Horace Barnett Samuel - Modernities - Scholars Choice Edition

Published by Good Press, 2019

EAN 4064066203290

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'tre 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.

Table of Contents

"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 terre observations of psychological science.

Henri Beyle was born in 1783, in Grenoble in Dauphin, 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 bte noire, his Aunt Sraphie, 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 Hlose 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 Molire, 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 cole 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.