A promenader of souls and cities, Stendhal was a letter-writer of
formidable patience; his published correspondence is enormous. How
enormous may be seen in the three volumes published at Paris by Charles
Bosse, the pages of which number 1,386. These letters begin in 1800,
when Stendhal was a precocious youth of seventeen, and end 1842, a few
days before his death. There are more than 700 of them, and he must
have written more--probably several thousand; for we know that Mérimée
destroyed nearly all his correspondence with Stendhal, and we read of
300 written to a Milanese lady--his one grand, because unsuccessful,
passion. But a few of these are included, the remainder doubtless
having been burned for prudence' sake. The earliest edition of the
Stendhal letters appeared in 1855, edited by Prosper Mérimée, with an
introduction by the author of Carmen. The present edition is edited by
two devoted Stendhalians, Ad. Paupe and P. A. Cheramy. It comprises
all the earlier correspondence, the letters printed in the Souvenirs
d'Egotisme (1892), some letters never before published, Lettres Intimes
(1892), and letters published in the first series of Soirées du
Stendhal Club (1905). There are also letters from the archives of the
Ministers of the Interior, of War, and of Foreign Affairs--altogether a
complete collection, though ugly in appearance, resembling a volume of
Congressional reports, but valuable to the Stendhal student.
For the first time the names of his correspondents appear in full.
Mérimée suppressed most of them or gave only the initials. We learn
who these correspondents were, and there is a general key for the
deciphering of the curious names Stendhal bestowed upon them--he was
a wag and a mystifier in this respect. His own signature was seldom
twice alike. A list is given and reaches the number of one hundred and
seventy-nine pseudonyms. Maurice Barrès has written a gentle preface
rather in the air, which he entitled: Stendhal's Sentiment of Honour.
One passage is worthy of quotation. Barrès asserts that Stendhal never
asked whether a sentiment or an act was useful or fecund, but whether
it testified to a thrilling energy. Since the pragmatists are claiming
the Frenchman as one of their own, this statement may prove revelatory.
The first volume is devoted to his years of apprenticeship (1800-1806)
and his active life (1808-1814). The majority of the letters are
addressed to his sister, Pauline Beyle, at Grenoble, a sympathetic
soul. With the gravity of a young, green philosopher, he addresses to
her homilies by the yard. Sixty instructing twenty! He tells her what
to read, principally the eighteenth century philosophers: Rousseau,
Voltaire, Helvétius, Tracy, Locke--amusing and highly moral reading
for a lass--and he never wearies of praising Shakespeare. "I am a
Romantic," he says elsewhere; "that is, I prefer Shakespeare to
Racine, Byron to Boileau." This worldly-wise youth must have bored his
sister. She understood him, however, and as her life at home with a
disagreeable and avaricious father was not happy, her correspondence
with brother Henry must have been a consolation. He does not scruple to
call his father hard names, and recommends his sister not to marry for
love but for a comfortable home. She actually did both. Edouard Mounier
is another correspondent; also Félix Faure, born in Stendhal's city,
Grenoble. We learn much of the Napoleonic campaigns in which Stendhal
served, particularly of the burning of Moscow and the disastrous
retreat of the French army. Related by an eye-witness whose style is
concise, whose power of observation is extraordinary, these letters
possess historic value.
All Paris and Milan are in the second volume, The Man of the World and
the Dilettante (1815-1830); while The Public Functionary and Novelist
are the themes of volume three (1830-1842). The friends with whom
Stendhal corresponded were Guizot, Thiers, Balzac, Byron, Walter Scott,
Sainte-Beuve, and many distinguished noblemen and men of affairs. He
had friends in London, Thomas Moore and Sutton-Sharp among the rest;
and he visited England several times. Baron Mareste and Romain Colomb
were confidants. Stendhal, with an irony that never deserted him, wrote
obituary notices of himself because Jules Janin had jestingly remarked
that when Stendhal died he would furnish plenty of good material for
the necrologists. The articles in guise of letters sent to M. Stritch
of the _German Review_, London, are tedious reading; besides, there are
too many of them.
As a man whose ears and eyes were very close to the whirring of
contemporary events, his descriptions of Napoleon and Byron are
peculiarly interesting. At first Napoleon had been a demi-god, then he
was reviled because with the Corsican's downfall he lost his chances
for the future. He had witnessed the coronation and did not forget
that Talma had given the young Bonaparte free tickets to the Comédie
Française; also that Pope Pius VII. pronounced Latin Italian fashion,
thus: _Spiritous sanctous_. As the Emperor passed by on horseback,
cheered by the mobs, "he smiled his smile of the theatre, in which one
shows the teeth, but with eyes that smile not." Stendhal tells us that
the Emperor had forehead and nose in an unbroken line, a common trait
in certain parts of France, he adds.
He first encountered Byron in the year 1812, at Milan. It was in
a box of the Scala. He was overcome by the beauty of the poet, by
his graciousness. Here we see Stendhal, no longer a soldier or a
cynic, but a man of sensibility, almost a hero-worshipper. Byron was
agreeable. They met often. When Byron's physician and secretary,
Polidori, was arrested by the Milan secret police, Stendhal relates
that the Englishman's rage was appalling. Byron resembled Napoleon,
declared Stendhal, in his marble wrath. Another time the French author
advised Byron, who lived at a distance from the opera house, to take
a carriage, as after midnight walking was dangerous in Milan. Coldly
though politely Byron asked for some indication of his route and then,
during a painful silence, he left poor Stendhal staring after him as he
hobbled away in the darkness. Such human touches are worth more than
the letters in which the literature of the day is discussed.
Ten years later, from Genoa (1823), Byron wrote Stendhal, whom he
apparently liked, thanking him for a notice he had read of himself in
the latter's book, Rome, Naples, et Florence. Supreme master of the
anecdote, these letters may serve as an introduction to Stendhal's
works, though we wish for more of the tender epistles. However, in
The Diary, the Journal and the Life of Henri Brulard, one may find
copious and frank confessions of Stendhal's love-life. So little of
the literary man was in him that at the close of his career, when he
had received the Legion of Honor, he was indignant because this was
bestowed upon him not in his capacity of public functionary but as a
man of letters. Adolphe Paupe, the editor of this bulky correspondence
--and who knows how much more material there may be in the Grenoble
archives!--fittingly closes his brief introduction with a quotation
from a writer the antipodes of Stendhal, the parabolic Barbey
d'Aurevilly, who, after calling the correspondence "adorable," adds
that it possesses the unheard-of charm of Stendhal's other books, a
charm which is inexhaustible. Notwithstanding this eloquence, I prefer
the old edition compiled by Mérimée. There is such a thing as too much
Stendhal, although every scrap of his writing may be sacred to his
disciples.
I am glad, therefore, to note in the second series of the Soirées du
Stendhal Club, that the principal Stendhalian--or Beyliste, as some
name themselves--Casimir Stryienski, shows a disposition to mock at the
antics of over-heated Stendhalians. M. Stryienski, who has been called
by Paul Bourget "the man of affairs of the Beyliste family," dislikes
the idea of a Stendhal cult and wonders how the ironic and humorous
Beyle would have treated the worshippers who wish to make of him a
mystic god--which is the proper critical attitude. Beyle-Stendhal would
have been the first man to overthrow any altar erected to his worship.
The second series, collated by Stryienski and Paul Arbelet, is hardly
as novel as the first. The most important article is devoted to the
question whether Stendhal dedicated to Napoleon his History of Painting
(mostly borrowed from Lanzi's book). The 1817 dedication is enigmatic;
it might have meant Napoleon, or Louis XVIII., or the Czar Alexander
of Russia. M. Arbelet holds to the latter, as Stendhal was so poor
that he hoped for a position as preceptor in Russia and thought by the
ambiguity of his dedication to catch the favourable eye of the Czar.
Napoleon was at Saint Helena and a hateful king was on the throne of
France. Let all three be duped, said to himself the merry Stendhal.
That is Arbelet's theory. When in 1854 a new edition of the history
appeared, it was headed by a touching, almost tearful dedication to the
exile at Saint Helena! Stendhal's executor, Romain Colomb, had found
it among the papers of the dead author, and as Napoleon was dead he
published it. Evidently Stendhal had written several, and for politic
reasons had selected the misleading one of the 1817 edition. Recall
Beethoven's magnificent rage when he tore into pieces the dedicatory
page of his Eroica Symphony, on hearing that his hero, Napoleon, had
crowned himself Emperor. Quite Stendhalian this, Machiavellian, and
also time-serving. No doubt he smiled his wicked smile--with tongue
in cheek--at the trick, and no doubt his true disciples applaud it.
He was the Superman of his day, one who bothered little with moral
obligations. His favourite device was a line of verse from an old
opera bouffe: "_Vengo adesso di Cosmopoli_"; and what has a true
cosmopolitan, a promenader of cities and prober of souls, in common
with such a bourgeois virtue as truth-telling? If, as Metchnikoff
asserts, a man is no older than his arteries, then a thinker is only
as old as his curiosity. Beyle was ever curious, impertinently so--the
Paul Pry of psychologists.
V
His cult grows apace, and like all cults will be overdone. First
France, then Italy, and now Germany has succumbed to the novels,
memoirs, and delightful gossiping books of travel written by the
Frenchman from Grenoble. But what a literary and artistic gold-mine
his letters, papers, manuscripts of unfinished novels have proved to
men like Casimir Stryienski and the rest. Even in 1909 the Stendhal
excavators are busy with their pickers and stealers. Literary Paris
becomes enthusiastic when a new batch of correspondence is unearthed
at Grenoble or elsewhere. Recently a _cahier_--incomplete to be
sure, but indubitably Stendhal's--was found and printed. It was a
section of the famous journal exhumed in the library of Grenoble by
Stryienski during 1888. Published in the _Mercure de France_, it bore
the title of Fin du Tour d'Italie en 1811. It consists of brief, almost
breathless notes upon Naples, its music, customs, streets, inhabitants.
References to Ancona, to the author's second sojourn in Milan, and
to his numerous lady-loves--each one of whom he lashed himself into
believing unique--are therein. He placed Mozart and Cimarosa above all
other composers, and Shakespeare above Racine. Naturally the man who
loved Mozart was bound to adore Raphael and Correggio. Lombard and
Florentine masters he rated higher than the Dutch. Indeed, he abhorred
Rembrandt and Rubens almost as much as William Blake abhorred them,
though not for the same reason. Despite his perverse and whimsical
spirit, Stendhal was, in the larger sense, all of a piece. His likes
and dislikes in art are so many witnesses to the unity of his character.
Maurice Barrès relates that at the age of twenty he was in Rome,
where he met in the Villa Medici its director, M. Hébert, the painter
(died 1908), who promptly asked the young Frenchman: "Do you admire
Stendhal?" and proceeded to explain that the writer of La Chartreuse de
Parme was his cousin, and once consul at Cività Vecchia, although he
spent most of his time in Rome. Stendhal's Promenades had offended the
Pope, so these visits were really stolen ones. Bored to death in the
stuffy little town where he represented the French Government, Stendhal
had been reproved more than once for the dilatory performance of his
duties. Hébert, after warning Barrès not to study him too deeply,
described him as an old gentleman of exceeding but capricious _esprit_.
He roamed among the picture galleries, exclaiming joyously before some
old Greek marble or knitting his brows in the Sistine Chapel. Raphael
was more to his taste than Michaelangelo, as might have been expected
from one who went wild over the ballets Viganò. Another anecdote is one
that reveals the malicious, almost simian trickiness of Beyle-Stendhal.
An English lady, a traveller bent on taking notes for a book about
Paris, was shown around the city by Stendhal. Seriously, and with
his usual courtesy, he gave her an enormous amount of misinformation,
misnaming public buildings, churches, the Louvre, its pictures, and
nicknaming well-known personages. All this with the hope that she
would reproduce it in print. Not very _spirituel_, this performance
of M. Beyle. He was an admirer of English folk and their literature,
and corresponded in a grotesque sort of English with several prominent
men and women in London. We find him writing a congratulatory letter
to Thomas Moore on his Lalla Rookh, complacently remarking that the
ingrained Hebraism of English character and literature made the
production of such an exotic poem all the more wonderful. Though he
could praise the gew-gaws and tinsel of Moore's mock Orientalism, he
openly despised the limpidity of Lamartine's elegiac verse and the
rhythmic illuminated thunder of Victor Hugo.
It is not generally known that Stendhal's friend and disciple, Prosper
Mérimée, left an anonymous book, of which there are not many examples,
though it has been partially reprinted. It is entitled "H. B. [Henry
Beyle], par un des quarante, avec un frontispice stupéfiant dessiné
et gravé. Eleutheropolis, l'an 1864 du mensonge Nazaréen." Now, there
is a "stupefying" drawing, a project for a statue, by Félicien Rops,
the etcher. It depicts the new world-city of Eleutheropolis--a
Paris raised to the seventh heaven of cosmopolitanism--with Stendhal
set in its midst. Rops was evidently contented to take the little
pot-bellied caricature of Henri Monnier, which Monnier declared was
not exaggerated, and put it on a pedestal. In his familiar and amusing
manner the illustrator shows us multitudes from every quarter of the
globe travelling by every known method of conveyance. The idea of
teeming nationalities is evoked. All sorts and conditions of men and
women are hurrying to pay their homage to Stendhal, who, hat in hand,
stomach advancing, legs absurdly curving, umbrella under his arm,
and his ironical lips compressed, contemplates with his accustomed
imperturbability these ardent idolators. He seems to say: "I predicted
that I should be understood about 1880."
But if this cartoon of Rops is amusing, the contents of Mérimée's book
are equally so, both amusing and blasphemous. Stendhal and Mérimée got
on fairly well together. Mérimée tells what he thought of Stendhal.
There are shocking passages and witty. An atheist, more because of
political reasons than religious, Stendhal relates a story about the
death of God from heart disease. Since that time the cosmical machine,
he asserted, has been in the hands of his son, an inexperienced youth
who, not being an engineer, reversed the levers; hence the disorder in
matters mundane.
To prove how out of tune was Stendhal with his times, we have only
to read his definitions of romanticism and classicism in his Racine
et Shakespeare. He wrote: "Romanticism is the art of presenting to
people literary works which in the actual state of their habitudes
and beliefs are capable of giving the greatest possible pleasure;
classicism, on the contrary, is the art of presenting literature which
gave the greatest possible pleasure to their great-grandfathers." He
also proclaimed as a corollary to this that every dead classic had
at one time been a live romantic. Yet he was far from sympathising,
both romantic and realist as he was, with the 1830 romantic movement.
Nor did he suspect its potential historical significance; or his own
possible significance, despite his clairvoyant prediction. He disliked
Hugo, ignored Berlioz, and had no opinion at all on the genius of
Delacroix. The painters of 1830, that we knew half a century later as
the Barbizon school, he never mentions. We may imagine him abusing the
impressionists in his choleric vein. His appreciations of art, while
sound--who dare flout Raphael and Correggio?--are narrow. The immense
claims made continually by the Stendhalians for their master are
balked by evidences of a provincial spirit. Yes; he, the first of the
cosmopolitans, the indefatigable globe-trotter, keenest of observers
of the human heart, man without a country--he has said, "My country is
where there are most people like me"--was often as blindly prejudiced
as a dweller in an obscure hamlet. And doesn't this epigram contradict
his idea of the proud, lonely man of genius? It may seem to; in reality
he was not like a Nietzschian, but a sociable, pleasure-loving man,
seldom putting to the test his theories of individualism. He always
sought the human quality; the passions of humanity were the prime
things of existence for him. A landscape, no matter how lovely, must
have a human or a historic interest. The fiercest assassin in the
Trastevere district was at least a man of action and not a sheep.
"Without passion there is neither virtue nor vice," he preached.
Therefore he greatly lauded Benvenuto Cellini. He loathed democracy
and a democratic form of government. Brains, not votes, should rule a
nation. He sneered at America as being hopelessly utilitarian.
In the preface to his History of Italian Painting he quoted Alfieri:
"My only reason for writing was that my gloomy age afforded me no other
occupation." From Cività Vecchia he wrote: "It's awful: women here
have only one idea, a new Parisian hat. No poetry here or tolerable
company--except with prisoners; with whom, as French Consul, I cannot
possibly seek friendship." To kill the ennui of his existence he either
slipped into Rome for a week or else wrote reams of "copy," most of
which he never saw in print. Among certain intellectual circles in
Paris he was known and applauded as a man of taste, a dilettante of
the seven arts, though his lack of original invention occasionally got
him into scrapes. Stendhal might have echoed Molière's "Je prends mon
bien où je le trouve"; but he would not have forgotten to remind the
dramatic poet that the very witticism was borrowed from Cyrano.
Stryienski's Soirées du Stendhal Club actually presents for the
delectation of the Stendhalians parallel columns from Lanzi and
Stendhal--so proud are the true believers of the fold that even such
evidences of plagiarism do not disconcert them. The cribbing occurs in
the general reflections devoted to the Renaissance. It is as plain as
a pikestaff. Notwithstanding, we can read Stendhal with more interest
than the original. His lively spirit adorns Lanzi's laborious pages.
Beyle's joke about the "reversed engines of Christianity," quoted by
Mérimée, and his implacable dislike of the Jesuits (as may be seen in
his masterpiece, Le Rouge et le Noir--in those days the Yellow Peril
was the Jesuits), did not dull his perception of what the papacy had
done for art in Italy. He nearly approaches eloquence in his Philosophy
of Art (which Taine appreciated and profited by) when writing of the
popes of the Renaissance. He does not fail to note the vivifying and
reforming influence of the Church at this period upon the brutality
and lusts of the nobility and upon poets and painters. Adoring Raphael
as much as he did Napoleon and Byron, he declared that Raphael
failed in _chiaroscuro_ and vaunted the superiority of Correggio in
this particular. But he did not deign to mention Rembrandt. Nothing
Germanic or Northern pleased him. He was a Latin among Latins, and
his passion for Italy and the Italians was not assumed. He had asked
of his executor that he be buried in the little Protestant cemetery
at Rome. Then he changed his mind and ordered that the cemetery of
Andilly, near Montmorency, be his last resting-place. But the fates,
that burn into ashes the fairest fruits of man's ambitions, dropped
Stendhal's remains in the cemetery of Montmartre, Paris, where still
stands the prosaic tomb with its falsification of the writer's birth.
His epitaph he doubtless discovered when fabricating his life of Haydn.
In the composer's case it runs: "Veni, scripsi, vixi." And when we
consider the fact that his happiest years were in Milan, that there
lived the object of his deepest affection, Angela Pietragrua, this
inscription was as sincere as the majority of such marble ingenuities
in post-mortem politeness.
With all his critical limitations, Stendhal never gave vent to such
ineptitudes as Tolstoy regarding Shakespeare. The Russian, who has
spent the latter half of his life bewailing the earlier and more
brilliant part, would have been abhorrent to the Frenchman, who died as
he had lived, impenitent. Stendhal was a man, not a purveyor of words,
or a maker of images. Not poetic, yet he did not fail to value Dante
and Angelo. Virile, cynical, sensual, the greatest master of psychology
of his age, he believed in action rather than thought. Literature he
pretended to detest. Not a spinner of cobwebs, he left no definite
system; it remained for Taine to gather together the loose strands of
his sane, strong ideas and formulate them. He saw the world clearly,
without sentiment--he, the most sentimental of men--and he had a horror
of German mole-hill metaphysics. The eighteenth century with its hard
logic, its deification of Reason, its picturesque atheism, enlisted
Beyle's sympathies. Socialism was for him anathema.
Love and art were his watchwords. His love of art was on a sound basis.
Joyous, charming music like Mozart's, Rossini's, Cimarosa's, appealed
to him; and Correggio, with his sensuous colouring and voluptuous
design, was his favourite painter. He was complex, but he was not
morbid. The artistic progenitor of a long line of analysts, supermen,
criminals, and æsthetic ninnies, he probably would have disclaimed the
entire crowd, including the faithful Stendhalians, because the latter
have so widely departed from his canons of simplicity and sunniness in
art.
But Stendhal left the soul out of his scheme of life; never did he
knock at the gate of her dwelling-place. Believing with Napoleon
that because the surgeon's scalpel did not lay bare any trace of the
soul, there was none, Stendhal practically denied her existence. For
this reason his windows do not open upon eternity. They command fair,
charming prospects. Has he not written: "J'ai recherché avec une
sensibilité exquise la vue des beaux paysages.... Les paysages étaient
comme un archet qui jouait sur mon âme"? He meant his nerves, not his
soul. Spiritual overtones are not sounded in his work. A materialist
(a singularly unhappy home and maladroit education are to blame for
much of his errors in after life), he was, at least, no hypocrite. He
loved beautiful art, women, landscapes, brave feats. He confesses, in
a letter to Colomb, dated November 25, 1817, to planning a History of
Energy in Italy (both Taine and Barrès later transposed the theme to
France with varying results). A tissue of contradictions, he somehow or
other emerges from the mists and artistic embroilments of the earlier
half of the last century a robust, soldierly, yet curious, subtle
and enigmatic figure. It is best to employ in describing him his own
favourite definition--he was "different." And has he not said that
difference engenders hatred?