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EGOISTS,

A BOOK OF SUPERMEN


STENDHAL, BAUDELAIRE, FLAUBERT, ANATOLE FRANCE,

HUYSMANS, BARRÈS, NIETZSCHE, BLAKE, IBSEN,

STIRNER, AND ERNEST HELLO


BY

JAMES HUNEKER


WITH PORTRAIT OF STENDHAL; UNPUBLISHED LETTER OF

FLAUBERT; AND ORIGINAL PROOF PAGE OF MADAME BOVARY


NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

1909



[Illustration: Henry Beyle-Stendhal--Redrawn by Edwin B. Child
from a crayon portrait.]


TO

DR. GEORG BRANDES



"Leb' Ich, wenn andere leben?"--Goethe


The studies gathered here first appeared in _Scribner's
Magazine_, the _Atlantic Monthly_, the _North American
Review_, the _New York Times_, and the _New York Sun_.




CONTENTS

       I. A Sentimental Education: Henry Beyle-Stendhal
      II. The Baudelaire Legend
     III. The Real Flaubert
      IV. Anatole France
       V. The Pessimists' Progress: J.-K. Huysmans
      VI. The Evolution of an Egoist: Maurice Barrès
     VII. Phases of Nietzsche

            I. The Will to Suffer
           II. Nietzsche's Apostasy
          III. Antichrist?

    VIII. Mystics

            I. Ernest Hello
           II. "Mad Naked Blake"
          III. Francis Poictevin
           IV. The Road to Damascus
            V. From an Ivory Tower

      IX. Ibsen
       X. Max Stirner



I

A SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION

HENRY BEYLE-STENDHAL



I


The fanciful notion that psychical delicacy is accompanied by a
corresponding physical exterior should have received a death-blow
in the presence of Henry Beyle, better known as Stendhal. Chopin,
Shelley, Byron and Cardinal Newman did not in personal appearance
contradict their verse, prose and music; but Stendhal, possessing an
exquisite sensibility, was, as Hector Berlioz cruelly wrote in his
Memoirs: "A little pot-bellied man with a spiteful smile, who tried to
look grave." Sainte-Beuve is more explicit. "Physically his figure,
though not short, soon grew thick-set and heavy, his neck short and
full-blooded. His fleshy face was framed in dark curly hair and
whiskers, which before his death were assisted by art. His forehead
was fine: the nose turned up, and somewhat Calmuck in shape. His lower
lip, which projected a little, betrayed his tendency to scoff. His eyes
were rather small but very bright, deeply set in their cavities, and
pleasing when he smiled. His hands, of which he was proud, were small
and daintily shaped. In the last years of his life he grew heavy and
apoplectic. But he always took great pains to conceal the symptoms of
physical decay even from his own friends."

Henri Monnier, who caricatured him, apparently in a gross manner,
denied that he had departed far from his model. Some one said that
Stendhal looked like an apothecary--Homais, presumably, or M.
Prudhomme. His maternal grandfather, Doctor Gagnon, assured him when
a youth that he was ugly, but he consolingly added that no one would
reproach him for his ugliness. The piercing and brilliant eye that
like a mountain lake could be both still and stormy, his eloquent and
ironical mouth, pugnacious bearing, Celtic profile, big shoulders, and
well-modelled leg made an ensemble, if not alluring, at least striking.
No man with a face capable of a hundred shades of expression can be
ugly. Furthermore, Stendhal was a charming _causeur_, bold, copious,
witty. With his conversation, he drolly remarked, he paid his way into
society. And this demigod or monster, as he was alternately named by
his admirers and enemies, could be the most impassioned of lovers. His
life long he was in love; Prosper Mérimée declares he never encountered
such furious devotion to love. It was his master passion. Not Napoleon,
not his personal ambitions, not even Italy, were such factors in
Stendhal's life as his attachments. His career was a sentimental
education. This ugly man with the undistinguished features was a
haughty cavalier, an intellectual Don Juan, a tender, sighing swain, a
sensualist, and ever lyric where the feminine was concerned. But once
seated, pen in hand, the wise, worldly cynic was again master. "My head
is a magic-lantern," he said. And his literary style is on the surface
as unattractive as were the features of the man; the inner ear for the
rhythms and sonorities of prose was missing. That is the first paradox
in the Beyle-Stendhal case.

Few writers in the nineteenth century were more neglected; yet, what
a chain of great critics his work begot. Commencing with Goethe in
1818, who, after reading Rome, Naples, and Florence, wrote that the
Frenchman attracted and repulsed him, interested and annoyed him, but
it was impossible to separate himself from the book until its last
page. What makes the opinion remarkable is that Goethe calmly noted
Stendhal's plagiarism of his own Italian Journey. About 1831 Goethe
was given Le Rouge et le Noir and told Eckermann of its worth in warm
terms. After Goethe another world-hero praised Stendhal's La Chartreuse
de Parme: Balzac literally exploded a bouquet of pyrotechnics, calling
the novel a masterpiece of observation, and extolling the Waterloo
picture. Sainte-Beuve was more cautious. He dubbed Stendhal a "romantic
hussar," and said that he was devoid of invention; a literary Uhlan,
for men of letters, not for the public. Shortly after his sudden
death, M. Bussière wrote in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ of Stendhal's
"clandestine celebrity." Taine's trumpet-call in 1857 proclaimed him
as the great psychologue of his century. And later, in his English
Literature, Taine wrote: "His talents and ideas were premature,
his admirable divinations not understood. Under the exterior of a
conversationalist and a man of the world Stendhal explained the most
esoteric mechanisms--a scientist who noted, decomposed, deduced;
he first marked the fundamental causes of nationality, climate,
temperament; he was the naturalist who classified and weighed forces
and taught us to open our eyes." Taine was deeply influenced by
Stendhal; read carefully his Italian Pilgrimage, and afterward Thomas
Graindorge. He so persistently preached Stendhalism--_beylisme_, as its
author preferred to term his vagrant philosophy--that Sainte-Beuve
reproved him. Melchior de Vogüé said that Stendhal's heart had been
fabricated under the Directory and from the same wood as Barras and
Talleyrand. Brunetière saw in him the perfect expression of romantic
and anti-social individualism. Caro spoke of his "serious blague,"
while Victor Hugo found him "somniferous." But Mérimée, though openly
disavowing discipleship, acknowledged privately the abiding impression
made upon him by the companionship of Beyle. 'Much of Mérimée is
Stendhal better composed, better written.

About 1880 Zola, searching a literary pedigree for his newly-born
Naturalism, pitched upon Stendhal to head the movement. The first
Romantic--he employed the term Romanticism before the rest--the first
literary Impressionist, the initiator of Individualism, Stendhal forged
many formulas, was a matrix of _genres_, literary and psychologic. Paul
Bourget's Essays in Contemporary Psychology definitely placed Beyle in
the niche he now occupies. This was in 1883. Since then the swelling
chorus headed by Tolstoy, Georg Brandes, and the amiable fanatics who
exhumed at Grenoble his posthumous work, have given to the study of
Stendhal fresh life. We see how much Nietzsche owed to Stendhal; see
in Dostoïevsky's Raskolnikow-Crime and Punishment--a Russian Julien
Sorel; note that Bourget, from Le Disciple to Sensations d'Italie,
is compounded of his forerunner, the dilettante and cosmopolitan who
wrote Promenades dans Rome and Lamiel. What would Maurice Barrès and
his "culte du Moi" have been without Stendhal--who employed before him
the famous phrase "deracination"? Amiel, sick-willed thinker, did not
alone invent: "A landscape is a state of soul"; Stendhal had spoken of
a landscape not alone sufficing; it needs a moral or historic interest.
Before Schopenhauer he described Beauty as a promise of happiness; and
he invented the romance of the petty European Principality. Meredith
followed him, as Robert Louis Stevenson in his Prince Otto patterned
after Meredith. The painter-novelist Fromentin mellowed Stendhal's
procedure; and dare we conceive of Meredith or Henry James composing
their work without having had a complete cognizance of Beyle-Stendhal?
The Egoist is _beylisme_ of a superior artistry; while in America Henry
B. Fuller shows sympathy for Beyle in his Chevalier Pensieri-Vani and
its sequel. Surely the Prorege of Arcopia had read the Chartreuse.
And with Edith Wharton the Stendhal touch is not absent. In England,
after the dull essay by Hayward (prefixed to E. P. Robbin's excellent
translation of Chartreuse), Maurice Hewlett contributed an eloquent
introduction to a new edition of the Chartreuse and calls him "a man
cloaked in ice and fire." Anna Hampton Brewster was possibly the first
American essayist to introduce to us Stendhal in her St. Martin's
Summer. Saintsbury, Dowden, Benjamin Wells, Count Lützow have since
written of him; and in Germany the Stendhal cult is growing, thanks to
Arthur Schurig, L. Spach, and Friedrick von Oppeln-Bronikowski.

It has been mistaken criticism to range Beyle as only a "literary"
man. He despised the profession of literature, remarking that he wrote
as one smokes a cigar. His diaries and letters, the testimony of
his biographer, Colomb, and his friend Mérimée, betray this pose--a
greater poser and _mystificateur_ it would be difficult to find. He
laboured like a slave over his material, and if he affected to take
the Civil Code as his model of style it nettled him, nevertheless,
when anyone decried his prose. His friend Jacquemont spoke of his
detestable style of a grocer; Balzac called him to account for his
carelessness. Flattered, astounded, as was Stendhal by the panegyric