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
intellect and the concurrence of his overarching emotional temperament.
In the black-and-white sketch by Vallotton he resembles both Remenyi,
the Hungarian violin virtuoso, and Louise Michel, the anarchist.
The brow is vast, the expression exalted, the mouth belligerent,
disputatious, and the chin slightly receding. One would say a man of
violent passions, in equilibrium unsteady, a skirter of abysses, a good
hater--did he not once propose a History of Hatred? Yet how submissive
he was to papal decrees; many of his books contain instead of a preface
his act of submission to Catholic dogma. More so than Huysmans was
he a mediæval man. For him modern science did not exist. The Angelic
Doctor will outlive Darwin, he cried, and the powers and principalities
of darkness are as active in these days as in the age when the saints
of the desert warred with the demons of doubt and concupiscence. "To
wring from man's tongue the denial of his existence is proof of Satan's
greatest power," was a sentiment of Père Ravignan to which Hello would
have heartily subscribed. He detested Renan--_Renan, voilà l'ennemi!_
Jeremy Taylor's vision of hell as an abode crowded with a million dead
dogs would not be too severe a punishment for that silken sophist,
whose writings are the veriest flotsam and jetsam of a disordered
spiritual life. Hello has written eloquent pages about Hugo, whose
poetry he admired, whose ideas he combated. Napoleon was a genius, but
a foe of God.
Shakespeare for him vacillated between obscenity and melancholy; Hamlet
was a character hardly sounded by Hello; doubt was a psychological
impossibility to one of his faith. He was convinced that the John of
the Apocalyptic books was not John the Presbyter, nor any one of the
five Johns of the Johannic writings, but John the Apostle. He has often
the colour of Bossuet's moral indignation. A master of theological
odium, his favourite denunciation was "Horma, Anathema, Anathème,
Amen!" His favourite symbol of confusion is Babel--Paris. He loved,
among many saints, Denys the Areopagite; he extolled the study of St.
Thomas Aquinas. To the unhappy Abbé de Lamenais's Paroles d'un Croyant
(1834), he opposed his own Paroles de Dieu. He could have, phrase for
phrase, book for book, retorted with tenfold interest to Nietzsche's
vilification of Christianity. Society will again become a theocracy,
else pay the penalty in anarchy. One moment beating his breast, he
cries aloud: "_Maranatha! Maranatha!_ Our Lord is at hand!" The next
we find him with the icy contemptuousness of a mystic quoting from
the Admirable Ruysbroeck (a thirteenth-century mystic whom he had
translated, whose writings influenced Huysmans, and at one period of
his development, Maurice Maeterlinck) these brave words: "Needs must
I rejoice beyond the age, though the world has horror of my joy, and
its grossness cannot understand what I say." Notwithstanding this
aloofness, there are some who after reading Ernest Hello's Man may