Egoists, A Book of Supermen: Stendhal, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Anatole France, Huysmans, Barrès, Nietzsche, Blake, Ibsen, Stirner, and Ernest Hello — Nietzsche — John Shaqi
Egoists, A Book of Supermen: Stendhal, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Anatole France, Huysmans, Barrès, Nietzsche, Blake, Ibsen, Stirner, and Ernest Hello
Nietzsche · en
The labours, during the past twenty years, of Casimir Stryienski,
François de Nion, L. Bélugon, Arthur Chuquet, Henry Cordier, Pierre
Brun, Ricciotto Canudo, Octave Uzanne, Hugues Rebell--to quote the
names of a few devoted Stendhalians--have enabled us to decipher
Stendhal's troubled life. M. Stryienski unearthed at Grenoble a mass
of manuscript, journals, tales, half-finished novels, and they have
been published. Was there any reason to doubt the existence of a
Stendhal Club after the appearance of those two interesting books,
Soirées du Stendhal Club, by Stryienski? The compact little study in
the series, Les Grands Ecrivains Français, by Edouard Rod, and Colomb's
biographical notice at the head of Armance, and Stryienski's Etude
Biographique are the principal references for Stendhal students. And
this, too, despite the evident lack of sympathy in the case of M. Rod.
It is a minute, painstaking _étude_, containing much fair criticism;
fervent Stendhalians need to be reminded of their master's defects
and of the danger of self-dupery. If Stendhal were alive, he would be
the first to mock at his disciples' enthusiasm--the enthusiasm of the
_parvenu_, as he puts it. (He ill concealed his own in the presence of
pictorial master-pieces or the ballets of Viganò.) Rod, after admitting
the wide influence of Stendhal upon the generations that followed him,
patronisingly concludes by a quotation: "Les petits livres ont leurs
destinées." What, then, does he call great, if Le Rouge et le Noir and
La Chartreuse de Parme are "little books"?