The Project Gutenberg eBook, Modernities, by Horace Barnett Samuel

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Title: Modernities

Author: Horace Barnett Samuel

Release Date: February 15, 2014 [eBook #44916]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MODERNITIES***

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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