Horace Barnett Samuel

“ 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. ”

“ The theme is the pathetic irony of the illusion of a middle-aged professor, who gives an almost paternal benediction to what he fondly imagines to be the grand passion of his young and temperamental wife. When, consequently, his wife dies suddenly, the husband is prepared quite honestly to condole with the lover, for after all has he not a right to be pitied even more than himself? When, therefore, he learns from his young colleague that he has just become engaged to another girl with whom he has been in love for some time his righteous indignation is unbounded. ”

“ For if we may presume to put our own unauthorised gloss on M. Marinetti's vividly illuminated manuscript, what the Futurist really wishes is to break down the conventional divorce that is so often thought to exist between ideal Art and actual Life, so as to bring the two elements into the most drastic and immediate contact. Art, in fact, should not be an escape from but an exaltation of the red impetus of life. Art's function is not merely to titillate the dispassionate æsthetic feeling of the dilettante or connoisseur, but to thrill with a keen vital emotion the actual experiencer of life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Realising that complexity of temperament is but too frequently the mere euphemism for dissoluteness of life, she is content that her young heroes should be immaculate with all the immaculacy of the jeune premier, that her middle-aged heroes should be those strong silent men who have contributed so largely to make England what she is, and that her heroines should be all equally typical and equally sweet flowers of our English womanhood. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Human life became an end in itself embraced with the most poetic exaltation and pursued with all the zeal of religious martyrdom. The struggle for existence, ceasing to be a bare scientific formula, was metamorphosed into a classic arena in which the "life-artist" battled for the crown of his Dionysiac agonies, finding the most delicious music in the perpetual clash of brain with brain, and experiencing a sweetness in the very bitterness of the conflict. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Genia after Friedrich has just fought a fatal duel with the twenty-five year old naval officer, Otto.
GENIA. But why? If you cared the least bit about me—if it had been a case of hate—if it had been jealousy—love—
FRED. No—I feel at any rate damned little of all that. But no man likes to be made an ass of.
In his new asexual play, Professor Bernhardi, Schnitzler strikes out an entirely new line, leaves that light, airy sphere which he had made so peculiarly his own, and embarks into the grim realms of pure problem. ”

“ Thus the Futurists would banish the nude from painting and adultery from the novel, so that they may be able to substitute the sublime male fury of creation of artistic and scientific masterpieces for all the sterile embraces of hedonistic eroticism, and, like some gallant band of twentieth-century Hercules, cleanse the Augean stables of the Latin civilisation of its vast surplus of malignant mud vomited forth by that stewing and pestiferous swamp of sex. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ His muse is no serene nymph piping delicately on some Parnassian slope, but an extremely tumultuous Amazon, at once primeval, and ultra-modern, chanting the pæan of battle, steeped in the wine of victory, and suckling the supermen of the future on her universal breasts. No muse in the whole of literature is more highly charged with vitality, and no reader is qualified to enjoy her unless he, too, is charged to the maximum with "the red tonic liquor of a harsh and formidable reality." ”

“ 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? ”

“ So also modern music, as represented at any rate by the tense restlessness of Richard Strauss with all his fine shades of crouching fear and exultant cruelty, or the mystical sensuousness of Debussy, ceases to be a mere meaningless euphony of pleasing melody, devoid of any vital significance except its own æsthetic beauty, sets itself more and more to travel, in the sphere of sound, over the whole vibrant gamut of the human emotions. ”

“ He is an atheist, a degenerate, and—one of the most popular 'Souls' in decadent English society—just to have a look at the fat smooth-faced sensualist and voluptuary whose reputation for shameless vice makes him the pride and joy of Upper-Ten Jezebels will help you along like a gale of wind. Claude Ferrers is a modern Heliogabalus in his very modern way, and by dint of learning a few salacious witticisms out of Molière and Baudelaire he almost persuades people to think him a wit and a poet. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When again the subtle souls of Great Britain will so far break the ice of their insular reserve as to discourse about the tragedy of existence, the far more heroic spirits of German modernity will have recourse to all the æsthetic delights of a fine and artistic suicide, which indeed in the most advanced circles is almost a fashionable analogue to our own appendicitis, or will find in the modern dogma of "living their own life" the substantial though possibly slightly less exhausting equivalent to our English hunger-strike. ”

“ Like Guy de Maupassant, Wedekind treats only the one subject. His technique, however, is different, and while the Frenchman crowns each tale with a climax, the German clothes it with an atmosphere. Feuerwerk, moreover, is worth reading, if only for the style, with its noble simplicity and its majestic roll. The masterpiece of the series is Der Greise Freier, where, set in the background of an Italian honeymoon, lies painted the grey romance of a young girl realising her love in the very arms of death. ”

“ 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. ”