Even in our days of hasty production the numerous books of Stendhal
provoke respectful consideration. What leisure they had in the first
half of the last century! What patience was shown by the industrious
man who worked to ward off _ennui_! He must have written twenty-five
volumes. In 1906 the _Mercure de France_ printed nineteen newly
discovered letters to his London friend, Sutton Sharpe (Beyle visited
London occasionally; he corresponded with Thomas Moore the poet, and
once he spent an evening at a club in the company of the humourist
Theodore Hook). But the titles of many of his books suffice; the
majority of them are negligible. Who wishes to read his lives of
Rossini, Haydn, Mozart, Metastasio? His life of Napoleon, posthumously
published in 1876, is of more interest; Beyle had seen his subject
in the flesh and blood. His Racine et Shakespeare is worth while for
the Stendhalian; none but the fanatical kind would care to read the
History of Painting in Italy. There is the Correspondence, capital
diversion, ringing with Stendhalian wit and prejudice; and Promenades
dans Rome is a classic; not inferior are Mémoires d'un Touriste, or
Rome, Naples, et Florence. Indeed, the influence of the Promenades has
been pronounced. His three finished novels are Armance, Le Rouge et
le Noir--which does not derive its title from the gambling game, but
opposes the sword and the soutane, red and black--and La Chartreuse de
Parme. The short stories show him at his best, his form being enforced
to concision, his style suiting the brief passionate recitals of
love, crime, intrigue, and adventure--for the most part, old Italian
anecdotes recast; as the Italian tales of Hewlett are influenced by
Stendhal. L'Abbesse de Castro could hardly have been better done by
Mérimée. In the same volume are Les Cenci, Vittoria Accoramboni,
Vanina Vanini, and La Duchesse de Palliano, all replete with dramatic
excitement and charged with Italian atmosphere. San Francesca a Ripa is
a thrilling tale; so are the stories contained in Nouvelles Inédites,
Féder (le Mari d'Argent), Le Juif (Filippo Ebreo)--the latter Balzac
might have signed; and the unfinished novel, Le Chasseur Vert, which
was at first given three other titles: Leuwen, l'Orange de Malte, Les
Bois de Prémol. It promised to be a rival to Le Rouge et le Noir.
Lucien Leuwen, the young cavalry officer, is Stendhal himself, and he
is, like Julien Sorel, the first progenitor of a long line in French
fiction; disillusioned youths who, after the electric storms caused
by the Napoleonic apparition, end in the sultry dilettantism of Jean,
duc d'Esseintes of Huysmans' A Rebours and in the pages of Maurice
Barrès. From Beyle to Huysmans is not such a remote modulation as might
be imagined. Nor are those sick souls, Goncourt, Charles Demailly
and Coriolis, without the taint of _beylisme_. Lucien Leuwen is a
highly organized young man who goes to a small provincial town where
his happiness, his one love-affair, is wrecked by the malice of his
companions. There is a sincerer strain in the book than in some of its
predecessors.
Armance, Stendhal's first attempt at fiction, is unpleasant; the theme
is an impossible one--pathology obtrudes its ugly head. Yet, Armance
de Zohilhoff is a creature who interests; she was sketched from life,
Stendhal tells us, a companion to a lady of left-handed rank. She is an
unhappy girl and her marriage to a _babilan_, Octave de Malivert, is a
tragedy. Lamiel, a posthumous novel, published by Casimir Stryienski in
1888, contains an _avant-propos_ by Stendhal dated from Cività Vecchia,
May 25, 1840. (His prefaces are masterpieces of sly humour and ironical
malice.) It is a very disagreeable fiction--Lamiel is the criminal
woman with all the stigmata described by Lombroso in his Female
Delinquent. She is wonderfully portrayed with her cruelty, coldness,
and ferocity. She, too, like her creator, exclaimed, "Is that all?"
after her first bought experience in love. She becomes attached to a
scoundrel from the galleys, and sets fire to a palace to avenge his
death. She is burned to cinders. A hunchback doctor, Sansfin by name,
might have stepped from a page of Le Sage.
The Stendhal heroines betray their paternity. Madame de Renal, who
sacrifices all for Julien Sorel, is the softest-hearted, most womanly
of his characters. She is of the same sweet, maternal type as Madame
Arnoux in Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale, though more impulsive.
Her love passages with Julien are the most original in French
fiction. Mathilde de la Môle, pedant, frigid, perverse, snobbish,
has nevertheless fighting blood in her veins. Lamiel is a caricature
of her. What could be more evocative of Salome than her kneeling
before Julien's severed head? Clelia Conti in the Chartreuse is like
the conventional heroine of Italian romance. She is too sentimental,
too prudish with her vow and its sophistical evasion. The queen of
Stendhal women is Gina, _la duchesse_ Sanseverina. She makes one of the
immortal quartet in nineteenth-century fiction--the other three being
Valérie Marneffe, Emma Bovary, and Anna Karénina. Perhaps if Madame
de Chasteller in Le Chasseur Vert had been a finished portrait, she
might have ranked after Gina in interest. That lovable lady, with the
morals of a _grande dame_ out of the Italian Renaissance, will never
die. She embodies all the energy, tantalizing charm, and paradox of
Beyle. And a more vital woman has not swept through literature since
the Elizabethans. At one time he dreamed of conquering the theatre.
Adolphe Brisson saw the _ébauches_ for several plays; at least fifteen
scenarios or the beginnings of them have been found in his literary
remains. Nothing came of his efforts to become a second Molière.
Zola places Le Rouge et le Noir above La Chartreuse de Parme; so does
Rod. The first novel is more sombre, more tragic; it contains masterly
characterisations, but it is depressing and in spots duller than the
Chartreuse. Its author was too absorbed in his own ego to become a
master-historian of manners. Yet what a book is the Chartreuse for a
long day. What etched landscapes are in it--notably the descriptions
of Lake Como! What evocations of enchanting summer afternoons in
Italy floating down the mirror-like stream under a blue sky, with the
entrancing Duchess! The episodes of Parmesan court intrigue are models
of observation and irony. Beyle's pen was never more delightful, it
drips honey and gall. He is master of dramatic situations; witness the
great scene in which the old Duke, Count Mosca, and Gina participate.
At the close you hear the whirring of the theatre curtain. Count
Mosca, it is said, was a portrait of Metternich; rather it was
Stendhal's friend, Count de Saurau. In sooth, he is also very much like
Stendhal--Stendhal humbly awaiting orders from the woman he loves.
That Mosca was a tremendous scoundrel we need not doubt; yet, like
Metternich and Bismarck, he could be cynical enough to play the game
honestly. Despite the rusty melodramatic machinery of the book, its
passionate silhouettes, its Pellico prisons, its noble bandit, its
poisons, its hair-breadth escapes, duels and assassinations--these we
must accept as the slag of Beyle's genius--there is ore rich enough in
it to compensate us for the _longueurs_.
Of his disquisition, De l'Amour, with its famous theory of
"crystallisation," much could be written. Not founded on a basic
physiological truth as is Schopenhauer's doctrine of love, Beyle's is
wider in scope. It deals more with manners than fundamentals. It is
a manual of tactics in the art of love by a superior strategist. His
knowledge of woman on the social side, at least, is unparalleled. His
definitions and classifications are keener, deeper than Michelet's or
Balzac's. "Femmes! femmes! vous êtes bien toujours les mêmes," he cries
in a letter to a fair correspondent. It is a quotidian truth that few
before him had the courage or clairvoyancy to enunciate. Crowded with
crisp epigrams and worldly philosophy, this book on Love may be studied
without exhausting its wisdom and machiavellianism.
Stendhal as an art or musical critic cannot be taken seriously, though
he says some illuminating things; embedded in platitudes may be
found shrewd _aperçus_ and flashes of insight; but the trail of the
"gifted amateur" is over them all. At a time when Beethoven was in the
ascendant, when Berlioz--who hailed from the environs of Grenoble--was
in the throes of the "new music," when Bach had been rediscovered,
Beyle prattles of Cimarosa. He provoked Berlioz with his praise of
Rossini--"les plus irritantes stupidités sur la musique, dont il
croyait avoir le secret," wrote Berlioz of the Rossini biography.
Lavoix went further: "Ecrivain d'esprit ... fanfaron d'ignorance en
musique." Poor Stendhal! He had no _flair_ for the various artistic
movements about him, although he had unwittingly originated several.
He praised Goethe and Schiller, yet never mentioned Bach, Beethoven,
Chopin; music for him meant operatic music, some other "divine
adventure" to fill in the background of conversation. Conversation!
In that art he was virtuoso. To dine alone was a crime in his eyes. A
_gourmet_, he cared more for talk than eating. He could not make up his
mind about Weber's Freischütz, and Meyerbeer he did not very much like;
"he is said to be the first pianist of Europe," he wrote; at the time,
Liszt and Thalberg were disputing the kingdom of the keyboard. It was
Stendhal, so the story goes, who once annoyed Liszt at a _musicale_ in
Rome by exclaiming in his most elliptical style: "Mon cher Liszt, pray
give us your _usual_ improvisation this evening!"
As a plagiarist Stendhal was a success. He "adapted" from Goethe,
translated entire pages from the _Edinburgh Review_, and the
material of his history of Painting in Italy he pilfered from Lanzi.
More barefaced still was his wholesale appropriation of Carpani's
Haydine, which he coolly made over into French as a life of Haydn.
The Italian author protested in a Paduan journal, _Giornale dell'
Italiana Letteratura_, calling Stendhal by his absurd pen-name:
"M. Louis-Alexander-César Bombet, _soi-disant_ Français auteur des
Haydine." The original book appeared in 1812 at Milan. Stendhal
published his plagiarism at Paris, 1814, but asserted that it had been
written in 1808. He did not stop at mere piracy, for in 1816 and in an
open letter to the _Constitutionnel_ he fabricated a brother for the
aforesaid Bombet and wrote an indignant denial of the facts. He spoke
of César Bombet as an invalid incapable of defending his good name.
The life of Mozart is a very free adaptation from Schlichtegroll's.
When Shakespeare, Handel, and Richard Wagner plundered, they plundered
magnificently; in comparison, Stendhal's stealings are absurd.
Irritating as are his inconsistencies, his prankishness, his bombastic
affectations, and pretensions to a superior immorality, Stendhal's
is nevertheless an enduring figure in French literature. His power
is now felt in Germany, where it is augmented by Nietzsche's
popularity--Nietzsche, who, after Mérimée, was Stendhal's greatest
pupil. Pascal had his "abyss," Stendhal had his fear of _ennui_--it
was almost pathologic, this obsession of boredom. One side of his
many-sided nature was akin to Pepys, a French Pepys, who chronicled
immortal small-beer. However, it is his heart's history that will make
this protean old faun eternally youthful. As a prose artist he does
not count for much. But in the current of his swift, clear narrative
and under the spell of his dry magic and peptonized concision we do
not miss the peacock graces and coloured splendours of Flaubert or
Chateaubriand. Stendhal delivers himself of a story rapidly; he is all
sinew. And he is the most seductive spiller of souls since Saint-Simon.