To begin with, that was not his name, Stendhal being
merely the most publicly acknowledged of the 171 pseudonyms he used for
purposes of largely unnecessary deception.
This odd creature – he was christened Marie-Henri Beyle – led two simultaneous
lives: one chronological, one posthumous. The seeming paradox is characteristic
of him in general.
Stendhal’s chronological existence extended from 1783, when he was born in Grenoble,
to 1842, when he died in Paris. We know a great deal about him, for he set down
his thoughts and actions in exhaustive detail, scribbling on his fingernails
when paper was unavailable. The record is interesting but hardly spectacular:
Hollywood will never base a film on his life.
His outward career may be described as a succession of almosts. A fairly good
mathematician, he almost entered the Ecole Polytechnique but found the
preparation for the entrance examination too troublesome. Through his
influential cousin Pierre Daru ( whose wife he seduced, almost) he obtained a
commission in Napoleon’s army. During the second Italian campaign he almost saw
combat. Back in Paris, living on money from his hated father, he almost wrote
several plays. In Marseilles he almost became a businessman. During the Russian
campaign, serving as a non –combatant officer, he almost succeeded in mildly
distinguishing himself.
From 1814 to 1821 he lived in his beloved Italy but did not quite manage to
succeed even as an expatriate. Suspected of liberal tendencies by the Austrian
police, he decamped to Paris. In 1830 he was appointed French consul at
Civita-Vecchia. This minor post he almost contrived to fill adequately, except
during his many periods of leave. (Stendal was a great success at wrangling
vacations.) In 1841 he returned to Paris on legitimate sick leave and on March
22, 1842 died of a stroke.
During his lifetime he almost gained a high reputation as a wit, lover, and
writer. But not quite. His writing career was managed with almost infallible
negligence. He never published anything under his own name; much of his work
remained in manuscript at his death; some of it is still unpublished. His many
books, articles, compilations netting him hardly a pittance. Today his fame
rests largely on his novels, but his first one, Armance, did not appear until he was forty-four; The Red and the Black until he was
forty-seven; and The Charterhouse of
Parma (written in fifty-three days and it shows it) until three years
before his death.
Stendhal was a smallest, fattish man, fond of dandical costume, conversation,
ladies, and almost-ladies. He pursued his many love affairs as if never quite
certain whether he were Casanova making conquests or a psychologist making
notes. As Casanova he was not always successful. His diaries record his fiascos
with the same detail that others devote to an account of their triumphs. He
admired and visited England and in the course of several decades of assiduous
study almost succeeded in mastering the language to the degree that a
second-year American high school student masters French.
At first glance, then, a rather undistinguished figure, a rather
undistinguished life.
But this figure was merely the one presented to the world. This life was merely
his chronological life. His real life was posthumous, and a complete triumph.
By posthumous I do not mean merely that since his death his reputation has
steadily grown, so that today his is one of the half-dozen greatest names in
the development of the European novel. I mean that in a real sense he himself
live posthumously, that is, in the future. The greater part of his imaginative
life was enacted in front of an audience he was never to encounter, those
‘happy few’ of the coming generations for whom he wrote and thought.
The life for which he was unfitted – that of a would-be popular playwright,
soldier, businessman, civil servant- he loved unsuccessfully. The life for
which he was fitted – that spent grasping the history of his time in terms of
the perspective of the future – he lived successfully. Thus Stendhal is
something of an oddity. Perhaps part of his fascination for us springs from the
fact that he was odd without being minor.
We usually think of a contemplative as one who spends his life in a meditation
upon God, Stendhal spent is life, an active and worldly one, in meditation upon
men. He was that rare bird, a lay
contemplative. In a period during which all men seemed to be scrabbling for ‘careers’
– that is, money- Stendhal too went through the motions of scrabbing, though he
never sought a job if a sinecure was available. Essentially, however, he
remained that oddity, an unfixed man, attached only to his own thought. ‘I am
but a passenger on this boat,’ he loved to say; and, as his epitaph, suggested Visse, amo, scrisse.[ I
have seen, I love, I have written.]
As a young man of twenty-eight he chose nosce
te ipsum[ know thy self] as his device; and to know himself was his
profession. His whole life resembled one of those Grand Tours taken by the
young English milords to acquaint them with human nature. To be ‘an observer of
the human heart’ and to portray it was his overarching ambition. One way to
portray it, he thought, was through ‘egotism provided it be sincere.’ This is
one of the basic principles of Beyist philosophy, if we understand by egotism
what is today called introspection. The medium of his egotism was his books. In
a sense all of them, even the novels, are part of an interminable, formless
diary. Everything he wrote contributed to his self-analysis; he remained
throughout his life, as someone has remarked about Henry James, on very good
terms with himself. Had he had any religion , his work might have been entitled
Spiritual Exercises.
Contemplation plus self-contemplation sum up Stendhal’s real life. Emerson put
it this way: ‘Living is what a man thinks about all day.’ Stendhal neither
worked nor idled. He thought all day.
He thought almost for thought’s sake. It was for him a metaphysical necessity:
‘If am not clear, my whole universe crumbles into nothingness.’ He believed
that the mind could be formed and developed by study and will power. At times
he sounds almost like Dale Carnegie with
genius: ‘The Abbe Helie has swift and complete transitions. That’s very good
and should be imitated.’ As one would expect, he thought there was a ‘logic of
happiness,’ and tried all his life to refine his formulas.
But this was only one side of Stendhal, the part he called ‘logique,’ a word he
was fond of intoning with a kind of ecclesiastical preciseness. Stendhal was
bipolar: part of him went back to Descartes and the rationality of the
Eighteenth Century; part of him had an affinity with the romanticism of the
early part of his own century. The interplay of forces between these poles
created the tension that made Stendhal an artist as well as an observer; and it
is this same interplay that he transfers to the hero of The Red and the Black, who is both an icy intellectual and a furious
romantic. In Stendhal the bipolarity extended into almost every field. For
example, he thought of himself as a champion of the democratic age to come; yet
the whole bias of his temperament is aristocratic: He championed the
spontaneity of Shakespeare against the frigidity of Racine; but his psychology,
when it is not dazzlingly modern, is far more Racinian than Shakespearean. He
combined a passion for exact analysis with a delight in the unexpected – l'imprévu is one of his favorite words.
Volumes have been written about the contradictions in Stendhal’s personality,
contradictions which, instead of tearing him apart, generated his whole
intellectual life and career. What I here stress is the essential, underlying
contradiction, that between what was present-minded in Stendhal, his unusual
capacity to enjoy, analyze, and enjoy through analysis his day-today
experience; and what was future-minded, his equally unusual capacity to think of
himself constantly a citizen of a culture still in time’s womb.
The interesting thing about Stendhal is not that he has been re-discovered by
every generation since his death, but that he foresaw that discovery with
absolute clairvoyance. He seems to have felt, and not out of the simple vanity
that afflicts many unsuccessful scribblers, that he was a writer with a
brilliant future. In the 1830s he was already a great novelist, but there were
few to recognize the fact. ‘ I shall be understood about 1880,’ he remarked
casually, and that turned out to be true. Again he said, ‘I have drawn a
lottery ticket whose winning number is: to be read in 1935’; and that has also
turned out to be true. This prescience derived not from his espagnolisme, his passionate
temperament, but from his logique. He
based his claim to the attention of the future not on his sense of the absolute
value of his work (as Shakespeare does or Horace), but on his clear insight
into the form that future would take, a form for which he knew his special
genius had a lively affinity.
Again and again, notably in his diaries, he makes statements about society
which he prophesies will be commonplaces ‘in the days to come when my babblings
may perhaps be heard.’ His sense of the future was sharpened by his effortless
ability to see through his own time. In a way his ‘century in which everything
can be bought’ bored him, so that almost in self-defense his active
intelligence went to work on the less transparent problems of the future. Like
Julien Sorel, he felt deeply at odds with his period. As early as 1803 we find
him saying, ‘In the present order of society lofty souls must nearly always be
unhappy.’ As a vey young man he had already marked out for himself his
non-contemporary role: ‘I must go entirely out of my century and consider
myself to be beneath the eyes of the great men of the century of Louis XIV. I
must always work for the twentieth century.’
One must however distinguish his outsiderism from the Weltschmerz of Werther and other romantic heroes. It sprang not
from a deficiency but from an excess of mind. There is no self-pity in
Stendhal. Though he rejected most of the dominant moral and political doctrines
of his time, he did not feel aggrieved, much less revengeful. ‘I do not believe
that society owes me anything in the least.’ Stendhal would be as scornful of
our Welfare State as he was of the bourgeois monarchy of Louis-Philippe. All he
really wanted from his time was the leisure and opportunity to study it, and these
were granted to him.
His study was unsystematic, for Stendhal’s scholarship was slipshod, and though
he possessed a high energy his organizational
abilities were limited. But he had a certain power of divination,
difficult to explain; and, by actually rubbing elbows with a great variety of
men and women he derived insights often denied to the most profound student of
history. Thus in 1826 he was able to quite casually to set a date for the Italian struggle for
unification. He chose 1845, which is near enough. His clairvoyance extended
even to relatively trivial matters: ‘What,’ he once speculated, ‘will become of
the capital invested in the railroads if a carriage is invented that can run on
ordinary roads?’ He doesn’t hedge on his prophesies: in 1813, when
Chateaubriand was a much the rage as Faulkner is today, he remarked bluntly,
‘In 1913 people will not longer be concerned with his writings.” Like most of
his predictions, that one came true right on time.
Like Tocqueville, he is a Great Ancestor; that is, we are continually tracing
back to him the origin, or at least the first energetic formulation, of many of
our commonly received ideas and art forms. The psychological novel, for
example, can claim a number of rather misty grandfathers, Diderot and Sterne
and Richardson among them; but its father, as we shall see when we discuss The Red and the Black, would appear to
be Stendhal.
Stendhal’s heroes anticipate Nietzsche’s superman. They anticipate Dostoevsky’s
too, even though their struggle is with men, whereas Myshkins and Raskolnikovs
engage God.
The idea of therapy by confession is as old a recorded history, but it is
developed consciously in Stendhal’s half-absurd, half-brilliant On Love.
In his novels Stendhal lays down the main lines of at least a dozen motifs
which have engrossed novelists since his day: the revolt from the village, the
struggle against the father, the sense of social inferiority, the position of
the intellectual, the declassed man, the realistic description of war,
emotional ambivalence, the non-party revolutionary.
His formula – ‘A novel is a mirror carried along a road’- contains the seed of
Zola and the naturalistic school. It would be difficult to believe that Flaubert
and Proust did not learn from him. Just because he constantly wrote against the
grain of the novels of his time, he engendered a thousand novels of a future
time. Novels of physical description, costume fiction, the triumphant romances
of Scott – these dominated his era. He was bored with them, not necessarily
because they were bad ( some were first-rate of their kind) but because he felt
in his bones that they had no future. And so it was not until he was forty-four
that he started his first novel Armance,
anticipating by thirty years the victory ( Flaubert’s’ Madame Bovary) of psychological realism.
A whole book could easily be written about any one of a dozen aspects of Stendhal’s
mind, so rich it is, so various, so free. For three reasons I have chosen to
stress mainly its future-ranging character. First, it happens to interest me.
Second, it is what gives Stendhal his extraordinary contemporaneity: he is not merely a live
classic but, if one ignores the trivial fact that he is dead, a classic of our
own day. Third, it is singled out again and again by Stendhal’s peers, by men
with minds proportioned to Stendhal’s own mind. It was Nietzsche who called him
‘that remarkable anticipatory and forerunning
man who with Napoleonic tempo traversed his Europe, in fact several centuries
of the European soul, as a . .
.discoverer thereof.’ His own contemporary Balzac was one of the few who
understood at once what Stendhal was up to
and distinguished him from his rivals as ‘one of the most eminent
masters of the literature of ideas.’ And it was Paul Valery who summed it up: ‘We
should never be finished with Stendhal. I can think of no greater praise than
that.’
Bantam Books 1958
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifton_Fadiman
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