Adepts in Self-Portraiture

by Stefan Zweig

  To know his own heart; by understanding, to enhance the mystery of the emotions because one has fathomed them — such is Stendhal’s formula. The children of his fancy, his heroes, feel just as he feels. They, too, have no wish to be fooled, to be swept off their feet by emotion, but would like to keep watch over their feelings, hearken to them, plumb them, analyze them; they want to understand their emotions as well as to feel them. No phase, no mutation, is allowed to escape their vigilance; they test themselves to see whether their emotions are genuine or false, whether some other, still deeper feeling does not lie concealed behind. They are statisticians of their own hearts, alert and unsentimental observers of their own sentiments. They are continually asking themselves: “Do I love her already? Do I still love her? What did I feel then and why don’t I feel the same now? Is my affection genuine or is it feigned? Am I merely playacting where she is concerned?” They keep their fingers upon the pulse of their emotions and are instantly aware when excitement quickens the beat. Their self-scrutiny mercilessly confronts their self-surrender; with the precision of an insensate machine they reckon up the expenditure of feeling. In the very moment of rapturous fulfillment they pause to consider; “pensait-il” and “disait-il à soi-même,” constantly crop up to impede the restless movement of the story. Every stretch of the muscles, every twitch of the nerves, is commented upon with the accuracy of a physicist or a physiologist. These peculiarities endow them all with the typical Stendhalian cleavage of character: they enthusiastically calculate their sensations, and with cool deliberation they make up their minds to experience an emotion just as if it were a business affair.

  As an example I will cite the well-known love scene in Le Rouge et le Noir. Here, in the very moment of ecstasy, when the maiden he loves is about to give herself to him, Julien remains fully intellectualized, painfully wide-awake. He is risking his life in order, at one o’clock at night, to visit Mademoiselle de la Môle. To reach her, he has had to place a ladder near the open window of her mother’s bedroom. Surely passion, the spirit of romance, should be supreme? But the critical intelligence is still dominant! “Julien was much perplexed, he was at a loss what to do, he felt not the smallest particle of love. In his bewilderment he thought it incumbent upon him to be bold, and he therefore made to embrace her. ‘Fie!’ said she, thrusting him away. Her repulse pleased him immensely. He hastened to cast a glance around the room.” Thus intellectually conscious, thus cool and deliberate in thought, are Stendhal’s heroes even at the height of their most daring adventures. Let us follow the scene to its close; let us see how, after all the reflections and meditations in the midst of the lovers’ excitement, the young maid gives herself to her father’s secretary. “Mathilde found it hard to address him with the familiar ‘thou,’ and, when she did, the word lacked tenderness and therefore gave Julien no pleasure. He was amazed to find that he had as yet no sensation of happiness. In order that he might experience this emotion he took refuge in deliberation, reminding himself that he was in the good grace of a young girl who was, in general, chary of her praise. The reflection brought him happiness, for it gratified his vanity.” What are her thoughts meanwhile? “I must talk to him. One is supposed to talk to a lover.” To paraphrase Gloucester, did ever man and woman woo one another in such a vein? What other writer has ventured to allow his characters to control themselves, to calculate their actions with such composure, in circumstances of high tension? And Stendhal’s characters are by no means persons of a fishy disposition!

  Here we approach the innermost technique of his psychological exposition, a technique which smothers the fires and disintegrates feeling into its impulses. Stendhal never contemplates an emotion as an entity, but always as a compost of innumerable details; he examines its crystallizations under a lens. That which in the realm of reality takes place suddenly, in one spasmodic movement, is divided by his analytical mind into infinitesimal molecules of time; he shows us a slow-motion picture of the psychical actions, and thus permits us to comprehend them with greater intellectual accuracy. The events in Stendhal’s novels take place almost entirely upon the psychical plane, and not in the earthly realm of time and space; they occur, not so much in the lists of objective reality, as in the tumultuous region of the nerves that interconnect heart and brain. Art for the first time is used as an instrument for the elucidation of unconscious functional action. Le Rouge et le Noir begins the series of the “roman expérimental,” which is later to bring the science of psychology so closely into contact with imaginative writing. We are not surprised to find that Stendhal’s contemporaries did not regard this newfangled art as art at all. On the contrary, they looked upon it as anti-poetic, as a grossly mechanical and materialistic probing of the soul. Balzac, for instance, had something like a monomania for the study of the impulses, but he regarded them as unified, as integral. Stendhal, on the other hand, put them under the microscope, that he might examine the tiny germs, the true exciters of the strange disease known as love. Doubtless such elaborate methods impede the vehement course of the action, and many passages in Stendhal’s works savor of laboratory sobriety, of the dispassionateness of the schoolroom. Nevertheless, Stendhal’s furor artisticus is quite as creative as is Balzac’s, though the former casts his into a logical mold, fanatically seeking after clarity, and displaying a determination to attain clairvoyance of the soul. His depiction of the world is no more than a medium for the comprehension of the soul; his portrayal of men is merely a preliminary essay for his portrait of himself. Stendhal, the arch-egoist, dispenses passion only that it may return to himself in a stronger and wiser form; he seeks to know mankind in order the better to know himself. “Art for art’s sake,” the objective delight in presentation, the discovery and the creation of personages for the sheer pleasure in the doing, was neither known to nor practiced by Stendhal. Such were his limitations! This master of spiritual autoeroticism, this most self-absorbed of artists, was never able to merge himself wholeheartedly into the world-all, to throw wide his arms and exclaim: “Come, soul of the universe, and penetrate my being through and through.” He was incapable of any such ecstatic self-abnegation. In spite of his amazing artistic penetration he was never, not in one single instance, able to understand the art of another man of letters when such an author drew his inspiration, not from the purely human, but from the primal sources of the cosmos — from chaos. The titanic, any cosmic emotion, any thought of being merged with the universe — these were terrifying to Stendhal. Rembrandt, Beethoven, Goethe, beauty that was stormy or belonged to the somber realms of thought, these things were a closed book to him. His crystal-clear intelligence could apprehend beauty only when it presented itself in the Apollonian art, the luminous serenity, of a Mozart and a Cimarosa, whose melodies are clear as spring water; or of a Rafael and a Guido Reni whose pictures are so engagingly simple and easy to understand. The mystery and suffering of the world, Dionysian art, mighty, strenuous, violently destructive, driven onward by demonic forces, such art was beyond his ken. Nothing in the vast universe held his interest save the human factor; and that human factor consisted, in the last resort, of the microcosm called Stendhal.

  To fathom this one entity he became a man of letters; he created characters in order to portray himself. Although genius made him a supreme artist, Stendhal never served art; he made use of art as a delicate and responsive instrument whereby he could measure the rapturous flight of the spirit and express this flight in the music of his prose. Art was never a goal for him, it was always a road leading to his one and only goal: the discovery of his ego, the joy of self-knowledge.

  DE VOLUPTATE PSYCHOLOGICA

  Ma véritable passion est celle de connaître et d’éprouver. Elle n’a jamais été satisfaite.

  A worthy citizen, meeting Stendhal at a social function, asked him what profession he practiced. A quizzical smile puckered Henri’s mouth, his little eyes sparkled and glinted impudently, as with assumed modesty he replied: “Je suis observateur du coeur humain.” I
ronical? Of course! The delight in poking fun at a defenseless bourgeois! And yet behind the bantering words there is a considerable morsel of truth, for in very fact Stendhal devoted the best of his energies to the observation of spiritual happenings; nothing else absorbed his interest as did the passion “de voir l’intérieur des cerveaux.” He ranks among the greatest psychologists of all time, among the experts in the topography of the soul, and may be acclaimed the Copernicus of the astronomy of the heart. Nevertheless, Stendhal may well be ironical when he declares that he is a psychologist by profession. For when we speak of “profession,” we imply something to which we devote ourselves entirely, a special and purposive activity. Now Stendhal’s psychological investigations were never purposive or didactic; they were always casual and ambulatory, made for his own amusement as he sauntered along through life. At the risk of appearing over-insistent, I must repeat that one who should ascribe any kind of earnestness in labor, any rigorous precision, any emotional or moral purpose to Stendhal, grossly misjudges his character. Sentiment alone was the motive power of this gossamer-like creature of enjoyment, who had taken as his device: “L’unique affaire de la vie est le plaisir.” He never propounded complicated systems, he never made or observed any rule of life; on the contrary, he was a dilettante in the original sense of the word, a man wholly absorbed in that which brought him pleasure, without aim and without constraint.

  He does not surrender himself to the claims of the work of art with the devotion of a Baudelaire or a Flaubert. When he creates a character, it is the better to enjoy the world, and himself as reflected therein. Similarly, if he goes traveling it is not that he may, like Humboldt, make a careful exploration of the lands he visits; he sets forth in the tourist vein, as a wayfarer enjoying the landscape, the national customs, the women. Again, he is never a psychologist in the professorial sense of the term, he never practices the art of psychology as his main purpose in life, never throws himself into the examination of phenomena with the painful conscientiousness of a Nietzsche or with the distressing remorse of a Tolstoy. Like art, knowledge is for him no more than the cerebral form of enjoyment, and he does not love it as a task but as the most ingenious kind of plaything for the intellect. For this very reason there is always an undertone of joyfulness in every one of his inclinations and pursuits, something spontaneously musical, something jocund and soaring, something buoyant and fiercely avid like a tongue of flame. He must not be compared with the German professor who patiently and laboriously worries his way through to the primeval world, nor with such a keen huntsman as Pascal (or, once more, Nietzsche), who, thirsty and eager, pursued every phenomenon to its lair. Stendhal’s thought process is full of the champagne of life, is a human craving to know, a light and effervescent intoxication of the nerves; it is that genuine and rare kind of inquisitiveness known as voluptas psychologica.

  Few have been more under the spell of this passion for psychological investigation. With all writers of an intellectual bent, it is a master passion; with Stendhal it became almost an obsession. How fine a flair he has for the secrets of the heart, how exhilarating is his psychological insight! Here curiosity, with its sensitive and discerning probe, explores the inner recesses of the heart, and then with subtle lasciviousness extracts the spiritual sap from the living things. His elastic intelligence does not need to come to grips with phenomena; he does not crush them to a pulp in order to fit them to the Procrustes bed of a preconceived system. All his analyses have the unexpected and delightful fragrance of sudden discoveries, the freshness and cheerfulness of chance encounters. In spite of his virile and aristocratic appetite for the chase, he is too proud to pursue the quarry in heat and sweat, to track it down with a pack of arguments till it stands at bay; he is revolted at the unsavory task of disemboweling the facts, and, like a haruspex of old, groping among the entrails of the victims. His sensitive perceptions, his delicate organ of touch, make it unnecessary for him to seize aesthetic values roughly in his grasp. The aroma of things, the pellucid aura of their essence, the ethereal radiance of their spirituality, are enough to inform this epicurean genius as to their meaning, and to disclose to him the mysteries of their inner substance; the tiniest movement causes him to feel, the merest anecdote tears away the veils of history, an aphorism is enough to explain a man. The most elusive and intangible detail, “un raccourci,” the rapidest of glances, opens a way for him into the very core of things. He knows that the observation of these “petits faits vrais” is of supreme importance in the realm of psychology. “Il n’y a d’originalité et de vérité que dans les détails,” says Leuwen the banker; and Stendhal extols the methods of a generation which was “quite rightly, devoted to detail work.” Thus was he foreshadowing our own time, the epoch of those who are no longer content to study psychology upon the foundation of broad and nebulous hypotheses, but minutely examine both the bodily and the spiritual foundations of the mind — investigating the former in the cellular anatomy and physiology of the nervous system, and the latter in the actual workings of the psyche, always with close attention to detail. At the very time when Kant’s disciples together with Schelling, Hegel, e tutti quanti, on the imposing eminence of their professorial platforms, were juggling the world-all into their college caps, this one man, Stendhal, spurred forward by his autoeroticism, had, by a brilliant flash of insight, come to the realization that the day of huge philosophical dreadnoughts, of giant systems, was over and done with.

  How tremendously Stendhal is in advance of his contemporaries! He outstrips all the psychologists of his day, simply because his mind is not loaded with a mass of ready-made hypotheses; he is a franc-tireur who has no wish to conquer or to subjugate: “je ne blâme ni approuve, j’observe”; he is one who pursues knowledge for the fun of the thing, for his own personal gratification. Like Novalis, his spiritual brother, he cares to catch only the “pollen-grains” of knowledge, chance-blown, wafted to him by the breeze, but instinct with the innermost meaning of the organic world, reproductive elements, tiny germs charged with invincible potentialities. Only in the scrutiny of the infinitesimally small, in the observation of the fleeting moment when feeling begins, does Stendhal sense the intimate conjunction of body and soul which scholars have named “the enigma of the world.”

  Thus it is that at the first approach his psychology appears to be no more than a petty art, a play with subtleties. In his novels and elsewhere, Stendhal’s discoveries, his opinions and outlooks, seem to do no more than “effleurer les choses”; nevertheless he is convinced that an exact observation, be it never so insignificant, is of far greater value to the understanding of the world of feeling than any theory. “Le coeur se fait moins sentir que comprendre.” Just as an attack of fever can be registered by the tiny movements of mercury in a clinical thermometer, so must one be able to read the mutations of the soul as they find expression in the most inconspicuous symptoms. Psychology has no trustworthy means of penetrating into the dark abysses, except the utilization of these chance revelations of the feelings. “Il n’y a de sûrement vrai que les sensations.” One need but devote a lifetime to the contemplation of five or six ideas, and already certain laws begin to take shape (nothing dictatorial of course, only of interest to the individual); and these laws assume an aspect of a spiritual orderliness, whose comprehension or mere foreshadowing is the joy and the passion of every genuine psychologist.

  Innumerable are the minute and helpful observations we owe to Stendhal; they are concise and unique discoveries which have, since his day, become axiomatic; indeed, they form the starting point of any serious investigation of the emotional and intellectual world. Stendhal himself lays no store by his discoveries. He throws his coruscating ideas on paper higgledy-piggledy without a thought of expounding them systematically. These fertile seeds are strewn with a lavish hand in his letters and diaries and novels, scattered haphazard at the moment they are found, and left to be discovered as fate decrees. His whole psychological output is contained in from ten to twenty d
ozen sentences and in his novels. He rarely gives himself the trouble to collect them, to order them consecutively, to round them into a theoretical whole. Even the monograph on love is nothing more than a pot-pourri of fragments, sentences, and anecdotes. He does not call his treatise “L’amour,” but, treading warily, christens it “De l’amour.” He deduces no more than the sketchiest of principles whereon to found his ideas, dividing love into “amour-passion,” “amour-physique,” “amour-goût,” and so forth. Or he roughs in a theory concerning love’s coming and its disappearance, a pencil sketch (in very fact, he wrote his book in pencil). He confines himself to hints, to suppositions, to noncommittal hypotheses, which he intersperses with amusing anecdotes — for Stendhal had no wish to pose as a profound intelligence, as one who thinks matters out to their logical conclusion, as one who presumes to do the thinking for others; he never follows up a chance discovery.