In the whole of French literature it would be difficult to point to a
figure at once so important, so remarkable, and so little known to
English readers as Henri Beyle. Most of us are, no doubt, fairly
familiar with his pseudonym of 'Stendhal'; some of us have read _Le
Rouge et Le Noir_ and _La Chartreuse de Parme_; but how many of us have
any further knowledge of a man whose works are at the present moment
appearing in Paris in all the pomp of an elaborate and complete edition,
every scrap of whose manuscripts is being collected and deciphered with
enthusiastic care, and in honour of whose genius the literary
periodicals of the hour are filling entire numbers with exegesis and
appreciation? The eminent critic, M. André Gide, when asked lately to
name the novel which stands in his opinion first among the novels of
France, declared that since, without a doubt, the place belongs to one
or other of the novels of Stendhal, his only difficulty was in making
his choice among these; and he finally decided upon _La Chartreuse de
Parme_. According to this high authority, Henri Beyle was indisputably
the creator of the greatest work of fiction in the French language, yet
on this side of the Channel we have hardly more than heard of him! Nor
is it merely as a writer that Beyle is admired in France. As a man, he
seems to have come in, sixty or seventy years after his death, for a
singular devotion. There are 'Beylistes,' or 'Stendhaliens,' who dwell
with rapture upon every detail of the master's private life, who extend
with pious care the long catalogue of his amorous adventures, who
discuss the shades of his character with the warmth of personal
friendship, and register his opinions with a zeal which is hardly less
than sectarian. But indeed it is precisely in these extremes of his
French devotees that we shall find a clue to the explanation of our own
indifference. Beyle's mind contained, in a highly exaggerated form, most
of the peculiarly distinctive elements of the French character. This
does not mean that he was a typical Frenchman; far from it. He did not,
like Voltaire or Hugo, strike a note to which the whole national genius
vibrated in response. He has never been, it is unlikely that he ever
will be, a popular writer. His literary reputation in France has been
confined, until perhaps quite lately, to a small distinguished circle.
'On me lira,' he was fond of saying, 'vers 1880'; and the 'Beylistes'
point to the remark in triumph as one further proof of the almost divine
prescience of the great man. But in truth Beyle was always read by the
_élite_ of French critics and writers--'the happy few,' as he used to
call them; and among these he has never been without enthusiastic
admirers. During his lifetime Balzac, in an enormous eulogy of _La
Chartreuse de Parme_, paid him one of the most magnificent compliments
ever received by a man of letters from a fellow craftsman. In the next
generation Taine declared himself his disciple; a little later--'vers
1880,' in fact--we find Zola describing him as 'notre père à tous,' and
M. Bourget followed with elaborate incense. To-day we have writers of
such different tendencies as M. Barrès and M. Gide acclaiming him as a
supreme master, and the fashionable idolatry of the 'Beylistes.' Yet, at
the same time, running parallel to this stream of homage, it is easy to
trace a line of opinion of a totally different kind. It is the opinion
of the more solid, the more middle-class elements of French life. Thus
Sainte-Beuve, in two characteristic 'Lundis,' poured a great deal of
very tepid water upon Balzac's flaming panegyric. Then Flaubert--'vers
1880,' too--confessed that he could see very little in Stendhal. And,
only a few years ago, M. Chuquet, of the Institute, took the trouble to
compose a thick book in which he has collected with scrupulous detail
all the known facts concerning the life and writings of a man whom he
forthwith proceeds to damn through five hundred pages of faint praise.
These discrepancies are curious: how can we account for such odd
differences of taste? How are we to reconcile the admiration of Balzac
with the dislike of Flaubert, the raptures of M. Bourget and M. Barrès
with the sniffs of Sainte-Beuve and M. Chuquet of the Institute? The
explanation seems to be that Beyle occupies a position in France
analogous to that of Shelley in England. Shelley is not a national hero,
not because he lacked the distinctive qualities of an Englishman, but
for the opposite reason--because he possessed so many of them in an
extreme degree. The idealism, the daring, the imagination, and the
unconventionality which give Shakespeare, Nelson, and Dr. Johnson their
place in our pantheon--all these were Shelley's, but they were his in
too undiluted and intense a form, with the result that, while he will
never fail of worshippers among us, there will also always be Englishmen
unable to appreciate him at all. Such, _mutatis mutandis_--and in this
case the proviso is a very large one--is the position of Beyle in
France. After all, when Bunthorne asked for a not-too-French French bean
he showed more commonsense than he intended. Beyle is a too-French
French writer--too French even for the bulk of his own compatriots; and
so for us it is only natural that he should be a little difficult. Yet
this very fact is in itself no bad reason for giving him some attention.
An understanding of this very Gallic individual might give us a new
insight into the whole strange race. And besides, the curious creature
is worth looking at for his own sake too.
But, when one tries to catch him and pin him down on the
dissecting-table, he turns out to be exasperatingly elusive. Even his
most fervent admirers cannot agree among themselves as to the true
nature of his achievements. Balzac thought of him as an artist, Taine
was captivated by his conception of history, M. Bourget adores him as a
psychologist, M. Barrès lays stress upon his 'sentiment d'honneur,' and
the 'Beylistes' see in him the embodiment of modernity. Certainly very
few writers have had the good fortune to appeal at once so constantly
and in so varied a manner to succeeding generations as Henri Beyle. The
circumstances of his life no doubt in part account for the complexity of
his genius. He was born in 1783, when the _ancien régime_ was still in
full swing; his early manhood was spent in the turmoil of the Napoleonic
wars; he lived to see the Bourbon reaction, the Romantic revival, the
revolution of 1830, and the establishment of Louis Philippe; and when he
died, at the age of sixty, the nineteenth century was nearly half-way
through. Thus his life exactly spans the interval between the old world
and the new. His family, which belonged to the magistracy of Grenoble,
preserved the living tradition of the eighteenth century. His
grandfather was a polite, amiable, periwigged sceptic after the manner
of Fontenelle, who always spoke of 'M. de Voltaire' with a smile
'mélangé de respect et d'affection'; and when the Terror came, two
representatives of the people were sent down to Grenoble, with the
result that Beyle's father was pronounced (with a hundred and fifty
others) 'notoirement suspect' of disaffection to the Republic, and
confined to his house. At the age of sixteen Beyle arrived in Paris,
just after the _coup d'état_ of the 18th Brumaire had made Bonaparte
First Consul, and he immediately came under the influence of his cousin
Daru, that extraordinary man to whose terrific energies was due the
organisation of Napoleon's greatest armies, and whose leisure
moments--for apparently he had leisure moments--were devoted to the
composition of idylls in the style of Tibullus and to an enormous
correspondence on literary topics with the poetasters of the day. It was
as a subordinate to this remarkable personage that Beyle spent nearly
the whole of the next fifteen years of his life--in Paris, in Italy, in
Germany, in Russia--wherever the whirling tempest of the Napoleonic
policy might happen to carry him. His actual military experience was
considerably slighter than what, in after years, he liked to give his
friends to understand it had been. For hardly more than a year, during
the Italian campaign, he was in the army as a lieutenant of dragoons:
the rest of his public service was spent in the commissariat department.
The descriptions which he afterwards delighted to give of his adventures
at Marengo, at Jéna, at Wagram, or at the crossing of the Niémen have
been shown by M. Chuquet's unkind researches to have been imaginary.
Beyle was present at only one great battle--Bautzen. 'Nous voyons fort
bien,' he wrote in his journal on the following day, 'de midi à trois
heures, tout ce qu'on peut voir d'une bataille, c'est à dire rien.' He
was, however, at Moscow in 1812, and he accompanied the army through the
horrors of the retreat. When the conflagration had broken out in the
city he had abstracted from one of the deserted palaces a finely bound
copy of the _Facéties_ of Voltaire; the book helped to divert his mind
as he lay crouched by the campfire through the terrible nights that
followed; but, as his companions showed their disapproval of anyone who
could smile over Akakia and Pompignan in such a situation, one day he
left the red-morocco volume behind him in the snow.
The fall of Napoleon threw Beyle out of employment, and the period of
his literary activity began. His books were not successful; his fortune
gradually dwindled; and he drifted in Paris and Italy, and even in
England, more and more disconsolately, with thoughts of suicide
sometimes in his head. But in 1830 the tide of his fortunes turned. The
revolution of July, by putting his friends into power, brought him a
competence in the shape of an Italian consulate; and in the same year he
gained for the first time some celebrity by the publication of _Le Rouge
et Le Noir_. The rest of his life was spent in the easy discharge of his
official duties at Civita Vecchia, alternating with periods of
leave--one of them lasted for three years--spent in Paris among his
friends, of whom the most distinguished was Prosper Mérimée. In 1839
appeared his last published work--_La Chartreuse de Parme_; and three
years later he died suddenly in Paris. His epitaph, composed by himself
with the utmost care, was as follows: