"I only write for a hundred readers, and of those unhappy, amiable,
charming creatures without either hypocrisy or morality whom I should
like to please, I only know one or two."
On the assumption that with the natural growth of the population, "the
happy few" for whom Stendhal wrote have sufficiently multiplied in this
country to render it likely that a reasonable number of readers will
possess these requisite qualifications, it becomes relevant to give
both some analysis and some appreciation of a man who is perhaps the
most perfect type of the "intellectual" that Europe has yet produced.
For Stendhal was an intellectual in the fullest sense of the term.
Neither a recluse scholar nor a rabid doctrinaire, but a man of the
world and of action, of brain, heart, and sensibility, he sought and to
a large extent found in the intellect an energetic servant, by whose
faithful escort he could sally forth on that "hunt of happiness," which
led him in his variegated career from the field of battle to the bowers
of love, and from the high plateaux of reverie to the meticulous _terre
à terre_ observations of psychological science.
Henri Beyle was born in 1783, in Grenoble in Dauphiné, a town whose
hidebound provincialism he hated consistently from his childhood to his
death.
"His childhood," to quote from his own autobiography, "was a continual
period of unhappiness and of hate and of the sweets of a vengeance
which was always helpless." Loving his mother, according to his
somewhat pathetic boast, with a man's passion, he lost her at the age
of seven. On being told that God had taken her away, he conceived
with immediate logic an implacable hatred against that Deity who had
deprived him of the being whom he loved most in the world, a hatred
which, turning into momentary gratitude on the occasion of the death
of his _bête noire_, his Aunt Séraphie, was finally merged in the
chilly negation of the honest atheist. Inasmuch as to the quality
of logic Stendhal added those of rebelliousness and imagination, it
is not surprising that even in childhood his relations should have
been inharmonious with his father, a royalist lawyer situated on the
borderland between the bourgeoisie and the gentry. The royalism of
his father immediately sufficed to turn Henri into the reddest of
republicans. The execution of Louis XVI filled his childish heart with
holy glee, and the guillotining of two royalist priests at Grenoble
affected him with an elation which, if solitary, was for that very
reason all the more genuine. So hot indeed was his republican ardour
that he even forged an official order requiring his enlistment in a
body of cadets. But although he was unappreciative of his father,
whom he would refer to in his diaries and letters by the almost
equally offensive synonyms of "bastard" and "Jesuit," he none the
less manifested the deepest affection for his maternal grandfather,
M. Gagnon, a Voltairean doctor of lively intellect and genial
disposition, and for the cook and the butler of the paternal house.
The child soon began to stimulate by books his naturally precocious
imagination, stealing in his thirst for knowledge those volumes which
the solicitude or conventionalism of his father deemed it inexpedient
for him to read. From _La Nouvelle Héloïse_ in particular he would
appear to have derived imaginative transports far transcending the
joys of a prosaic reality. But he had conceived an early aversion to
poetry by reason of an awful poem by some Jesuit about a fly that got
drowned in a cup of milk. The reading of Molière, however, dispelled
the unpleasant association, and his early ambition became crystallised
into going to Paris and writing a comedy. For apart from the magnetic
attraction of the metropolis itself, Grenoble exacerbated his nerves.
Unappreciated at home, he found himself, with the exception of one or
two genuine friendships, solitary and unpopular at school among those
masters and schoolfellows whom he already despised. It is interesting
to remember, parenthetically, that even when a schoolboy he fought a
duel, and boldly faced the fire of what subsequently turned out to
have been an unloaded pistol by concentrating his gaze on a distant
rock. His intellectual ability carried all before him, and he found in
mathematics a loophole of escape from his provincial prison. Coming out
top in the examinations he obtained a bourse at the École Polytechnique
at the age of sixteen, and was sent to Paris with instructions to place
himself under the protection of M. Daru, a relative of the family
and the holder of a ministerial appointment. By this time his erotic
ambitions were beginning to formulate themselves with comparative
definiteness. He had already experienced a passion for a Mdlle. Kably,
a local actress, which while never attaining a more advanced stage
than that of inquiring the way to her lodgings, was none the less
violent. Anyway, when the boy went to Paris he had finally decided to
live up to the best of his ability to the Don Juan ideal.
His first sojourn at Paris, however, surprised both himself and
his parents. With considerable obstinacy he refused to attend the
Polytechnique and set himself to study privately in his own rooms. But
the first essay at the single life proved a fiasco. No dashing romances
coloured his solitary existence, while he was either too nervous or
too refined to sully his soul with mere mercenary pleasure. He became
dreamy and ill, and was eventually taken charge of by the Darus. In the
pompous officialdom of this family his health recovered, but his spirit
rebelled. He complains bitterly that he not only had to sleep in the
house but also to dine with the family. He none the less knit a firm
friendship with his cousin Martial Daru, a brainless and amiable youth
who subsequently at Milan and at Brunswick taught him the elementary
rules of amoristic etiquette.
The Marengo campaign gave him an opportunity of practising that
Napoleonic worship which was his one and only religion. The influence
of the Darus procured him a commission, and the passage of the St.
Bernard was one of the landmarks of his life. He drank to the full
the intoxication of victory which attended the entry into Milan of
the youthful army, and conceived for the Countess Angela Pietragrua,
"a sublime wanton a la Lucrezia Borgia," a passion which ten years
subsequently was duly rewarded. The Milan period was, according to that
epitaph which he penned himself, "the finest in his life." "He adored
music and literary renown, set great store by the art of giving a good
blow with the sabre and was wounded in the foot by a thrust received
in a duel. He was aide-de-camp to Lieutenant-General Michaud. He
distinguished himself. He was the happiest and probably the maddest of
men when on the conclusion of the peace the minister of war ordered the
subaltern aides-de-camp to return to their regiments."
Returning to Grenoble on furlough, he fell in love with Mdlle.
Victorine Bigillon, the sister of one of his best friends, whom he
suddenly followed to Paris, although his leave would appear to have
been limited to Grenoble. Reprimanded by the authorities he sent in
his resignation, and "madder than ever started to study with the view
of becoming a great man." His experiences, subjective and objective,
during this period are described in his journal with a detail, a
lucidity, an honesty which are worthy of some mention. For we see now
officially scheduled and officially annotated all those heterogeneous
qualities which made up the sum of this man's psychology; his rigid
intellectualism, his sentimentality, his ambition, his artistic
enthusiasm, his constant flow of analytical energy (directed now
against the external world, now against himself, yet scarcely for
a single moment losing itself in a complete abandon), his love of
witty conversation, whether his own or that of others, the sweep of
his intellectual ideals, his intolerance of bores and fools, that
apprehensive self-consciousness which so often made him the dupe of the
fear of being duped, his exuberant _joie de vivre_, and "that love of
glory and sensibility which are only for the _intimes_ friends."
And extraordinarily stimulating are the reflections, charmingly
interspersed with English phrases, in this breviary of intellectual
egoism, where the _I_ and the _Me_ enter into a Holy Alliance in their
heroic conspiracy against the rest of the world. It was mainly this
self-consciousness which induced Beyle deliberately to set himself to
become a psychologist. "Nearly all the misfortunes of life," writes
our twenty-year-old philosopher, "come from the false notions we have
concerning that which happens to us. Must know men thoroughly." And how
he scolds himself when he fails to live up to his ideal, and when "his
accursed mania for being brilliant results in his being more occupied
in making a deep impression than in guessing others." And so it is that
he reflects, "what a fool I am not to have the knack of drawing out
each man to tell his story, which might prove so useful to me," and
that the man, who was subsequently to style himself by profession "an
observer of the human heart" developed that "universal desire to know
all that passes within a man." Though, however, his love of psychology
was thus, as we have seen, to some extent a case of reaction from his
own nervousness and of externalised introspection, it is impossible to
deny the purity of his intellectual enthusiasm. At an age when even the
chastest of prose writers may well be pardoned for wallowing in the
debauchery of purple patches, he inscribes in his journal that the sole
quality in style is lucidity. It was this deeply rooted abhorrence of
floridity and ostentation that on a subsequent occasion nearly induced
him to fight a duel with a man who had praised unduly the well known
"la cime indéterminable des arbres" of Chateaubriand, that _bête noire_
of Stendhal's of whom he prophesies in English, "This man shall not
outlive his century." In the sphere of philosophy, characteristically
enough his logical and mathematical turn of mind embraced with natural
love and facility the materialism of the French sceptics.
"Helvetius opened wide to him the doors of the world," and he became
on terms of affectionate friendship with the aged philosopher Destutt
Tracy. So radical indeed was Stendhal's philosophic bias, that on one
occasion, feeling presumably more studious than amorous, he neglects
an assignation with the lady whom he was pursuing, to plunge with even
greater gusto into a hundred pages of Adam Smith. Though, too, he
habitually worked twelve hours a day, he would appear to have cut a
frequent figure in both those formal and Bohemian sets of the capital
which offered such refreshing contrasts and facilities to artistic
young men.
His love for Victorine proved unreciprocated. There followed innocuous
passages with a respectable demi-vierge, referred to in the journal as
Adèle of the Gate. But Stendhal found his chief distraction in that
society of authors, men of the world, and actresses whom he met at the
house of Dugazon, a celebrated teacher of theatrical elocution. In this
variegated set, where the mutual relations and complications of the
various members provided a chronic source of interest and speculation,
Stendhal met a young mother, named Mélanie Guilbert (the Louason of
the journal), "a charming actress who had the most refined sentiments
and to whom I never gave a son." To this lady Stendhal set himself to
lay a siege, which was eventually successful after a quite unnecessary
duration.
The demeanour of Stendhal in society is highly instructive. A man of
such abnormal sensitiveness that "the least thing moved him and made
the tears come to his eyes," he encased himself in an "irony which
was imperceptible to the vulgar," and, posing with marked success as
both a cynic and a roué, notes with interest "the terrifying effect
which his particular kind of wit produced on society." But if his
deliberate brilliancies won him respect rather than popularity, they
certainly consolidated his own selfestimation. "Maximum of wit in my
life--Je me suis toujours vu aller mais sans gêne pour cela," runs
one of these honest confidences which he made to himself, "without
lying, without deceiving himself, with pleasure, like a letter to
a friend." He needed, however, the audience of a salon to put him
on his mettle, and would appear, at any rate during this period, to
have been somewhat ineffective in _tête-à-tête_. His journal records
a lamentable succession of muddled opportunities, of occasions when
he was too natural to observe his companion with sufficient acumen,
and of occasions when he was not natural enough. It was the latter
characteristic, however, which predominated, and even though the
emotion of his love was genuine, its expression was a bookish and
theatrical formulation of an already rehearsed ideal, directed quite
as much to the critical approbation of his own consciousness as to
the actual object of his wooing. Yet the full gusto of a rich _joie
de vivre_ palpitates in this incessant cerebration. Time after time
do we come upon the entry that such and such a day was the happiest
in his life. And if at times "his only distraction was to observe his
own state, it was none the less a great one." His very sensibility
becomes a source of gratification, and he will congratulate himself
that he has perhaps lived more in a day than many of his more stolid
friends will live in the whole of their life. The financial problem
pressed irksomely upon him at this period, and, combining business
and sentiment, he obtained a position in a house at Marseilles, in
which town Louason had obtained an engagement. Whether however because
of parental pressure or because the distractions of business had
cured him of his passion, he soon left Marseilles for Grenoble, and
subsequently returned to Paris.
The campaigns of 1806 to 1809 offered new scope to the ambition of
Beyle, who always rose successfully to practical emergencies and was,
as he tells us himself, "most simple and most natural in the greatest
dangers." He was present at the battle of Jena, came several times into
personal contact with Napoleon, and discharged with singular efficiency
the fiscal administration of the state of Brunswick.
The next landmark in his life, however, is his passion for the wife of
his relative, the punctilious but aged M. Daru, a passion the various
nuances of which are faithfully recorded in those sections of his
journal headed "The Life and Sentiments of Silencious Harry," "Memoirs
of my life during my amour for the Gräfin P----y," the narrative of
the intrigue between Julien and Mathilde in _Le Rouge et le Noir,_
and the posthumous fragment entitled "Le Consultation de Banti," a
piece of methodical deliberation on the pressing question, "_Dois-je
ou ne dois-je pas avoir la duchesse?_" which, it is believed, is quite
unparalleled in the whole history of eroticism. For with his peculiar
faculty of driving his intellect and his heart in double harness,
he analyses the pros and cons of the erotic and ethical situation,
the qualifications and defects of the lady with all the documentary
coldness of a Government report. His diary during this period is so
delightfully honest as to justify quotations: "Tuesday, 18th April
1810, 1st day of Longchamps. On the whole I think that I love the
Countess P----y a little." "10th August, I have proved by an evidence
the truth of my principles about rousing love in the heart of a woman."
"The 4th August. I was reading the excellent essay of Hume upon the
feudal government from two till half-past four o'clock; during this
time she wanted my presence; _au retour_ she cannot say a word without
speaking of me or to me. J'eus le tort de ne pas hasarder quelque
entreprise. Mais je le répète j'ai trop de sensibility pour avoir
jamais du talent dans l'art de Lovelace!"
Stendhal would appear to have treated this particular liaison rather
as a polite routine of social amenities than as a serious passion. How
refreshing is his account of the tedium of the relationship: "At Paris
I have no time for working to Letellier [a mediocre comedy in verse
which was never finished], I have here nothing but my passion for C.
Palfy; 'tis a month that I reproach to myself the money that I spent
without pleasure of mind into those walls."
Towards the autumn of 1811 Stendhal journeyed to Milan, his favourite
town in Europe whose citizenship he arrogated in his self-written
epitaph. Renewing his acquaintance with the Countess Pietragrua, for
whom he had languished in dumb nervousness on his first visit to
Milan ten years past, he took an especial joy in compensating for his
previous clumsiness by displaying the easy brilliancy of the man of
the world. And then on the eve of his departure from Milan he writes
in English--"I was, I believe, in love." "Après un combat moral fort
sérieux où j'ai joué le malheur et jusque le désespoir, elle est à
moi onze heures et demi. Je pars de Milan à une heure et demie le 22
septembre 1811."
In 1812 Beyle served in the Moscow campaign, having obtained a position
in the commissariat department. It is characteristic that he should
have kept his nerve during the whole of that panic-stricken retreat,
shaving every day, and repelling with considerable sangfroid and
bravery an attack by the enemy on a hospital of wounded. Disgusted by
the Restoration, he settled in Milan in 1814, resumed his relationship
with Mme. Angelina Pietragrua, who would appear to have systematically
deceived him, and lived generally the life of the dilettante and the
man of letters.
In 1814 he published his first work, _The Lives of Haydn and Mozart_
par Louis Alexander Bombet. This pseudonym is partly due to Beyle's
habitual mania for anonymity and partly to the consciousness that
the substantial portion of the work had been coolly plagiarised from
Carpani. Nor do any morbid pangs of conscience appear to have ruffled
the serenity of the author, who found a precedent for his action in the
plagiarisms of Molière and a subsequent justification in the money that
he obtained. Emboldened indeed by his success he published in London,
in 1817, a series of travel sketches, _Rome, Naples, and Florence_,
which owed in some places an unacknowledged debt to the _Italian
Travels_ of Goethe. Yet even so, viewed as a whole the book possesses a
richness of material, a raciness of observation, a joy of journeying,
a spontaneity of verve which give it a high rank among travel
literature and make it eminently readable even at the present day.
Less a guide-book than a personal narrative, it describes the actual
life of the period as actually lived by a man who plumed himself at
thirty on still retaining all the folly of his youth. The author was an
enthusiast for the theatre, a devotee of the ballet, and a keen wagerer
of those exquisite ices which formed one of the chief allurements of
the Scala Theatre. An enthusiastic anti-clerical and an eager reader
of forbidden political plays at midnight côteries, he yet feels on
visiting the Church of the Jesuits "a little of that respect which even
the most criminal power inspires when it has done great things." And
how simply natural is the following confession of a traveller's faith:
"I experience a sensation of happiness on my journeys which I have
found nowhere else, even in the most happy days of my ambition." In the
same year, 1817, Stendhal published his _History of Painting in Italy_.
This book is remarkable, not so much by its purely æsthetic criticism
as by the application to the sphere of artistic criticism of those
theories of heredity, climate, and environment which were afterwards to
be so brilliantly exploited at the hands of Taine. Some mention should
also be made of that simplicity of lyric fervour which distinguishes
the extremely fine dedication to Napoleon.
In 1821 much to his disgust, Stendhal, accused, and apparently quite
unjustly, of being a French spy, was forced to leave Milan. This exile
was all the more irksome as Stendhal's amoristic history had now
reached its great climax. If Louason had constituted the initiation
of his youth, Mme. Daru the acme of his social achievement, and the
Countess Pietragrua the incarnate realisation of his adventurous search
for ideal beauty, it was in Mèthilde, Countess Dembowska, that his
mature heart found a passion which though always ungratified remained
none the less grand. It is instructive to observe how honest was the
love, how deep the devotion of this official rake for "une femme
que j'adorais, qui m'aimait et qui ne s'est jamais donnée a moi."
Particularly significant is it that this man, whose cynicism had gained
for him the sobriquet of Don Juan, should have condemned himself to a
three years' fidelity that thereby he might become more worthy of that
"âme angélique cachée dans un si beau corps qui quittait la vie en
1825." But it is even more interesting to notice how there mingles with
this perfectly genuine attachment the most morbid self-consciousness
and fear of ridicule:
"Le pire des malheurs, m'écriais-je, serait que ces
hommes si secs, mes amis au milieu desquels je vais
vivre, devinissent ma passion pour une femme que je n'ai
pas eue. Cette peur mille fois répétée a été dans le
fait la principe dirigeante de ma vie pendant dix ans.
C'est par là que je suis venu à avoir de l'esprit, chose
qui était la butte de mes mépris à Milan en 1818 quand
j'aimais Mèthilde."
In 1822 Stendhal published in Paris that book _De l'Amour_ which he had
composed at odd moments during his sojourn at Milan. Thought by the
author to be his most important work, and deemed worthy by the public
of a total purchase of seventeen copies, the work possesses even at the
present day considerable claims upon the attention. For it possesses
the unique characteristic of being a treatise on the sexual emotion
written by an author who was at the same time an acute psychologist
and a brilliant man of the world, who could test abstract theories by
concrete practice, and could co-ordinate what he had felt in himself
and observed in others into broad general principles. While we do not
propose to enter into a detailed analysis of this work, which occupies
more than four hundred pages of close print, we may perhaps mention the
author's fourfold division of love into "amour-passion, amour-goût,
amour physique, amour de vanité."
We would also refer to just a few of the innumerable maxims with which
the book is studded, as typical of that naïvely subtle simplicity which
is so characteristic of our author:
"L'amour c'est avoir du plaisir à voir, toucher, sentir par tous
les sens et d'aussi près que possible un objet aimable et qui nous
aime"--"l'amant erre sans cesse entre ces idées: 1. Elle a toutes les
perfections. 2. Elle m'aime. 3. Comment faire pour obtenir d'elle la
plus grande preuve d'amour possible?" "Tout l'art d'aimer se réduit,
ça me semble, à dire exactement à quels degrés d'ivresse le moment
comporte, c'est-à-dire en d'autres termes à écouter son âme."
And how curious is the following phrase where the point of view of
this cynical roué seems for once quite in accord with that of the more
ladylike of our lady novelists: "Le plus grand bonheur qui puisse
donner l'amour c'est le premier serrement de main d'une femme qu'on
aime."
But the philosophical breadth of the author is perhaps best manifested
by that spirit of comparative erotology, which induces him to analyse
the various nuances of love all over the world from Boston to
Constantinople, while he traces the connection between each particular
variation and the climate of the country and the character of the
people.
With the habitual cleverness of his tongue exacerbated by the
misfortune of his love affair, Stendhal became a distinguished but
unpopular figure with the Parisians. Most in his element "in a salon
of eight or ten persons where all the women have had lovers, where the
conversation is gay and flavoured with anecdote, and when light punch
is served at half-past twelve," he was merciless to the philistine and
the bore, would rally with tactless truth a highly respectable lady
on her liaison with the Archbishop of Paris, and would snub unwelcome
declarations with artistic repartee.
Plunging vigorously into the controversy between the Classicism and
the Romanticists, Stendhal published in 1825 his celebrated pamphlet
_Racine and Shakespeare_, which denounced the Alexandrine as a
_cache-sottise_ and vindicated the live modernity of a present age
against the dead orthodoxy of a past generation. This little work,
rushed off in a few hours, is one of Stendhal's happiest efforts. The
style is bright with a lucid enthusiasm and sharp with a malicious
logic. How crisp for instance is the truth of the following:
"Le Viellard--'Continuons.'"
"Le jeune Homme--'Examinons.'"
"Voilà tout le dix-neuvieme siècle."
_Shakespeare and Racine_ was followed by the _Life of Rossini_, whom
Stendhal had known personally at Milan, and by _Armance_ (1827), the
first of that series of novels on which the literary fame of Stendhal
substantially rests. This work possesses all the essential Stendhalian
qualities; the vein of Byronism, the contempt for the bourgeois, the
lucid style, and above all the detailed description of what takes place
in the interior of the mind. The plot consists of the sentimental
complications resultant on the consciousness of the hero, who is one of
those souls made to feel with energy, of his natural disqualification
for efficient marriage. Yet with a subtlety which is Jamesian in
everything but the clearness of the style, the actual difficulty is
never explicitly mentioned, though every nuance of sensitiveness is
delicately delineated. And with what delicate simplicity does Stendhal
narrate the suicide of Octave, who has simply married his adored cousin
in order to leave her the prestige of a rich and honourable widowhood.
Shortly after the marriage Octave has left his wife and set sail for
Greece.
"Never had Octave been so under the spell of the most tender love as
in this supreme moment. He granted to himself the luxury of telling
everything to Armance except the nature of his death. A cabin boy from
the top of the mast cried out 'land.' It was the soil of Greece and
the mountains of the Morea which were to be perceived on the horizon.
A fresh wind carried on the vessel rapidly. The name of Greece
reawakened the courage of Octave. I salute you, he said to himself,
oh land of heroes. And at midnight on the third of March, as the moon
was rising behind Mount Kalos, a self-prepared mixture of opium and
digitalis softly delivered Octave from that life of his which had been
so agitated. He was found at dawn motionless on the bridge, resting on
some cordage. A smile was on his lips, and his rare beauty struck even
the sailors charged with his burial."
Stendhal's next work was the well-known _Promenades en Rome_, an
admirable book entirely free from the taint of the conscientious
sightseer, but replete with the original observations of an acute
cosmopolitan who never shrinks from following his fancy along some
amiable digression. It was however in _Le Rouge et le Noir_, 1830,
that Stendhal gave to the world his real masterpiece. This work, which
has become since the end of the last century the revered object of the
cult of the Rougistes, among whom it is a point of honour to know the
whole book by heart, and which occupies an equal rank with that of the
_Comédie Humaine_ or _Madame Bovary_, is remarkable both by reason of
the intrinsic character of the hero and the psychological technique
with which the story is told.
The hero, like Stendhal himself, possesses a subjective and sensitive
mind, rendered tough and virile by the savage energy of the Revolution.
In fact some previous knowledge both of Stendhal's life and Stendhal's
character are requisite for the full appreciation of a book which,
in spite of the fact that the hero is not only a seducer but also an
attempted murderer, has yet some claim to be regarded as the dignified
confession of a robust faith.
Julien Sorel is the son of a carpenter in a small provincial town.
Proved guilty from his infancy of the unpardonable crime of being
different from the average child, he is harshly treated by his father.
The Napoleonic legend inflames his imagination, but he lives in the
time of the Restoration, when it is the Church and not the Army which
opens a career to the ambitious parvenu. By a stroke of fortune Julien
obtains when nineteen the post of tutor to the children of the local
mayor, M. de Rênal. Feeling acutely the degradation of his menial
position, he violently rebels against his own sensitiveness, as he
deliberately forges the natural softness of his heart into the most
brutal iron. Formulating the ideals of pride and success, he determines
to live up to them at whatever cost either to himself or others. When
consequently the charming though ordinary Mme. de Rênal begins to
manifest towards him a somewhat personal interest, he sets himself
to force the pace, as a matter neither of sensuality nor even of
politeness, but of sheer self-respect. What for instance are Julien's
feelings during the first assignation?
"Instead of being attentive to the transports which he was bringing
into existence, and to those feelings of remorse which somewhat dulled
their vivacity, the idea of his duty never ceased to be present
to his eyes. He was afraid of an awful remorse and of an eternal
stultification if he should deviate from that ideal model which he
proposed to follow." From being, however, the mere instrument of his
ethical self-discipline, Mme. de Rênal becomes the sincere object of
his romantic devotion. But the intrigue is discovered and Julien is
packed off to a theological seminary. Though a devout freethinker,
he sacrifices his beliefs to his ambition. His deviation from the
mediocre pattern renders him unpopular, but his very unpopularity
only serves to stiffen his perverse obstinacy for success. After
an agonising struggle he succeeds in winning the due of abilities,
and goes to Paris to become secretary to the Marquis de la Môle, an
influential nobleman, drawn after the model of the author's relative,
Comte Daru. He gains the confidence of his employer, which he rewards
by an intrigue with his daughter Mathilde (Mme. Daru). Here again it
is stern devotion to principle, not natural love, which is the motive.
It is in fact on purely ethical and idealistic considerations that he
goes to the nocturnal rendezvous in the same spirit that a soldier
goes to the field of battle or a martyr to the stake. And as Banti in
that variation of Hamlet's soliloquy of "To be or not to be," which we
have already considered, clinched the question by the consideration
that if he did not embrace the opportunity he would regret it all his
life, so did Julien exclaim: "Au fond il y a de la lâcheté à ne pas y
aller, ce mot décide tout." Note also the masterly delineation of the
girl herself, who, yielding originally by reason neither of her love
nor her weakness, but simply through her romantic desire to emulate
an illustrious ancestress, falls completely in love and manifests a
courage which in spite of some affectation is none the less genuine.
The Marquis de la Môle is compelled to promise to recognise Julien as
his son-in-law and procures for him a commission in the army. But now
just when the hero's ambitions are beginning to realise themselves,
Mme. de Rênal writes, under priestly instigation, a slanderous letter
to his prospective father-in-law, who withdraws his consent to the
marriage. Julien in a fit of rage shoots at Mme. de Rênal, gives
himself up, and dies "poetically" on the scaffold.
It is not surprising that in view of these facts critics lacking
in subtlety have found the character of Julien the wildest of
impossibilities, the most monstrous of distortions. It is, however, a
reasonably safe maxim to assume that those characters in novels which
are thought to be too bizarre to exist are taken from actual life. In
this case the actual framework of fact is drawn from the history of
a young student of Besançon named Berthet, while as we have already
seen his mental attitude is that of Stendhal himself. While no doubt a
villain from the ethical standpoint of a modern serial, Julien is none
the less, viewed more deeply, the Nietzschean knight-errant of energy
and efficiency, the successful pursuer of a subjective ideal, and a
perfect example of the Aristotelian virtue of _ἐγκράτεια_.
Of all the discontented young idealists of the literature of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, who find themselves thrown
into collision with conventional society, the Werthers, the Renés, the
Don Juans, the Karl Moors, and the Vivian Greys, Julien Sorel is by far
the most interesting and intellectually by far the most respectable. He
has no hysterical and visionary aspirations, no mawkish Weltschmerz.
A phenomenal power of analysis renders his aim direct and simple.
He proposes to open the oyster of the world with the sword of his
intellect. _Le Rouge et le Noir_ is the tragedy of energy and ambition,
the epic of the struggle for existence.
Reverting from the emotional content of the book to its more technical
characteristics, it may be claimed that it was the first novel in the
history of European literature to portray with successful consistency
a series of characters alternately complex and simple, in a style
which, whatever might be the personal sympathies and aversions of the
author, subordinated all picturesque flourishes to his cardinal aim
of psychological truth. For on the principle that the external life
is but the mere mechanical expression of the life carried on within
the mind, Stendhal portrays his characters by describing their mental
processes. This method is of course most palpable in Julien, who lives
in a chronic state of soliloquy which fails, however, to blunt the edge
of his drastic action, and who keeps inside his brain a register which
tickets every process with the most copious annotations. But even such
comparatively simple characters as M. Rênal, the purse-proud mayor of
a petty provincial town; Mme. de Rênal, the conventionally adulterous
wife; abbé Pirard, the Jansenist priest, all think too according to
their dimmer lights and their limited intelligences, and their thoughts
also are duly recorded with scientific precision.
The same year in which _Le Rouge et le Noir_ was published, Stendhal
wrote his other great work _La Chartreuse de Parme_, which while
thought by Taine and Balzac, though not by Goethe, to have been his
masterpiece, certainly lacks the original outlook and concentrated
force of the earlier work. In this book, which describes all the
ramifying intrigues of that Italian court life which Stendhal knew and
loved so well, the rich tapestry of romance is successfully embroidered
by the needle of the psychologist. The rapid succession of adventure
is not an end in itself, but simply a means to the setting in motion
of this numerous array of characters whose cerebral interiors are so
faithfully portrayed; Fabrice del Dougo, the hero, no Ishmael of the
intellect like Julien, but a _jeune premier_ with a soul, who runs a
wild career of military ardour, amoristic extravagance, justifiable
homicide, and political persecution, only finally to fall in love with
his gaoler's daughter and die in the self-chosen exile of a Trappist
monastery; the Duchess of Sanseverina (a reincarnation of Stendhal's
mistress, Countess Pietragrua), his dashing and magnanimous aunt who
loves him with an ardour which the reader thinks must at any rate have
needed a papal dispensation; Count Mosca, the hardened minister and
man of the world who is yet capable of all the devotion of a grand
passion; his enemy, the grotesque and plebeian Raversi; the loyal
and sonneteering coachman, Ludovici; the pretty and amiable little
actress Marietta with her obstreperous lover and her avaricious duenna;
Ranuce Ernest of Parma studiously living up to his majestic rôle; and
most romantic if not most interesting of all, Clèlia Conti, with her
pathetic clash of amoristic devotion and filial duty.
In 1830 the monetary embarrassments of Stendhal forced him to leave
Paris and take up the post of consul at Trieste. The Ultramontanes,
however, with a not unnatural desire to be revenged on a man whose
attitude to the Church is well crystallised in the phrase that "the
priests were the true enemies of all civilisation," drove him from
his position, and he was transferred to Civita Vecchia where he
remained till 1835, solacing his ennui by the compilation of his
autobiography and thinking seriously of marriage with the rich and
highly respectable daughter of his laundress. Returning to Paris,
Stendhal completed _Lucien Leuwen_, that long posthumous romance of the
financial, literary, and political life of the age of Louis Philippe,
a work which, though lacking something of the high vital quality of
_La Chartreuse_ and _Le Rouge et le Noir_, does ample justice to the
encyclopædic powers of the author's observation. For here too we
trace the personal Stendhalian characteristics, the sympathy with
the isolated intellectual, the contempt for the bourgeois and the
philistine, the idealisation of an efficiency that is not always
achieved. We may perhaps give a quotation which well illustrates the
friendly malice with which this detached novelist treats even his most
favoured heroes:
"He talked for the sake of talking, he bandied the pro and the con, he
exaggerated and altered the circumstances of every story which he told,
and he told a great many and at great length. In a word he talked like
a young man of parts from the provinces; and consequently his success
was immense."
And how neat in the subtle simplicity of its irony is the following:
"He was received in this house with that stiffness resulting from
baulked hopes of matrimony which has the knack of making itself felt in
such a variety of ways and in so amiable a manner in a family composed
of six young ladies who are particularly pretty."
Returning to Paris, Stendhal commenced in 1838 the last of his novels,
the posthumous and unfinished _Lamiel_. Influenced, though by no means
discouraged by the lack of success of his other novels, he determined
to write "in a wittier style on a more intelligible subject," and
with regard to each incident to ask himself the question, "Should it
be described philosophically or described narratively according to
the doctrine of Ariosto?" Hence Lamiel, the most fascinating feminine
character in the whole of the Stendhalian literature. For Lamiel is a
young woman possessed simultaneously of a brisk intellectual honesty,
a lively humour, a charming _naïveté,_ and a Nietzschean outlook on
a tumultuous world. "Her character was based on a profound disgust
for pusillanimity," and "where there was no danger there she found no
pleasure." The whole book is crisp with the true comic spirit. The
scene in particular in which Lamiel purchases her first lesson in the
essential element of human knowledge, as a mere matter of intellectual
curiosity, is a masterpiece of racy delicacy. Yet acuteness of
psychology is never sacrificed to airiness of style. Sansfin the
malicious hump-backed doctor, Comte D'Aubigné Nerwinde the snob, "a
serious, prudent, and melancholy paragon always preoccupied with public
opinion," the plebeian parents of Lamiel, the pompous duchess, the
conventional young lord, are all portrayed with a delightful malice
whose satire is never too extravagant to be otherwise than convincing.
But it is Lamiel herself who dominates the book, Lamiel with that
mixture of high flippancy and deep seriousness which is so essentially
attractive, ever developing fresh phases in response to her repeated
change of environment, yet ever retaining a fundamental consistency
with her original character. It can only be regretted that Stendhal
should have left unfinished what might well have been possibly the
greatest, and certainly the most amusing of all his novels, and that
having traced the adventures of his heroine from her plebeian origin to
the aristocratic château, and from the aristocratic château to Paris,
he should finally leave her floating jauntily amid all the rich welter
of Parisian life with only a synopsis of those subsequent experiences
which if undergone would have entitled her to rank as one of the most
truly romantic characters in the whole of fiction.
In 1842, Stendhal, with his physical and intellectual faculties still
unimpaired, died suddenly at the age of fifty-nine. Like his hero
Julien, he was "game" to the last, and "I have struck nothingness" was
his self-given substitute for the more orthodox viaticum.
In endeavouring to adjudicate finally the value of Stendhal, it is
difficult not to yield to the fascination of his cock-sure prophecy of
his eventual fame. For as Stendhal the man, in his autobiographical
writings, _La Vie de Henri Brulard, Le Journal_, and _Souvenirs
d'Egotisme_, would project his ego some years forward and as it
were shake hands with himself across the gulf of time, so, one can
almost say, Stendhal, the incarnation of the early nineteenth-century
Zeitgeist, with his genial greeting, "Je serai compris vers 1880,"
shakes hands with those modern men of the world who rightly or wrongly
have imagined themselves to be incarnations of the Zeitgeist of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as they look back with
appreciative camaraderie at this earlier manifestation of their own
selves. And this no doubt is why Stendhal, viewed of course with a not
unnatural Ultramontane frigidity by such critics as Sainte-Beuve or
Émile Faguet, has become the spoilt darling of Nietzsche, Taine, and
Bourget, and indeed all the more intellectual spirits in modern French
and German literature.
The life of Stendhal no doubt may not have been as ideally satisfactory
as his theories may have warranted. A man, who professed to find his
chief interest in life in the erotic emotion, he played as often as
not the rôle of the unhappy lover. His spasmodic fits of political and
military ambition spluttered out in the self-complacent consciousness
of their own intensity. He suffered throughout his life from being a
dilettante with a financial competence. Yet it is no small achievement
to have chased happiness so consistently and with so male an energy, to
have kept unjaded to the last his intellectual gusto and the appetite
of his _joie de vivre_, and to have been the first man in European
literature to have put into efficient practice, without thereby in
any way detracting from the clearness of his own personal note, the
important principle that the elaborate delineation of character is even
more the function of the novel than adventurous action or picturesque
description. And so it is that we entitle Stendhal the patentee of
psychology, the inventor of introspection, and take our leave of him
with his own epitaph:
Qui giace
ARRIGO BEYLE MILANESE
isse, scrisse, amo.