The Project Gutenberg eBook, Modernities, by Horace Barnett Samuel

MODERNITIES

BY

HORACE B. SAMUEL

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

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.

[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 regime. 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 nth 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.

[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 Thor who gravely officiates at some blood-stained human sacrifice.

It is outside the purpose of this essay to discuss whether these descriptions of the intellectual and sexual clique of the Swedish capital constitute a fair portrait or a monstrous defamation, or whether, for instance, Hanna Paj is a malignant travesty or a euphemistic delineation of that lady whom all who have the slightest acquaintance with the Continental Feminist Movement will immediately recognise.

As a sheer piece of satire the book waves its black flag unchallenged amid all the fluttering multicoloured pennons of modern European literature. What matter if the characterisation be true or false? So far, at any rate, as the non-Swedish reader is concerned, the illusion is complete. Kilo, "the little bookseller, with the suffering eyes of a sick dog"; Falkenstrom, the idealist, whose wife is induced by her bosom friend to join some alleged monstrous cosmopolitan masonic sisterhood; Hanna Paj, the feminist lecturer, the fury with the flag of hate on which was written the device, "Revenge on Man"; Smartman, the debonair intriguing editor with his two sets of rooms—all these pictures of "the galley-slaves of ambition linked together in the fetters of interest, these murderers and thieves who steal each other's thoughts, addresses, friends, and personalities," are perfectly convincing. Above all there stands out the delineation of Lars Peter Zachrisson, "the intellectual cannibal," the "broker of literature, the promoter of mutual admiration societies, the speculator in reputations, the founder of syndicates for the manufacture of celebrities," the morphia maniac, the tippler "who laughs humorously in his moustache and weeps tears of whisky from his eyes," the father of "that resurrected corpse, that wandering shame, whose face was known to all, and who was branded with his own name." And how devilish is the description of this domestic hell of human hate, where he mocks his wife on her failing charms and encourages her gluttony with the specific object of spoiling her figure, where the mother in her turn brings up her children like a breed of dachshunds whom she sets to bait their father, and where the two spouses yet feel some inexplicable need of being together in the same room for the purpose of that mutual nagging and mutual reviling which constituted the chief interest in their miserable existence.

To sum up, we have seen how throughout his life the persecution mania of Strindberg expressed itself in his attitude to sex, religion, and society, as like at once some veritable Rhadamanthine recorder, and some cowering victim of divine vengeance, he dispenses and fears those words of doom in his black adamant of diction. Yet it is impossible casually to brush the man aside as some mere paranoiac. The very torments of his soul fructified in the stupendous genius of his intellectual production. With all his perversities, with all his aberrations, Strindberg remains the blackest, and in his own particular spheres the most drastic, intelligence in the whole of our European literature.