of the
man was the ingenious method by which he exploited even his weaknesses
to advance his purpose. Realising that nothing was more fatal to his
career than the indifference of the public, that to be hated was better
than to be ignored, and that notoriety was a passable substitute for
fame, he was determined to bulk largely in the public eye. Living,
fortunately, in an age when dandyism, if not an art, was at any rate
a career, and when "wild, melancholy men" were still the rage among
the ladies, he manipulated the dandy and Byronic pose with phenomenal
success. But his social career was not all pose. Though political
ambition was to him always the main point of existence, he was far too
healthy to lose sight of the small change of life. He had, moreover,
a genuine love of society. His remark _apropos_ of Gladstone, "What
can we do with a leader who is not even in society?" was sincere in
spite of being an epigram, and the hosts of great ladies who crowd his
novels attest conclusively to his social fastidiousness. But the most
convincing proof of this lighter side of his nature is to be found in
his correspondence with his sister. Those letters, dashed off hurriedly
to his "dearest Sa," written with that complete lack of ceremony which
is the sign of a perfect intimacy, show with what zest he frequented
balls and water-parties, dinners and _soirées_. Yet his ambition is
never far in the background. He goes to the House of Commons, hears the
big man speak, and then writes to his sister, "But between ourselves I
could floor them all." His genius for conversation is historic, and we
are not surprised that he considered that the one unforgivable sin was
to be a bore. He had not, it is true, Gladstone's habit of unburdening
himself freely to the most casual of acquaintances. How many, indeed,
were there of his intimates who had penetrated into the secret places
of his heart? But over-much sincerity is a hindrance to the art of
conversation; and many of his most brilliant paradoxes were thrown off
as an evasive retort to an impertinent question. When, however, we come
to Disraeli's social and private life, the most interesting question
that presents itself is that of his relation to his wife. Even though
he had discoursed in _Contarini Fleming_ of the grand passion with all
the high-flown sentimentalism of the age, it was obviously impossible
for him, considering the disparity of their ages, to be seriously in
love with Mrs. Disraeli; and it must have seemed that he had been
forced to exchange the poetry of the mistress for the prose of the
wife. Had he not, about ten years before his marriage, written to his
sister, "How would you like Lady B---- for a sister-in-law? Clever,
£25,000, and domestic. As for love, all my friends who have married for
love either beat their wives or live apart from them. This is literally
true. I may commit many follies, but never that of marrying for love,
which, I am convinced, cannot but be a guarantee of infelicity." Yet
this union, based originally on mere policy and camaraderie, was
eventually crowned with the most faithful of loves. It was his wife's
absorbing interest in his career that supplied the link. He has himself
written that the most exquisite moment in a man's life was when he
surprised his lady-love reading the manuscript of his first speech, and
the sympathy of Mrs. Disraeli in his successes may well have given them
a yet further charm. The situation is well expressed in the remark of
Mrs. Disraeli's: "You know you married me for money, and I know that if
you had to do it again you would do it for love."

In fact the warm and constant affection Disraeli lavished on his wife
during her lifetime, and the poignant grief that he evinced at her
death, furnish a more than sufficient refutation to those who persist
in regarding him as a mere cynical fortune-hunter. Disraeli, like
Browning, had

    "Two soul sides, one to face the world with,
    One to show a woman when he loves her."

In the other departments of private life he was likewise exemplary.
His hardness was limited to politics; he was the most dutiful of sons,
the most affectionate of brothers, the most faithful of friends. His
debts, for the most part, were incurred by backing the bills of other
men. His touching and romantic friendship for Mrs. Brydges Williams,
the eccentric old Cornish lady who gave him pecuniary assistance at a
critical period of his career, is well known. The story, again, of the
Premier and his wife dancing a Highland jig in their night apparel on
hearing of the success of an old friend, shows how little the bitter
struggles of politics had hardened his heart. Particularly touching,
also, is the mutual affection between him and the Queen, that
sweetened his last years. She was, as we read in a letter of Disraeli's
to the Marchioness of Ely, "the best friend he had in the world."

But Disraeli, though he fulfilled himself in many ways, was first
of all a politician, and it is Disraeli the politician rather than
Disraeli the man of letters, the dandy, or the human being, that
principally provokes our interest. What were his real views on
politics? How far can we distinguish between the official edition of
himself which he displayed for public inspection and the original that
he alone could read? Given his policy, how far was it justifiable, how
far rational? The view of his most devoted, but yet in reality, quite
unappreciative, admirers, that throughout a political career of over
half a century he remained consistently and absolutely faithful to his
original ideals, and that he introduced into politics an integrity and
disinterestedness that Parliament had rarely witnessed, is even more
absurd than the opinion of his blind and malignant enemies that he
was a mere charlatan who juggled with parties and the people without
possessing a single genuine political faith of his own. Disraeli, as
was inevitable in a man of so detached and unprejudiced a nature,
simply took the then party system at its true worth, and, of course,
realised from the outset that before he could do anything worth
doing he must first obtain that power which alone could give him the
opportunity of doing it. His attack on Peel was, _primâ facie_, an
occasion that it would have been the depth of folly to have missed, and
Mr. Birrell's statement that Disraeli "ate his peck of dirt," and his
comparison of him to Casanova, is mere petulance. For these preliminary
stages of the higher politics Disraeli was admirably fitted, and the
following autobiographic passages from _Tancred_ show how congenial
were his Herculean labours: "To be the centre of a maze of manœuvres
was his empyrean, and while he recognised in them the best means of
success he found in their exercise a means of constant delight"; and
again, "'Intrigue,' cried the young prince, using, as was his custom, a
superfluity of expression both of voice and hand and eyes, 'intrigue,
it is life, it is the only thing. If you wish to produce a result
you must make a combination, and you call combination intrigue.'"
Disraeli viewed party politics from the dispassionate standpoint of
a chess-player, "playing off the proud peers like pawns," skilfully
manœuvring his knights and bishops beneath the shadow of the old
mediæval castles, though it was "in his masterly manipulation of his
queen" that he really surpassed himself. What a contrast to Gladstone's
youthful frame of mind, who entered politics because he felt a strong
moral duty to defend that Church which he was afterwards partly to
disestablish against the insidious attacks of philosophic Radicalism.
But Disraeli's point of view was, after all, merely that which was
obvious and rational. It is well known that in Disraeli's day the whole
efficiency of the party system as a means of carrying on the government
was based on that sagacious inconsistency, so characteristic of this
country, which, cheerfully accommodating the most untractable of facts
to the most docile of theories, drew between the two parties no clear
dividing line either of principle or of class. Those genuine lines
of cleavage both of policy and interest that now tend to become more
and more clearly marked did not then exist. The only vital political
distinction then existing in England was that between the Ins and the
Outs. Whigs and Tories were, in their origin, merely the names for the
two rival organisations for the pursuit of political power into which
the oligarchy of the time had divided itself, and the party catch-words
then indicated as much essential difference as the badges by which the
two sides of a "scratch" game symbolise a fictitious distinction.

Particularly interesting is the following quotation from a letter of
Gladstone, written comparatively early in his career, which shows
convincingly that the subsequent democratic idealist fully realised
the intrinsic farce of the then party system: "Each of them, the Whig
and the Tory Party, comprises within itself far greater divergencies
than can be noticed as dividing the more moderate portion of the one
from the more moderate portion of the other. The great English parties
differ no more in their general outlines than by a somewhat different
distribution of the same elements in each." It is impossible for
the opportunist position to be more cogently stated. It is, indeed,
a strange paradox that political integrity should be traditionally
associated with the name of Gladstone, who accomplished more than any
other of our statesmen in changing statesmanship into demagogy. His
pronouncedly religious temperament, however, led to extraordinary
results, and his psychological condition was best expressed in the
well-known epigram that "he followed his conscience in the same manner
that the driver of a gig follows the horse." It was not that he was
deliberately insincere. He could deceive himself as well as others
with his ingenious sophisms. His sincerity was merely so elastic,
his enthusiasm so adaptable, that he found it easy to be sincere and
enthusiastic, _inter alia_, about those things which coincided with his
interests.

Carlyle hits the mark in dubbing Gladstone a deeper and unconscious
juggler as contrasted with Disraeli, the clever, conscious juggler. The
latter, at any rate, played the game straight with himself. He did not,
like his rival, have recourse to super-natural inspiration for every
argument that dropped from his specious lips, or degrade his deity into
a veritable _deus ex machinâ_, whose function it was to sanction the
most elementary dictates of Parliamentary tactics.

Yet, though he exhibited a prudent elasticity in his handling of the
minor details of party politics, in the main outlines of his policy
he remained consistent and true to himself throughout his career. The
romantic strain in his temperament rendered him congenitally opposed to
the cut and dried utilitarianism of the Whigs. The renovated Toryism
of New England, for which he was largely responsible, though to a
great extent merely a move in the game, is deeply stamped with the
impress of his own nature. That his bias was naturally aristocratic no
one can doubt who has read the passage in _The Revolutionary Epicke_
on Equality, or has appreciated the tone of personal superiority
and contempt for the mediocre that pervades all his writings. His
Conservatism, however, was not the orthodox Conservatism of the Eldon
school, "the barren mule of politics which engenders nothing," to
use his own phrase, but a more picturesque and practical policy. He
poured successfully the new wine of Democracy into the old bottles
of Toryism, and thus, while no doubt indulging the more romantic
side of his nature, placed, his party on a more modern and workable
basis. Disraeli's policy, in fact, was always one of sane and rational
opportunism. In the same way that Gambetta, the exponent of French
Opportunism, opposed "a policy of results to the policy of chimeras"
of the reactionaries, Disraeli opposed to Gladstone's dangerous and
visionary ideals a policy that was at once feasible and salutary.
Disraeli invariably treated England as a definite country with a
definite personality of its own, requiring individual attention and
delicate handling, while Gladstone regarded her as a mere _tabula rasa_
on which the latest new-fangled doctrines could be easily imprinted.
Precisely the same spirit induced Gladstone to treat the Queen as a
department of State and Disraeli to treat her as a woman. In home
politics he has grasped well that transition from feudal to federal
principles which was the keynote of the last century politics. His
detractors object that no great measures stand identified with his
name; but here the fates were against him. It was a cruel paradox
that when at last he obtained an untrammelled power he was too old
and jaded to initiate any new creative measure in domestic affairs.
I quote Mrs. Disraeli: "You don't know my Dizzy; what great plans he
has long matured for the good and greatness of England. But they have
made him wait and drudge so long, and now time is against him." In his
foreign policy, however, he displayed his characteristic combination
of practical and imaginative strength. In the same spirit in which
he himself had obtained the foremost place in England, he desired
that England should acquire the foremost rank among the nations;
while, as is shown by his Imperial policy, he infused something of
his own picturesqueness into the policy of the most prosaic Power in
Europe. His Indian policy, in particular, proves with what practical
imagination he had divined how much lay in a name, and that to the
feudatory princes it meant all the difference whether they paid their
allegiance to the Queen of England or to the Empress of India.

Disraeli's master-passion was ambition. But he was no monomaniac like
Napoleon. In the same way that Sidonia, the complete and perfect man,
according to Disraeli, played with a master-hand on the whole gamut
of life, so did Disraeli, though in a lesser scale, live largely and
fully. He lived in the solitudes of the Arabian deserts and in the
crowded drawing-rooms of St. James's; in the halls of Westminster and
the shady quietude of Bradenham; in the privacy of his own study, and
in the historic chambers of Downing Street. To few men has it been
given to express themselves in so many different ways. What matter if
his feats of statesmanship were restricted by the limitations of the
Parliamentary system and the handicap of his own failing health? To
such a nature the joy of life lay rather in the winning than in the
using of the prize. It is the romance and character of the man that
perpetuate his memory rather than his political achievements. He lives
as a great career. When yet a boy he had mapped out his future, and he
realised his ambition in every detail. By sheer force of intellect and
determination he lifted himself from the Ghetto to the highest position
in England. As he himself said, in one of Mrs. Craigie's novels: "Many
men have talent; few have genius; fewer still have character."




THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS


I

_The Genealogy of Morals: a Polemic_! Nietzsche was well advised to
append the word "polemic" to his title, for it supplies the key to
his whole position. To some extent, no doubt, the "Genealogy" may be
the expression in more philosophic language of those ideas, which
find in Zarathustra their poetic and almost biblical formulation. Yet
philosopher though he may be, Nietzsche is no abstract thinker sitting
down stolidly on some icy height to solve the riddle of the universe,
whatever it may be, by the rigid rules of abstract logic, so that he
may placidly present the solution to such members of the public as
happen to be interested in metaphysics. On the contrary his mind, and
even more truly his temperament, are made up from the outset. Certain
ideas grip him so tensely, and for him, at any rate, constitute so
fiery and omnipresent a reality, as to be from his standpoint things
transcending the mere cavillings of logicians and scientists.

"You ask me why," says Zarathustra, "but I say unto you I am not one of
those whom one may ask their why."

The same idea is more technically expressed in the preface to the
Genealogy--"that new immoral, or at least, 'amoral' _a priori_, and
that 'categorical imperative,' which was its voice (but, oh I how
hostile to the Kantian article, and how pregnant with problems), to
which since then I have given more and more obedience (and, indeed,
what is more than obedience)." For, startling though it may seem to
the orthodox, albeit acceptable enough to the acolytes of the new
faith, the fact stands out irresistibly, that all the later writings of
Nietzsche are saturated through and through with the religious spirit.

For Nietzsche was inspired with as supreme a consciousness of the
infallibility and paramount necessity of his message, as rigid a belief
in exclusive salvation through his own teachings, as has overwhelmed
the brain of any prophet or Messiah known to human history. "I have
given mankind the deepest book it possesses," writes Nietzsche to
Brandes, and means it quite deliberately and quite literally. The
content, indeed, of the religion of this converse Christ may be
diametrically opposed to that of the original, but the machinery is the
same. With the same exalted spirit in which Jesus preached the kingdom
of heaven, so did Nietzsche preach the kingdom of this earth, while it
may be noted incidentally that both kingdoms were the perquisites of
a select few; and as the spurned god of Israel taught self-abasement
to the weak with an intensity that, rightly or wrongly, seems a little
extravagant to our modern taste, so does Nietzsche, and with every whit
as honest a fanaticism, thunder forth to the strong the sublime dogma
of self-expression and self-glorification. Turn, in fact, the doctrines
of Christianity upside down, but leave constant the missionary
enthusiasm of its founder, his chronic fits of extreme depression and
extreme exaltation, and you have the quintessence of Nietzsche.

As, however, it is the boast of all religions that they are beyond the
realms of exact logic and empirical science, it would be as unfair
to look in our prophet's polemic for the mathematical accuracy of a
Euclidian proposition, as it would be to search for such accuracy amid
the many grandiose and tragic thoughts that loom over the invectives of
Isaiah, Jesus, and Jeremiah.

Not, indeed, but what there are many new, swift, and illuminating
truths in our philosopher's gospel, just as there were in the
pronouncements of his afore-said Hebrew brethren. But the essence, the
_raison d'être_ of the whole book is purely polemical. Nietzsche is out
to kill, and so long as his weapons effectually subserve that object,
he is, and quite logically, indifferent to aught else.

Before, however, we analyse in detail the philosophy of this book, it
is advisable to adjust our sights to those particular targets on which
Nietzsche trained his gigantic and murderous artillery. We shall also
have a better prospect of getting really into touch with "the very
inner pulse of the machine," the real core of this philosophy, if we
take a necessarily short, but it is to be hoped none the less vivid,
glance at those reasons which induced Nietzsche to envisage the objects
of his attack with so tense and implacable a hatred.

Now Nietzsche found his intellectual jumping-off ground in that
hybrid of Christianity and Buddhism stuck on a pedestal of sex, which
constituted the philosophy of Schopenhauer and the essence of the
fashionable pessimism of mid-century Germany. To endeavour to condense
one of the most brilliant and elaborate systems of the last century
into a few words is at best a delicate and hazardous task, yet perhaps
we may adumbrate tentatively the radical elements which spurred
Nietzsche to so sanguinary a revolt.

Life according to Schopenhauer was a sorry failure, a thing not worth
living on its merits, but kept going by the driving impetus of a blind
life-force and knit with a mutual pity. Life then being intrinsically
evil, the remedy for the evil was to live as little as possible--"Draw
your desire back from the world so that there may be an end of that
phenomenal life which is nothing but grief." Apart from general
asceticism, there were two specific anodynes prescribed by Schopenhauer
for the disease called life--art which transcended life, and lifted
the spectator or listener on to another plane, and philosophy which,
as it were, blunted the sting of life by the contemplation of the
essentially unreal nature of the phenomenal universe. But the greatest
good was Nirvana, a kind of Pantheistic Absolute of negativity, into
which one eventually merged, to enjoy the supreme paradox of a peaceful
self-consciousness of one's own nothingness.

It is easy for us to sneer, nowadays, at this bilious and suicidal
system, and to explain the whole theory of the Will to Live by the
keen and chronic tyranny which the sexual instinct exercised over
the philosopher himself; the fact remained, Schopenhauer was the
dominant influence of the day--how dominant, can be seen from the
fact that the whole of later Wagnerian music is merely a translation
of his philosophy into the language of sound. It is easy to see the
extent to which Schopenhauer and Wagner were saturated with the whole
spirit of primitive and mediæval Christianity. Human life, forsooth,
is essentially bad and essentially unreal; salvation only lies in
the mortification and annihilation of the self. Apart, however,
from philosophical and theological technicalities, the profound
psychological import of this nihilistic pessimism and neo-Christian
romanticism is patent. Man looks at man's life on earth, and gives it
up as a bad job, or at best makes some fantastic effort to create a
new world to redress the balance of the old. "They wanted to run away
from their misery, and the stars were too far away. Then they sighed,
Oh, that there were heavenly ways, forsooth, to slink into another
Being and Happiness."

It has, in fact, been well put that, as the motto of Goethe was
"_Memento vivere_," so was the motto of Schopenhauer, "_Memento mori_."

Now, Nietzsche voiced the revolt of those temperaments whose ears
were attuned rather to "_Memento vivere_" than "_Memento mori_." We
must remember, moreover, that that Christian romanticism which finds
its best metaphysical formulation in Schopenhauer was in itself but
a reaction from the real spirit of the century, that ebullience and
exuberance of the human ego of which Stendhal is perhaps the most
typical manifestation. It might well indeed be instructive to trace the
intellectual descent of Nietzsche from Stendhal, and, applying again
the sociological method, to speculate as to how far he derived some of
the impetus for his philosophy of egoism from the aggressive wars of
Prussia, as exemplified in the Sadowa campaign and the Franco-German
war. It is time, however, that we came to the temperament of the
philosopher himself. It is indeed a platitude, that as man makes his
gods in his own image, so does the philosopher create his systems.
What is Aristotle's ideal of the _βίος θεωρήτικος_, and
his conception of the self-contemplative god but the erection into
a universal norm of the thinker's natural philosophic idiosyncrasy?
What is the elaborate "I and Me" of the cosmology of Fichte but the
attribution to the universe of the personal idiosyncrasies of Fichte,
the self-conscious Doppelgänger? And how Schopenhauer promoted sex
into the devil, whose heat animates this earthly hell, we have
already seen. What, then, was the impetus which impelled Nietzsche
to batter down the walls of the contemporary moral and philosophic
universe? The theory of an innate _joie de vivre_, a system highly if
not over-charged with vitality, supplies but half the answer. The real
explanation lies in the stiffening of this natural exuberance beneath
the tension of a grim incessant struggle with a nervous malady.

It is not actually necessary to go as far as the Swedish writer,
M. Bjerre, who finds in Nietzsche's deliberate and revolutionary
transvaluation of values that break up of the cerebral system from
its previous condition which signalises the earlier stages of general
paralysis. Yet Nietzsche's own writings, particularly his letters,
reveal how potent was the stimulus exercised on his ego by those
nervous headaches which hounded him over the Continent. To prevent
defeat his will had to be perpetually strained to the maximum pitch of
tension. The sweets of comfort being denied him, the only alternative
left was to find a kind of super-happiness in the ecstasies and
exultations of that Titanic contest which was perpetually fought on
the battlefield of his own person. Let him speak for himself: "I made
of my wish to get well, to live, my philosophy--it should, in fact, be
noted--the years when my vitality descended to its minimum were those
when I ceased to be a pessimist."

We have not, however, at this juncture space to elaborate further
the theory of the superman. Let it be enough to say that it is the
raising to the _n_th power of the spirit of struggling and aggressive
efficiency, and the venting of an over-full vitality by the creation of
new values out of the wealth of the individual ego. As, however, the
glorification of strength involves, and logically so, the degradation
of weakness, and "to build up a sanctuary it is necessary for a
sanctuary to be destroyed," it is not surprising that Nietzsche should
clear the ground for his new creations by a ferocious bombardment of
the crumbling ruins that still encumbered the site. Schopenhauer,
who had been the fount from which Nietzsche's philosophic youth had
drawn its inspiration before, as it were, he had found him out, is
always treated with a certain amount of respect. But the arch-enemy
was the, to him, poisonous system of altruism, self-annihilation, and
world-renouncement which was called Christianity.

The cynical may smile at the inordinate and concentrated frenzy of this
attack. "Is not your wildly militant prophet simply wasting his powder
and shot? Who in his senses ever heard of Christianity being taken _au
pied de la lettre_, even by the most orthodox of modern bishops? What
is it, to use another metaphor, but flogging a dead horse?" To which
Nietzsche's answer would be that it is by removing the foundations
that you remove also the superstructure, or to translate our metaphor,
"Let me kill Christianity, and I kill at the same time all that system
of altruism for altruism's sake, of abstract truth for the sake of
abstract truth, which is built on that hateful foundation." It may also
be observed that, even apart from the poetic and prophetic licence to
which a man writing under such circumstances would be legitimately
entitled, there are even now not wanting people who do in point of fact
take Christianity with all the implicit seriousness of the mediæval
monks or the early Fathers. It is, indeed, a phenomenon not without a
certain intrinsic humour, that almost at the very moment when Tolstoi
was making his pathetic efforts to resuscitate literal Christianity
with the abortive tears of pity, Nietzsche should swing along to
flagellate the semi-inanimate ghost of the bleeding God, in no monkish
spirit, forsooth, but with all the grim and scientific energy of the
most enthusiastic of executioners, compared to whom Voltaire was but
the most urbane of wits, and Heine the most innocuous of schoolboys.
Having thus taken a brief view of the targets, and of the implacable
and very serious spirit that animates the assailant, let us glance
briefly at the chief lines of attack.


II

The first essay of the Genealogy consists of an essay on "Good and
Evil, Good and Bad." The line of attack is double, being first
etymological, and secondly historical.

Without going into philological exactitudes, it is, we think, fairly
safe to follow Nietzsche in his theory that the word "good" and its
analogues were originally applied to designate those qualities which
were peculiar to the governing aristocratic classes, albeit qualities
by no means susceptible of the title of "ethical" goodness. Physical
valour being in primitive times the most valuable asset of the
community, it is not unnatural that that quality should be held in
universal esteem. We would remark, however, in passing, that though
Nietzsche professes to make a flying expedition into the domain of
early Greek ethics, which would appear, according to his teachings, to
be represented as an ideal system worthy of modern imitation, he is
apparently oblivious to the fact that the spirit of cunning prudence,
of which he so emphatically disapproves, was one of the most admired
qualities of primitive Greece.

On the general question, however, we may perhaps supplement Nietzsche's
by Spencer's argument on the meaning of the English word "good,"
which, as is notorious, has the double meaning of "ethical" and
"efficient." Instructive, however, though this argument is, it cannot
be said to clinch the question, since, even in the times of ancient
Greece, there were not wanting words such as _κάλος, αἴχρος,
ὅσιος_ to denote, albeit mostly in æsthetic terminology, that ethical
meaning, of which the word _ἄγαθος_ fell so signally short.
In other words, to use Nietzschean terminology, the ethical taint even
then existed, though in a less virulent form.

The other line of attack, however, is more serious, and penetrates to
the very core of the modern moral system with its savage onslaught on
Christianity. What is Christianity, says Nietzsche, but the revolt
of the slaves in the sphere of morals? Our philosopher's suggestion,
of course, that Christianity was a deliberate stratagem on the part
of a revengeful Israel to square accounts with the conqueror, has,
on the face of it, no claim to serious consideration as anything
but a poetic thought. The fact, however, that Christianity from its
beginning catered avowedly for the poor, the weak, the oppressed, the
inefficient, is admittedly true, whatever disputes may range as to the
inferences to be drawn from this fact. And that the accusation of being
a slave-morality is something more than empty abuse, is substantiated
by the numerous slaves who did, in fact, subscribe to the infant
creed. It is, moreover, not without its interest to watch nowadays a
recurrence of the same phenomenon. Just, indeed, as at present the
proletariate are _ipso facto_ ready to believe, quite apart from any
question of any economic justification of the doctrine, in the genuine
iniquity of the rich capitalist, so in the early Christian era the
proletariate were not reluctant to put their faith in the saying, that,
"it was as easy for a camel to go through the eye of a needle as for
a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven." The difference, however,
between modern and ancient Christianity stands out clearly from the
fact that though this identical creed is invoked with something
approaching equal facility on the sides both of the angels and the
devils, it is, on the whole, now identified with the richer and more
prosperous classes.

It must, however, be frankly admitted that Nietzsche somewhat
overshoots the mark, both in dubbing the history of the world a
conflict between the two ideals, of Rome and Judæa, the egoistic and
altruistic ideals, and in asseverating that the primitive "beast of
prey prowling avidly after booty and victory" was the only type of the
human species worthy of admiration, and that the tamed modern species
is but a diseased distortion. We will deal later with the lacuna
caused in Nietzsche's philosophy by his refusal to recognise the true
significance of the Aristotelian doctrine that man is a _ζῶον
πολιτικον_ when we show that even from his own standpoint the modern
state of man is preferable to the primal. Suffice it for the present
to say that, however large a part of the truth Nietzsche captured with
this potent theory, there remains a not inconsiderable part which still
eluded him.


III

Having endeavoured thus to dispose of the "ethically good" and
"ethically bad" by the theory that such ideas are merely distortions
of the ideas of "practically good and practically bad," Nietzsche in
the second essay of the Genealogy makes a similar effort to take the
sting out of the ideas of "Schuld" (guilt, debt), and "schlechtes
Gewissen" (bad conscience). But here, again, difficulties beset our
revolutionary. He approves of responsibility and the sacredness of the
promise, but disapproves of the bad conscience by which the individual
would enforce these things on himself. He blesses justice, but damns
the social system. We shall find it hard to follow him in his attempted
reconciliation of these divergent standpoints. When, for instance,
he alludes with almost paternal approbation to the savage mnemonics
by which the "conscience" (_per se_) was produced, and then proceeds
to an envenomed, if none the less brilliant polemic against the "bad
conscience," we see that in reality it is not so much the existence of
a conscience _quâ_ conscience, to which he objects, but the existence
of a conscience functioning on what he conceives to be a vicious
basis. Indeed, even the most faithful of our prophet's disciples would
admit that the Nietzschean teaching lays down as thorny and toilsome
a path for the "bold, bad man," or _übermensch_, as Christianity ever
decreed for the good man or weakling. The only difference, in fact,
between Nietzschean and Christian ethics is that between excessive
self-affirmation and excessive self-negation. But one has only to read
_Zarathustra_ to realise immediately that this self-affirmation is no
heedless hedonism, but a tense and chronic struggle of the ego against
the world, subject to as rigid rules and braving as intense martyrdoms
as does the Christian struggle of the spirit against the flesh. We may
say, in fact, that on an officially Nietzschean basis the "bad" man who
fails in being thoroughly and perfectly bad is, and apparently properly
so, subject to as poignant pangs as is the "good" man who fails in
being thoroughly and perfectly good.

Granted, however, that it is the content of the bad conscience rather
than the existence of a bad conscience _per se_, which provokes his
righteous indignation, let us make some attempt to see how far
Nietzsche is logical in condemning, as he does, existing ethics as the
bastard child of contract and revenge, thriving amid a civilisation
which has no real right to exist. Nietzsche starts off in fine
feather to prove that the word "Schuld" (guilt) is the same as the
word "Schuld" (debt), as though that momentous piece of philological
research crushed all ethics once and for all. We do not for a moment
dispute the philology. Moreover, as far as the general principle is
concerned, it had been previously pointed out by Maine that all crimes
were in their origin torts--that is to say, private wrongs against the
individual (though doubts as to how far this theory is to be carried
are raised by the universal execration which even in the most primitive
societies was visited on murderers like Cain or Orestes).

It may, moreover, be true that in many cases the local god is simply
a deceased ancestor promoted to a heavenly status, who requires
payment for protecting his descendants. But such arguments can at the
best merely have effect on the theological conception of morality
as a divine ordinance descending immediately from heaven. From the
sociological standpoint, indeed, to derive "ethics" from "contract"
is simply to consolidate one phase of the social instinct by deriving
it from another. As, however, has been hinted before, it was the
theological conception that was Nietzsche's main objective. So long
as he could kill that, he was indifferent to the price, if, indeed,
his morbidly classic and aristocratic standpoint did not hold that
the taint of the bourgeois and the _βάναυσος_ attached
automatically to everything commercial.

The shifts, however, to which Nietzsche is driven are well illustrated
when we come to that further stage in his evolution of the moral idea,
which consists in deriving modern ethics or the "bad conscience" from
the principle of "resentment" or "revenge," which is alleged to be
a totally distinct thing from the "active feeling" by which Justice
enforces its sanctions. But with all due respect to Nietzsche and his
official expounders, we find it hard to appreciate any real difference
in principle between the various drastic measures by which the social
organism enforces its decree. The punishment for murder, we suggest,
would be equally death both in a Nietzschean and in a non-Nietzschean
state, and how anything more than the merest verbal distinction is
achieved by labelling one sanction the "active emotion of justice" and
the other "the principle of resentment" we are frankly at a loss to
conceive. We can only say that the basing of the "bad conscience" on
the spirit of revenge is true in the sense that from one aspect the
function of the social organism is to protect the many against the few
by the enforcements of drastic punishments against its transgressors.
That, moreover, the strong are unduly restricted to pamper the weak is
an arguable proposition, how arguable, can be seen from the present
volubility of the financially strong when menaced nowadays with
taxation for the benefit of the financially weak. But to go to the
length of saying that the whole social fabric is a morbid distortion,
a thing intrinsically bad, a kind of quasi-theological fall from an
ideal state of primitive anarchy, is, at the most charitable estimate,
a mere piece of poetic extravagance. Yet to this length Nietzsche goes
when he pictures his blonde primæval beast swung into "new situations
and conditions of existence"; in other words, into the "pale of society
with a spring and rush." The apparent suddenness of the transition
strikes us, indeed, as naïf as the philosophy of Rousseau or of Hobbes,
who actually conceived the social contract as a specific bargain
entered into at a specific time.

One of the most interesting parts, however, of the whole essay is
Nietzsche's explanation of the "bad conscience" as the result of
the primitive energy of the savage venting itself in psychological
self-torture when debarred from its natural outlet of physical
violence. "All instincts which do not vent themselves without vent
themselves within," so runs the dictum of the prophet, a dictum
no doubt of great psychological truth, and capable of concrete
illustration when applied to nuns, monks, and other ascetics, or to
definite cases of neurotic introspection, but clearly not deserving to
be treated as the key to the whole social fabric.

We have already remarked that the real weakness of the Nietzschean
philosophy lay in the neglect of the Aristotelian theory that man was a
_ζῶον πολιτικον_ or a social animal. Let us resume this line
of inquiry. Nietzsche does, it is true, refer to the "herd instinct"
of the weak, but only to exhibit his very palpable contempt against
the weak who herd together so as to be able effectually to combat the
strong. A yet further proof of Nietzsche's bitter hatred of the social
organism is supplied by the celebrated phrases in _Zarathustra_, "as
little state as possible," and "the slow suicide which we call the
state." In our view, however, the real test of Nietzsche's position
is touched when we come to the position of the aristocratic strong
man. "Are they," one wonders, "tainted or untainted with the herd
instinct?" Nietzsche's answer to this question seems to be that, so
far as concerns the vast bulk of the herd, they are inimical to the
social instinct, but that none the less they find social organisation
(apparently that identical state which we have seen spoken of as
"slow suicide") necessary, not only for keeping the herd in proper
order, but for the purpose of "their own fight with other complexes
of power." Viewed impartially, however, it does not seem to us that
Nietzsche pays sufficient importance to the universality and value of
the social instinct. Perhaps the root of the whole matter lies in the
fact that Nietzsche fixes apparently the human unit as the individual,
whereas, in point of fact, it is that state in miniature, the family.
The origin of the family may no doubt be found in the primæval
instincts of sex and parentship. None the less, it is an indisputed
sociological fact that the family, or its larger manifestation the
tribe, is, as is evident from the slightest perusal of the works of
Darwin, Maine, or Westermarck, the primitive form of human life. It
would obviously be outside the scope of this preface to go in detail
into the whole question of the origin of society, but it would also
appear an indisputable platitude that man, _quâ_ man, thrives by
co-operation and association. In economical terminology this truth is
known as the division of labour, in sociology by our frequently quoted
Aristotelian dictum that man is a social animal. Nietzsche, it is
true, tries to evade, or at any rate minimise, the force of this fact
by treating law as the concrete exemplification of might is right.
This, of course, is true as far as it goes, but it is only one side
of the medal. All law is based on sovereignty, and all sovereignty is
in the last resort based on force. It is possible, no doubt, for this
force, this ultimate sanction to be exercised on approved Nietzschean
principles by the few against the many. To quote the words of Ihering,
the great Austrian jurist: "And so force, when it allies itself with
insight and self-control, produces law. It is the origin of law out
of the power of the stronger who stands in opposition to another,
of which we now begin to get a glimpse." Yet, even though for the
moment we confine ourselves to this aspect, it is obvious that while
such a law subjugates the weak to the strong, it also regulates and
curtails the rights of the strong among themselves, creating, as it
were, a state within a state, or, to use once again the language of
Ihering, "the self-limitation of force in its own interest." Equally
important, however, is the obverse side of the medal, on which appears
the exercise of the ultimate sanction by the many against the few.
To quote Ihering for the last time: "The crucial point in the whole
organisation of law is the preponderance of the common interests of
all over the particular interests of the individuals." The vice, then,
of Nietzsche's theory is that he bisects law into its two constituent
phases, ignores one phase and confines himself to the other, apparently
in blissful oblivion of the fact that even in the most aristocratic of
aristocracies there exists, even though in miniature, the "slow suicide
of the state."

There is a further criticism which seems to arise properly out of
Nietzsche's vehement denunciation of civilisation. The state and
civilisation are bad according to Nietzsche, because they take the
sting out of this struggle for existence, and cut the fangs of the
superman. But, according to Nietzschean principles, are they not
equally good in so far as they enable the superman to refine and
elaborate his scale of combat? It is, indeed, obvious that the
intellectualisation of the blonde beast of primitive times into the
newspaper proprietor, American financier, or revolutionary philosopher
of modernity would have been impossible but for the intervention of
a very highly developed social organism. Yet even the most confirmed
Nietzschean would admit that Mr. Rockefeller is, in spite of his
evangelistic proclivities, a more highly developed specimen of the
superman than Tamerlane, and Lord Northcliffe than, say, Cæsar Borgia.

One final observation: according to Nietzsche the test of merit is
efficiency and the test of efficiency is success. Supposing, however,
that a large number of individuals comparatively weak overpower through
sheer force of combination a small number of individuals comparatively
strong. Are not the weak changed into the strong, and conversely? We do
not say that this is necessarily so: we merely adduce the argument to
show how easily Nietzschean principles lend themselves to exploitation
at the hands of the Socialists.

Nietzsche's philosophy, however, was above all didactic, missionary.
He analysed contemporary morality, not by way of an academic or
scientific exercise, but with a view to striking, and striking hard,
at that aspect of it which he quite honestly believed to be vicious
and deleterious. Hence it is that having in his first two essays
dealt with the etymological and legal aspects of the question, he now
goes straight to the root of the whole matter. What is the practical
application of all these tendencies which he has analysed? The ascetic
ideal--and against this ideal our teacher proceeds to deliver as
tense and concentrated a sermon as ever fell from the lips of any
denouncer of the luxurious or non-ascetic ideal. We have not space,
unfortunately, to follow Nietzsche through his elaborate analysis both
of the ascetic ideal in its origin and in its eventual distortion and
corruption at the hands of the ascetic priest. We will only observe
that to grasp properly Nietzsche's position, stress should be laid
on the fact that in the same way in which it was not the conscience
_per se_, but the current content of the conscience, so it was not
asceticism _per se_, but the current content of asceticism to which
Nietzsche objected.

As he explains in drastic and elaborate style, the philosopher, like
the jockey or the athlete, would, through the simple exigencies of his
_métier_, live the ascetic life. In such cases asceticism is simply the
mechanical condition precedent of complete concentration. Similarly,
the _übermensch_ (superman) would no doubt be compelled to live the
ascetic life in his strenuous struggle with subsisting values. The
asceticism, however, to which Nietzsche in fact did object, was the
asceticism which was not like the philosopher's asceticism, a means to
creating or promoting actual human life, but was a means to destroying
and minimising actual human life, the asceticism which denied the right
to happiness, and which found in sin the solution to the riddle of the
human world.

Indeed, it is thoroughly characteristic of Nietzsche's whole attitude
that he demurs vigorously to almost any solution of the riddle of the
world. According to his reasoning, the need for any solution at all,
whether transcendental, after the pattern of Kant and the Idealists, or
quasi-transcendental, after the pattern of the pseudo-metaphysics of
the scientists, argues an inability to take life on its own merits and
on its own valuation.

Let us finally glance briefly at the practical application of the
Nietzschean philosophy, a course thoroughly consistent with the
intensely practical spirit of our prophet. We are at first almost
overwhelmed by the heterogeneous character of those who profess to be
the true disciples of the great master, a character so heterogeneous,
forsooth, that Nietzsche seems occasionally to be nothing but a
catch-word mouthed by every conceivable school of thought with
the rankest impunity. The Socialists, conveniently forgetting the
opprobrious designation by the sage as "spiders," and their apostolic
"Man is not equal," which he had thundered forth, find a bond of
sympathy in their common disapproval of Christianity, though even
here their standpoints are radically different, since while the
"tarantulæ" rebelled against it as being too narrow a prison, Nietzsche
scorns it as being too comfortable a lounge. Zarathustra, moreover,
showed himself truly Persian in his repudiation of the claims of
the child-bearing machine called woman to equal rights with the
warrior-man: "When thou goest with women," quoth the prophet, "forget
not the whip." Nothing daunted, however, the shrieking hordes of
the ultra-modern sisterhood, from the "Free Lover" to the "Ethical
Lifer," find in Nietzsche the most emphatic justification for alike
their theories and their practices. Does not _Es Lebe das Leben_, the
well-known drama of Sudermann, portray the philosophical dogma of
self-expression leading to highly unphilosophic applications? Does not
the Scandinavian writer and woman with a mission, Ella[1] Key, start
her book _Personality and Beauty_ with the following quotations from
Nietzsche: "Follow after thyself--what says thy conscience?--thou shalt
be that which thou art--let the highest self-expression be thy highest
expression." Truly the Nietzschean aphorisms seem caps guaranteed
to fit the most diverse heads so, but they show the slightest
disposition to tumidity. Young men and nations in a hurry, Socialists
and aristocrats, æsthetes and "woman's righters," all combine in a
cacophonous chorus well calculated to make the shade of Zarathustra,
should he visit Europe, hasten back in disgust to the mountain peaks of
his solitude.

Yet, however susceptible to abuse the Nietzschean philosophy may be,
such a multifarious exploitation, though repudiated from the official
standpoint, does not strike us as necessarily illogical. The doctrine
of the superman, indeed, has in Nietzsche two distinct meanings--the
evolution of generic man to his extreme limit, as exemplified in the
aphorism, "Man is a bridge between beast and superman," and secondly
the idealisation of the clash between the individual and society, the
apotheosis of the aggressive combatant element in man, the
_τὸ θυμοεῑδες_ of the Platonic trinity. Yet, whatever meaning may
be chosen, it is well-nigh impossible to prevent individuals from
cherishing the honest and sincere belief that in developing themselves
(whether with or without the rigid discipline incumbent upon the
orthodox superman), they are either helping the development of the
race, or providing a picturesque expression of a considerably altered,
but still authentic, "Athanasius contra mundum." With the present boom
no doubt Nietzscheanism may become a craze (in Germany, of course, it
is already _passé_ and has become academic and respectable), like the
æstheticism of the Wilde period and grown liable to equal if dissimilar
perversions.

Yet none the less, if taken very broadly and very sanely, Nietzsche
is capable of constituting a valuable modern bible for the
twentieth-century man who proposes to live vastly and to play for grand
stakes. It may no doubt be true that while Heine and Voltaire merely
shot poisoned arrows at Christianity, Nietzsche blew it clean away with
the giant salvos of his artillery; yet on the tremendous space that he
cleared he built a temple to Energy and Efficiency. And note, that he
worships these deities not for any ulterior advantage, but for their
own sake solely. His frenzy for life precludes him at once from being
a pessimist; it does not follow, however, that he is an optimist (in
the hedonistic sense of the word), for neither in his own life, nor in
his conception of that of others, do we find it clearly expressed that
the pleasures of life outweigh the pains. More accurate is it to say
that he is a philosophy transcending optimism. "On! On!! On!!! Live!
Live!! Live!!! whatever the result and whatever your fate. Fight life
and chance everything, for the fight's the thing rather than the mere
trumpery guerdon." So we would venture to phrase the true Nietzschean
spirit, or if an actual quotation is required, "_I say unto you it is
not the good cause which sanctifies the war, but the good war which
sanctifies the cause_."

The most marvellous thing, however, about this grim lust of life is
that it is absolutely insatiate, absolutely infinite. According to
the theory of the Eternal Return, the events of this life will repeat
and repeat with the tireless inevitability of a recurring decimal.
Taken literally, no doubt this theory is simply the mystical dance
of a Titanic mind striving to scale infinity. But the psychological
significance is none the less profound. Is it not turning the tables
with a vengeance on the Christian idea of a prospective non-earthly
existence, compared with which this existence is a mere shadowy
preparation, to pile future life on future life on future life, and
every one of them a repetition of man's life on earth? It is impossible
for the affirmation of human existence to be carried further. And
this human existence, what is its solution, None, or rather itself!
Existence is its own sanction, its own _raison d'être_, and he who
coldly ravishes the sphinx of life has found a drastic solution far
excelling that of any Œdipus.


[Footnote 1: transcriber's note: "Ella" (sic). Should be "Ellen" Key.
(M.D.)]




AUGUST STRINDBERG

        "I seek God and find the Devil."

        "My hate is boundless as the wastes, burning as the sun,
        and stronger than my love."


The above quotations give some idea of that black pessimism which is,
at any rate, the most patent characteristic of Strindberg. Yet neither
quotation, motto, nor catch-word can do justice to the multifarious
life and character of this man. For Strindberg, more than any other
European author of our age, has boxed the whole compass of our
modernity with its tumults, its aspirations, its perversities; its
glaring searchlights of science, its pallid flames of mysticism, and
its needle ever pointing to the two opposite though connected poles
of sex. He is in turns the most rabid of atheists, the most devout of
Catholics, the most esoteric of occultists; now the most Utopian of
Socialists, now the most uncompromising of individualists. Running the
gauntlet of three unhappy and dissolved marriages, he has become the
European specialist in conjugal infelicity, to say nothing of being
credited with innumerable conquests, which he himself would doubtless
have designated as captures. His novels, his autobiographies, and his
equally subjective dramas all exhale the most sulphurous hate against
the distorted anomaly of the new woman, yet he is an Orpheus who,
scorning the prosaic joys of some normal and uninteresting Eurydice,
surrenders himself with almost pathological gusto to be torn to
pieces by the monstrous mænads of modernity. The paroxysms of his hate
alternate with moods of the most sentimental idealism, and the harsh
impetus of his onslaught is only equalled by the, at times, abject
meekness of his romantic devotion.

Before, consequently, we embark on some slight survey of Strindberg's
life and of the more characteristic of his numerous works, let us
endeavour to lay hold of the clues of one or two primary features
which will serve as a guide in the, at first sight, extremely tangled
labyrinth of his psychology.

Now the dominant emotion in Strindberg's temperament is fear. It is
this fear which, at times assuming the dimensions of _paranoia_ or
systematised delusion and persecution mania, largely supplies the
explanation to his whole attitude towards Man, Woman, and God. He
possessed also a vehemently explosive egoism and a gigantic intellect,
at times dominating his fear and functioning with the most powerful
precision, but as often as not interpreting the whole external world in
the terms of some preconceived subjective emotion. Add also a morbidly
hypertrophied sexual sensibility, together with a distinct strain of
genuine idealism, and one may perhaps be able to envisage with some
accuracy the cardinal points of our author's brain.

August Strindberg was born in 1849, the son of a _mésalliance_ between
a shipping agent and a servant girl. The circumstances of his childhood
tended to magnify that morbid sense of fear which, according to our
most eminent psychologists, is always innate and never altogether
acquired. The two parents, the seven children, and the two servants
lived in two rooms, and the family always appeared to him like "a
prison in which two prisoners watched each other, a place where
children were tortured and maids brawled." His mother died when he was
thirteen, to be succeeded by the inevitable stepmother. His school life
also was unhappy, but his description of it, though no doubt perfectly
consistent with actual hardship, exhibits at the same time the
reactions of a morbid sensibility to the hard facts of external life.
"Life was a penitentiary for crimes which one had committed before one
was born, so that the child always went about with a bad conscience."

Note also, at the same time, the presence of the combative aggressive
element in the boy who would lose nearly every game of chess by the
inconsidered vehemence of his attack, or would break open chests of
drawers in the fury of his desire to obtain their contents. And observe
the early manifestations of that fundamental emotion which was to
obtain throughout his life alternative outlets in the two parallel
channels of religion and sex. Thus, like Byron, he experienced a
violent passion for a girl before the age of puberty. So far, again,
as religion was concerned, he had a great horror of darkness and the
unknown, and his deity would appear to have been a god rather of fear
than of love. And though Scandinavians as a race take Christianity far
more seriously than the inhabitants of any other European country, he
would appear to have possessed, even for a Scandinavian, the religious
temperament to an unusual degree. Thus, he said his prayers on his way
to school, and evinced a precocious desire to become a priest. But
the religious element became dormant amid the chequered vicissitudes
which signalised his youth and his adolescence. He started to study
medicine at the University of Upsala, but his lack of funds broke into
his college career and compelled him to earn his own living. He is by
turns telegraph clerk, editor of an insurance paper (for which purpose
he specially learns the higher mathematics), tutor in the family of a
rich Jewish physician, actor in the Karl Moor of Schiller's _Robbers_,
journalist on a daily paper (where the drastic offensiveness of his
criticisms made his position on the staff intolerable), and librarian
in the Royal Library of Stockholm (when he specially learns Chinese
for the purpose of compiling a catalogue). His struggles were bitter
and continued, and the acuteness of his privations manifests itself in
a deep consciousness of class hatred against the prosperous and not
infrequently dishonest philistinism of the day.

Note, also, the occurrence of combined religious and persecution mania
in the crises of his illness and despondency. For at such times he
takes the Devil himself as seriously as the Deity, believes in an
"Evil God to whom the Creator had handed over the world," and "has the
consciousness of being personally persecuted by personal powers of
evil." These emotional outbursts are all the more interesting because
intellectually he had become the most fanatical of freethinkers, had
read with profit Buckle's _History of Civilisation in England_, and
was a fervent disciple of the new naturalism. During this period he
had already begun to write dramas, none of which, however, have any
substantial significance with the possible exception of the historical
drama _Meister Olof_, which was unsuccessfully performed in 1877-8, and
into which the already misogynous author had introduced the character
of the prostitute, "in order to show that the difference between her
and the ordinary woman is not so enormously great."

In 1879, however, Strindberg achieved a _succès de scandale_ with
his novel _The Red Room_. The satire of this book (written, it will
be remembered, during his freethought years), may, no doubt, be the
milk of Christian charity when compared with the concentrated vitriol
of the _Black Flags_ of his Catholic period, and the various scenes
and pictures may, no doubt, strike the critic as episodic and lacking
in systematic cohesion, yet the work has some claim to recognition
by reason of the vivid force of its description of contemporaneous
life. The naïvely idealistic hero, the shady actress passing from
seduction to seduction with all the facility of the experienced
_ingénue_, the respectable director of the shoddy insurance company,
the insidious Jewish financial broker, the cynical journalist, the
grim but benevolent doctor, are all portrayed in a style which at once
shines and chills with all the brightness of the coldest steel. Viewed
psychologically, the book is significant as exhibiting the Socialistic
fury of an embittered man "whose class-hatred lay in his blood and in
his nerves," and who revenges himself on the system which had conspired
against him, by exposing with sinister precision its most repulsive
truths.

The cynicism of _The Red Room_ was succeeded by the Utopian
romanticism of the dramas, _Das Geheimniss der Gilde_, _Frau Margit_,
_Gluckspeter_. The change in mood is probably to be ascribed to the
vogue of _The Red Room_, and to the initial success of his alliance
with his first wife, Siri von Essen, the actress, whom he had married
in 1878, and who was subsequently to enjoy the ambiguous blessing of
being officially immortalised in _The Confession of a Fool_.

This mood, in its turn, was soon replaced by a concentrated and
fanatical misogynism which was to dominate practically every book
which Strindberg was subsequently to write. The fundamental cause
was, no doubt, the morbidly irritable and suspicious nature of the
man himself. Strindberg's whole attitude towards woman, however, is
only fully understood by some appreciation of the New Woman Movement,
which under the auspices of Ellen Key flourished vigorously in Sweden
in the "eighties." Like, for instance, our own Suffragette agitation,
or indeed, any popular craze, however intrinsically meritorious, this
movement, which was, above all, a crusade for sexual equality, was
attended by wild and perverse extravagances. Not merely the genuinely
masculine woman, but every little doll of a woman in every little
doll's house, became obsessed with the imperative necessity of the
emancipation of her own body and the self-development of her own soul.
A holy war of the sexes was proclaimed, and the sacred shibboleth of
the New Thought, the New Ethics, and the New Love was soon in the mouth
of every woman possessed of the true feminine _esprit de corps._ And
with the praiseworthy object of adjusting the balance of nature, and of
arriving so far as possible at the ideal harmony of an almost perfect
equation, in some cases even the little boys would be brought up as
girls, while, conversely, the little girls would be educated as boys.

But the misogynism of Strindberg was something far more than a merely
intellectual appreciation of the Anti-Feminist standpoint. Even making
allowance for the considerable impetus doubtless given to his attack
by reason of his personal matrimonial complications, the cause lay far
more deeply ingrained in his own constitution. For the arrogation by
the female of equal rights to the male would of itself tend to provoke
the violent apprehensiveness of a man always morbidly alarmed at the
slightest suggestion of any interference with his own personal rights,
and always scenting a grievance with all the superhuman _flair_ of
the true maniac of persecution. Strindberg's hatred of woman is thus
to a large extent the hatred self-begotten of fear out of its own
spirit, and without the superfluous aid of a concrete reality. If,
too, we identify Strindberg himself with some of his men characters
(_e.g._ Kurt in _The Death Dance_, Axel in _Playing with Fire_, or the
narrator of _The Confession of a Fool_), who render to the objects
of their passion acts of the most abject servility, and who kiss the
feet of women almost as frequently as their lips, we would hazard the
suggestion that he himself (who owns to having found in his reverence
for woman a substitute for his reverence for God) would in certain
moods welcome with morbid alacrity this new feminine domination, while
his reaction from this inverted attitude would but lash his misogynism
to even more hysterical paroxysms.

These considerations may perhaps explain why in so many of his works
the Strindberg woman and the Strindberg man are so highly specialised.
The typical Strindberg woman is a fiend with the physique of a Madonna
and the soul of a vampire, who sucks dry the life-blood of her heroic
victim. The typical Strindberg man is a Samson shorn of his strength,
writhing in the toils of some Delilah, protesting vociferously, and
yet taking a morbid delight in his own bondage. English readers
will remember the not altogether unanalogous case of John Tanner,
that converse Don Juan of Mr. Shaw, who, with all his fanfaronnade
of masculine independence, is, as he has from the beginning feared,
anticipated and desired, successfully hunted down by his sly and
dashing _Donna Juana_.

After the publication of _The Red Room_, Strindberg visited both
Switzerland and Paris, where he was invited to meet Björnsen, entered
into relations with the Théätre Libre of M. Antoine, had one or two of
his plays produced, and meditated an unfortunately written satire on
the French capital. In 1883 he produced _Swedish Destinies_, a volume
of essays on contemporary problems, whose romantic masquerade would
seem to have effectively concealed its underlying satire.

The most significant work, however, which he published at this period
was the volume of twelve (subsequently expanded to twenty) short
stories, entitled _Marriage_. These tales all treat of the various
phases, economic, social, psychological, and physiological, of the
sexual problem, which he observed either in his own life or in the
couples whom he saw in a Swiss _pension._ The characteristic of this
work is its extraordinary seriousness. For to Strindberg the sexual
problem provides neither the excuse for the philosophic flippancy
of the cynic, nor for the priggish modernity of the ethical or
intellectual snob, but is the one obsessing reality of actual life.

Compared with the black pessimism of this work (relieved though it may
be at times by a ray of tender sentiment or deep paternal feeling), the
grimmest stories of Wedekind are benignly jovial and the most scabrous
tales of De Maupassant but innocently sportive. Neither smile, nor
even leer, ever breaks the set visage of this stern irony, which seems
indistinguishable from life itself. There are no artificial climaxes
or ostentatious flourishes of style to prick the senses of the reader.
Described in a language of the most brutal phlegm and the most forceful
simplicity, the facts of reality do their own unaided work. Each story
is no mere dexterously elaborated incident, but a condensed life. How
powerful, for instance, is such a story as _Asra,_ the history of the
pious youth afflicted with anæmia by reason of his own continence,
and dying two years after his marriage with that superabundantly
healthy ethical worker who subsequently married twice again, had eight
children, and wrote articles on over-population and immorality. And how
genuinely awful is _Autumn_, that frigid anti-climax of a stale and
re-hashed honeymoon:

        "And she sang, 'What is the name of the land in which
        my darling dwells?' But, alas, the voice was thin and
        sharp. It was at times like a shriek from the depths of
        the soul that fears that the noon is passed, and that
        the evening is approaching. When the song was over, she
        did not at first dare to turn round, as though she was
        expecting that he would come to her and say something.
        But he did not come; and there was silence in the room.
        When at last she turned round on her chair, he sat on
        the sofa and cried. She wanted to get up, take his head
        in her hands, and kiss him as before; but she remained
        seated, motionless, with her gaze turned to the floor....

        "They drank coffee, and spoke about the coolness of the
        summer weather, and where they would spend the summer
        next year. But the conversation began to dry up; and
        they repeated themselves. At last he said, after a long,
        undisguised yawn, 'I'm going to bed now.' 'So will I,'
        she said, and got up, 'but I will go first and have a
        look on the balcony.'

        "When she came back, she remained standing and listening
        at the door of the bedroom. All was quiet inside, and
        the boots were outside the door. She knocked, but there
        was no answer. Then she opened the door, and went in. He
        slept! He slept!"

Though, moreover, the characters in _Marriage_ are more normal and
average than in any other of Strindberg's works, the author airs again
and again his pet sexual grievances. _Corinna_, in particular, and
_The Duel_, are savage attacks respectively on the ethical amazon and
the womanly woman who makes her very womanliness an engine of tyranny,
while the _Breadwinner_ narrates how an apparently quite impeccable
husband and father, writing himself to death to support his family,
was driven to suicide by the naggings and exactions of a querulous and
discontented wife.

_Marriage_ was succeeded by the Utopian _Swiss Tales_; but the
strenuous economic struggles to which Strindberg was now subjected
forced him to discard as insipid the vague compromise of free-thought
and to drink the bracing tonic of a Nietzschean and self-reliant
atheism. "God, Heaven, and Eternity had to be thrown overboard if the
ship was to be kept afloat; and it had to be kept afloat because I was
not alone ... I became an atheist as a matter of duty and necessity."

Yet it is interesting to observe that, taking the solution of the
World-Riddle as a matter of acute personal importance, he studies the
whole history of mankind to satisfy himself that he is right in his
conclusion, and that the element of superstition is still so strong
that when his child is ill he prays, atheist that he is, with all the
fervour of a Christian Scientist. To the period of his atheism are to
be ascribed, with the exception of _Black Flags_, his most powerful,
most drastic work, his two packed volumes of one-act plays, the
autobiographic _Confession of a Fool_, and the Nietzschean novel, _The
Open Sea_.

Note also that his matrimonial misery and his divorce from his first
wife had given an additional poison to a sting which was always
morbidly eager to inject its venom.

The plays of Strindberg belong to the naturalistic school of
problem-play which was in full vogue during the period of their
composition. Technically their originality lies in the intensity of
their concentration. Though many of them are one-acters and they nearly
all observe the unity of place, they resemble less the ordinary
curtain-raiser than the one solitary act round which the ordinary
modern play is usually written. Each play is nothing but climax. Though
in some cases they are nearly as long as ordinary drama, it is rare
that they have any subsidiary characters. Even the protagonists are too
occupied with the urgencies of their own immediate crises, and with
exposing the nakedness of their own souls, to have time for either the
artificial jewels of the Pinerovian epigram or the flying rockets of
the Shavian dialectic. The problem is stuck too deep into their lives
to require any artificial flourishing. Observe, too, that nearly every
play is a variation on one theme, the mutual hate, fear, and war of a
malevolent humanity. Their very love but sharpens their enmity, and
they draw blood with nearly every word.

The three-act play, _The Father_, ventilates the author's chronic
grievance of the ruin of the man by the woman. The plot is cruel
in its simplicity. The husband, though in a state of acute nervous
disorder, is not certifiable. The wife, anxious for a freer life,
smuggles a doctor into the house, plays adroitly on the man's pet
mania that he is not the father of his own daughter, forges in his
handwriting a letter branded with insanity, goads him into throwing
a burning lamp at her, and with the aid of his old nurse gets him by
a ruse into a strait-jacket, in which he succumbs to a stroke. Yet
with all its concentrated sensationalism, and work though it may be
of a constitutional maniac of persecution, the play is too deep, too
sincere, too fundamentally convincing to be ever near that line which
separates the realm of tragedy from the pandemonium of melodrama. With
what ghastly irony does the daughter innocently prick the sensitive
sore in her father's brain:

        [Rittmeister _sits huddled up on the settee_.

        BERTHA. Do you know what you've done? Do you know you've
        thrown the lamp at Mamma?

        RITTMEISTER. Have I?

        BERTHA. Yes, you have. Just think if she'd been hurt?

        RITTMEISTER. What would that have mattered?

        BERTHA. You are not my father if you can talk like that.

        Rittmeister (_gets up_). What do you say? Am I not your
        father? How do you know that? Who told you so? And who
        is your father, then? Who?

But of all Strindberg's plays, indisputably the most powerful is _Miss
Julie_, that gripping tragedy of the over-sexed young woman who on an
oppressive mid-summer evening insists on being seduced by her father's
butler. The girl is of noble birth, and the duel of sex is intensified
by the duel of class. In the fifty pages of this play, with its three
characters of the woman, the butler, and the cook, which observes
rigorously the Aristotelian unities, every element of the highest
and gravest tragedy is introduced with the most accurate and natural
psychology--the exaggerated dancing of the daughter of the house, who
competes with her own cook for the favours of her own butler-lover; the
ribald grins and songs of the servants; the mingled insolence, common
sense, and respectfulness of the domestic; the hysterical reaction
of the _déclassée_ and dishonoured girl. The following passages may
perhaps give some faint idea of this work's sustained and infernal
power:

        [John _opens the cupboard, takes a bottle of wine out,
        and fills two used glasses_.

        THE YOUNG LADY. Where do you get the wine from?

        JOHN. From the cellar.

        THE YOUNG LADY. My father's burgundy.

        JOHN. Ain't it good enough for his son-in-law?

        THE WOMAN. Thief!

        JOHN. Are you going to blab?

        THE LADY. Oh--oh--the accomplice of a thief....

        JOHN. You hate men-folk, miss?

        THE LADY. Yes, as a rule!... But at times, when I feel
        weak--ugh!

        JOHN. You hate me, too?

        THE LADY. Infinitely! I could have killed you like an
        animal....

And how clutching is the climax, when the girl, a simultaneous prey
to nausea with life and to fear of death, persuades her domestic to
hypnotise her into suicide at almost the precise minute when her father
is ringing for his boots:

        THE YOUNG LADY. Have you never been in a theatre and
        seen the mesmerist? He says to the subject: "Take the
        broom"; he takes it. He says "Sweep"; and he sweeps....

        JOHN (_takes his razor and puts it into her hand_). Here
        is the broom--go now where there's plenty of light--into
        the barn--and--(_whispers into her ear_).

_Miss Julie_ is remarkable as being the only one of Strindberg's
works in which the man comes off victorious with the exception of the
four-act _Comrades,_ that sombre comedy of Parisian artist life, where
the crowing wife bullies her self-sacrificing husband on the score of
having ousted him from the Salon by her own successful picture, only
to be told that he had simply changed the numbers, and to be finally
ejected from her perverted home by that reasserted man whose efficiency
she had despised and exploited, but whose virile despotism she now
begins to love.

In _The Creditor_, Strindberg treats again his favourite theme of the
vampire woman and the spoliated man. Thekla, the usual worthless,
demoniac female, having dissolved her marriage with the schoolmaster
Gustav, has married the artist Adolph. The scene is the sea-side.
Thekla has gone off on some jaunt. Her new husband, who is apparently
even more miserable without than with his wife, is a nervous wreck.
He makes the acquaintance of the old husband, who presents himself
incognito to readjust the balance of his matrimonial account. Gustav
plays with masterly hypnotism on the suggestibility of his colleague,
making him doubt himself, his vocation, his health, and at last his
wife. And then when his wife returns, and the enfeebled husband has
made an abortive attempt at asserting his theoretic virile superiority,
he makes love to the wife, is detected by the visitors, and goes
back to his own solitary misery, to leave his wife stranded and his
new confrere dead. Note, too, that here again the human triangle is
complete in itself, and that the agony is protracted to the last shred
of its passion without ever flagging for one single moment.

Space prohibits any complete discussion of the remaining plays in
the cycle of Strindberg's _Eleven One-acters_. Yet we would mention
_Motherly Love,_ a variation on the theme of Mrs. Warren. The
_souteneuse_ mother, with all her loathsome affectation of wounded
parental feeling, plays judiciously on the morbidly filial conscience
of a clean-minded but weak-willed actress-daughter, prevents her from
obtaining respectable friends or advancement on the stage, in order to
preserve for herself her sole professional stock-in-trade.

Equally impressive is _The Bond_, which expresses in one divorce-court
scene the whole mordant tragedy of wrangling matrimony and authentic
parental affection.

In a lighter vein is _Playing with Fire_, the one real comedy which
Strindberg ever wrote. In this the delightful _ménage_ of a young son,
a young wife, a young friend of the family, a young charity cousin,
and a philistine but by no means senile father, everybody is flirting
with everybody else. Particularly admirable in its mixture of the comic
and the ironic is the character and attitude of the conceited and
ultra-modern artist-husband, genuinely jealous of that friend and of
that wife whom he loves so sincerely, and yet throwing them into each
other's arms in a compounded mood of priggish bravado and authentic
affection. The friend, apprehensive lest he may have a bad conscience,
is anxious to take a room in the village.

        THE WIFE. Why don't you stay with us? Out with it.

        THE FRIEND. I don't know. I think you ought to be left
        quiet. Besides it might happen that we should get fed up
        with each other.

        THE WIFE. Are you fed up with us already? I tell you, it
        won't do. I tell you that if you stay out there in the
        village, people will begin to talk.

        THE FRIEND. Talk? What will they talk about?

        THE WIFE. Oh, you know perfectly well how stories get
        put together.

        THE SON. You stay here--there's an end of it. Let them
        talk. If you stay here, it goes without saying that
        you're my wife's lover, and if you stay in the village,
        it goes without saying that you've broken with each
        other, or that I've kicked you out. Consequently, I
        think it more honourable for you to be regarded as her
        lover--eh, what?

        THE FRIEND. You certainly express yourself with
        considerable lucidity; but in a case like this, I'd
        rather prefer to consider which is honourable for you
        two.

As we have already hinted, an additional bitterness had been introduced
into Strindberg's misogynism by the unhappiness of his own first
marriage, which was dissolved in 1889. It is this marriage which
Strindberg celebrates in that phenomenal piece of official sexual
autobiography, _The Confession of a Fool_, which has successfully
scandalised the whole Continent of Europe. In comparison with this book
the _New Machiavelli_ is but the tamest Sunday-school reading, and
the romantic confessions of Mr. George Moore the merest healthy pranks
of robustious youth. This work throughout has the real spontaneity of
the genuine diary rather than the studied frankness of the elaborate
literary artificer. The young librarian is in Stockholm. A young lady
makes advances to him. "She has an adventurous appearance, hovering
between the artist, the blue-stocking, the daughter of the house,
the _fille de joie_, the new woman, and the coquette." She presses
her suit, looks at him in an unambiguous manner, and "he only owes
his virtue to her extraordinary ugliness." He is introduced to her
friends, the Baron and Baroness X. He becomes the _ami de famille_.
But the demon of sex is at work, and simply through keeping step with
her in walking he will experience a unification of their whole nervous
systems. Honourable man that he is, he runs away from danger, starts
for Paris in a steamship, and is seen off amid the combined tears
of the married pair. The ship sails. His nerves break down; and in
an hysterical paroxysm he insists on being disembarked, is attended
by a priest and doctor at a small hotel, and returns post-haste to
Stockholm. The Baroness runs away to a watering-place. But matters only
progress with even greater rapidity on her return. The Baron is largely
occupied with a cousin; and an official declaration takes place between
the wife and the lover. With ultra-modern honesty they immediately
apprise the husband, who while giving them the widest margin within
which to exercise their platonic affections, yet reposes implicit trust
in their combined honour. A financial crash, however, disposes of the
Baron; and the gentleman is landed with his lady. There ensue all the
joys and agonies of a ten-years' union. The couple are linked in the
burning bonds of a mutual love and a mutual hate. The author has to
sacrifice his own well-being and career to push forward his wife in
her amateurish efforts in journalism and acting. From that time "legal
prostitution enters into the marriage...." She belongs to the public,
she makes up and dresses for the public, and she consequently becomes
"a prostitute who will finally send in her bill for such and such
services."

The moods alternate with the regularity of a pendulum. If at one moment
"the nest of love has become transformed into a dog-kennel," and the
author is morbidly jealous of nearly every man and every woman with
whom his wife has the slightest acquaintance, strikes his wife, and
endeavours to drown her; it is only subsequently, in the last stages of
servile uxoriousness, to idolise her again as a martyr and as a saint.
Six times does he leave her (expending on one occasion in debauchery
the proceeds of his pawned wedding-ring), and six times does he return,
only to draw up at last this monstrous dossier of his conjugal life:
"The story is at an end, my beloved one; I have revenged myself; the
account is squared."

Not altogether inexplicably, Strindberg has been much attacked on the
score of this book. He has been charged with wickedly defaming an
innocent and deserving woman. Yet even though the book be objectively
false, it is subjectively true. It is impossible to doubt its
prodigious sincerity, even though this merely be the implicit sincerity
of persecution mania. Every single nuance of the emotions of a man who
honestly thinks that he is being unscrupulously exploited is faithfully
described. The book may shock by its vehement coldness, its abnormal
callousness, its matter-of-fact explicitness; yet from the literary
standpoint, its entire absence of affectation, the drastic ease of
its simplicity, the swift naturalness of its diction, cannot fail to
convince. It stands out from the whole of European literature as the
superlative masterpiece of suspicious love and monstrous morbid hate.

In the great novel, _By the Open Sea_ (1890), Strindberg's Nietzschean
mood achieves its grand zenith. The hero, Axel Borg (whom we may
already remember from _The Red Room_), "instead of, like the weak
Christians, embracing a God outside himself, took what he could seize
with his own hands and in his own self, and sought to make his own
personality into a complete type of humanity." Borg, who combines with
the ideals of the superman the hyper-sensitiveness of the neurotic,
lives the single life as an inspector of fishery in a little village on
the Swedish coast, where the sea "frightens not like the forest with
its dark mystery, but brings quietude like an open great big true eye."
He is pursued and caught by an over-sexed young woman, realises her
worthlessness, and sails out to commit suicide.

        "Out toward the new Star of Christmas, ran his voyage,
        out over the Sea, the All-Mother, from whose bosom the
        first spark of life was kindled, the inexhaustible
        source of fertility and love, life's origin and life's
        foe."

This book, with its splendid nature-descriptions, the tragic dignity
of its hero, and the azure swiftness of its limpid style, is one
of Strindberg's most impressive feats. Yet even here the author's
characteristic traits can be distinctly traced. The noble male is
ruined by a despicable woman; while here, too, the cosmic mysticism of
the professed atheist (whose mood can perhaps be best expressed by the
worn _cliché_ of "being in tune with the infinite"), reveals only too
clearly the emotional bias of a fundamentally religious temperament.

This temperament was soon to manifest itself in the most tragic form.
Jaded with literature, and unhappy again in his second marriage with
the Austrian authoress, Frida Uhl, in 1893, Strindberg embarked on
the study of chemistry, took rooms in the Latin quarter, attended the
Sorbonne laboratories, and imagined that he had revolutionised science
by the discovery of a new element in sulphur. He had by now attained
the, to him, crucial period of the late "forties," and the chronic
excesses of his emotionalism now assumed a religious form, to the
accompaniment of the most acute mania of persecution.

His experiences in these years, 1895-8, are described in the _Inferno_
and the _Legends_, works which the mystic and the psychologist can read
with equal if heterogeneous edification. In these books, which are
based on Strindberg's diaries during the actual time, the aberrations
of a disorganised brain are set out with the most unconscious literary
art. His delusions became systematised with all the ingenuity of the
_paranoiac_. Every casual suggestion thrown up by his memory, or the
events and associations of every-day life, every bit of science that
he had ever studied or of mysticism that he had ever felt, are all
utilised to build the infernal scheme of his mania. He is "the innocent
sacrifice of an unjust persecution," the prey of unknown powers, the
conducting-point of electrical streams from unknown agencies. He asks
for a miracle and sees in the heavens the ten commandments and the name
of Jehovah. His friend Popoffski (in point of fact, the Polish-German
novelist Przybeszewski) has come to Paris; it is with the sole object
of killing him by poison. His usual seat at his usual café is occupied;
he is the victim of a universal conspiracy. Eventually the hells of
his torment burn themselves out in an abject ecstasy of atonement, in
Catholicism, Swedenborgianism, and the bastard hybrid of a scientific
occultism.

From this time the religious obsession sits upon most, if not
all, of his subsequent work. To this mood are due the officially
religious dramas _To Damascus, Midsummer_, the extremely weak
_Advent and Easter_, his new-found theory of _The Conscious Will in
the World-History_, his historical dramas (where the characters,
particularly Luther, were too subjectively conceived to be historically
convincing), and his _Dream-Play_ (where telephones, lawyers, theatres,
enchanted woods, Indra's daughter, military officers, married
couples, casinos, poets, and ballet-dancers all combine to weave the
filmy phantasmagoria of a Buddhistic reality). We may also mention
in this connection the _Blue Books_, the official synthesis of his
life (a series of miniature essays on such apparently heterogeneous
subjects as, _inter alia_, Troy, Christ, electro-chemistry, botany,
surds, Assyriology, optics, geology, Hammurabi, astrology, morphium,
Swedenborgianism, spermatozoic analysis, mystic numbers, Kipling, and
Jehovah).

Although, speaking generally, Strindberg achieved his masterpieces
during the period of his atheism, many of his later works have
indisputable value. The play _Intoxication_ (1900), for instance
(though the killing through sheer unconscious force of will, by the
hero, of the child of one mistress, in order to gratify the caprice of
another, may strike the unimaginative critic as slightly melodramatic,
and his eventual retirement into a Catholic monastery as somewhat of an
anti-climax), is a work of extraordinary power.

So also is the _Death Dance_ (1900), in which the middle-aged captain
and his _passée_ wife grind each other to ruin and despair beneath
the mutual mill-stones of their hate, "that most unreasonable hate,
without ground, without object, but also without end." Does not the
author plumb the extreme depths of human malevolence in the passage in
which the wife in company with her cousin is expecting her paralytic
husband to fall down dead?

        KARL. What are you looking at over there, dear, by the
        wall?

        ALICE. I'm seeing if he's tumbled down.

        KARL. Has he tumbled down?

        ALICE. NO, more's the pity. He deceives me in everything.

We would also mention the Maeterlinckian beauty of the _Crown Bride_
and _Swan White_ (1900), the heroine of which is an idealisation of
the author's third wife, the actress, Harriet Bosse; the delicate
fantasy of _Tales_ (1908); and the _Swedish Miniatures_, of which the
_Sacrifice Dance_ in particular is a positive masterpiece of swift
bloodiness.

Cruelty, moreover, is an integral element in at any rate primitive
religion. This may conceivably explain why, faithfully fulfilling
what he personally professed to have found a joyless duty, Strindberg
successfully performed in _Black Flags_, his celebrated _roman à clef,_
the intellectual flaying and dismemberment of all Stockholm Bohemia.
It is amusing to remember that he successfully consulted the oracle
of the Book of Job before he published the work in 1905, to face the
protesting shrieks of his victims with all the devout conscience of
some early priest of Tho

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