Egoists, A Book of Supermen Stendhal, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Anatole France, Huysmans, Barrès, Nietzsche, Blake, Ibsen, Stirner, and Ernest Hello

Not-withstanding their loose construction, they are never inchoate. That the ideas put forth may astound by their perversity, their novelty, their nihilism, their note of cosmic...

He was endowed with a nervous temperament, though up to his twenty-second year he was as handsome and as free from sickness as a god. He was very tall and his eyes were sea-gree...

This pleasing chromatism in beliefs, a belief in all and none, is not a new phenomenon. The classical world of thought has several matches for Anatole France, from the followers...

The good, sensible old Abbé Boumisien, who advised Emma Bovary, when she came to him for spiritual consolation, to consult her doctor husband, was, in reality, an Abbé Lafortune...

Mr. Moore's recollections are slighter, though extremely engaging. Above all, with his trained eye of a painter, he sketches for us another view of Pater, one not quite so attra...

To traverse the books of Huysmans is a true pessimistic progress; from Le Drageoir aux Epices (1874) to Les Foules de Lourdes (1906), the note, at times shrill, often profound,...

Egoism as a religion is hardly a new thing. It began with the first sentient male human. It has since preserved the species, discovered the "inferiority" of women, made civilisa...

_Pacem summam tenent!_ He never reached peace on the heights. Let us admit that souls of his kind are encased in sick frames; their steel is too shrewd for the scabbard; yet the...

Consider, then, how Ibsen was misunderstood. Setting aside the historical and poetic works, we are confronted in the social plays by the average man and woman of every-day life....

To prove how out of tune was Stendhal with his times, we have only to read his definitions of romanticism and classicism in his Racine et Shakespeare. He wrote: "Romanticism is...

As a critic of painting Huysmans revealed himself the possessor of a temperament that was positively ferocious in the presence of an unsympathetic canvas. His vocabulary and pec...

Women played a commanding rôle in his life. They always do with any poet worthy of the name, though few have been so frank in acknowledging this as Baudelaire. Yet he was in lov...

Ibsen left Bergen to take the position of director at the Norwegian Theatre, Christiania. He remained there until 1862, staging all manner of plays, from Shakespeare to Scribe....

The first thing that occurs to one after reading Beyond Good and Evil is that Nietzsche is more French than German. It is well known that his favourites were the _pensée_ writer...

The art of Barrès till this juncture had been of a smoky enchantment, many-hued, of shifting shapes, often tenuous, sometimes opaque, yet ever graceful, ever fascinating. Whethe...

Perhaps the best criticism ever uttered offhand about the art of William Blake was Rodin's, who, when shown some facsimiles of Blake's drawings by brilliant Arthur Symons with t...

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 Evolutio...

It is weakness, admitted Goethe, not to possess the capacity for noble indignation; but Nietzsche was obsessed by his indignations. His voice, that golden poet's voice, becomes...

Stendhal as an art or musical critic cannot be taken seriously, though he says some illuminating things; embedded in platitudes may be found shrewd _aperçus_ and flashes of insi...

How much Tolstoy thought of the Frenchman may be found in his declaration that all he knew about war he learned first from Stendhal. "I will speak of him only as the author of t...

De l'Amour, Stendhal's remarkable study of the love-passion, is marred by the attempt to imprison a sentiment behind the bars of a mathematical formula. He had inherited from hi...

A collective title for them might be Nuances; Poictevin searches the last nuance of sensations and ideas. He is a remote pupil of Goncourt, and superior to his master in his pow...

Stirner, after being deserted, led a precarious existence. The old jolly crowd at Hippel's seldom saw him. He was in prison twice for debt--free Prussia--and often lacked bread....

In practice he would not have agreed with Havelock Ellis that "all the art of living lies in the fine mingling of letting go and holding on." Stirner, sentimental, henpecked, my...