only two expressions of one fundamental passion, namely, love for what
he was wont to call _le divin imprévu_--the passion which makes a poet
of him. How war, especially war as conducted by Napoleon, satisfied his
craving, requires no explanation. How women, and especially Italian
women, satisfied it, Beyle tells us himself. In a letter from Milan,
dated 4th September 1820, he writes: "As I have spent fifteen years in
Paris, nothing on earth leaves me so completely indifferent as a pretty
Frenchwoman. And my dislike of the commonplace and the affected often
carries me beyond mere indifférence. When I meet a young Frenchwoman
who has had the misfortune to have been well brought up, I am at once
reminded of my own home and my sisters' upbringing; I foresee not
only all her movements, but the most fugitive shades of her thoughts.
That is why I am partial to bad company; it offers far more of the
unforeseen. If I know myself at all, this is the chord in my soul which
people and things in Italy set vibrating--the women first and foremost.
Imagine my delight when I found out, what no writer of travels had
deprived me of the pleasure of discovering, namely, that in that
country it is in good society that there is most of the unforeseen.
Nothing deters these remarkable geniuses except want of money or pure
impossibility; if prejudices still exist, it is only in the lower
classes."
In other words, what Beyle loves best is reckless energy, both
in action and emotion--energy, whether revealing itself as the
irresistibleness of the military genius or the boundless tenderness
of the loving woman. Therefore he, the cold, dry cynic, positively
worshipped Napoleon.[3] Therefore he loved the women of Milan.
Therefore he understood and depicted the life of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries in Italy much better even than modern Italian
life. A work which he long purposed writing was a _History of Energy
in Italy_; and it is not too much to say that his Italian Chronicles,
copied, adapted, or imitated from old manuscripts, are equivalent to a
psychological analysis of Italian energy.
One utterance will suffice to show that the same love of the unforeseen
which had irresistibly attracted him to the war, made of him, when
the war was over, a traveller, an emigrant, a cosmopolitan. In a
letter in which he tells that he has been transferred to another post
and is going unwillingly because of the tender ties which bind him
to the place where he is living, he expressly mentions the pleasure
which he nevertheless involuntarily feels, "the moment there is any
talk of travelling and seeing new life." And it is equally evident
that the same love of the unforeseen, the same strong personality,
the same recklessness, or, taking it in a profounder sense, genius,
which attracted him to woman and made him love more passionately and
tenderly than others, reveals itself in the devotion to music and
plastic art which made of him the enthusiastic dilettante, cicerone,
and biographer. His love for Cimarosa and Correggio, Ariosto and Byron,
was a passion. Take his attitude to Byron. His published criticism of
the great English poet was severe and cold; he was haughty in personal
intercourse with him, disputed with him on the subject of Napoleon,
&c.; he actually left unanswered a most charming letter which Byron
wrote him seven years after their meeting, because he fancied there
was a trace of hypocrisy in the English poet's defence of Sir Walter
Scott. But observe the way in which, when he is writing unreservedly,
he describes his feelings on the occasion of his first meeting with
Byron: "I was at the time wildly enthusiastic on the subject of _Lara_.
My second look no longer showed me Lord Byron as he really was, but the
author of _Lara_ as I thought he ought to be. When the conversation
in the box flagged, Monsieur de Brême tried to get me to speak; but I
simply could not; I was too full of awe and tenderness. If I had dared,
I should have kissed Lord Byron's hand and burst into tears.... My
tenderness made me urge him to take a carriage."[4]
Many other men in every age and country have loved war and travel,
women and art; but what is peculiarly characteristic and distinctly
modern in Beyle is his tendency and his ability to examine himself in
the moment of action or of passion. He is constantly observing himself,
has, so to speak, constantly his hand on his pulse; and with unfailing
coolness he renders account to himself of his condition under all
different circumstances, and draws a whole chain of general inferences
from it. Let us follow him into a battle. During the cannonade at
Bautzen he writes in his journal:
"Between twelve and three we see remarkably well all that can be seen
of a battle, that is to say, nothing. The entertainment consists in
one's being slightly [the "slightly" is very characteristic] excited by
the certainty that something dreadful is happening before one's eyes.
The majestic roar of the cannons contributes greatly to this effect; if
they made a whistling sound I do not believe that the same degree of
emotion would be produced. The whistle might be as terrible, but could
not be so grand."
Or let us listen to him when he is in love. He writes:--
OF THE BIRTH OF LOVE.
What takes place in the soul is:
1. Admiration.
2. One says to one's self: "What happiness it would be to kiss her, to
be kissed by her, &c."
3. Hope.
One studies the perfections of the object of one's admiration ... the
eyes of even the most reserved women flush in the moment of hope; the
passion is so vehement, the pleasure so ardent, that it betrays itself
by unmistakable signs.
4. Love is born.
To love is to have pleasure in seeing, touching, perceiving by all the
senses, in as close contact as possible, a lovable person who loves us.
5. The first crystallisation begins.
One takes pleasure in adorning with a thousand perfections the woman
of whose love one is sure; one rehearses all the details of one's
happiness with infinite satisfaction.
Allow the brain of a lover to work for twenty-four hours, and the
result will resemble what happens at Salzburg when a leafless branch
is let down into the deserted depths of the salt mines. When it is
drawn up again two or three months later, it is covered with sparkling
crystals; the smallest twigs, those that are not thicker than a
titmouse's claw, are decked with myriads of dazzling, twinkling
diamonds; the original branch is unrecognisable. What I denominate
crystallisation is the operation of the mind which, from everything
that presents itself, draws the discovery of fresh perfections in the
beloved object. A traveller speaks of the coolness of the orange groves
near Genoa during the scorching summer heat--what a pleasure it would
be to enjoy their coolness with her!... This phenomenon which I take
the liberty of naming crystallisation, is a product of the nature
which ordains that we shall feel pleasure and that the blood shall
rush to our heads, of the feeling that our pleasure increases with the
perfections of the beloved object, and of the idea: she is mine. The
savage has not time to proceed further than the first step. He feels
pleasure, but the energy of his brain is employed in the chase of the
deer which is to provide him with food.... The man who is passionately
in love sees every perfection in the woman he loves; nevertheless his
attention may still be distracted, for the mind tires of everything
that is monotonous, even of perfect happiness. But then comes what
rivets attention:
6. Doubt is born.
After ten or twelve looks or any other series of actions have inspired
the lover with hope and strengthened his hope ... he demands more
positive proofs of his happiness. Coldness, indifference, or even anger
is displayed if he shows too much assurance.... He begins to doubt his
certainty of the happiness he had promised himself. He determines to
solace himself with the other pleasures of life, but finds that they no
longer exist for him. Fear of a dreadful misfortune attacks him, and
his attention is concentrated.
7. Second crystallisation.
Its diamonds are confirmations of the idea: She loves me. Every quarter
of an hour during the night which follows the birth of doubt, the
lover, after a moment of terrible suffering, says to himself: Yes, she
loves me; and he discovers new charms. Then doubt attacks him again;
he sits up, forgets to breathe, asks himself: But does she really love
me? And in the midst of these distressing and delightful reflections
the poor lover feels with ever greater certainty: She would give me
pleasures which she alone in all the world is capable of giving me."
Few such acute and delicate analyses of a passion exist. Not without
reason have Beyle's descriptions of what happens in the human soul when
it is under the influence of a passion, reminded his best critics,
Taine and Bourget, of the third part of Spinoza's Ethics, the masterly
_De Affectibus. In this soldier, administrator, diplomatist, and lover
there was a good deal of the philosopher. He endeavoured to resolve
every phenomenon of emotional life into its elements, and, on the other
hand, he showed the connection between the ideas and emotions, which,
united into a system, constitute the disposition and character of the
individual. He paid as much attention to the comparative strength of
the emotions as to the variety of their connections and concatenations;
he traced peculiarities of character to the deepest lying national
and climatic causes; he sketched a psychology of race; and, though
he did not adhere to strictly scientific methods, there was a strong
scientific tendency in his psychological studies. He loved to define
by the aid of numbers, measure, weight. Writing of a king's visit to
a little town, he describes the procession, the Te Deum and clouds
of incense within the church, the salvoes of artillery outside, and
concludes: "The peasants were beside themselves with joy and piety;
_one such day undoes the work of a hundred issues of the Jacobin
newspapers_." In one of his books, an exiled revolutionist is telling
how the revolt he headed failed because he would not consent to the
execution of three men, and would not divide among his followers seven
or eight millions of francs contained in a box of which he had the
key. "Who wills the end must will the means," says Beyle's hero; "if,
instead of being an atom, I were a power, _I would hang three men to
save four_,"[5]--a stupid and indefensible theory, by the way, based on
the childish premise that any four men are of more value than any three.
It is plain enough that in Beyle's case the final condition of
happiness was understanding. The real aim and object of all his
endeavour was a clear understanding of the state of his own mind,
and insight into the mechanism of the human soul generally. He was
of opinion that prosperity, happiness in love, happiness generally,
clears the understanding and sharpens the critical faculty, but was
equally convinced that nothing contributes so much to make a man
unhappy as want of clear-sightedness. In a letter to a friend, dated
Moscow, 1812, he writes characteristically: "The happiness you now
enjoy ought to lead you back naturally to the principles of pure
_Beylism_. I read Rousseau's _Confessions_ last week. It was simply
for want of two or three _Beylean_ principles that he was so unhappy.
_The mania of seeing duties and virtues everywhere_ made his style
pedantic, his life miserable. After three weeks of friendly intercourse
with a man--crash! the duties of friendship, &c." Two years afterwards
the man in question has forgotten him; Rousseau seeks and finds some
pessimistic explanation. _Beylism_ would have told him: "Two bodies
approach each other; warmth and a fermentation result; but every such
state is transitory. It is a flower to be voluptuously enjoyed." These
words contain a fragment of excellent practical philosophy, and would
testify to an unusually well-balanced mind if the practice of their
writer's life had corresponded to his theory. But although Beyle was
by nature a robust sensualist, and had accustomed himself to a cynical
boldness of expression (he shocked George Sand by his cynicism when she
and De Musset met him on their way to Italy), and although as a thinker
he was what he required a philosopher to be, namely, clear-headed,
unimpressionable, and free from illusions (he used to say that to have
been a banker was to have gone through the best preparatory school
for philosophy), there lay behind the robust temperament and the
dryness of the logician an artistic receptivity to every impression,
an irritability and feminine sensitiveness which did not fall far
short of Rousseau's. And this sensitiveness Beyle retained to the
end of his life. In the autobiography (_Vie de Henri Brulard_) which
was found amongst his papers, we come upon the following confession:
"My sensitiveness is excessive; what only grazes another man's skin
draws blood from me. Such was I in 1799; such am I in 1840. But I
have learned to hide it all under an irony which the vulgar do not
understand."
Seldom has a character combined so great a love of spontaneity and
straightforwardness with so much calculation and subterfuge; seldom
has a mind been so truthful and at the same time so addicted to
dissimulation, so ardent in its hatred of hypocrisy and yet so lacking
in openness and straightforwardness.
[1] See Beyle's dissertation on the subject in a most interesting
letter, dated 28th December 1829.
[2] In a letter of July 16, 1813, he writes: "If the so-called
superiority is only a superiority of some few degrees, it makes its
possessor amiable and attractive to others--see Fontenelle. If it is
more, it destroys every relation between him and other men. This is
the unfortunate position in which the superior man, or, to speak more
correctly, the man who is different from others, finds himself. Those
who surround him can contribute nothing to his happiness. The praise of
all these people would very soon disgust me, and their criticism would
gall me."
And in the fourth chapter of _La Chartreuse de Parme_ we read: "His
comrades found out that Fabrice was very _unlike_ themselves, at which
they took umbrage; he, on the contrary, began to have a very friendly
feeling towards them."
[3] In the letter which he wrote, but did not send, to Byron, he writes
of Napoleon as "le héros que j'ai adoré." And a letter of 10th July
1818 contains the following lyrical outburst--probably the only one in
his twenty volumes: "O Sainte-Hélène! roc désormais si célèbre, tu es
l'écueil de la gloire anglaise." We are reminded of Hugo and Heine.
[4] For references to Lord Byron in Beyle's works, see the essay "Lord
Byron en Italie" in the volume entitled _Racine et Shakespeare_, 261;
and _Lettres à ses Amis_, i. 273, &c.: ii. 71, &c.
[5] _Rouge et Noir_, i. 105; ii. 45.
XX
BEYLE
Prior to 1830 Beyle published no imaginative work of any importance
except a novel entitled _Armance_, an unsuccessful book, the hero of
which, a gifted young man, makes the woman he loves unhappy, because
he suffers from a half-physical, half-mental ailment, the nature of
which is not precisely defined, but which appears to resemble that
which played a part in the lives of Swift and Kierkegaard. The year
1830, epoch-making in history, is also epoch-making in Beyle's literary
career. It is the year in which he writes or plans both his great
novels--_Le Rouge et le Noir_, published in 1831, and _La Chartreuse
de Parme_, which was not completed till 1839, when it was published
simultaneously with the most important of his Italian Chronicles,
_L'Abbesse de Castro_.
Both of the novels deal with the period immediately succeeding
Napoleon's fall, and both deal with it in the same spirit. The motto
of both might be the passage from De Musset's _Confession d'un Enfant
du Siècle_ quoted in _The Reaction in France_: "And when the young
men talked of glory they were answered: Become priests! and when they
talked of honour: Become priests! and when they talked of hope, of
love, of power, of life, it was always the same: Become priests!" The
scene of _Rouge et Noir_ is laid in France, that of _La Chartreuse_
in Italy, but in both books the principal character is a young man
with a secret enthusiasm for Napoleon, who would have been happy if
he could have fought and distinguished himself under his hero in the
bright sunlight of life, but who, now that that hero has fallen, has
no chance of making a career except by playing the hypocrite. In this
art the two young men gradually develop a remarkable degree of skill.
Julien and Fabrice are cut out for cavalry officers; nevertheless both
become ecclesiastics; the one passes through a Catholic seminary, the
other rises to be a bishop. Not without reason have Beyle's novels been
called handbooks of hypocrisy. The fundamental idea inspiring them is
the profound disgust and indignation which the spectacle of triumphant
hypocrisy aroused in their author. Desiring to work off this feeling
he gave vent to it by simply, without any display of indignation,
representing hypocrisy as the ruling power of the day, to which every
one who desired to rise was compelled to do homage. And he tries to
play the modern Macchiavelli by frequently applauding his heroes when
their attempts at impenetrable hypocrisy succeed, and expressing
disapproval when they allow themselves to be surprised or carried away,
and unguardedly show themselves as they are. A certain unpleasant
forcedness is inseparable from this ironic style of narration.[1]
As Beyle's was essentially a reasoning mind, with a gift of purely
philosophic observation, externalities did not impress him strongly,
and he had little skill in depicting them. His one interest is in
emotional and intellectual processes, and, himself an adept in the
observation of these processes, he endows almost all his characters
with the same skill. They as a rule have an understanding of what
is happening in their own souls which far surpasses that derived
by ordinary mortals from experience. This conditions the peculiar
construction of Beyle's novels, which consist in great part of
connected monologues that are at times several pages long. He reveals
all the silent working of his characters' minds, and lends words to
their inmost thoughts. His monologues are never the lyric, dithyrambic
outbursts which George Sand's often are; they are the questions and
answers--short and concise, though entering into minute details--by
which silent reflection progresses.
The fundamental characteristic of Beyle's principal personages, who,
measured by the current standards of morality, have no conscience and
no morals, is, that they have evolved a moral standard for themselves.
This is what every human being ought to be capable of doing, but what
only the most highly developed attain to; and it is this capacity of
theirs which gives Beyle's characters their remarkable superiority
over other characters whom we have met with in books or in real life.
They keep an ideal, which they have created for themselves, constantly
before their eyes, endeavour to follow it, and have no peace until they
have won self-respect. Hence Julien, who is executed for an atrocious
attempt to murder a defenceless woman, is able to comfort himself in
the hour of his death with the thought that his life has not been a
lonely life; the idea of "duty" has been constantly present with him.
It is evident that Beyle found this feature which he has bestowed on
his heroes in his own character. In a letter written in 1820, after
remarking that he detests large hotels because of the incivility shown
in them to travellers, he adds: "A day in the course of which I have
been in a passion is a lost day for me; and yet when I am insolently
treated I imagine that I shall be despised if I do not get angry."
This is precisely the manner in which Julien and Fabrice reason. With
some such thought in his mind Julien compels himself to lay his hand
caressingly on Madame de Rênal's, Fabrice compels himself defiantly
to repeat the true but contemptuous words he had used in speaking of
the flight of the French soldiers at Waterloo. Julien is French, and
acts with full consciousness of what he is about; Fabrice is Italian
and naïve, but they both possess the quality to which we may give the
name of moral productivity. Julien says to himself in prison: "The duty
which I, rightly or wrongly, prescribed to myself, has been like the
trunk of a strong tree against which I have leaned during the storm";
the light-hearted Fabrice, reproaching himself with a momentary feeling
of fear, says to himself: "My aunt tells me that what I need most is to
learn to forgive myself. I am always comparing myself with a perfect
model, a being who cannot possibly exist." Mademoiselle de la Mole in
_Rouge et Noir_ and Mosca in _La Chartreuse de Parme_ are distinguished
by the same superiority and self-reliance. Mosca, a character in whom
Beyle's contemporaries naïvely saw a portrait of Metternich, is, in
spite of his position as prime minister of a small legitimist state,
quite as free from prejudice in his views of the system he serves as
Beyle's young heroes are. The object of his private hero-worship is
Napoleon, in whose army he held a commission in his youth. He jests as
he puts on the broad yellow ribbon of his order. "It is not for us to
destroy the prestige of power; the French newspapers are doing that
quite fast enough; _the reverence mania_ will scarcely last out our
time."
But whether the personages described be eminently or only ordinarily
gifted human beings, the manner in which their inner life is revealed
is unique. We not only see into their souls, but we perceive (as in the
writings of no other author) the psychological laws which oblige them
to act or feel as they do. No other novelist offers his readers so much
of the pleasure which is produced by perfect understanding.
Madame de Renal loves Julien, her children's tutor. We are told that
"she discovered with shame and alarm that she loved her children more
than ever _because they were so devoted to Julien_." Mathilde de la
Mole tortures Julien by confiding to him her feelings for her former
lovers. "If molten lead had been injected into his veins he would not
have suffered so much. How was the poor fellow to guess that it was
_because she was talking to him_ that it gave Mademoiselle de la Mole
so much pleasure to recall her flirtations with Monsieur de Caylus and
Monsieur de Luz?" Both these passages elucidate a psychological law.
Julien has entered the Church from ambitious motives, and secretly
detests the profession he has embraced. On the occasion of some
festival he sees a young bishop kneeling in the village church,
surrounded by charming young girls who are lost in admiration of his
beautiful lace, his distinguished manners, and his refined, gentle
face. "At this sight the last remnant of our hero's reason vanished.
_At that moment he would, in all good faith, have fought in the cause
of the Inquisition_." The addition "in all good faith" is especially
admirable. A parallel passage is to be found in _La Chartreuse_. After
the death of a Prince whom he has always despised and who has actually
been poisoned by his (Mosca's) mistress, Mosca has been obliged to
put himself at the head of the troops and quell a revolt against the
young Prince, whose character is as despicable as his predecessor's.
In the letter in which he communicates the occurrence to his mistress,
he writes: "But the comical part of the matter is that I, at my age,
actually had a moment of enthusiasm whilst I was making my speech to
the guard and tearing the epaulettes from the shoulders of that coward,
General P. _At that moment I would, without hesitation, have given my
life for the Prince_. I confess now that it would have been a very
foolish way of ending it." In both these passages we are shown with
remarkable sagacity how an artificial enthusiasm dazzles and is, as it
were, caught by infection.