In reviewing the performance by the New Shakespeare Company of _King
Henry V._ I was reminded by one of Henry’s lines at Agincourt,
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,
to speak, it may have seemed a trifle incongruously, of Stendhal. But
it was Stendhal who said, “je n’écris que pour les _happy few_.” No
quotation could have been more appropriate. Stendhal’s readers have
always been few, but they have been enthusiastic. In his lifetime he
was hardly read at all, though Balzac gave him a magnificent “puff”—so
magnificent that even Stendhal himself was taken aback by it and infused
a little irony into his thanks. He supposed himself to be ahead of his
time, and in 1840 said he would be understood somewhere about 1880. It
was rather a good shot, for somewhere about that date there came into
being the fierce tribe of Stendhalians, who founded the “Stendhal Club”
and included in their number no less a man than M. Paul Bourget. But the
vicissitudes of literary reputations are as uncertain as anything in
this world, and M. Bourget wondered what would be thought of Stendhal in
another forty years—namely, in 1920. Well, 1920 has arrived, as the years
have the habit of doing with abominable rapidity, and any one who likes
can seek for an answer to M. Bourget’s question. I will hazard a guess.
I doubt if in the interval there has been very much change in Stendhal’s
position. Now, as in 1880, Stendhal is read, and immoderately loved, by
the “happy few,” and ignored or detested by the rest. But, in enjoying
him, the happy few contrive to take him a little less seriously than did
the Stendhal Club. That process goes on with even greater reputations.
Croce, we are told, takes Dante more lightly than has been the habit
of Italian critics in the last half-century. We English are gradually
learning to discuss Shakespeare as a human being. And here, pat to the
occasion, is a paper on Stendhal in the _Revue de Paris_ by M. Anatole
France, which handles its subject with the easy Anatolian grace we all
know and does, perhaps, at the same time indicate what the readers of
1920 think of Stendhal, though none of them would express their thought
of him with the same charm.
It would probably occur to none of them, for instance, as it does to
Anatole France, to begin an appreciation of Stendhal with the statement
that he “had a leg.” Modern costume has abolished this advantage,
but Stendhal lived, at any rate for the greater part of his life, in
the knee-breeches period, when calves were on exhibition. Unluckily,
Stendhal’s calves do not appear in the portrait prefixed to the
Correspondence, but only the head, which is rather quaintly ugly.
Quaint ugliness in men is not displeasing to women (or where would most
of us be?), but what ne’er won fair lady is faint heart, and Stendhal
was timid. Thus, as a young man Stendhal is said to have loved Mlle.
Victorine Monnier for five years before he spoke to her. He was not sure
that even then she knew who he was. And this was the man who wrote a
treatise “De l’Amour” (a delightful book to skim through, nevertheless),
and preaches that every woman can be captured by direct assault! I
remember once talking to the wife of a popular novelist, a great
enthusiast for love, about her husband’s variety and virtuosity on this
subject. She replied without enthusiasm: “Yes, in his books.” On the same
point, M. France reports a capital _sub rosâ_ saying of Renan’s:—“Les
Européens font preuve d’une déplorable indécision en tout ce qui concerne
la conjonction des sexes.”
As might have been expected from a writer for the “happy few,” Stendhal
did not suffer fools gladly. A man must have the social, the gregarious
spirit for that, and Stendhal lived much to himself. That being so, he
could not hope to escape boredom. An incurable _ennui_ lurks behind many
of his pages; his enemies would say _in_ them. He even got bored with
Italy, as so many others of a century ago, who began as enthusiastic
lovers, got bored. Byron went to Greece—and Shelley took to yachting with
the fatal result we know—because each was bored with Italy. But Stendhal
in his later years had to put up with it at Civita Vecchia—which, for
a “littery gent” must have been a deadly dull place in 1840, and would
not, I imagine, be very lively even now. Indeed, his existence (after
his early experiences with the Grand Army) seems to have been quiet,
solitary, and slow. Perhaps that is why his books, his MSS., his letters,
are so full of mysterious disguises, initials, pseudonyms, codes,
erasures, as though he were being watched by censors and hunted by spies.
It was a way of creating for himself an imaginary atmosphere of adventure.
M. France has some good things to say about Stendhal’s style. M. Bourget
calls his prose algebraic, which is rather hard. But there are many ways
of writing, says M. France, and one can succeed at it perfectly without
any art, just as one can be a great writer without correctness, as Henri
IV. was in his letters and Saint-Simon in his memoirs. No one would read
“Le Rouge et le Noir” or “La Chartreuse de Parme,” as the Duchess in a
Pinero play said she read her French novel, for the style. Anatole France
commits himself to a very definite statement. No Frenchman, he says, in
Stendhal’s time wrote well, the French language was altogether lost, and
every author at the beginning of the nineteenth century wrote ill, with
the sole exception of Paul Louis Courier. “The disaster to the language,
begun in the youth of Mirabeau, increased under the Revolution, despite
those giants of the tribune, Vergniaud, Saint-Just, Robespierre, compared
with whom our orators of to-day seem noisy children, despite Camille
Desmoulins, author of the last well-written pamphlet France was to read;
the evil was aggravated under the Empire and the Restoration; it became
a frightful thing in the works of Thiers and of Guizot.” This, from the
greatest living master of French, is not without its interest. No one
could say the same thing of our English prose in the same period—a period
that gave us, to take a few instances at random, Cowper’s letters and
Byron’s, and the Essays of Elia.
Stendhal, then, was not remarkable for style. But one gathers that, in
the rare occurrence of congenial society, he was a good talker. One
would give something to have been a third in the box at La Scala when
Stendhal, a young officer of Napoleon, met an old, lanky, melancholy
general of artillery—no other than Choderlos de Laclos, author, before
the Revolution, of “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.” Stendhal, as a child, had
known the original of Laclos’s infamous Mme. de Merteuil, an original who
appears to have been even worse than the copy. Some years later George
Sand, on her way to Italy with Musset, met Stendhal on a Rhone steamer,
and he told her a story which, she said, shocked her. She does not repeat
it. One would really rather like to hear a story which could shock George
Sand.