Adepts in Self-Portraiture

by Stefan Zweig

  The solid work of application, of sifting, of building up, is nonchalantly left by this tourist in the Europe of the soul to the draymen and the billstickers of psychology, to those who are fond of labor; and, indeed, a whole generation of Frenchmen has elaborated the themes to which he had so lightheartedly improvised the preludes. Dozens of psychological novels have been written around his famous theory of the crystallization of love, a theory which compares the awakening of love to the sudden appearance of crystals in a supersaturated solution when certain appropriate physical conditions are supplied (“le rameau de Salzbourg”). Again, Stendhal’s casual reference to the influence exercised by race and environment upon the development of the artist gave Taine the clue for his ponderous hypothesis and was the foundation of his philosophical celebrity. Stendhal, however, the incurable do-nothing, the genius of improvisation, never develops his psychological discoveries beyond the fragmentary stage; he contents himself with voicing them in aphorisms, thus following in the footsteps of his predecessors, Pascal, Chamfort, La Rochefoucauld, and Vauvenargues. He does not trouble to find out whether others have forestalled him, any more than he considers the possibility of his successors plagiarizing from himself: he just thinks and observes as naturally, with as little effort, as he breathes and speaks and writes. The idea of founding a school, of proselytizing, of having disciples, never crossed his mind: scrutinizing and again scrutinizing, cogitating and again cogitating, this was joy enough for him. Thinking, like all the other elementary human activities, was for him a simple pleasure, to be lavishly enjoyed.

  Stendhal owes his supreme position as a psychologist to the fact that he practices the science as an art and not as a profession. Like Nietzsche, he is not only a bold thinker, but at times a most charmingly impudent one; he is strong enough and audacious enough to play with truth, and to love knowledge with a devotion bordering on the voluptuous. For Stendhal’s intelligence is not merely the product of his brain, but is interpenetrated with the vital substances of his whole being. Warm-blooded sensuousness, the spice of irony, the acerbity of bitter experience, and a pungent mischievousness, all go to the composition of his intelligence; one is conscious of the presence of a soul which has sunned itself in the light of many heavens, has drunk of the winds from many worlds; of a being who has absorbed all the wealth of a universe and yet, even at fifty years of age, is not filled to satiety, but is still eager for more. He is overflowing with vitality, effervescent and sparkling like champagne; and yet his aphoristic sayings are no more than the bubbles at the brim. The rarest treasures are carefully guarded within the goblet which is himself, and which death alone can shatter.

  His psychology has none of the precision which is the asset of a well-tutored brain; it is the concentrated essence of an existence, the thought substance of a veritable man. It is this which makes his truths appear so truthful; his insight so penetrating; his cognitions so universally applicable, and, above all, so unique and so enduring. No amount of intellectual assiduity in thinking can grasp the living reality with such sensuous comprehensiveness as can the spontaneous delight in thinking, the untroubled mental audacity of a sovereign nature. The purposeful becomes petrified in the purpose, the temporal in the time. Ideas and theories are like the shades in the Hades of Homer. They are nothing more than empty reflection until they have drunk the blood of men. Then they acquire voice and form; then they are able to converse with men.

  SELF-PORTRAITURE

  Qu’ai-je été? Que suis-je? Je serais bien embarrassé de le dire.

  Stendhal was his own master in the art of self-portraiture. And what a consummate artist he was in this field! He once said: “Pour connaître l’homme il suffit de s’étudier soi-même: pour connaître les hommes il faut les pratiquer.” To which he hastened to add that he knew men only from books and had never studied anyone except himself. Stendhal invariably took himself as starting point for his psychological investigations; and his conclusions returned upon himself. But the path encircling this one individual takes him around an orbit embracing the whole expanse of the human psyche.

  In earliest childhood he made his preliminary essays in the art of self-observation. The premature death of his dearly loved mother left the little boy forlorn in a hostile and alien world. He had to conceal and deny the impulses of his heart, thus acquiring early in life “the slave’s art” of lying. Crouching in a corner, silent, reserved, he would eye these rough and bigoted provincials among whom he seemed to be a fish out of water; he would take stock of his father, his aunt, his tutor, his tormentors, those placed in authority over him, and hatred would sharpen his faculties of perception. Loneliness invariably makes a man more observant of himself and others. Thus already as a child he schooled himself to attention, to act the detective; he cultivated all the wiles of the subjugated, all the “slavish tricks” of the dependant who is forever trying to slip through the meshes of the net which has captured him; he sought out people’s weaknesses in order to profit by them; in a word he became an adept in psychology because he was misunderstood and because he needed a shield for his own protection.

  His second course in psychology lasted till the end of his life. Love and women were his training college. Stendhal is the last to hide the melancholy fact that he was no hero as a lover, no conqueror; least of all a Don Juan, whose mantle he would like to have assumed. Mérimée tells us that, as far as he knew, Stendhal was always in love, and, unfortunately, nearly always unhappy in his passion. “Mon attitude générale était celle d’un amant malheureux,” he admits, and goes on to say that few officers in Napoleon’s army had possessed so small a number of women as he. Yet he had inherited from his parents, from his broad-shouldered father and his warm-blooded mother, a goodly store of sensuality, “un tempérament de feu,” and women were a perpetual fascination to him. He once asked a comrade how best he could proceed in order to win a woman’s love. “Ayez-la d’abord,” was the answer. But how, he asked himself, can one be sure that she is “haveable”? He was at pains to carry about his person an infallible prescription as to how to overcome a woman’s “virtue,” a document furnished him by a brother officer. All these devices notwithstanding, Stendhal throughout life cut a sorry figure as a lover. At home, comfortably ensconced at his writing table, far from the field of operations, this typical example of the anticipator in enjoyment excelled in the art of erotic strategy, “loin d’elle il a l’audace et jure de tout oser”: in his diary he makes notes of the exact hour when the lady who happens to be his goddess at the moment will yield to his advances; “in two days I could have her,” he writes in English. But as soon as he is in the beloved one’s presence, the would-be Casanova becomes as bashful as a schoolboy; every sortie ends, as he himself declares, in the discomfiture of the man to whose advances the lady is on the point of surrendering.

  At the most inopportune moments his timidity would stem the tide of his finest ardors; he would become “timide et sot” just when his gallantry should have been at its most active; or he would be cynical when the circumstances demanded tenderness, sentimental when he should have attacked with decision; in a word, he muffed the most admirable opportunities by over-calculation and undue constraint. The excessive delicacy of his feelings caused him to be awkward; he was so anxious lest he should appear sentimental, “d’être dupe,” that he hid his tenderness “sous le manteau de hussard.” Hence his frequent “fiascos” in his relations with women, mishaps which were the secret bane of his life. Stendhal longed for nothing so much as for a tangible success in the lists of love: “L’amour a toujours été pour moi la plus grande des affaires ou plutôt la seule.” For no philosopher, for no poet, not even for Napoleon himself, did he betray so much respect as for his uncle Gagnon and his cousin Martial Daru both of whom had enjoyed the embraces of countless women without being at pains to make use of any psychological refinements. Indeed, their successes were probably due precisely to the absence of such devices. Gradually Stendhal comes to the conclusion that nothing
militates so positively against one who ought to be the conquering male in his relations with womankind as an excess of feeling. He declares that the less trouble a man takes, the more he assumes a nonchalant attitude, as though a mere game of billiards were at stake, the more likely is he to be successful in winning a woman’s love. But he himself, he tells us, has “trop de sensibilité pour avoir jamais le talent de Lovelace.” He would far rather have been a seducer than the poet and artist and civil servant he actually was.

  Stendhal is obsessed by his own inferiority as a Don Juan; no other problem so completely occupies his thoughts. And it is to his persistent work in the anatomizing of his own eroticism that we owe so penetrating an insight into the minutest tracery of his sensations. He himself admits that it was his frequent disasters in his love life that aroused his interest in psychological investigation. Had things been otherwise, he would never have been forced to observe the feminine psyche as he did, he would never have stopped to examine the finest and most tender emanations from a woman’s soul. Women taught Stendhal to test himself, and thus he became the accomplished psychologist he was.

  There was a special reason why Stendhal began the task of self-portraiture so early — he had a capricious, an unreliable memory. He was ever pencil in hand scribbling his notes on the margins of books, on scraps of paper, on letters; above all, he recorded his thoughts in his diary. The fear lest he should forget some important experience and thus lose a link in the continuity of his life led him to fix each stir of the feelings, each event, on paper, the moment he had experienced it. In a moving letter to the Comtesse Curial, a letter written with tears and blood, he notes the date when the relationship began and when it ended, the record being made with the cool precision of an entry in an official register. He inscribes the exact hour when Angela Pietragrua at length yields to his embraces. He exercises the same exactitude in recording his most intimate spiritual experiences, as he does when jotting down the number of francs he spends on food, on books, or in paying his washerwoman. He is perpetually making notes. Sometimes it would seem that he begins to think only when the pencil is between his fingers. To this restless graphomania we owe from sixty to seventy volumes of self-portraiture embodied in all kinds of imaginative works, in letters, and in anecdotes. Even today scarcely half of what Stendhal wrote has been published. He is not urged to so much scribbling by any exhibitionist trend; his impulse is, rather, an egoistical anxiety lest one single drop of the substance that is Stendhal, a substance which has never existed before and will never be created again, should be lost in the sands of his unretentive memory. It is this anxiety which we have to thank for the fact that so much of Stendhal has been preserved for us.

  Like everything else in his make-up, Stendhal analyzes the unretentive quality of his memory with admirable lucidity. First of all, he recognizes that he is egotistical and lets everything slip away which does not directly concern himself. “Je manque absolument de mémoire pour ce qui ne m’intéresse pas.” We therefore find few records of events happening outside the realm of the spirit, hardly any dates, or figures, or facts, or places; all the details of important historical occurrences completely pass out of his mind; even the meeting with such celebrated people as Byron and Rossini fades from his mind; he adds to his memories of objective facts or alters them with willful or unwitting fabrications, and, far from trying to conceal this defect, he acknowledges it frankly: “Je n’ai de prétention à la véracité qu’en ce qui touche mes sentiments.” In one place he protests that he has no intention “de peindre les choses en elles-mêmes, mais seulement leur effet sur moi.” Nothing more clearly shows that for Stendhal “les choses en elles-mêmes” have no existence except in so far as they influence the movements of his own soul. But when outside events exercise such an influence they react upon him with the utmost rapidity and incisiveness. Thus we find that the man who is uncertain whether or not he actually talked with Napoleon, who does not know to what extent his “memories” of the Great Saint Bernard pass are really derived from an engraving, this same man will remember with the utmost precision the passing gesture of a woman, a tone of voice, a movement, because he himself was stirred by the event. Where his feelings have not been implicated, his memories are clouded, so that whole decades of his life are hidden to us. Curiously enough the same thing happens when he has felt too intensely, as for instance during the passage over the Saint Bernard, on his first journey to Paris, in his first night of love. He often remarks that he has no remembrance of such and such a thing because the emotion he felt was “trop véhément.” Excess of feeling shatters Stendhal’s impression as an explosion shatters a bottle.

  Thus remembrance, in Stendhal, can flower only when the humus of the heart is watered with emotional excitement, and yet it cannot flower if the heart is submerged in too impetuous and stormy a flood. Outside the sphere of the feelings, his memory is not to be trusted, and his artistry suffers likewise: “Je ne retiens que ce qui est peinture humaine. Hors de là je suis nul.” The impression must be a spiritual one if Stendhal is to retain it. As an egocentric self-portraitist, he never wishes to pose as an eyewitness of world-happenings, for he knows that he cannot re-think events; he can only re-feel them. He reconstructs the course of his life by following the devious ways taken by the reflexes of his mind, never by the direct process of conscious re-memorization; “il invente sa vie”; he remembers, not facts, but feelings, and out of his memory of the feelings he conjures up his facts. His self-portraiture thus approximates to the novel, just as his novels approximate to autobiography. In many places, his works are what may be paradoxically termed “fictional reality.”

  Stendhal’s reminiscences are, therefore, only reliable insofar as detail is concerned; one must not expect from him any such comprehensive picture as the one given by Goethe in Dichtung und Wahrheit. Even as autobiographer, Stendhal remained true to himself, an impressionist, recording in fragmentary form day-to-day observations, jotting down his lightning flashes of insight, assiduously keeping his records decade after decade — of course for his own use alone, “un tel journal n’est fait que pour celui qui l’écrit.” And yet — for he remains true to himself — ambiguities, roundabout methods, complexities abound. We know that he writes for a duplex-self; for the writer-self, the self-enjoying ego of 1801, and likewise for the Stendhal of a later day for whose satisfaction he is at pains to depict and to elucidate his life: “Ce journal est fait pour Henri s’il vit encore en 1821. Je n’ai pas envie de lui donner occasion de rire aux dépens de celui qui vit aujourd’hui.” The impulse “de se perfectionner dans l’art de connaître et d’émouvoir l’homme,” is already at work in the lad of nineteen. We see him at that tender age postulating a shrewder personality than the present one, a “Henri plus méfiant,” a later and colder Beyle endowed with more sobriety than the youth. He fancies these “mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de ma vie” laid before the fully adult being, for control, and for practical use by that adult. It is almost as if the stripling realized that the fully grown man would eagerly desire the elements necessary for the construction of an integral portrait of himself.

  Here, then, we are presented with another side of Stendhal’s genius: his clairvoyant preparation of himself for his later self. He fixes the photograph of himself insofar as he gives fixity to the minutiae, to the “petits faits vrais” — tiny grains of sand which life will place in the hourglass of the mature man. Jot down the smallest of experiences at the moment when they are warm and throbbing like a bird in the captor’s hand; never rely on the memory, that untrustworthy stream which contorts and submerges everything in its current; never feel shy of recording the most trifling incidents! Who knows but what the adult man may find the greatest pleasure precisely in the trifles which welled up from his heart of long ago? It was, therefore, with instinctive genius that young Beyle set himself to write his diary, for it is from this youthful record that Stendhal was later to cull the material for his autobiographical romance Henri Brulard
, an elderly man’s wonderful survey of the years of childhood and youth.

  We see him in Rome, seated on the steps of San Pietro in Montorio, an aging man musing over his life’s course. In a month or two he will be fifty. Gone forever the days of his youth, women, love. It is well to ask oneself: “Qu’ai-je-été? Que suis-je? Qu’ai-je donc été?” The time for heart searchings that should fit a man for adventure and for exaltation is past. Now it is seemly to look back over the road already traveled, and not forward into the unknown. That same night, returning home from a party at the ambassador’s, a party where he had found nothing but boredom (seeing that women could no longer be won, and desultory conversation irked him), he suddenly made up his mind. “Je devrais écrire ma vie, je saurais peut-être enfin, quand cela sera fini, dans deux ou trois ans, ce que j’ai été, gai ou triste, homme d’esprit ou sot, homme de courage ou peureux, et enfin au total heureux ou malheureux.” The premonition of the boy becomes a reality for the man, and Stendhal writes a consecutive story of his life, thus coming to a full knowledge of himself by means of an integral description of himself.