MR. HUNEKERS Egotists: A Book of Supermen is a companion volume to his Iconoclasts, and both are very interesting contributions to the study of a notable literary movement. Both are text-books of the up-to-date expression of modern individualism; they register the stages of a movement which has been antipodal to the classical spirit and achievement in any form of art. The classical drama, poetry, painting, fiction, was fundamentally social, and derived its definiteness of thought and form largely from the recognition of the force of tradition, of the authority of the general feeling, and of the common language of experience... ...Inviolability of the individual conscience, impulse, conviction, genius. When individualism asserts itself as the supreme force unrestrained by the social sense, the consciousness of a race as well as a personal obligation and authority, egotism on a great scale is the inevitable result, and Mr. Huneker has shown his discernment in the title of his book. Its sub-title is open to serious discussion; are egotists Supermen if we use the word in the general and not in the Nietzschian sense? Are they not men of abnormal development in one or two directions, who present a distorted rather than a superior order of power, a view of life at once perverted and partial; an art highly specialized in craftsmanship but singularly and ominously devoid of vision, of those divinations and intimations of the unseen which give the Greek tragedies such majesty and the Shakespearean tragedies such moving and liberating power?
They are a singularly unpleasant group- Beyle-Stendhal, Baudelaire, Huysmans, Nietzsche, Stirner-and Mr. Huneker presents them with unflinching candor. They were all men of talent, some of them men of genius; they were exacting craftsmen; but they were all touched with insanity; some of them were unmistakably mad. The end of the road along which they traveled was the place where Maupassant died. The interest which attaches to the work of these writers is very great, but does their contribution to literature sustain the importance which Mr. Huneker attaches to it? Sheer audacity and paradox have much to do with the vogue of several members of the group. When Stirner declares that crimes spring from fixed ideas, and that the Church, the State, the family morals are fixed ideas, he catches attention; but does he make good his position? These oracular sayings are humorous from the standpoint of serious thinking, but they are indecent exposures of confused mental processes. Mr. Huneker puts the attitude of a large group of egotists with precision when he interprets Stirner in these phrases: I am not you, but Ill use you if you are agreeable to me. Not to God, not to man, must be given the glory. Ill keep the glory myself. What is Humanity but an abstraction? I am Humanity. The philosophy and practice of egotism could not be put more succinctly; nor could its ignobility, its blindness, its mental and spiritual confusion, be more clearly revealed. Ibsen is the most important figure with whom Mr. Huneker deals, and the interpretation of the dramatist whose dynamic energyhas made such a great and definite impression on his time is an excellent piece of semi-critical writing; but does not Mr. Huneker overstate the case for Anatole France, a facile, sensitive, impressionable spirit devoid of the stability of a great artist; an artist who has been debilitated by the easy, vague cosmopolitanism of his time? Stendhal was beyond question an interesting man of singular gifts; but is it certain that he is an enduring figure in French literature ? Will the twenty-first century count him among the artists or the spiritual liberators? And when Huneker calls him the most seductive spiller of souls since Saint-Simon, what does he mean to say?...
--New Outlook, Volume 92