by Stefan Zweig
His books were not a striking success. The public was not used to having its mental food presented in so cut-and-dried a fashion, lacking the spice of oily sentimentality. In addition to creating the persons of the novel, Stendhal had to create a public which would read his books, an élite, “the happy few,” as he himself expressed it; but this public did not arise till a generation later, in the nineties of the nineteenth century. The indifference of his contemporaries left Stendhal cold; he despised them too much to worry about their opinions. In any case, his books are so many letters addressed to himself; experiments in sensation, written to expand his own being, to develop to the full the spiritual, intellectual, and scientific capacities of the person he loved best on earth, Henri Beyle. Has he, the timid and obese Henri Beyle, been scorned of women? Very well; in his books he can live in a waking dream, present himself as a handsome stripling like Julien and Fabrice, boldly uttering the words of love he never ventured to utter in reality. Do the blockheads at the Foreign Office deprive him of the possibility for playing the diplomatist? He can compensate himself for the stupidity of his chiefs by showing his capacity for intrigue, his Machiavellism, his cleverness in threading his way through labyrinthine complications; he can indemnify himself by pillorying the silly fools in effigy, by subjecting them to his condemnation and mockery. There is a note of fervency in the descriptions of the places he loves so well; he recalls the unforgettable days spent at Milan; soon he discovers the sublime pleasure, while still remaining shut away and isolated, of bringing his lonely ego into contact with the world — a world, be it understood, which is not so common and vulgar as the real world, but one which is more consonant with his own tastes, a world more impassioned, more vehement, wiser, brighter, and more untrammeled. “Que m’importent les autres?” Stendhal writes for himself alone. The aging epicurean has discovered a new and subtle form of amusement: by the light of two candles on a plain deal table, in a garret, to write or to dictate. Towards the close of his life, this intimate communing with his own soul becomes more important to him than women and other pleasures, than Café Foys and discussions in the salons; it even surpasses music. Enjoyment in solitude and the solitude of enjoyment, his earliest ideal, is at length realized by him when he reaches fifty, and the realization secures expression in art.
A joy which came tardily, it is true, a joy colored by the rays of the setting sun and partly hidden by the clouds of resignation. For Stendhal’s literary creation started too late to influence his life; it merely served as a musical accompaniment to the slow process of physical dissolution. He was forty-three when he began to write his first novel — Le Rouge et le Noir (for an earlier romance, Armance, is too slight to be taken seriously into consideration); at fifty, he wrote Lucien Leuwen; at fifty-four, La Chartreuse de Parme. Three novels are his whole literary accomplishment, three variations on one and the same original and elementary theme: the spiritual history of Henri Beyle’s youth, a story the aging Beyle does not wish to see perish and must therefore continually renew. All three might bear the same title as the one adopted by Flaubert (who was born much later than Beyle, and was one of his most ardent detractors), L’éducation sentimentale, the education of the emotions.
The three young men — Julien, the ill-used son of a peasant, Fabrice, the pampered nobleman, and Lucien Leuwen, the son of a banker — are all born into a chill world, but they enter life with glowing hearts and immense idealism, are enthusiastic admirers of Napoleon, worship everything that is heroic and great and free. In the superabundance of their feeling, they seek a something better, a something more spiritual, a something more inspired than the actualities of life. All three bring a perplexed mind, and a pure heart filled with restrained passion, to lay at the feet of womankind; each is filled with the romanticism of youth unspotted as yet through contact with the common and calculating world of every day. Yet for each in turn comes a rude awakening, the terrible discovery that in a frozen and hostile environment the fires of the heart must be smothered, enthusiasm denied expression, the real self disguised. Their chivalrous impetus breaks against the mob mind of an epoch immersed in moneymaking, against the meanness and the poltroonery of “those others” (Stendhal’s pet aversions!) Little by little they learn the tricks and dodges of their opponents, cleverness in intrigue, artful calculations; they become crafty, deceitful, cold men of the world. Or, worse still, they become knowing; as calculating and egotistic as Stendhal is in middle age; they become brilliant diplomatists, business geniuses, superlative bishops; in a word, they come to terms with reality and adapt themselves to their surroundings as soon as they feel that they have been thrust forth from their true spiritual world, the world of youth and genuine idealism. In the sixth decade of his life, Henri Beyle sets himself to the writing of these novels, that he may gather the three young men around him; or, rather, that he himself may relive “sa vie à vingt ans,” may passionately relive his youth, his youth when he harbored such shy, reserved, and glowing feelings within his breast, when he had such implicit faith in the world. Only when he himself has become informed, cool-headed, and disillusioned does he tell the story of his heart as a young man, does he portray the everlasting romance of the “beginning.” Thus these novels unite in a wonderful manner the fundamental contrasts of his character, unite the lucidity of age with the noble perplexity of youth. Stendhal’s lifelong struggle of spirit with feeling, of realism with romanticism, is at last liquidated in three unforgettable battles, each one of them as memorable as Marengo, Austerlitz, and Waterloo.
These three young men, though they experience different destinies and are of varying races and characters, are nevertheless brothers in the realm of feeling: their creator has endowed them all with his own romanticism, and has given this to them that they may develop it. There is the same tie uniting the three men into whom they grow up: Conte Mosca, Leuwen the banker, and Comte de la Môle; they are all Beyle himself, the intellectualist who has crystallized into pure spirit, the man who has become wise, out of whom every vestige of idealism has been burned by the fires of reason. These transfigurations are symbolic representations of what life makes of the young; they show us how the “exalté en tout genre se dégoûte et s’éclaire peu à peu,” as Henri Beyle writes of his own life. Heroic enthusiasm is dead, magical intoxication is replaced by a sad superiority of tactic and practice, and elemental passion has to yield to a cold pleasure in the game of life. The three men end by ruling the world; Conte Mosca in his principality, Leuwen on the stock exchange, Comte de la Môle in the realm of diplomacy; but they do not love the marionettes which dance to their pulling of the strings; they are full of scorn, because they know all the pitiable meannesses of their fellow mortals. They have not lost the power of appreciating beauty, have not ceased to thrill responsively to heroism; but the appreciation and the thrill remain in the realm of feeling, and can no longer be translated into action. Gladly enough would they exchange their worldly achievements for the obscure, confused yearnings of youth — which, though it has achieved nothing, can dream of achieving all. Just as Antonio Montecalino, the shrewd, dispassionate, and calculating aristocrat, contrasts with Torquato Tasso, the young and ardent poet, so do these men of maturer years, for whom daily life has become a matter of plain prose, contrast with the young men they themselves once were. Maturity contemplates youth with mixed feelings: would like to be helpful, and is nonetheless hostile; is somewhat contemptuous, and yet is moved to envy. It is the old antithesis between brain and heart, between the waking man and the dreamer.
Stendhal’s universe oscillates between these two poles of human destiny, between the boy’s vague yearning after beauty and the man’s positive will-to-power, a will touched with irony. It is between the vicissitudes of manhood, between age and youth, between maturity and romanticism, that the surging current of feeling finds vent. Women confront these striplings, who though shy are burning with desire; women, by the music of their goodness, assuage the torment of unfulfilled craving. They prov
ide a pure and glowing outlet for youthful passion, these women of Stendhal’s, noble in character one and all, Madame de Rênal, Madame de Chasteller, La Duchessa di Sanseverina. But not even this hallowed surrender can preserve the young men’s pristine purity of soul, for at every step forward into life they plunge deeper into the morass of human baseness. Here again we have a contrast. These heroic and aspiring women, capable of providing the spirit of youth with wings, are counterposed to the commonplace world of reality and of practical life, to the cunning and crafty brood of petty intrigues and opportunists, to mankind as Stendhal sees it through the spectacles of his contempt. In retrospect he contemplates these women with the eyes of his youth, and glorifies them, for even as an elderly man he is still in love with love; taking them gently by the hand, he leads these adorable idols forth from the most secret haven of his heart, and presents them to his heroes. At the same time, with all the vigor of his pent-up wrath, he thrusts the baser wretches down into the shambles. Out of offal and fire he creates his judges, his lawyers, his pettifogging ministers, his parade-ground officers, his chatterers of the salons; and all these creatures, sticky and malleable as mud, all these nullities, increase and multiply till they become the great majority of mankind, and succeed (as is ever the way on earth) in crushing the sublime. Throughout Stendhal’s works, the tragic melancholy of an incurable enthusiast goes hand in hand with the keen-bladed irony of a disillusioned man. In his novels Stendhal depicts the world of reality with a hatred no less strong than the glowing passion with which he paints the world of his fancy; he is as great a master in the one field as in the other; he belongs to two worlds and is equally at home in either, whether it be the world of the intellect or that of the feelings.
Stendhal’s novels probably owe a good deal of their charm and distinction to the fact that they are the product of a man in his maturity, a man whose memories are still fresh and whose survey of events has been well pondered before setting it to paper, whose writing is youthful in sentiment and impregnated with a wise deliberation as far as the thoughts are concerned. Distance alone is capable of imparting a creative interpretation to the meaning and the beauty of each passion. Does not Stendhal himself write: “Un homme dans les transports de la passion ne distingue pas les nuances”; a man cannot know the origin or the limits of his sensations? He may be able to voice his ecstasy in lyrical and hymnal form, sending it forth into limitless space; but he cannot, in the moment of passion, explain the ecstatic rapture and give it epic expression. Analysis demands clearness of vision, cool blood, alert understanding, a position which is above the passionate; it needs a certain lapse of time since the event, and a steady pulse so that the hand of the sculptor may not tremble. In his novels, Stendhal displays to a supreme degree all these requisites, both internal and external. He, the artist arrived at the boundary line which separates the rise from the fall in a man’s life, consciously and knowledgeably portrays the world of the feelings; he recaptures the emotions of the past, understands them, and is able to bring them into the daylight, to express them while keeping them within due bounds. Stendhal’s greatest delight, the impulse which urges him to the task of writing these novels, is the opportunity it affords him to contemplate this inner world of his revived emotions.
The outward husk, the technique of novel writing, is of little importance to our artist; he improvises as he goes along. Indeed, having come to the end of a chapter, he has no idea what is to happen in the following. The episodes are not always compatible with the characters, and Goethe, who was one of the first to read Stendhal with appreciation, did not fail to point this out. In a word, the melodramatic side of the stories could have been concocted by Mr. Anybody. Stendhal is a genuine literary creator only in the passionate moments experienced by his heroes. His writings have artistic worth and vitality only insofar as they depict the inner currents of life. They are at their most beautiful where one feels that the author has spiritually participated; they are incomparable where Stendhal’s own shy and reticent soul is allowed to speak through the words and deeds of his favorites, where he allows his characters to suffer on account of the cleavage within his own nature. The description of the battle of Waterloo in the Chartreuse de Parme is a masterly résumé of the years he spent in Italy as a youth. Just as Stendhal himself had been drawn to Italy, so his Julien is attracted to Napoleon, hoping to find upon the battlefields that spirit of heroism which he feels to be astir within his own soul. But the rude hand of reality tears the veils from his idealistic concept. Instead of clashing cavalry charges he experiences the senseless confusion of modern warfare; instead of the Grande Armée, he finds a rout of men fleeing before the foe; instead of heroes, he encounters cynical soldiers, as mediocre and second-rate in their fine uniforms as dozens of other men in drab coats. These disillusionments are limned with marvelous insight. No other artist has succeeded in depicting with such intimacy of touch the way in which the ecstasy of the soul is again and again bruised upon the rock of hard reality, until at length, too weary to rise, it resigns itself to its defeat. Stendhal’s psychological genius triumphs precisely in those moments when the senses and the brain generate electric sparks through contact one with another, and when the two opposites in his disposition meet. He excels himself as an artist only when he makes his characters experience what he himself has experienced, and his portrayals are complete only when he is in perfect spiritual accord with his creations. His art, too, therefore, is autobiographical, and discloses the most intimate secrets of his personal life. “Quand il était sans émotion, il était sans esprit.”
Yet strangely enough it is this quality of sympathetic understanding which Stendhal is at most pains to conceal. He is ashamed lest some casual reader shall detect how much of himself has gone to the making of Julien, Lucien, and Fabrice. No one must ever guess that his soul has been breathed into these imaginary beings. Stendhal, therefore, adopts the style of the dispassionate chronicler, of the police-court recorder: “Je fais tous les efforts pour être sec.” He would have been nearer the truth had he written: “pour paraître sec.” One must indeed be dull of perception not to detect behind this “dryness” the emotional participation of the author. Stendhal, so full of passion, is never cold in his writing. In truth he is an impassioned novelist, if ever a novelist was impassioned. But his passion is deliberately kept out of sight. Just as in daily life he is desperately concerned lest he shall “laisser deviner ses sentiments,” so in his writings he tries to conceal his emotion beneath a veil of assumed impassivity. He refuses to wear his heart upon his sleeve, for nothing is more distasteful to him than the public display of emotion; his sense of spiritual discretion makes him shrink away in disgust from the man who tells his story in a voice choked with tears; he loathes the guttural “ton déclamatoire” of a Chateaubriand, who transfers the bombastic mouthings of the boards into the realm of literature. Better by far to appear hard than “larmoyant,” better be lacking in art than become pathetic, better be logical rather than lyrical!
Stendhal therefore chews his every word to exhaustion before he spits it out into the world, and in order to acquire the style of his desire he assiduously cons the bourgeois code before he sets himself to work in the morning. Nevertheless, dryness is far from being Stendhal’s ideal. With his “amour exagéré de la logique,” he aims at making his style as inconspicuous as possible so as not to obscure the vividness of his picture: “Le style doit être comme un vernis transparent: il ne doit pas altérer les couleurs ou les faits et pensées sur lesquels il est placé.” The mere words are not to obtrude themselves upon our notice by assuming the lyrical form, the coloratura, the “fiorituri” of Italian opera. On the contrary, the words must play second fiddle to the events and thoughts, or, to change the metaphor, they must, like a well-tailored suit, fit the situation so becomingly that they are forgotten, and only the spiritual movements they clothe find palpable expression. Clarity is Stendhal’s chief aim. His Gallic instinct for lucidity makes him abhor everything wh
ich savors of muddle-headedness, of sentimentality, of pomposity, of turgescence: above all he dislikes that succulent sentimentalism which Rousseau introduced into French literature. Stendhal wants precision and truth to be part of every feeling, even the most confused; he wants clarity to penetrate into the labyrinthine ways of the heart. “Écrire” spells for him “anatomiser,” that is to say the dissection of every sensation into its component parts, the measurement of heat in degrees, the examination of the emotions with clinical accuracy as though they were an illness. In art, as in life, the only thing which bears no fruit is vagueness, confusion of thought. One who befuddles himself with emotion sinks into the quagmire of his own feelings. While he is sleeping off the fumes of intoxication, he misses the highest, the most spiritual form of enjoyment: consciousness of enjoyment. But he who plumbs his own depths with clearness of vision is able to relish these same depths, to contemplate them with manly and genuine appreciation. While realizing the confusion of his feelings he can simultaneously recognize their beauty. Thus Stendhal is fond of putting into practice the old Persian precept which tells us to ponder with the waking mind that which the ecstatic heart betrays in moments of passionate exaltation. He is at once the most blissful servant of the soul, and yet, by his clear-cut logic, he remains master of his emotions.