I
The fanciful notion that psychical delicacy is accompanied by a
corresponding physical exterior should have received a death-blow
in the presence of Henry Beyle, better known as Stendhal. Chopin,
Shelley, Byron and Cardinal Newman did not in personal appearance
contradict their verse, prose and music; but Stendhal, possessing an
exquisite sensibility, was, as Hector Berlioz cruelly wrote in his
Memoirs: "A little pot-bellied man with a spiteful smile, who tried to
look grave." Sainte-Beuve is more explicit. "Physically his figure,
though not short, soon grew thick-set and heavy, his neck short and
full-blooded. His fleshy face was framed in dark curly hair and
whiskers, which before his death were assisted by art. His forehead
was fine: the nose turned up, and somewhat Calmuck in shape. His lower
lip, which projected a little, betrayed his tendency to scoff. His eyes
were rather small but very bright, deeply set in their cavities, and
pleasing when he smiled. His hands, of which he was proud, were small
and daintily shaped. In the last years of his life he grew heavy and
apoplectic. But he always took great pains to conceal the symptoms of
physical decay even from his own friends."
Henri Monnier, who caricatured him, apparently in a gross manner,
denied that he had departed far from his model. Some one said that
Stendhal looked like an apothecary--Homais, presumably, or M.
Prudhomme. His maternal grandfather, Doctor Gagnon, assured him when
a youth that he was ugly, but he consolingly added that no one would
reproach him for his ugliness. The piercing and brilliant eye that
like a mountain lake could be both still and stormy, his eloquent and
ironical mouth, pugnacious bearing, Celtic profile, big shoulders, and
well-modelled leg made an ensemble, if not alluring, at least striking.
No man with a face capable of a hundred shades of expression can be
ugly. Furthermore, Stendhal was a charming _causeur_, bold, copious,
witty. With his conversation, he drolly remarked, he paid his way into
society. And this demigod or monster, as he was alternately named by
his admirers and enemies, could be the most impassioned of lovers. His
life long he was in love; Prosper Mérimée declares he never encountered
such furious devotion to love. It was his master passion. Not Napoleon,
not his personal ambitions, not even Italy, were such factors in
Stendhal's life as his attachments. His career was a sentimental
education. This ugly man with the undistinguished features was a
haughty cavalier, an intellectual Don Juan, a tender, sighing swain, a
sensualist, and ever lyric where the feminine was concerned. But once
seated, pen in hand, the wise, worldly cynic was again master. "My head
is a magic-lantern," he said. And his literary style is on the surface
as unattractive as were the features of the man; the inner ear for the
rhythms and sonorities of prose was missing. That is the first paradox
in the Beyle-Stendhal case.
Few writers in the nineteenth century were more neglected; yet, what
a chain of great critics his work begot. Commencing with Goethe in
1818, who, after reading Rome, Naples, and Florence, wrote that the
Frenchman attracted and repulsed him, interested and annoyed him, but
it was impossible to separate himself from the book until its last
page. What makes the opinion remarkable is that Goethe calmly noted
Stendhal's plagiarism of his own Italian Journey. About 1831 Goethe
was given Le Rouge et le Noir and told Eckermann of its worth in warm
terms. After Goethe another world-hero praised Stendhal's La Chartreuse
de Parme: Balzac literally exploded a bouquet of pyrotechnics, calling
the novel a masterpiece of observation, and extolling the Waterloo
picture. Sainte-Beuve was more cautious. He dubbed Stendhal a "romantic
hussar," and said that he was devoid of invention; a literary Uhlan,
for men of letters, not for the public. Shortly after his sudden
death, M. Bussière wrote in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ of Stendhal's
"clandestine celebrity." Taine's trumpet-call in 1857 proclaimed him
as the great psychologue of his century. And later, in his English
Literature, Taine wrote: "His talents and ideas were premature,
his admirable divinations not understood. Under the exterior of a
conversationalist and a man of the world Stendhal explained the most
esoteric mechanisms--a scientist who noted, decomposed, deduced;
he first marked the fundamental causes of nationality, climate,
temperament; he was the naturalist who classified and weighed forces
and taught us to open our eyes." Taine was deeply influenced by
Stendhal; read carefully his Italian Pilgrimage, and afterward Thomas
Graindorge. He so persistently preached Stendhalism--_beylisme_, as its
author preferred to term his vagrant philosophy--that Sainte-Beuve
reproved him. Melchior de Vogüé said that Stendhal's heart had been
fabricated under the Directory and from the same wood as Barras and
Talleyrand. Brunetière saw in him the perfect expression of romantic
and anti-social individualism. Caro spoke of his "serious blague,"
while Victor Hugo found him "somniferous." But Mérimée, though openly
disavowing discipleship, acknowledged privately the abiding impression
made upon him by the companionship of Beyle. 'Much of Mérimée is
Stendhal better composed, better written.
About 1880 Zola, searching a literary pedigree for his newly-born
Naturalism, pitched upon Stendhal to head the movement. The first
Romantic--he employed the term Romanticism before the rest--the first
literary Impressionist, the initiator of Individualism, Stendhal forged
many formulas, was a matrix of _genres_, literary and psychologic. Paul
Bourget's Essays in Contemporary Psychology definitely placed Beyle in
the niche he now occupies. This was in 1883. Since then the swelling
chorus headed by Tolstoy, Georg Brandes, and the amiable fanatics who
exhumed at Grenoble his posthumous work, have given to the study of
Stendhal fresh life. We see how much Nietzsche owed to Stendhal; see
in Dostoïevsky's Raskolnikow-Crime and Punishment--a Russian Julien
Sorel; note that Bourget, from Le Disciple to Sensations d'Italie,
is compounded of his forerunner, the dilettante and cosmopolitan who
wrote Promenades dans Rome and Lamiel. What would Maurice Barrès and
his "culte du Moi" have been without Stendhal--who employed before him
the famous phrase "deracination"? Amiel, sick-willed thinker, did not
alone invent: "A landscape is a state of soul"; Stendhal had spoken of
a landscape not alone sufficing; it needs a moral or historic interest.
Before Schopenhauer he described Beauty as a promise of happiness; and
he invented the romance of the petty European Principality. Meredith
followed him, as Robert Louis Stevenson in his Prince Otto patterned
after Meredith. The painter-novelist Fromentin mellowed Stendhal's
procedure; and dare we conceive of Meredith or Henry James composing
their work without having had a complete cognizance of Beyle-Stendhal?
The Egoist is _beylisme_ of a superior artistry; while in America Henry
B. Fuller shows sympathy for Beyle in his Chevalier Pensieri-Vani and
its sequel. Surely the Prorege of Arcopia had read the Chartreuse.
And with Edith Wharton the Stendhal touch is not absent. In England,
after the dull essay by Hayward (prefixed to E. P. Robbin's excellent
translation of Chartreuse), Maurice Hewlett contributed an eloquent
introduction to a new edition of the Chartreuse and calls him "a man
cloaked in ice and fire." Anna Hampton Brewster was possibly the first
American essayist to introduce to us Stendhal in her St. Martin's
Summer. Saintsbury, Dowden, Benjamin Wells, Count Lützow have since
written of him; and in Germany the Stendhal cult is growing, thanks to
Arthur Schurig, L. Spach, and Friedrick von Oppeln-Bronikowski.
It has been mistaken criticism to range Beyle as only a "literary"
man. He despised the profession of literature, remarking that he wrote
as one smokes a cigar. His diaries and letters, the testimony of
his biographer, Colomb, and his friend Mérimée, betray this pose--a
greater poser and _mystificateur_ it would be difficult to find. He
laboured like a slave over his material, and if he affected to take
the Civil Code as his model of style it nettled him, nevertheless,
when anyone decried his prose. His friend Jacquemont spoke of his
detestable style of a grocer; Balzac called him to account for his
carelessness. Flattered, astounded, as was Stendhal by the panegyric
of Balzac, his letter of thanks shows that the reproof cut deeply. He
abused Chateaubriand, Madame de Staël, and George Sand for their highly
coloured imagery and flowing manner. He even jeered at Balzac, saying
that if he--Beyle--had written "It snows in my heart," or some such
romantic figure, Balzac would then have praised his style.
Thanks to the labours of Casimir Stryienski and his colleagues,
we may study the different drafts Stendhal made of his novels. He
seldom improved by recasting. The truth is that his dry, naked
method of narration, despite its clumsiness, despite the absence of
plan, is excellently adapted to the expression of his ideas. He is a
psychologue. He deals with soul-stuff. An eighteenth-century man in
his general ideas and feelings, he followed the seventeenth century
and Montesquieu; he derives from Montaigne and Chamfort, and his
philosophy is coloured by a study of Condillac, Hobbes, Helvétius,
Cabanis, Destutt Tracy, and Machiavelli. He is a descendant of Diderot
and the Encyclopædists, a _philosophe_ of the salons, a _petit maître_,
a materialist for whom nothing exists but his ideas and sensations.
A French epicurean, his pendulum swings between love and war--the
adoration of energy and the adoration of pleasure. What complicates
his problem is the mixture of warrior and psychologist. That the man
who followed Napoleon through several of his campaigns, serving
successfully as a practical commissary and fighter, should have been
an adorer of women, was less strange than that he should have proved
to be the possessor of such vibrating sensibility. Jules Lemaitre sees
him as "a grand man of action paralysed little by little because of
his incomparable analysis." Yet he never betrayed unreadiness when
confronted by peril. He read Voltaire and Plato during the burning
of Moscow--which he described as a beautiful spectacle--and he never
failed to present himself before his kinsman and patron, Marshal Daru,
with a clean-shaved face, even when the Grand Army was a mass of
stragglers.
"You are a man of heart," said Daru, Frenchman in that phrase. When
Napoleon demanded five millions of francs from a German province,
Stendhal--who adopted this pen-name from the archæologist Winckelmann's
birthplace, a Prussian town--raised seven millions and was in
consequence execrated by the people. Napoleon asked on receiving the
money the name of the agent, adding, "_c'est bien!_" We are constrained
to believe Mérimée's assertion that Stendhal was the soul of honour,
and incapable of baseness, after this proof. At a time when plunder was
the order of the day's doings, the poor young aide-de-camp could have
pocketed with ease at least a million of the excess tax. He did not do
this, nor did he, in his letters or memoirs, betray any remorse for his
honesty.
Sainte-Beuve said that Beyle was the dupe of his fear of being duped.
This was confirmed by Mérimée in the concise little study prefixed
to the Correspondence. It is doubtful if these two men were drawn to
each other save by a certain contemptuous way of viewing mankind.
Stendhal was the more sentimental of the pair; he frequently reproached
Mérimée for his cold heart. He had also a greater sense of humour.
That each distrusted the other is not to be denied. Augustin Filon,
in his _brochure_ on Mérimée, said that "the influence exercised by
Stendhal on Mérimée during the decisive years in which his literary
eclecticism was formed, was considerable, even more than Mérimée
himself was aware." But the author of Carmen was a much finer artist.
The Danish critic, Georg Brandes, has described Beyle's relation to
Balzac as "that of the reflective to the observant mind; of the thinker
in art to the seer. We see into the hearts of Balzac's characters,
into the 'dark-red mill of passion' which is the motive force of their
action; Beyle's characters receive their impulse from the head, the
'open light-and-sound chamber'; the reason being that Beyle was a
logician, and Balzac a man of an effusively rich animal nature. Beyle
stands to Victor Hugo in much the same position as Leonardo da Vinci
to Michaelangelo. Hugo's plastic imagination creates a supernaturally
colossal and muscular humanity fixed in an eternal attitude of struggle
and suffering; Beyle's mysterious, complicated, refined intellect
produces a small series of male and female portraits, which exercise
an almost magic fascination on us with their far-away, enigmatic
expressions, and their sweet, wicked smile. Beyle is the metaphysician
among the French authors of his day, as Leonardo was the metaphysician
among the great painters of the Renaissance."
According to Bourget, Beyle's advent into letters marked the "tragic
dawn of pessimism." But is it precise to call him a pessimist? He was
of too vigorous a temper, too healthy in body, to be classed with the
decadents. His was the soul of a sixteenth-century Italian, one who had
read and practised the cheerful scepticism of Montaigne. As he served
bravely when a soldier, so, stout and subtle in after life, he waged
war with the blue devils--his chief foe. Disease weakened his physique,
weakened his mentality, yet he fought life to its dull end. He was
pursued by the secret police, and this led him to all sorts of comical
disguises and pseudonyms. And to the last he experienced a childish
delight in the invention of odd names for himself.
Félix Fénéon, in speaking of Arthur Rimbaud, asserted that his work
was, perhaps, "outside of literature." This, with some modification,
may be said of Beyle. His stories are always interesting; they may
ramble and halt, digress and wander into strange places; but the
psychologic vision of the writer never weakens. His chief concern is
the mind or soul of his characters. He hitches his kite to earth, yet
there is the paper air-ship floating above you, lending a touch of the
ideal to his most matter-of-fact tales. He uses both the microscope
and scalpel. He writes, as has been too often said, indifferently; his
formal sense is nearly _nil_; much of his art criticism mere gossip;
he has little feeling for colour; yet he describes a soul and its
manifold movements in precise terms, and while he is at furthest remove
from symbolism, he often has an irritating spiritual suggestiveness.
The analogue here to plastic art--he, the least plastic of writers--is
unescapable. Stendhal, whatever else he may be, is an incomparable
etcher of character. His acid phrases "bite" his arbitrary lines
deeply; the sharp contrasts of black and white enable him to portray,
without the fiery-hued rhetoric of either Chateaubriand or Hugo,
the finest split shades of thought and emotion. Never colour, only
_nuance_--and the slash and sweep of a drastic imagination.
He was an inveterate illusionist in all that concerned himself; even
with himself he was not always sincere--and he usually wrote of
himself. His many books are a masquerade behind which one discerns the
posture of the mocker, the sensibility of a reversed idealist, and the
spirit of a bitter analyst. This sensibility must not be confounded
with the _sensibilité_ of a Maurice de Guérin. Rather it is the morbid
sensitiveness of a Swift combined with an unusual receptivity to
sentimental and artistic impressions. Professor Walter Raleigh thus,
describes the sensibility of those times: "The sensibility that came
into vogue during the eighteenth century was of a finer grain than
its modern counterpart. It studied delicacy, and sought a cultivated
enjoyment in evanescent shades of feeling, and the fantasies of
unsubstantial grief." Vanity ruled in Stendhal. Who shall say how much
his unyielding spirit suffered because of his poverty, his enormous
ambitions? His motto might have been: Blessed are the proud of spirit,
for they shall inherit the Kingdom of Earth. He wrote in 1819: "I have
had three passions in my life. Ambition--1800-1811; love for a woman
who deceived me, 1811-1818; and in 1818 a new passion." But then he
was ever on the verge of a new passion, ever deceived--at least he
believed himself to be--and he, the fearless theoretician of passion,
often was, he has admitted, in practice the timid amateur. He planned
the attack upon a woman's heart as a general plans the taking of an
enemy's citadel. He wrote L'Amour for himself. He defined the rules of
the game, but shivered when he saw the battle-field. Magnificent he was
in precept, though not always in action. He was for this reason never
_blasé_, despite continual grumblings over his _ennui_. In his later
years at Cività Vecchia he yearned for companionship like a girl, and,
a despiser of Paris and the Parisians, he suffered from the nostalgia
of the boulevard. He adored Milan and the Milanese, yet Italy finally
proved too much for his nerves; _J'ai tant vu le soleil_, he confessed.
Contradictory and fantastic, he hated all authority. Mérimée puts
down to the account of the sour old abbé Raillane, who taught him,
the distaste he entertained for the Church of Rome. Yet he enjoyed
its æsthetic side. He was its admirer his life long, notwithstanding
his gibes and irreligious jests, just as he was a Frenchman by reason
of his capacity for reaction under depressing circumstances. But how
account for his monstrous hatred for his father? The elder Beyle was
penurious and as hard as flint. He nearly starved his son, for whom he
had no affection. Henry could not see him salute his mother without
loathing him. She read Dante in the original, and her son assured
himself that there was Italian blood on her side of the house. The
youth's hatred, too, of his aunt Séraphie almost became a mania. It
has possibly enriched fiction by the portrait of Gina of the resilient
temperament, the delicious Duchess of Sanseverina. All that she is, his
aunt Séraphie was not, and with characteristic perversity he makes her
enamoured of her nephew Fabrice del Dongo. Did he not say that parents
are our first enemies when we enter the world?
His criticisms of music and painting are chiefly interesting for what
they tell us of his temperament. He called himself "observer of the
human heart," and was taken by a cautious listener for a police spy.
He seldom signed the same name twice to his letters. He delighted to
boast of various avocations; little wonder the Milanese police drove
him out of the city. He said that to be a good philosopher one must be
_sec_, and without illusions. Perspicacious, romantic, delicate in his
attitude toward women, he could be rough, violent, and suspicious. He
scandalised George Sand, delighted Alfred de Musset; Madame Lamartine
refused to receive him in her drawing-room at Rome. His intercourse
with Byron was pleasant. He disliked Walter Scott and called him
a hypocrite--possibly because there is no freedom in his love
descriptions. Lord Byron in a long letter expostulated with Stendhal,
defending his good friend, Scott; but Stendhal never quite believed in
the poet's sincerity--indeed, suspecting himself, he suspected other
men's motives. He had stage-fright when he first met Byron--whom he
worshipped. A tremulous soul his, in a rude envelope. At Venice he
might have made the acquaintance of young Arthur Schopenhauer and
Leopardi, but he was too much interested in the place to care for new
faces.
He said that without passion there is neither virtue nor vice. (Taine
made a variation on this theme.) A dagger-thrust is a dignified gesture
when prompted by passion. After the Napoleonic disaster, Stendhal had
lost all his hopes of referment; he kept his temper admirably, though
occasionally calling his old chief bad names. It was a period of the
flat, stale, platitudinous, and bourgeois. "In the nineteenth century
one must be either a monster or a sheep," wrote Beyle to Byron. A
patriot is either a dolt or a rogue! My country is where there are most
people like me--Cosmopolis! The only excuse for God is that he does
not exist! Verse was invented to aid the memory! A volume of maxims,
witty and immoral, might be gathered from the writings of Stendhal
that would equal Rivarol and Rochefoucauld. "I require three or four
cubic feet of new ideas per day, as a steamboat requires coal," he
told Romain Colomb. What energy, what lassitude this man possessed! He
spoke English--though he wrote it imperfectly--and Italian; the latter
excellently because of his long residence in Italy.
Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil, described Stendhal as "that
remarkable man who, with a Napoleonic _tempo_, traversed _his_ Europe,
in fact several centuries of the European soul, as a surveyor and
discoverer thereof. It has required two generations to overtake him
one way or other; to divine long afterward some of the riddles that
perplexed and enraptured him--this strange Epicurean and man of
interrogation, the last great psychologist of France." He also spoke of
him as "Stendhal, who has, perhaps, had the most profound eyes and ears
of any Frenchman of this century."
Stendhal said that Shakespeare knew the human heart better than Racine;
yet despite his English preferences, Stendhal is a psychologist of the
_Racinien_ school. When an English company of players went to Paris in
1822, Stendhal defended them by pen and in person. He was chagrined
that his fellow-countrymen should hiss Othello or The School for
Scandal. He despised _chauvinisme_, he the ideal globe-trotter. And
he was contradictory enough to have understood Tennyson's "That man's
the best cosmopolite who loves his native country best." He scornfully
remarked that in 1819 Parisian literary logic could be summed up thus:
"This man does not agree with me, therefore he is a fool; he criticises
my book, he is my enemy; therefore a thief, an assassin, a brigand, and
forger." Narrow-mindedness must never be imputed to Stendhal. Nor was
he a modest man--modesty that virtue of the mediocre.
How much Tolstoy thought of the Frenchman may be found in his
declaration that all he knew about war he learned first from Stendhal.
"I will speak of him only as the author of the Chartreuse de Parme and
Le Rouge et le Noir. These are two great, inimitable works of art.
I am indebted for much to Stendhal. He taught me to understand war.
Read once more in the Chartreuse de Parme his account of the battle
of Waterloo. Who before him had so described war--that is, as it is
in reality?" In 1854 they said Balzac and Hugo; in 1886, Balzac and
Stendhal. Some day it may be Stendhal and Tolstoy. The Russian with
his slow, patient amassing of little facts but follows Stendhal's
chaplet of anecdotes. The latter said that the novel should be a
mirror that moves along the highway; a novel, he writes elsewhere, is
like a bow--the violin which gives out the sound is the soul of the
reader. And Goncourt assimilated this method with surprising results.
Stendhal first etched the soul of the new Superman, the exalted young
man and woman--Julien Sorel and Matilde de la Môle. They are both
immoralists. Exceptional souls, in real life they might have seen the
inside of a prison. Stendhal is the original of the one; the other is
the source of latter-day feminine souls in revolt, the souls of Ibsen
and Strindberg. Laclos's Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Marivaux he has
remoulded--Valmont is a prototype of Julien Sorel.
J. J. Weiss has said that profound immorality is probably an attribute
common to all great observers of human nature. It would require a
devil's advocate of unusual acuity to prove Stendhal a moral man or
writer. His philosophy is materialistic. He wrote for the "happy
few" and longed for a hundred readers, and wished his readers to be
those amiable, unhappy souls who are neither moral nor hypocritical.
His egoism brought him no surcease from boredom. His diaries and
letters and memoirs, so rich in general ideas, are valuable for the
student of human nature. The publication of his correspondence was
a revelation--a very sincere, human Stendhal came into view. His
cosmopolitanism is unaffected; his chapters are mosaics of facts and
sensations; his manner of narrative is, as Bourget says, a method of
discovery as well as of exposition. His heroes and heroines delve into
their motives, note their ideas and sensations. With a few exceptions,
modern romancers, novelists, psychologists of fiction seem shallow
after Stendhal. Taine confesses to reading Le Rouge et le Noir between
thirty and forty times. Stendhal disliked America; to him all things
democratic were abhorrent. He loathed the mass, upheld the class; an
individualist and aristocrat like Ibsen, he would not recognize the
doctrine of equality. The French Revolution was useful only because
it evolved a strong man--Napoleon. America, being democratic, would
therefore never produce art, tragedy, music, or romantic love.
It is the fate of some men to exist only as a source of inspiration
for their fellow-artists. Shelley is the poet's poet, Meredith the
novelist's novelist, and Stendhal a storehouse for psychologues.
His virile spirit, in these times of vapid socialistic theories,
is a sparkling and sinister pool wherein all may dip and be
refreshed--perhaps poisoned. He is not orthodox as thinker or artist;
but it is a truism that the wicked of a century ago may be the saints
of to-morrow. To read him is to increase one's wisdom; he is dangerous
only to fools. Like Schopenhauer and Ibsen, he did not flatter his
public; now he has his own public. And nothing would have amused this
charming and cynical man more than the knowledge of his canonisation
in the church of world literature. He gayly predicted that he would be
understood about 1880-1900; but his impertinent shadow projects far
into the twentieth century. Will he be read in 1935? he has asked. Why
not? A monument is to be erected to him in Paris. Rodin has designed
the medallion portrait.