ON LOVE
STENDHAL
(HENRY BEYLE)
ON LOVE
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH
WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES
BY
PHILIP SIDNEY WOOLF
AND
CECIL N. SIDNEY WOOLF, M. A.
FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
That you should be made a fool of by a young woman, why, it is many an
honest man's case.
_The Pirate._
NEW YORK
BRENTANO'S
TO B. K.
FOR WHOM
THE TRANSLATION
WAS BEGUN
_First Published 1915_
_Reprinted 1920_
Printed in Great Britain at
_The Mayflower Press, Plymouth_. William Brendon & Son, Ltd.
[Pg v]
INTRODUCTORY PREFACE TO THE TRANSLATION
Stendhal's three prefaces to this work on Love are not an encouraging
opening. Their main theme is the utter incomprehensibility of the book
to all but a very select few--"a hundred readers only": they are rather
warnings than introductions. Certainly, the early life of Stendhal's
_De l'Amour_ justifies this somewhat distant attitude towards the
public. The first and second editions were phenomenal failures--not
even a hundred readers were forthcoming. But Stendhal, writing in
the early part of the nineteenth century, himself prophesied that
the twentieth would find his ideas at least more comprehensible. The
ideas of genius in one age are the normal spiritual food for superior
intellect in the next. Stendhal is still something of a mystery to
the general public; but the ideas, which he agitated, are at present
regarded as some of the most important subjects for immediate enquiry
by many of the keenest and most practical minds of Europe.
A glance at the headings of the chapters gives an idea of the breadth
of Stendhal's treatment of love. He touches on every side of the
social relationship between man and woman; and while considering the
disposition of individual nations towards love, gives us a brilliant,
if one-sided, general criticism of these nations, conscious throughout
of the intimate connexion in any given age between its conceptions of
love and the status of woman.
Stendhal's ideal of love has various names: it is generally
"passion-love," but more particularly "love
[Pg vi]
_à l'italienne._"[1] The thing in itself is always the same--it is the
love of a man and a woman, not as husband and wife, not as mistress
and lover, but as two human beings, who find the highest possible
pleasure, not in passing so many hours of the day or night together,
but in living one life. Still more, it is the attachment of two free
fellow-creatures--not of master and slave.
Stendhal was born in 1783--eight years before Olympe de Gouges, the
French Mary Wollstonecraft, published her _Déclaration des Droits
des Femmes_. That is to say, by the time Stendhal had reached mental
maturity, Europe had for some time been acquainted with the cry for
Women's Rights, and heard the earliest statement of the demands, which
have broadened out into what our age glibly calls the "Woman Question."
How, may we ask, does Stendhal's standpoint correspond with his
chronological position between the French Revolution and the "Votes for
Women" campaign of the present day?
Stendhal is emphatically a champion of Women's Rights. It is true that
the freedom, which Stendhal demands, is designed for other ends than
are associated to-day with women's claims. Perhaps Stendhal, were he
alive now, would cry out against what he would call a distortion of
the movement he championed. Men, and still more women, must be free,
Stendhal holds, in order to love; his chapters in this book on the
education of women are all an earnest and brilliant plea to prove
that an educated woman is not necessarily a pedant; that she is, on
the contrary, far more _lovable_ than the uneducated woman, whom our
grandfathers brought up on the piano, needlework and the Catechism; in
fine, that intellectual sympathy is the true basis of happiness in the
relations of the two sexes. Modern exponents of Women's Rights will say
that this is true, but only half the truth. It would be more correct to
say that Stendhal
[Pg vii]
saw the whole truth, but forbore to follow it out to its logical
conclusion with the blind _intransigeance_ of the modern propagandist.
Be that as it may, Stendhal certainly deserves more acknowledgment, as
one of the pioneers in the movement, than he generally receives from
its present-day supporters.
* * * * *
Stendhal was continually lamenting his want of ability to write.
According to him, a perusal of the _Code Civil_, before composition,
was the best way he had found of grooming his style. This may well have
something to do with the opinion, handed on from one history of French
literature to another, that Stendhal, like Balzac--it is usually put
in these very words--_had no style_. It is not, correctly speaking,
what the critics themselves mean: to have no style would be to chop and
change from one method of expression to another, and nothing could be
less truly said of either of these writers. They mean that he had a bad
style, and that is certainly a matter of taste. Perhaps the critics,
while condemning, condemn themselves. It is the severe beauty of the
_Code Civil_ which, makes them uncomfortable. An eye for an eye and a
spade for a spade is Stendhal's way. He is suspicious of the slightest
adornment: everything that is thought clearly can be written simply.
Other writers have had as simplified a style--Montesquieu or Voltaire,
for example--but there is scant merit in telling simply a simple
lie, and Voltaire, as Stendhal himself says, was afraid of things
which are difficult to put into words. This kind of daintiness is not
Stendhal's simplicity: he is merely uncompromising and blunt. True,
his bluntness is excessive. A nice balance between the severity of the
_Code Civil_ and the "drums and tramplings" of Elizabethan English
comes as naturally to an indifferent pen, whipped into a state of false
enthusiasm, as it is foreign to the warmth
[Pg viii]
of genuine conviction. Had Stendhal been a little less vehement and a
little less hard-headed, there might have been fewer modifications, a
few less repetitions, contradictions, ellipses--but then so much the
less Stendhal. In that case he might have trusted himself: as it was he
knew his own tendency too well and took fright. Sometimes in reading
Carlyle, one wishes that he had felt the same kind of modesty: he,
certainly, could never have kept to the thin centre line, and we should
have had another great writer "without a style." Effect meant little
to Stendhal, hard fact and clearness everything. Perhaps, he would
often have made his meaning clearer, if he had been less suspicious of
studied effect and elaborate writing. Not infrequently he succeeds in
being colloquial and matter-of-fact, without being definite.
Stendhal was beset with a horror of being artistic. Was it not he who
said of an artist, whose dress was particularly elaborate: "Depend upon
it, a man who adorns his person will also adorn his work"? Stendhal was
a soldier first, then a writer--Salviati[2] is a soldier. Certainly
it is his contempt for the type of person--even commoner, perhaps,
in 1914 than in 1814--who carries his emotions on his sleeve, which
accounts for Stendhal's naive disclaimer of personal responsibility,
the invention of Lisio[3] and Salviati, mythical authors of this work
on love--all a thin screen to hide his own obsession, which manages,
none the less, to break through unmasked on almost every page.
The translation makes no attempt to hide these peculiarities or even
to make too definite a sense from a necessarily doubtful passage.[4]
Its whole aim is to reproduce
[Pg ix]
Stendhal's essay in English, just as it stands in French. No
other English translation of the whole work exists: only a selection
of its maxims translated piece-meal.[5] Had a translation existed,
we should certainly not have undertaken another. As it is, we have
relied upon a great sympathy with the author, and a studied adhesion
to what he said, in order to reconstruct this essay--encouraged by the
conviction that the one is as necessary as the other in order to obtain
a satisfactory result. Charles Cotton's _Montaigne_ seems to us the
pattern of all good translations.
* * * * *
In spite of the four prefaces of the original, we felt it advisable
to add still another to the English translation. Stendhal said that
no book stood in greater need of a word of introduction. That was
in Paris--here it is a foreigner, dressed up, we trust, quite _à
l'anglaise_, but still, perhaps, a little awkward, and certainly in
need of something more than the chilly announcement of the title
page--about as encouraging as the voice of the flunkey, who bawls out
your name at a party over the heads of the crowd already assembled.
True, the old English treatment of foreigners has sadly degenerated:
more bows than brickbats are their portion, now London knows the charm
of _cabarets, revues_ and cheap French cooking.[6]
The work in itself is conspicuous, if not unique. Books on Love are
legion: how could it be otherwise? It was probably the first topic
of conversation, and none has since been found more interesting. But
Stendhal has devised a new treatment of the subject. His method is
analytical and scientific, but, at the same time,
[Pg x]
there is no attempt at bringing the subject into line with a science;
it is no part of erotology--there is no
Greek ending with a little passing bell
That signifies some faith about to die.[7]
His faith is unimpeachable and his curiosity and honesty unbounded:
this is what makes him conspicuous. In claiming to be scientific,
Stendhal meant nothing more than that his essay was based purely upon
unbiassed observation; that he accepted nothing upon vague hearsay
or from tradition; that even the finer shades of sentiment could be
observed with as much disinterested precision, if not made to yield
as definite results, as any other natural phenomena. "The man who has
known love finds all else unsatisfying"--is, properly speaking, a
scientific fact.
Analytical, however, is the best word to characterise the Stendhalian
method. Scientific suggests, perhaps, more naturally the broader
treatment of love, which is familiar in Greek literature, lives all
through the Middle Ages, is typified in Dante, and survives later in
a host of Renaissance dialogues and treatises on Love. This love--see
it in the _Symposium_ of Plato, in Dante or in the _Dialoghi_ of Leone
Ebreo--is more than a human passion, it is also the _amor che muove il
sole e le altre stelle_, the force of attraction which, combined with
hate, the force of repulsion, is the cause of universal movement. In
this way love is not only scientifically treated, it embraces all other
sciences within it. Scientists will smile, but the day of Science and
Art with a contemptuous smile for each other is over. True, the feeling
underlying this cosmic treatment of love is very human, very simple--a
conviction that love, as a human passion, is all-important, and a
desire to justify its importance by finding it a place in a larger
order of
[Pg xi]
things, in the "mystical mathematics of the kingdom of Heaven." Weaker
heads than Plato are also pleased to call love divine, without knowing
very clearly what they mean by divinity. Their ignorance is relative;
the allegorical representation of Eros--damned and deified alternately
by the poets--is in motive, perhaps, not so far from what we have
called the scientific, but, perhaps, might better have named the
cosmic, treatment.
In a rough classification of books on Love one can imagine a large
number collected under the heading--"Academic." One looks for something
to express that want of plain dealing, of _terre-à-terre_ frankness,
which is so deplorable in the literature of Love, and is yet the
distinctive mark of so much of it. "Academic" comprehends a wide range
of works all based on a more or less set or conventional theory of the
passions. It includes the average modern novel, in which convention is
supreme and experience negligible--just a traditional, lifeless affair,
in which there is not even a pretence of curiosity or love of truth.
And, at the same time, "academic" is the label for the kind of book in
which convention is rather on the surface, rather in the form than in
the matter. Tullia of Aragon, for example, was no tyro in the theory
and practice of love, but her _Dialogo d'Amore_ is still distinctly
academic. Of course it is easy to be misled by a stiff varnish of
old-fashioned phrase; the reader in search of sincerity will look for
it in the thought expressed, not in the manner of expression. There is
more to be learnt about love from Werther, with all his wordy sorrows,
than from the slick tongue of Yorick, who found it a singular blessing
of his life "to be almost every hour of it miserably in love with
someone." But, then, just because Werther is wordy, all his feelings
come out, expressed one way or another. With Tullia, and others like
her, one feels that so much is suppressed, because it did not fit the
conventional
[Pg xii]
frame. What she says she felt, but she must have felt so much more or
have known that others felt more.
This suppression of truth has, of course, nothing to do with the
partial treatment of love necessary often in purely imaginative
literature. No one goes to poetry for an anatomy of love. Not love, but
people in love, are the business of a playwright or a novelist. The
difference is very great. The purely imaginative writer is dealing with
situations first, and then with the passions that cause them.
Here it is interesting to observe that Stendhal, in gathering his
evidence, makes use of works of imagination as often as works based
upon fact or his own actual experience.[8] Characters from Scott are
called in as witnesses, side by side with Mademoiselle de Lespinasse or
Mariana Alcaforado.
The books mentioned by Stendhal are of two distinct kinds. There are
those, from which he draws evidence and support for his own theories,
and in which the connexion with love is only incidental (Shakespeare's
Plays, for example, _Don Juan_ or the _Nouvelle Héloïse_), and
others whose authors are really his forerunners, such as André le
Chapelain.[9] Stendhal gives some account of this curious writer, who
perhaps comes nearer his own analytical method than any later writer.
In fact, we have called Stendhal unique perhaps too rashly--there are
others he does not mention, who, in a less sustained and intentional
way, have attempted an analytical, and still imaginative, study of
love. Stendhal makes no mention of a short essay on Love by Pascal,
which certainly falls in the same category as his own. It is less
illuminating than one might expect, but to read it is to appreciate
still more the restraint, which Stendhal has consciously forced upon
himself. Others also since
[Pg xiii]
Stendhal--Baudelaire, for instance--have made casual and valuable
investigations in the Stendhalian method. Baudelaire has here and there
a maxim which, in brilliance and exactitude, equals almost anything in
this volume.[10]
And then--though this is no place for a bibliography of love--there
is Hazlitt's _Liber Amoris_. Stendhal would have loved that patient,
impartial chronicle of love's ravages: instead of Parisian _salons_ and
Duchesses it is all servant-girls and Bloomsbury lodging-houses; but
the _Liber Amoris_ is no less pitiful and, if possible, more real than
the diary of Salviati.
There are certain books which, for the frequency of their mention
in this work, demand especial attention of the reader--they are its
commentary and furnish much of the material for its ideas.
In number CLXV of "Scattered Fragments" (below, p. 328) Stendhal gives
the list as follows:--
The _Autobiography_ of Benvenuto Cellini.
The novels of Cervantes and Scarron.
_Manon Lescaut_ and _Le Doyen de Killerine_, by the Abbé Prévôt.
The Latin Letters of Héloïse to Abelard.
_Tom Jones._
_Letters of a Portuguese Nun._
Two or three stories by Auguste La Fontaine.
Pignotti's _History of Tuscany_.
Werther.
Brantôme.
_Memoirs_ of Carlo Gozzi (Venice, 1760)--only the eighty pages on
the history of his love affairs.
The _Memoirs_ of Lauzun, Saint-Simon, d'Épinay, de Staël, Marmontel,
Bezenval, Roland, Duclos, Horace Walpole, Evelyn, Hutchinson.
Letters of Mademoiselle Lespinasse.
[Pg xiv]
All these are more or less famous works, with which, at least by name,
the general reader is familiar. Brantôme's witty and entertaining
writings, the _Letters of a Portuguese Nun_ and those of Mademoiselle
de Lespinasse, perhaps the sublimest letters that have ever been
written, are far less read than they deserve. The rest--excepting
perhaps Scarron, Carlo Gozzi, Auguste La Fontaine, and one or two of
the less-known Memoirs--are the common reading of a very large public.
This list of books is mentioned as the select library of Lisio
Visconti, who "was anything but a great reader." Lisio Visconti is one
of the many imaginary figures, behind which hides Stendhal himself; we
have already suggested one reason for this curious trait. Besides Lisio
Visconti and Salviati, we meet Del Rosso, Scotti, Delfante, Pignatelli,
Zilietti, Baron de Bottmer, etc. etc. Often these phantom people are
mentioned side by side with a character from a book or a play or with
someone Stendhal had actually met in life. General Teulié[11] is a
real person--Stendhal's superior officer on his first expedition in
Italy: Schiassetti is a fiction. In the same way the dates, which the
reader will often find appended to a story or a note, sometimes give
the date of a real event in Stendhal's life, while at other times it
can be proved that, at the particular time given, the event mentioned
could not have taken place. This falsification of names and dates was a
mania with Stendhal. To most of his friends he gave a name completely
different from their real one, and adopted with each of them a special
pseudonym for himself. The list of Stendhal's pseudonyms is extensive
and amusing.[12] But he was not always thorough in his system of
disguise: he is even known to have written from Italy a letter in
cypher, enclosing at the same time the key to the cypher!
[Pg xv]
We have only to make a few additions to Lisio Visconti's list of books
already mentioned, in order to have a pretty fair account of the main
sources of reference and suggestion, to which Stendhal turned in
writing his _De l'Amour_.[13] There are Rousseau's _Nouvelle Héloïse_
and _Émile_. Stendhal holds that, except for very green youth, the
_Nouvelle Héloïse_ is unreadable. Yet in spite of its affectation,
it remained for him one of the most important works for the study of
genuine passion. Then we must add the _Liaisons Dangereuses_--a work
which bears certain resemblances to Stendhal's _De l'Amour_. Both
are the work of a soldier and both have a soldierly directness; for
perfect balance and strength of construction few books have come near
the _Liaisons Dangereuses_--none have ever surpassed it. There is the
_Princesse de Clèves_ of Madame de Lafayette and _Corinne_ by Madame
de Staël, whose typically German and extravagant admiration for Italy
touched a weak spot in Stendhal. After Chateaubriand's _Génie du
Christianisme_, which Stendhal also refers to more than once, the works
of Madame de Staël were, perhaps, the greatest working influence in the
rise of Romanticism. What wonder, then, that Stendhal was interested?
To the letters of Mlle. de Lespinasse and of the Portuguese Nun we
must add the letters of Mirabeau, written during his imprisonment at
Vincennes, to Sophie de Monnier. Further, we must add the writings of
certain moral teachers whose names occur frequently in the following
pages: Helvétius, whom Clarétie[14] amusingly calls the _enfant
terrible_ of the philosophers; de Tracy[15]; Volney, author of the once
celebrated _Ruines_, traveller and philosopher. These names are only
the most important. Stendhal's reading was
[Pg xvi]
extensive, and we might swell the list with the names of Montesquieu,
Condillac, Condorcet, Chamfort, Diderot--to name only the moralists.
It is noticeable that almost all these books, mentioned as the
favourite authorities of Stendhal, are eighteenth-century works.
The fact will seem suspicious to those inclined to believe that the
eighteenth century was a time of pretty ways and gallantry _à la_
Watteau, or of windy mouthings about Cause and Effect, Duties and
Principles, Reason and Nature. But, to begin with, neither estimate
comes near the mark; and, moreover, Stendhal hated Voltaire almost
as much as Blake did. It was not an indiscriminate cry of Rights and
Liberty which interested Stendhal in the eighteenth century. The old
_régime_ was, of course, politically uncongenial to him, the liberal
and Bonapartist, and he could see the stupidity and injustice and
hollowness of a society built up on privilege. But even if Stendhal,
like the happy optimist of to-day, had mistaken the hatred of past
wrongs for a proof of present well-being, how could a student of Love
fail to be fascinated by an age such as that of Lewis XV? It was the
leisure for loving, which, as he was always remarking, court-life
and only court-life makes possible, that reconciled him to an age he
really despised. Moreover, the mass of memoirs and letters of the
distinguished men and women of the eighteenth century, offering as
it does material for the study of manners unparalleled in any other
age, inevitably led him back to the court-life of the _ancien régime_.
Besides, as has been already suggested, the contradiction in Stendhal
was strong. In spite of his liberalism, he was pleased in later life
to add the aristocratic "de" to the name of Beyle. With Lord Byron,
divided in heart between the generous love of liberty which led him
to fight for the freedom of Greece, and disgust at the vulgarity of
the Radical party, which he had left behind in England, Stendhal found
himself closely in sympathy
[Pg xvii]
when they met in Italy. It was the originality[16] of the men of the
sixteenth century which called forth his genuine praises; even the
statesmen-courtiers and soldiers of the heroic age of Lewis XIV awoke
his admiration;[17] the gallant courtiers and incompetent statesmen of
Lewis XV awoke at least his interest.
* * * * *
Stendhal's _De l'Amour_, and in less degree his novels, have had
to struggle for recognition, and the cause has largely been the
peculiarity of his attitude--his scepticism, the exaggerated severity
of his treatment of idyllic subjects, together with an unusual
complement of sentiment and appreciation of the value of sentiment for
the understanding of life. It is his manner of thinking, much rather
than the strangeness of his thoughts themselves, which made the world
hesitate to give Stendhal the position which it now accords him. But at
least one great discovery the world did find in _De l'Amour_--a novelty
quite apart from general characteristics, apart from its strange
abruptness and stranger truth of detail. Stendhal's discovery is
"Crystallisation"; it is the central idea of his book. The word was his
invention, though the thought, which it expresses so decisively, is to
be found, like most so-called advanced ideas, hidden away in a corner
of Montaigne's Essays.[18] Crystallisation is the
[Pg xviii]
process by which we love an object for qualities, which primarily
exist in our fancy and which we lend to it, that is to say, imaginary
or unreal qualities. While Montaigne, and others no doubt, had seen
in this a peculiarity of love, Stendhal saw in it love's essential
characteristic--one might say, its explanation, if love were capable of
being explained. Besides, in this book Stendhal is seeking the _how_
not the _why_ of love. And he goes beyond love: he recognises the
influence of crystallisation upon other sides of life besides love.
Crystallisation has become an integral part of the world's equipment
for thought and expression.
The crisis in Stendhal's posthumous history is Sainte-Beuve's
_Causeries des Lundis_ of January 2nd and 9th, 1854, of which Stendhal
was the subject. Stendhal died in 1842. It is sometimes said that his
reputation is a fictitious reputation, intentionally worked up by
partisanship and without regard to merit, that in his lifetime he was
poorly thought of. This is untrue. His artistic activities, like his
military, were appreciated by those competent to judge them. He was
complimented by Napoleon on his services prior to the retreat from
Moscow; Balzac, who of all men was capable of judging a novel and,
still more, a direct analysis of a passion, was one of his admirers,
and particularly an admirer of _De l'Amour_. From the general public
he met to a great extent with mistrust, and for a few years after his
death his memory was honoured with apathetic silence. The few, a chosen
public and some faithful friends--Mérimée and others--still cherished
his reputation. In 1853, owing in great measure to the efforts of
Romain Colomb and Louis Crozet, a complete edition of his works was
published by Michel-Lévy. And then, very appropriately, early in the
next year was heard the impressive judgment of Sainte-Beuve. Perhaps
the justest remark in that just appreciation is where he gives Stendhal
the merit of being one of the first Frenchmen to travel _littérairement
[Pg xix]
parlant_.[19] Stendhal came back from each of his many and frequent
voyages, like the happy traveller in Joachim du Bellay's sonnet, _plein
d'usage et raison_--knowing the ways of men and full of ripe wisdom.
And this is true not only of his travels over land and sea, but also of
those into the thoughtful world of books.
An equally true--perhaps still truer--note was struck by Sainte-Beuve,
when he insisted on the important place in Stendhal's character played
by _la peur d'être dupe_--the fear of being duped. Stendhal was always
and in all situations beset by this fear; it tainted his happiest
moments and his best qualities. We have already remarked on the effect
on his style of his mistrust of himself--it is the same characteristic.
A sentimental romantic by nature, he was always on his guard against
the follies of a sentimental outlook; a sceptic by education and the
effect of his age, he was afraid of being the dupe of his doubts; he
was sceptical of scepticism itself. This tended to make him unreal and
affected, made him often defeat his own ends in the oddest way. In
order to avoid the possibility of being carried away too far along a
course, in which instinct led him, he would choose a direction approved
instead by his intellect, only to find out too late that he was cutting
therein a sorry figure. Remember, as a boy he made his entrance into
the world "with the fixed intention of being a seducer of women," and
that, late in life, he made the melancholy confession that his normal
role was that of the lover crossed in love. Here lies the commentary on
not a little in Stendhal's life and works.
The facts of his life can be told very briefly.
* * * * *
Henry Beyle, who wrote under the name of Stendhal, was born at Grenoble
in 1783, and was educated in his
[Pg xx]
native town. In 1799 he came to Paris and was placed there under the
protection of Daru, an important officer under Napoleon, a relative and
patron of his family. But he showed no fitness for the various kinds
of office work to which he was put. He tried his hand at this time,
unsuccessfully also, at painting.
In 1800, still under the protection of Daru, he went to Italy, and,
having obtained a commission in the 6th regiment of Dragoons, had
his first experience of active service. By 1802 he had distinguished
himself as a soldier, and it was to the general surprise of all who
knew him, that he returned to France on leave, handed in his papers and
returned to Grenoble.
He soon returned to Paris, there to begin serious study. But in 1806,
he was once more with Daru and the army,--present at the triumphal
entry of Napoleon into Berlin. It was directly after this that he was
sent to Brunswick as assistant _commissaire des guerres_.
He left Brunswick in 1809, but after a flying visit to Paris, he was
again given official employment in Germany. He was with the army at
Vienna. After the peace of Schoenbrunn he returned once more to Paris
in 1810.
In 1812, he saw service once more--taking an active and distinguished
part in the Russian campaign of that year. He was complimented by
Napoleon on the way he had discharged his duties in the commissariat.
He witnessed the burning of Moscow and shared in the horrors and
hardships of the retreat.
In 1813 his duties brought him to Segan in Silesia, and in 1814 to his
native town of Grenoble.
The fall of Napoleon in the same year deprived him of his position and
prospects. He went to Milan and stayed there with little interruption
till 1821; only leaving after these, the happiest, years of his life,
through fear of being implicated in the Carbonari troubles.
In 1830, he was appointed to the consulate of Trieste; but Metternich,
who, no doubt, mistrusted his liberal
[Pg xxi]
tendencies, refused to ratify his appointment, and he was transferred
to Civita Vecchia. This unhealthy district tried his health, and
frequent travel did not succeed in repairing it.
In 1841, he was on leave in Paris, where he died suddenly in the
following year.
* * * * *
Stendhal's best-known books are his two novels: _La Chartreuse de
Parme_ and _Le Rouge et le Noir_. Besides these there are his works of
travel--_Promenades dans Rome_ and _Rome, Florence et Naples_; _Mémoire
d'un Touriste_; his history of Italian painting; his lives of Haydn,
Mozart and Rossini; _L'Abbesse de Castro_ and other minor works of
fiction; finally a number of autobiographical works, of which _La Vie
de Henri Brulard_, begun in his fiftieth year and left incomplete, is
the most important.
But _De l'Amour_, Stendhal himself considered his most important work;
it was written, as he tells us, in his happy years in Lombardy. It was
published on his return to Paris in 1822, but it had no success, and
copies of this edition are very rare. Recently it has been reprinted
by Messrs. J. M. Dent and Sons (in _Chef d'Œuvres de la Littérature
Française_, London and Paris, 1912). The second edition (1833) had no
more success than the first and is equally difficult to find. Stendhal
was preparing a third edition for the press when he died in 1842. In
1853 the work made a new appearance in the edition of Stendhal's works
published by Michel-Lévy, since reprinted by Calmann-Lévy. It contains
certain additions, some of which Stendhal probably intended for the new
edition, which he was planning at the time of his death.
Within the last year have appeared the first volumes of a new French
edition of Stendhal's works, published by Messrs. Honoré and Edouard
Champion of Paris.
[Pg xxii]
It will be the most complete edition of Stendhal's works yet published
and is the surest evidence that Stendhal's position in French
literature is now assured. The volume containing _De l'Amour_ has not
yet appeared.
The basis of this translation is the first edition, to which we have
only added three prefaces, written by Stendhal at various, subsequent
dates and all well worth perusal. Apart from these, we have preferred
to leave the book just as it appeared in the two editions, which were
published in Stendhal's own lifetime.
We may, perhaps, add a word with regard to our notes at the end of
the book. We make no claim that they are exhaustive: we intended only
to select some few points for explanation or illustration, with the
English reader in view. Here and there in this book are sentences and
allusions which we can no more explain than could Stendhal himself,
when in 1822 he was correcting the proof-sheets: as he did, we have
left them, preferring to believe with him that "the fault lay with
the self who was reading, not with the self who had written." But,
these few enigmas aside--and they are very few--to make an exhaustive
collection of notes on this book would be to write another volume--one
of those volumes of "Notes and Appendices," under which scholars bury a
Pindar or Catullus. That labour we will gladly leave to others--to be
accomplished, we hope, a thousand years hence, when French also is a
"dead" language.
In conclusion we should like to express our thanks to our friend
Mr. W. H. Morant, of the India Office, who has helped us to see the
translation through the Press.
P. and C. N. S. W.
[1] See p. 195, below.
[2] See below, Chap. XXXI.
[3] See note at end of Chap. I, p. 21, below; also p. XIV and p. 157,
n. 3, below.
[4] Stendhal confesses that he went so far "as to print several
passages which he did not understand himself." (See p. 4, below.)
[5] _Maxims of Love_ (Stendhal). (Royal Library, Arthur Humphreys,
London, 1906).
[6] Lady Holland told Lord Broughton in 1815, that she remembered "when
it used to be said on the invitation cards: 'No foreigners dine with
us.'" (_Recollections of a Long Life_, Vol. I, p. 327).
[7] He does call it, once or twice, a "Physiology of Love," and
elsewhere a "_livre d'idéologie_," but apologises for its singular form
at the same time. (See Fourth Preface, p. 11, and Chap. III, p. 27, n.
1).
[8] See p. 63, n. 1, below.
[9] See p. 339, below.
[10] See Translators' note 11, p. 343, below.
[11] See p. 309, below.
[12] The list may be found in _Les plus belles pages de Stendhal_
(Mercure de France, Paris, 1908, pp. 511-14).
[13] On p. 7, below, Stendhal refers to some of the "best" books on
Love.
[14] _Histoire de la Littérature Française_ (800-1900), Paris, 1907.
[15] See Translators' note 47, p. 353, below.
[16] See Chap. XLI, p. 159, below.
[17] See Chap. XLI, p. 160, n. 4, below.
[18] "Like the passion of Love that lends Beauties and Graces to
the Person it does embrace; and that makes those who are caught
with it, with a depraved and corrupt Judgment, consider the
thing they love other and more perfect than it is."--Montaigne's
_Essays_, Bk. II, Chapter XVII (Cotton's translation.) This is
"crystallisation"--Stendhal could not explain it better.
We cannot here forgo quoting one more passage from Montaigne, which
bears distinctly upon other important views of Stendhal. "I say that
Males and Females are cast in the same Mould and that, Education and
Usage excepted, the Difference is not great.... It is much more easy
to accuse one Sex than to excuse the other. 'Tis according to the
Proverb--'Ill may Vice correct Sin.'" (Bk. Ill, Chap. V).
[19] "In a literary sense."
[Pg xxiii]
CONTENTS
Page
Introductory Preface to the Translation v
Author's Preface. I. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
II. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
III. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
IV. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
BOOK I
CHAPTER
I. Of Love . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
II. Of the Birth of Love. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
III. Of Hope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
IV. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
V. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
VI. The Crystals of Salzburg. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
VII. Differences between the Birth of Love in the Two Sexes. . 33
VIII. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
IX. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
X. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
XI. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
XII. Further Consideration of Crystallisation. . . . . . . . . 45
XIII. Of the First Step; Of the Fashionable World;
Of Misfortunes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
[Pg xxiv]
XIV. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
XV. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
XVI. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
XVII. Beauty Dethroned by Love. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
XVIII. Limitations of Beauty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
XIX. Limitations of Beauty (_continued_) . . . . . . . . . . . 59
XX. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
XXI. Love at First Sight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
XXII. Of Infatuation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
XXIII. The Thunderbolt from the Blue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
XXIV. Voyage in an Unknown Land . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
XXV. The Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
XXVI. Of Modesty. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
XXVII. The Glance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
XXVIII. Of Feminine Pride . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
XXIX. Of Women's Courage. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
XXX. A Peculiar and Mournful Spectacle . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
XXXI. Extract from the Diary of Salviati. . . . . . . . . . . . 103
XXXII. Of Intimate Intercourse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
XXXIII. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
XXXIV. Of Confidences. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
XXXV. Of Jealousy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
XXXVI. Of Jealousy (_continued_) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
XXXVII. Roxana. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
XXXVIII. Of Self-Esteem Piqued . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
XXXIX. Of Quarrelsome Love . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
XXXIX. (Part II) Remedies against Love . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
XXXIX. (Part III). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
[Pg xxv]
BOOK II
XL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
XLI. Of Nations with regard to Love--France. . . . . . . . . . 158
XLII. France (_continued_). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
XLIII. Italy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
XLIV. Rome. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
XLV. England . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
XLVI. England (_continued_) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
XLVII. Spain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182
XLVIII. German Love . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
XLIX. A Day in Florence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
L. Love in the United States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197
LI. Love in Provence up to the Conquest of Toulouse, in 1328,
by the Barbarians from the North . . . . . . . . . . . 200
LII. Provence in the Twelfth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
LIII. Arabia--Fragments gathered and translated from an Arab
collection entitled_ The Divan of Love_. . . . . . . . 213
LIV. Of the Education of Women . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222
LV. Objections to the Education of Women. . . . . . . . . . . 227
LVI. Objections to the Education of Women (_continued_). . . . 236
LVI. (Part II) On Marriage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
LVII. Of Virtue, so Called. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
LVIII. State of Europe with regard to Marriage.--
Switzerland and the Oberland. . . . . . . . . . . 245
LIX. Werther and Don Juan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254
BOOK III
Scattered Fragments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
[Pg xxvi]
APPENDIX
On the Courts of Love. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 332
Code of Love of the Twelfth Century. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 336
Note on André le Chapelain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339
Translators' Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341
_Note:_ All the footnotes to the Translation, except those within
square brackets, which are the work of the Translators, are by Stendhal
himself. The Translators' notes at the end of the book are referred to
by numerals enclosed within round brackets.
[Pg 1]
PREFACE[1]
It is in vain that an author solicits the indulgence of his public--the
printed page is there to give the lie to his pretended modesty. He
would do better to trust to the justice, patience and impartiality
of his readers, and it is to this last quality especially that the
author of the present work makes his appeal. He has often heard people
in France speak of writings, opinions or sentiments as being "truly
French"; and so he may well be afraid that, by presenting facts truly
as they are, and showing respect only for sentiments and opinions that
are universally true, he may have provoked that jealous exclusiveness,
which, in spite of its very doubtful character, we have seen of late
set up as a virtue. What, I wonder, would become of history, of ethics,
of science itself or of literature, if they had to be truly German,
truly Russian or Italian, truly Spanish or English, as soon as they had
crossed the Rhine, the Alps or the Channel? What are we to say to this
kind of justice, to this ambulatory truth? When we see such expressions
as "devotion truly Spanish," "virtues truly English," seriously
employed in the speeches of patriotic foreigners, it is high time to
suspect this sentiment, which expresses itself in very similar terms
also elsewhere. At Constantinople or among savages, this blind and
exclusive partiality for one's own country is a rabid thirst for blood;
among civilised peoples, it is a morbid, unhappy, restless vanity, that
is ready to turn on you for a pinprick.[2]
[1] [To the first edition, 1822.--Tr.]
[2] Extract from the Preface to M. Simond's _Voyage en Suisse_, pp. 7,
8.
[Pg 2]
PREFACE[1]
ThiS work has had no success: it has been found unintelligible--not
without reason. Therefore in this new edition the author's primary
intention has been to render his ideas with clearness. He has
related how they came to him, and he has made a preface and an
introduction--all in order to be clear. Yet, in spite of so much care,
out of a hundred who have read _Corinne_, there are not four readers
who will understand this volume.
Although it deals with Love, this little book is no novel, and still
less is it diverting like a novel. 'Tis simply and solely an exact
scientific description of a kind of madness which is very rarely to be
found in France. The Empire of propriety, growing day by day wider,
under the influence of our fear of ridicule much more than through the
purity of our morals, has made of the word, which serves as title to
this work, an expression, of which outspoken mention is avoided and
which at times seems even to give offence. I have been forced to make
use of it, but the scientific austerity of the language shelters me, I
think, in this respect, from all reproach.
* * * * *
I know one or two Secretaries of Legation who will, at their return,
be able to tender me their services. Till then what can I say to the
people who deny the facts of my narration? Beg them not to listen to it.
[Pg 3]
The form I have adopted may be reproached with egoism. A traveller is
allowed to say: "_I_ was at New York, thence _I_ embarked for South
America, _I_ made my way back as far as Santa-Fé-de-Bogota. The gnats
and mosquitoes made _my_ life a misery during the journey, and for
three days _I_ couldn't use _my_ right eye."
The traveller is not accused of loving to talk of himself: all his
_me's_ and _my's_ are forgiven; for that is the clearest and most
interesting manner of telling what he has seen.
It is in order, if possible, to be clear and picturesque, that the
author of the present voyage into the little-known regions of the
human heart says: "I went with Mme. Gherardi to the salt mines of
Hallein.... Princess Crescenzi said to me at Rome.... One day at
Berlin I saw handsome Capt. L...." All these little things really
happened to the author, who passed fifteen years in Germany and Italy.
But more observant than sensitive, he never encountered the least
adventure himself, never experienced a single personal sentiment
worthy of narration. Even supposing that he had the pride to believe
the contrary, a still greater pride would have prevented him from
publishing his heart and selling it on the market for six francs, like
those people who in their lifetime publish their memoirs.
Correcting in 1822 the proofs of this kind of moral voyage in Italy and
Germany, the author, who had described the objects the day that he had
seen them, treated the manuscript, containing the detailed description
of all the phases of this malady of the soul called Love, with that
blind respect, shown by a scholar of the fourteenth century for a newly
unearthed manuscript of Lactantius or Quintius Curtius. When the author
met some obscure passage (and often, to say the truth, that happened),
he always believed that the fault lay with the self who was reading,
not with the self who had written. He confesses that his respect for the
[Pg 4]
early manuscript carried him so far as to print several passages, which
he did not understand himself. Nothing more foolish for anyone who
had thought of the good graces of the public; but the author, seeing
Paris again after long travels, came to the conclusion that without
grovelling before the Press a success was not to be had. Well, let him
who brings himself to grovel keep that for the minister in power! A
so-called success being out of the question, the author was pleased
to publish his thoughts exactly as they had come to him. This was
once upon a time the procedure of those philosophers of Greece, whose
practical wisdom filled him with rapturous admiration.
It requires years to gain admittance to the inner circle of Italian
society. Perhaps I shall have been the last traveller in that country.
For since the _Carbonari_ and the Austrian invasion, no foreigner will
ever be received as a friend in the _salons_, where such reckless
gaiety reigned. The traveller will see the monuments, streets and
public places of a city, never the society--he will always be held in
fear: the inhabitants will suspect that he is a spy, or fear that he
is laughing at the battle of Antrodoco and at the degradations, which,
in that land, are the one and only safeguard against the persecution
of the eight or ten ministers or favourites who surround the Prince.
Personally, I really loved the inhabitants and could see the truth.
Sometimes for ten months together I never spoke a word of French, and
but for political troubles and the _Carbonari_ I would never have
returned to France. Good-nature is what I prize above all things.
In spite of great care to be clear and lucid, I cannot perform
miracles: I cannot give ears to the deaf nor eyes to the blind. So the
people of great fortunes and gross pleasures, who have made a hundred
thousand francs in the year preceding the moment they open this book,
had better quickly shut it, especially if they are
[Pg 5]
bankers, manufacturers, respectable industrial folk--that's to
say, people with eminently positive ideas. This book would be less
unintelligible to anyone who had made a large sum of money on the Stock
Exchange or in a lottery. Such winnings may be found side by side with
the habit of passing hours together in day-dreams, in the enjoyment of
the emotion evoked by a picture of Prud'hon, a phrase of Mozart, still
more, a certain peculiar look of a woman who is often in your thoughts.
'Tis not in this way that these people "waste their time," who pay
ten thousand workmen at the end of each week: their minds work always
towards the useful and the positive. The dreamer, of whom I speak, is
the man they would hate, if they had time; 'tis him they like to make
the butt of their harmless jokes. The industrial millionaire feels
confusedly that such a man has more _estime_ for a thought than for a
bag of money.
I invite the studious young man to withdraw, if in the same year as
the industrial gained a hundred thousand francs, he has acquired the
knowledge of modern Greek, and is so proud of it that already he
aspires to Arabic. I beg not to open this book every man, who has
not been unhappy for imaginary reasons, reasons to which vanity is
stranger, and which he would be very ashamed to see divulged in the
_salons_.
I am sure to displease those women who capture the consideration of
these very _salons_ by an affectation that never lapses for an instant.
Some of these for a moment I have surprised in good earnest, and so
astonished, that, asking themselves the question, they could no longer
tell whether such and such a sentiment, as they had just expressed, was
natural or affected. How could such women judge of the portraiture of
real feelings? In fact this work has been their _bête noire_: they say
that the author must be a wretch.
To blush suddenly at the thought of certain youthful doings; to have
committed follies through sensibility
[Pg 6]
and to suffer for them, not because you cut a silly figure in the eyes
of the _salon_, but in the eyes of a certain person in the _salon_;
to be in love at the age of twenty-six in good earnest with a woman
who loves another, or even (but the case is so rare that I scarcely
dare write it, for fear of sinking again into the unintelligible, as
in the first edition)--or even to enter the _salon_ where the woman
is whom you fancy that you love, and to think only of reading in her
eyes her opinion of you at the moment, without any idea of putting on
a love-lorn expression yourself--these are the antecedents I shall ask
of my reader. The description of many of these rare and subtle feelings
has appeared obscure to people with positive ideas. How manage to be
clear in their eyes? Tell them of a rise of fifty centimes or a change
in the tariff of Columbia.[2]
The book before you explains simply and mathematically, so to speak,
the curious feelings which succeed each other and form a whole called
the Passion of Love.
Imagine a fairly complicated geometrical figure, drawn with white chalk
on a large blackboard. Well, I am going to explain that geometrical
figure, but on one condition--that it exists already on the blackboard,
for I personally cannot draw it. It is this impossibility that makes
it so difficult to write on Love a book which is not a novel. In order
to follow with interest a philosophic examination of this feeling,
something is wanted in the reader besides understanding: it is
absolutely necessary that Love has been seen by him. But then where can
a passion be seen?
This is a cause of obscurity that I shall never be able to eliminate.
[Pg 7]
Love resembles what we call the Milky Way in heaven, a gleaming mass
formed by thousands of little stars, each of which may be a nebula.
Books have noted four or five hundred of the little feelings hanging
together and so hard to recognise, which compose this passion. But
even in these, the least refined, they have often blundered and taken
the accessory for the principal. The best of these books, such as
the _Nouvelle Héloïse_, the novels of Madame Cottin, the Letters of
Mademoiselle de Lespinasse and _Manon Lescaut_, have been written in
France, where the plant called Love is always in fear of ridicule, is
overgrown by the demands of vanity, the national passion, and reaches
its full height scarcely ever.
What is a knowledge of Love got from novels? After seeing it
described--without ever feeling it--in hundreds of celebrated volumes,
what is to be said of seeking in mine the explanation of this madness?
I answer like an echo: "'Tis madness."
Poor disillusioned young lady, would you enjoy again that which busied
you so some years ago, which you dared mention to no one, which almost
cost you your honour? It is for you that I have refashioned this book
and tried to make it clearer. After reading it, never speak of it
without a little scornful turn, and throw it in your citron bookcase
behind the other books--I should even leave a few pages uncut.
'Tis not only a few pages that will be left uncut by the imperfect
creature, who thinks himself philosopher, because he has remained
always stranger to those reckless emotions, which cause all our
happiness of a week to depend upon a glance. Some people, coming to
the age of discretion, use the whole force of their vanity to forget
that there was a day when they were able to stoop so low as to court a
woman and expose themselves to the humiliation of a refusal: this book
will win their hatred. Among the many clever people, whom I have seen
condemn this work, for different reasons but all angrily,
[Pg 8]
those only seemed to me ridiculous, who had the twofold conceit to
pretend always to have been above the weakness of sensibility, and yet
to possess enough penetration to judge _a priori_ of the degree of
exactitude of a philosophic treatise, which is nothing but an ordered
description of these weaknesses.
The grave persons, who enjoy in society their reputation as safe men
with no romantic nonsense, are far nearer to the understanding of a
novel, however impassioned, than of a book of philosophy, wherein the
author describes coldly the various stages of the malady of the soul
called Love. The novel moves them a little; but before the philosophic
treatise these sensible people are like blind men, who getting a
description of the pictures in a museum read out to them, would say to
the author: "You must agree, sir, that your work is horribly obscure."
What is to happen if these blind men chance to be wits, established
long since in possession of that title and with sovereign claims to
clairvoyance? The poor author will be treated prettily. In fact, it is
what happened to him at the time of the first edition. Several copies
were actually burnt through the raging vanity of very clever people.
I do not speak of insults all the more flattering for their fury: the
author was proclaimed to be coarse, immoral, a writer for the people,
a suspicious character, etc. In countries outworn by monarchy, these
titles are the surest reward for whoever thinks good to write on morals
and does not dedicate his book to the Mme. Dubarry of the day. Blessed
literature, if it were not in fashion, and interested those alone for
whom it was written!
In the time of the _Cid_, Corneille was nothing for M. le Marquis de
Danjeau[3] but "a good fellow." Today the whole world thinks itself
made to read M. de Lamartine: so much the better for his publisher, but
so much the worse, and a hundred times the worse, for
[Pg 9]
that great poet. In our days genius offers accommodation to people to
whom, under penalty of losing caste, it should never so much as give a
thought.
The laborious and active, very estimable and very positive life of a
counsellor of State, of a manufacturer of cotton goods or of a banker
with a keen eye for loans finds its reward in millions, not in tender
sensation. Little by little the heart of these gentlemen ossifies:
the positive and the useful are for them everything, and their soul
is closed to that feeling, which of all others has the greatest need
of our leisure and makes us most unfit for any rational and steady
occupation.
The only object of this preface is to proclaim that this book has the
misfortune of being incomprehensible to all who have not found time to
play the fool. Many people will feel offended and I trust they will go
no further.
[1] [May, 1826.--Tr.]
[2] "Cut this passage out," say my friends. "Nothing could be truer,
but beware of the men of business: they'll cry out on the aristocrat."
In 1812 I was not afraid of the Treasury: so why should I be afraid
of the millionaire in 1820? The ships supplied to the Pasha of Egypt
have opened my eyes in their direction, and I fear nothing but what I
respect.
[3] _Vide_ p. 120 of _Mémoires de Danjeau_ (Édition Genlis).
[Pg 10]
PREFACE[1]
I write for a hundred readers only and of these unhappy charming
beings, without hypocrisy or moral cant, whom I would please, I know
scarcely a couple. Of such as lie to gain consideration as writers, I
take little heed. Certain fine ladies should keep to the accounts of
their cook and the fashionable preacher of the day, be it Massillon
or Mme. Necker, to be able to talk on these topics with the women of
importance who mete out consideration. And to be sure, in France this
noble distinction is always to be won by turning high priest of any fad.
To anyone who would read this book I would say: In all your life have
you been unhappy six months for love?
Or, was your soul ever touched by sorrow not connected with the thought
of a lawsuit, with failure at the last election, or with having cut a
less brilliant figure than usual last season at Aix? I will continue
my indiscretions and ask if in the year you have read any of those
impudent works, which compel the reader to think? For example, _Émile_
of J. J. Rousseau, or the six volumes of Montaigne? If, I should say,
you have never suffered through this infirmity of noble minds, if you
have not, in defiance of nature, the habit of thinking as you read,
this book will give you a grudge against its author: for it will make
you suspect that there exists a certain happiness, unknown to you and
known to Mlle. de Lespinasse.
[1] [May, 1834.--Tr.
[Pg 11]
PREFACE[1]
I come to beg indulgence of the reader for the peculiar form of
this Physiology of Love. It is twenty-eight years (in 1842) since
the turmoil, which followed the fall of Napoleon, deprived me of my
position. Two years earlier chance threw me, immediately after the
horrors of the retreat from Russia, into the midst of a charming town,
where I had the enchanting prospect of passing the rest of my days.
In happy Lombardy, at Milan, at Venice, the great, or rather only,
business of life is pleasure. No attention, there, to the deeds and
movements of your neighbour; hardly a troubled thought for what is
to happen to you. If a man notice the existence of his neighbour, it
does not enter his head to hate him. Take away from the occupations
of a French provincial town jealousy--and what is left? The absence,
the impossibility of that cruel jealousy forms the surest part of that
happiness, which draws all the provincials to Paris.
Following the masked balls of Carnival, which in 1820 was more
brilliant than usual, the noise of five or six completely reckless
proceedings occupied the society of Milan an entire month; although
they are used over there to things which in France would pass for
incredible. The fear of ridicule would in this country paralyse such
fantastic actions: only to speak of them I need great courage.
One evening people were discussing profoundly the
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effects and the causes of these extravagances, at the house of the
charming Mme. Pietra Grua(6), who happened, extraordinarily enough,
not to be mixed up with these escapades. The thought came to me that
perhaps in less than a year I should have nothing left of all those
strange facts, and of the causes alleged for them, but a recollection,
on which I could not depend. I got hold of a concert programme, and
wrote a few words on it in pencil. A game of faro was suggested: we
were thirty seated round a card-table, but the conversation was so
animated that people forgot to play. Towards the close of the evening
came in Col. Scotti, one of the most charming men in the Italian army:
he was asked for his quantum of circumstances relative to the curious
facts with which we were busy, and, indeed, his story of certain
things, which chance had confided to his knowledge, gave them an
entirely new aspect. I took up my concert programme and added these new
circumstances.
This collection of particulars on Love was continued in the same way,
with pencil and odd scraps of paper, snatched up in the _salons_, where
I heard the anecdotes told. Soon I looked for a common rule by which
to recognise different degrees in them. Two months later fear of being
taken for a _Carbonaro_ made me return to Paris--only for a few months
I hoped, but never again have I seen Milan, where I had passed seven
years.
Pining with boredom at Paris, I conceived the idea of occupying myself
again with the charming country from which fear had driven me. I strung
together my scraps of paper and presented the book to a publisher.
But soon a difficulty was raised: the printer declared that it was
impossible to work from notes written in pencil and I could see that he
found such copy beneath his dignity. The printer's young apprentice,
who brought me back my notes, seemed quite ashamed of the more than
doubtful compliment, which had been put into
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his mouth: he knew how to write and I dictated to him my pencil notes.
I understood, too, that discretion required me to change the proper
names, and, above all, abridge the anecdotes. Although no one reads in
Milan, the book, if ever it reached there, might have seemed a piece of
wicked mischief.
So I brought out an ill-fated volume. I have the courage to own that I
despised at that period elegance in style. I saw the young apprentice
wholly taken up with avoiding sentence-endings that were unmusical and
odd sounds in the arrangement of words. In return, he made throughout
no scruple of changing details of fact, difficult to express: Voltaire
himself is afraid of things which are difficult to tell.
The Essay on Love had no claim to merit except the number of the fine
shades of feeling, which I begged the reader to verify among his
memories, if he were happy enough to have any. But in all this there
was something much worse: I was then, as ever, very inexperienced in
the department of literature and the publisher, to whom I had presented
the MS., printed it on bad paper and in an absurd _format_. In fact a
month later, when I asked him for news of the book--"On peut dire qu'il
est sacré,"[2] he said, "For no one comes near it."
It had never even crossed my mind to solicit articles in the papers:
such a thing would have seemed to me an ignominy. And yet no work was
in more pressing need of recommendation to the patience of the reader.
Under the menace of becoming unintelligible at the very outset, it was
necessary to bring the public to accept the new word "crystallisation,"
suggested as a lively expression for that collection of strange
fancies, which we weave round our idea of the loved one, as true and
even indubitable realities.
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At that time wholly absorbed in my love for the least details, which
I had lately observed in the Italy of my dreams, I avoided with care
every concession, every amenity of style, which might have rendered the
Essay on Love less peculiarly fantastic in the eyes of men of letters.
Further, I was not flattering to the public. Literature at that time,
all defaced by our great and recent misfortunes, seemed to have no
other interest than the consolation of our unhappy pride: it used to
rhyme "_gloire_" with "_victoire_," "_guerriers_" with "_lauriers_,"[3]
etc. The true circumstances of the situations, which it pretends to
treat, seem never to have any attraction for the tedious literature of
that period: it looks for nothing but an opportunity of complimenting
that people, enslaved to fashion, whom a great man had called a great
nation, forgetting that they were only great on condition that their
leader was himself.
As the result of my ignorance of the exigencies of the humblest
success, I found no more than seventeen readers between 1822 and 1833:
it is doubtful whether the Essay on Love has been understood after
twenty years of existence by a hundred connoisseurs. A few have had the
patience to observe the various phases of this disease in the people
infected with it in their circle; for we must speak of it as a disease,
in order to understand that passion which in the last thirty years our
fear of ridicule has taken so much trouble to hide--it is this way
which sometimes leads to its cure.
Now and now only, after half a century of revolutions, engrossing one
after another our whole attention, now and now only after five complete
changes in the form and the tendencies of our government, does the
revolution just begin to show itself in our way of living. Love, or
that which commonly appropriates Love's name and fills its place, was
all-powerful in the France of
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Lewis XV. Colonels were created by the ladies of the court; and that
court was nothing less than the fairest place in the kingdom. Fifty
years after, the court is no more; and the gift of a licence to sell
tobacco in the meanest provincial town is beyond the power of the most
surely established ladies of the reigning _bourgeoisie_ or of the
pouting nobility.
It must be owned, women are out of fashion. In our brilliant _salons_
the young men of twenty affect not to address them; they much prefer to
stand round the noisy talker dealing, in a provincial accent, with the
question of the right to vote, and to try and slip in their own little
word. The rich youths, who, to keep up a show of the good-fellowship of
past times, take a pride in seeming frivolous, prefer to talk horses
and play high in the circles where women are excluded. The deadly
indifference which seems to preside over the relations of young men and
the women of five-and-twenty, for whose presence society has to thank
the boredom of marriage, will bring, perhaps, a few wise spirits to
accept this scrupulously exact description of the successive phases of
the malady called Love.
Seeing the terrible change which has plunged us into the stagnation of
to-day, and makes unintelligible to us the society of 1778, such as
we find it in the letters of Diderot to Mlle. Voland, his mistress,
or in the Memoirs of Madame d'Épinay, a man might ask the question,
which of our successive governments has killed in us the faculty of
enjoying ourselves, and drawn us nearer to the gloomiest people on
the face of the earth? The only passable thing which that people have
invented--parliament and the honesty of their parties--we are unable
even to copy. In return, the stupidest of their gloomy conceptions, the
spirit of dignity, has come among us to take the place of our French
gaiety, which is to be found now only in the five hundred balls in the
outskirts of Paris or in the south of France, beyond Bordeaux.
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But which of our successive governments has cost us the fearful
misfortune of anglicisation? Must we accuse that energetic government
of 1793, which prevented the foreigners from coming to pitch their camp
in Montmartre--that government which in a few years will seem heroic in
our eyes and forms a worthy prelude to that, which under Napoleon, went
forth to carry our name into all the capitals of Europe?
We shall pass over the well-meaning stupidity of the _Directoire_,
illustrated by the talents of Carnot and the immortal campaign of
1796-1797 in Italy.
The corruption of the court of Barras still recalled something of the
gaiety of the old order; the graces of Madame Bonaparte proved that we
had no aptitude at that time for the churlishness and charnel-house of
the English.
The profound respect, which despite the jealousy of the faubourg
Saint-Germain, we could not but feel for the First Consul's method
of government, and the men whose superior merit adorned the society
of Paris--such as the Cretets and the Darus--relieves the Empire of
the burden of responsibility for the remarkable change which has been
effected, in the first half of the nineteenth century, in the character
of the French.
Unnecessary to carry my investigation further: the reader will reflect
and be quite able to draw his own conclusions.
[1] [1842. As Stendhal died early in that year, this probably is his
last writing.--Tr.]
[2] ["One might say it's taboo..." "Taboo" is a poor equivalent for
"sacré," which means "cursed" as well as "blessed."--Tr.]
[3] ["Glory with victory, warrior with laurel."--Tr.
[Pg 17]
BOOK I
[Pg 18]
[Pg 19]
ON LOVE
CHAPTER I
OF LOVE
My aim is to comprehend that passion, of which every sincere
development has a character of beauty.
There are four kinds of love.
1. Passion-love--that of the Portuguese nun(1), of Héloïse for Abelard,
of Captain de Vésel, of Sergeant de Cento.
2. Gallant love--that which ruled in Paris towards 1760, to be found
in the memoirs and novels of the period, in Crébillon, Lauzun, Duclos,
Marmontel, Chamfort, Mme. d'Épinay, etc. etc.
'Tis a picture in which everything, to the very shadows, should be
rose-colour, in which may enter nothing disagreeable under any pretext
whatsoever, at the cost of a lapse of etiquette, of good taste, of
refinement, etc. A man of breeding foresees all the ways of acting,
that he is likely to adopt or meet with in the different phases of
this love. True love is often less refined; for that in which there
is no passion and nothing unforeseen, has always a store of ready
wit: the latter is a cold and pretty miniature, the former a picture
by the Carracci. Passion-love carries us away in defiance of all our
interests, gallant love manages always to respect them. True, if we
take from this poor love its vanity, there is very little left: once
stripped, it is like a tottering convalescent, scarcely able to drag
himself along.
3. Physical love. Out hunting--a fresh, pretty country
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girl crosses your path and escapes into the wood. Everyone knows the
love founded on this kind of pleasure: and all begin that way at
sixteen, however parched and unhappy the character.
4. Vanity-love. The vast majority of men, especially in France, desire
and have a fashionable woman, in the same way as a man gets a fine
horse, as something which the luxury of a young man demands. Their
vanity more or less flattered, more or less piqued, gives birth to
transports of feelings. Sometimes there is also physical love, but by
no means always: often there is not so much as physical pleasure. A
duchess is never more than thirty for a bourgeois, said the Duchesse
de Chaulnes, and those admitted to the Court of that just man, king
Lewis of Holland, recall with amusement a pretty woman from the Hague,
who could not help finding any man charming who was Duke or Prince.
But true to the principle of monarchy, as soon as a Prince arrived at
Court, the Duke was dismissed: she was, as it were, the decoration of
the diplomatic body.
The happiest case of this uninspiring relationship is that in which
to physical pleasure is added habit. In that case store of memories
makes it resemble love a little; there is the pique of self-esteem
and sadness on being left; then, romance forces upon us its ideas and
we believe that we are in love and melancholy, for vanity aspires to
credit itself with a great passion. This, at least, is certain that,
whatever kind of love be the source of pleasure, as soon as the soul
is stirred, the pleasure is keen and its memory alluring, and in this
passion, contrary to most of the others, the memory of our losses seems
always to exceed the bounds of what we can hope for in the future.
Sometimes, in vanity-love habit or despair of finding better produces a
kind of friendship, of all kinds the least pleasant: it prides itself
on its security, etc.[1]
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Physical pleasure, being of our nature, is known to everybody, but it
takes no more than a subordinate position in the eyes of tender and
passionate souls. If they raise a laugh in the salons, if often they
are made unhappy in the intrigues of society, in return the pleasure
which they feel must remain always inaccessible to those hearts, whose
beat only vanity and gold can quicken.
A few virtuous and sensitive women have scarcely a conception of
physical pleasures: they have so rarely risked them, if one may use the
expression, and even then the transports of passion-love caused bodily
pleasure almost to be forgotten.
There are men victims and instruments of diabolical pride, of a pride
in the style of Alfieri. Those people who, perhaps, are cruel because,
like Nero, judging all men after the pattern of their own heart, they
are always a-tremble--such people, I say, can attain physical pleasure
only in so far as it is accompanied by the greatest possible exercise
of pride, in so far, that is to say, as they practise cruelties on the
companion of their pleasures. Hence the horrors of _Justine_(2). At any
rate such men have no sense of security.
To conclude, instead of distinguishing four different forms of love,
we can easily admit eight or ten shades of difference. Perhaps mankind
has as many ways of feeling as of seeing; but these differences of
nomenclature alter in no degree the judgments which follow. Subject to
the same laws, all forms of love, which can be seen here below, have
their birth, life and death or ascend to immortality.[2]
[1] Well-known dialogue of Pont de Veyle with Madame du Deffant, at the
fireside.
[2] This book is a free translation of an Italian MS. of M. Lisio
Visconti, a young man of the highest distinction, who died recently at
Volterra, the place of his birth. The day of his sudden death he gave
the translator permission to publish his Essay on Love, if means were
found to shape it to a decorous form. Castel Fiorentino, June 10th,
1819.
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