Adepts in Self-Portraiture

by Stefan Zweig

  1842.

  An enormous wooden chest is being carted by goods train from Civita Vecchia, through Italy to France. It is addressed to Romain Colomb, Stendhal’s cousin and legatee, who proposes to issue a collected edition of all his relative’s writings. Why should Romain trouble to do this for a man whose death has been dismissed with a few lines in the newspapers? Out of devotion to his cousin’s memory, that is all! He has the chest prized open. What a mountain of papers, how illegible the cramped script, the secret ciphers. What an orgy of writing! A man to write so persistently must indeed have suffered from perennial boredom! Romain selects a few of the more legible, and starts making a fair copy. On Lucien Leuwen he scribbles: “Rien à faire”; the autobiographical Henri Brulard is likewise rejected as undecipherable; and is doomed to remain in the chest for decades. What’s to be done with all this rubbish? Colomb packs everything back in the chest and dispatches it to Crozet, a friend of Stendhal’s youth, who, in his turn, sends the stuff to the library at Grenoble where it at last finds a resting-place. The librarian, following the rules of the institution, has each packet docketed, and registered in a book. Requiescat in pace! Sixty folio volumes, Stendhal’s life work and his own record of his life, have been buried away in the great mausoleum of books, and can collect the dust of ages, undisturbed. Four decades are to pass by before anyone dreams of soiling his fingers with these dusty folios.

  1888. Paris. November.

  The population has grown, the town is spreading out in all directions. Paris numbers nearly eight million legs which are not always inclined to walk; so a new omnibus route is planned to serve Montmartre. A tiresome obstruction lies in the way. The cemetery! Technical science can remedy this: a bridge shall be built, and the living shall pass on their way above the dead. But there are a few of the graves which will have to be disturbed willy-nilly. In the fourth row there is a tombstone, No. 11, a dilapidated, forgotten affair bearing a strange inscription: “Arrigo Beyle, Milanese, scrisse, visse, amò.” An Italian buried here? What an odd legend. He must have been a queer sort of man. As chance would have it, someone appeared upon the scene who remembered vaguely that there had once been a writer of the name of Henri Beyle. It was his whim to have the misstatement inscribed on his tomb. Quickly a committee was set up to collect a fund for the purchase of a new marble tablet whereon the same inscription should be engraved. Thus, quite suddenly, in 1888, after forty-six years of oblivion, the name of Henri Beyle was on everyone’s lips.

  Curious to relate, in that very same year, a young teacher of languages, Stanislas Stryienski, whom fate had doomed to eke out a living in Grenoble, seeking relief from the suffocating boredom of his existence, spent many hours in the municipal library. His attention is attracted to some fusty-looking manuscripts lying neglected in a corner. He rids them of the accumulated dust, unties them, sets himself to read them and to decipher those that are in code. The more he reads the more absorbed does he become. He seeks and finds a publisher: Henri Brulard, the autobiographical romance, and Lucien Leuwen, see the light of day, and with their appearance the true Stendhal makes his bow to the world. His genuine contemporaries hail his work with enthusiasm, for the author had been born before his time and could only be appreciated by a later generation. Did Beyle himself not say: “Je serai célèbre vers 1880”? The phrase occurs again and again in his writings: it was then no more than a cry of despair; now it has become an amazing reality. At the very time when his bodily remains were raised out of the earth to be given another sepulcher, the work of his brain was brought forth from the shadows of forgetfulness. An unbeliever had foretold the date of his own resurrection. In his every word he showed himself a genuine artist; by this prophecy, however, he proved himself a seer.

  AN EGO AND THE WORLD

  Il ne pouvait plaire, il était trop différent.

  The cleavage in Henri Beyle’s nature which is reflected in his creative work — this cleavage was inborn, was a heritage from his parents who were an ill-assorted couple. Chérubin Beyle (“the bastard,” as Henri, the exasperated son, was wont to name his father) is the embodiment of the provincial bourgeois, pigheaded, miserly, crafty, wholly devoted to money-grubbing. We have his likeness painted for us in masterly fashion by Flaubert and by Balzac, who have scornfully limned the features of the tribe on the canvas of world literature. From Chérubin the son inherits his thickset, paunchy figure and his absorption in himself, his egoism. Henriette Gagnon, the mother, hails from the south, and has the characteristic features of the Latin peoples. In psychological make-up, she is likewise akin to the Latins. Lamartine might well have written poems in her honor, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau sentimentalized over her, for she was of a tender disposition, musical, rather gushing, sensuous as are so many southerners. From her, Henri inherited his passion for love adventures, his inordinate powers of sensation, his agonizing and almost womanish nervous impressionability. Tossed hither and thither by these two contending streams in his blood, this strange compost of opposing qualities oscillates between the paternal and the maternal legacies, between realism and romanticism. Thus the writer, Henri Beyle, is doomed from the outset to be a dual personality and to live in two competing worlds.

  At an early date little Henri showed a preference for his mother. Indeed, as he himself confesses, his love for her was tinctured with passion. His father is the object of a jealous and scornful hatred, a hatred which is coldblooded, inquisitorial, and cynical. Psychoanalysts may rejoice, for nowhere in the whole range of literature will they find the Oedipus complex portrayed with greater precision than in the early pages of Beyle’s autobiographical romance Henri Brulard. But death all too soon claimed the beloved mother. Henri was no more than seven when he was left to the tender mercies of his father. From the day when Henri, a lad of sixteen, left Grenoble in the diligence, old Chérubin was dead so far as his son was concerned. Henceforward young Beyle was silent, inimical, disdainful of the parent he had thus arbitrarily buried out of sight. Yet the old man was not so easily shaken off. For fifty years he persisted under Henri’s skin, his spirit continued to move in Henri’s blood current; for fifty years the two psychic inheritances from Beyle and from Gagnon ancestry strove each with the other in Henri’s soul, without either tendency being able to conquer. Feeling would at one moment overwhelm intellect, to be in its turn crushed by reason. This product of discord could never wholly belong to one sphere or to the opposing sphere. The intellect and the feelings are forever at war, and rarely have we been privileged to witness more splendid fights than upon the battleground which goes by the name of Stendhal.

  At the outset let it be clearly understood that in these contests there is never a victor, never a decisive action. Stendhal is not conquered by his opposites, nor is he torn to pieces by them. The epicurean creature is protected from the more tragic blows of destiny by a certain ethical indolence and a coolly observant curiosity which is ever on the alert. All his life he cautiously avoids the disquieting and elemental forces which rise to encounter him; for the first commandment he has engraved on the tablets in his wisdom is “keep your own end up.” Just as in practical life he sees to it that he is always placed in the rearguard of the Napoleonic armies, sheltered from the bullets, so also in the battlefield of his soul, Stendhal chooses the part of spectator rather than that of active participator in the life-and-death tussle. He is totally lacking in the ultimate moral self-immolation of a Pascal, a Nietzsche, or a Kleist, each of whom raised the conflict to the plane of a decisive issue. Stendhal is content with the role of onlooker. Aware of the cleavage within him, he is nevertheless able, from the secure vantage ground given him by his spiritual self-possession, to contemplate the duel as an artistic drama. He is, therefore, never completely distraught by the discordances of his being, he does not seriously hate them. No, rather, he is fond of them. He loves the precision of his intellect, clear faceted as a diamond: he considers it a priceless treasure because it helps him to understand the world; because, amid the turmoil o
f feelings, it bestows on him the power of a candidly serene and unqualified moderation. On the other hand, Stendhal loves his excessive emotionalism and his hypersensitiveness, because they rescue him from the stupidity and boredom of everyday life, because these headlong emotions pluck the soul from the narrow confines of the body and allow it to wing its way through the empyrean. He is quick to realize the dangers of both extremes: the intellect may spoil the moment of most extreme rapture; the feelings, by luring him into realms that lie beyond the range of the definite, may smudge the precision of his mind — and this precision of thought is a vital necessity to Stendhal. He would like to teach his opposites to acquire some of the qualities they lack, learning one from the other. Unwearied are his efforts to intellectualize his feelings, to make them clear and precise; continuous his endeavors to put passion into the rational powers of his mind. All his life, the romantic intellectualist and the intellectual romanticist have to dwell together within the same tense and sensitive body.

  Stendhal’s formulas, therefore, always result in a fraction, never in an integer. Only in a cloven world can he fully realize his personality. Were it otherwise, his purely intellectual work would have been inadequate, and the lyrical intensity of his feelings would have fallen short. His greatest achievements are due to an intermixture of these innate contradictions. “Lorsqu’il n’avait pas d’émotion, il était sans esprit,” he once said of himself. He worships daydreaming as the most precious need of existence: “Ce que j’ai le plus aimé, était la rêverie.” Yet he cannot live without its opposite, alertness: “Si je ne vois pas clair, tout mon monde est anéanti.” He is just as dependent upon his intellectual faculties as upon his extravagant idealistic traits; above all he needs those voluptuously tingling vibrations of opposites ramifying into his every nerve. Goethe declared that what men usually spoke of as enjoyment was for him always something that “lay half way between sensation and intelligence.” In the same way, Stendhal, thanks to the fiery mingling of spirit and flesh, is able to enjoy the sensuous beauty of the universe. He realizes that it is the contact of his two opposites that generates the spiritual electricity, the sparks which tingle along the nerve fibers, the crepitating, tense, and stimulating vivacity, which we can still feel today on merely opening a book by Stendhal. Thanks to the transference of his vitality from pole to pole, he can savor to the full the creative, illuminating fires of his being; and his instinct of self-glorification, ever on the watch, puts all his passions in motion in order to keep up the tension. Just as the muscles require constant exercise if they are not to become lax, so the psychical powers, if they are to be kept elastic, must be unceasingly exercised, and drilled. This is precisely what Stendhal does by his innumerable and extraordinarily detailed observations in the world of psychological reactions, and he performs his task with a competence rarely exhibited by anyone in the field of letters. He practices his art with the same indefatigable enthusiasm as a musician handling his instrument or as a soldier his weapons. He never tires in the work of training his mental ego. In order to keep the feelings at high tension, in a condition of “érectisme moral,” he whips them up every evening by listening to an opera, and even as an elderly man he fearlessly plunges into new love adventures. If he suspects his memory of playing him false, he subjects it to a course of special exercises, sharpening his faculties of perception on the strop of self-observation. He utilizes every book and every conversation for the discovery of “trois ou quatre pieds cubes d’idées nouvelles par jour”; he fills himself with an ever more sublime measure of intensity, exciting himself, straining every nerve only to curb it again; perpetually tuning up his intelligence, constantly forging his feelings anew.

  It is owing to this systematic and refined technique of self-fulfillment that Stendhal is able to attain to so high a degree of spiritual delicacy both in the realm of the senses and in that of the intellect. But one has to pay the penalty for keeping the nervous mechanism in such intense vibration, so alert and knowledgeable and voluptuous. Delicacy implies vulnerability; and that which is a boon for art, denotes for the artist, almost invariably, danger and distress. This super-organized being called Stendhal suffers terribly in his own elemental universe, and is an alien in the lachrymose and sentimental world of his day. A man of so keen an intelligence must inevitably feel every stupidity as an affront; so romantic a soul cannot fail to resent every callousness, every demonstration of spiritual inertia on the part of the average individual. There was once a princess of fairyland who, in spite of a hundred coverlets and featherbeds, detected the pea under her mattress. So does Stendhal wince at every blundering word and every unseemly gesture. False romanticism, coarse exaggeration, pusillanimous vagueness, react on him like cold water on an aching tooth. He suffers as acutely from excess as from dearth, from manifestations of banality as from those of preciosity. “Mes bêtes d’aversion, ce sont le vulgaire et l’affecté.”

  One evening he was contemplating a Napoleonic battle from afar: the murderous medley, vibrant with the roar of cannon, illuminated in the red glow of the setting sun, touched him to the quick. He quivered in sympathetic horror. Suddenly a general who stood near by was moved to say: “A battle of giants!” — and preened himself on the aptness of his observation. But Stendhal’s whole world was shattered by the bathos. He hurried away from the spot, cursing the war, filled with bitterness, disillusioned, bereaved. Muddy thinking, exaggeration in speech, undue exhibition of feeling, always aroused irritation. He could not tolerate his companions because they were purveyors of sickly romanticism (Chateaubriand) and the pseudo-heroic (Victor Hugo). In general he found his fellowmen difficult to get on with. But this hypersensitiveness was turned against himself, too, at times; he could not escape it. As soon as he detected himself diverging, be it never so slightly, from genuine sentiment, introducing an unnecessary crescendo, lapsing into sentimentality, straying into vagueness or dishonesty, he rapped himself over the knuckles as ruthlessly as any schoolmaster an undisciplined pupil. His alert and relentless understanding tracked any hint of spuriousness into the remotest corners, and inexorably wrenched away every veil. Rarely, indeed, has an artist constrained himself to be thus truthful with himself; seldom has a student of the soul so cruelly supervised his own most secret deviations.

  Because he knows himself so well, Stendhal realizes better than anyone else that this superabundant sensibility of nerve and soul is a constituent part of his genius, is his greatest virtue and his greatest danger. “Ce qui ne fait qu’effleurer les autres me blesse jusqu’au sang.” For this reason he instinctively, from youth onwards, feels that these “others” are polar opposites to himself, belonging to an alien spiritual family, persons with whom he has no kinship, has no common understanding, no common idiom. Already as an awkward youngster in Grenoble, he was aware of this difference between himself and “the others,” when he saw his schoolfellows hallooing in heedless enjoyment; and later, more poignantly, when as a raw subaltern in Italy, he despairingly tried to imitate the enviable swagger with which his brother officers dragged their sabers along the pavement and ogled the Milanese women.

  In those days he had blushed at his own inferiority. For years he had endeavored to quell his own nature, to swank like the rest of them, to impress the crowd. Gradually, laboriously, and painfully, however, he had come to find a peculiar charm in his irremediable differentiation from the herd. His lack of success with the fair sex was due to timidity, to untimely accesses of shyness; slowly he came to analyze the reasons for his mischance: the psychologist awoke within him. He became inquisitive concerning himself, began to discover himself. At first he noticed merely that he was different from the rest, that he was more delicately poised, more sensitive, more keen-sighted. None of his associates felt things so passionately as he, none thought so clearly, not one of them was so strangely compounded — capable of the finest sensations, and yet unable to achieve anything in the practical sphere. Doubtless he was not unique; there had been other specimens of this
“être supérieur”; how else could he understand Montaigne so well? What an acerb and fundamentally shrewd man this Montaigne was, to be sure, so scornful of everything that was obvious and crude. He could not feel so perfectly at one with Montaigne, with Mozart, unless the souls of them all were similarly touched to fine uses!

  Thus at thirty, Stendhal begins for the first time to realize that he is not a failure among men. Rather does he belong to the rare company of “êtres privilégiés,” privileged beings who spring up from time to time among the most various nations and races and countries, who are as it were precious jewels shining forth from the ordinary conglomerate. He feels that among them he is at home, whereas among his French contemporaries he feels a stranger, and he therefore throws off his allegiance to France as he would a garment too small for him. He belongs to another, an invisible fatherland, peopled by mortals endowed with more delicate spiritual organs and more responsive nerves, creatures who never rushed together in dull-witted crowds or assembled in business cliques, but who from time to time sent forth a messenger to their age and generation.

  For these “happy few” who do not need emphasis as an aid to understanding, whose instinct guides them to penetrate every hole and corner of the heart, for these alone does he write, transcending the limitations of his own century; to them alone does he reveal the secrets of his sensations. What cares he, now that he has at last learned to despise the crowd, if the vociferous multitude, which is only capable of perceiving the fat and crudely colored letters of an advertisement, only able to taste over spiced and overcooked viands — what cares he if such persons fail to understand him? “Que m’importent les autres?” He puts the words into the mouth of one of his characters, Julien, but the scornful utterance rises from his own heart. He need not be ashamed that, in so coarse and dunderheaded a world, his writings are not a success! “L’égalité est la grande loi pour plaire”; a man must be on a level with his generation if he is to please the human pack. Thank God for being “un être extraordinaire,” “un être supérieur,” the unique, the special case, an individual, a different being, not one in a flock of silly sheep! All his external humiliations, his failure to rise in his career, his making a fool of himself where women are concerned, his complete lack of success in the field of literature, everything that seems on the surface to be calculated to depress him, becomes for Stendhal, as soon as he has made the discovery of his own distinctness, a source of delight, is looked upon by him as a triumphal token of his superiority. His feeling of inferiority becomes sublimated into resplendent arrogance, that delicately poised arrogance of Stendhal’s which is only to be sensed by those who understand, that arrogance which is so magnificently cheerful and debonair. He deliberately holds aloof from the commonalty, and has but one aim in life, “de travailler son caractère.” For him, now, “il n’y a d’intéressant que ce qui est un peu extraordinaire.” Very well, then, let us be extraordinary, let us foster this germ of singularity within ourself! No Dutch tulip-maniac had ever cultivated a new species with greater care and hedged it around with more ingenious precautions than did Stendhal his aloofness. He preserved it in a peculiar essence of his own distilling, an essence he christened “Beylisme”; it was a philosophy which had no other purpose in view than to preserve Henri Beyle unaltered in Henri Beyle. He shut himself away behind a thorny thicket of queerness and mystification; he guarded with the fanaticism of a miser the treasure chamber of his ego, hardly permitting even his most intimate friends a glimpse through the bars.