Egoists, A Book of Supermen. James Huneker
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the Stendhal cult is growing, thanks to Arthur Schurig, L. Spach, and Friedrick von Oppeln-Bronikowski.
It has been mistaken criticism to range Beyle as only a "literary" man. He despised the profession of literature, remarking that he wrote as one smokes a cigar. His diaries and letters, the testimony of his biographer, Colomb, and his friend Mérimée, betray this pose—a greater poser and mystificateur it would be difficult to find. He laboured like a slave over his material, and if he affected to take the Civil Code as his model of style it nettled him, nevertheless, when anyone decried his prose. His friend Jacquemont spoke of his detestable style of a grocer; Balzac called him to account for his carelessness. Flattered, astounded, as was Stendhal by the panegyric of Balzac, his letter of thanks shows that the reproof cut deeply. He abused Chateaubriand, Madame de Staël, and George Sand for their highly coloured imagery and flowing manner. He even jeered at Balzac, saying that if he—Beyle—had written "It snows in my heart," or some such romantic figure, Balzac would then have praised his style.
Thanks to the labours of Casimir Stryienski and his colleagues, we may study the different drafts Stendhal made of his novels. He seldom improved by recasting. The truth is that his dry, naked method of narration, despite its clumsiness, despite the absence of plan, is excellently adapted to the expression of his ideas. He is a psychologue. He deals with soul-stuff. An eighteenth-century man in his general ideas and feelings, he followed the seventeenth century and Montesquieu; he derives from Montaigne and Chamfort, and his philosophy is coloured by a study of Condillac, Hobbes, Helvétius, Cabanis, Destutt Tracy, and Machiavelli. He is a descendant of Diderot and the Encyclopædists, a philosophe of the salons, a petit maître, a materialist for whom nothing exists but his ideas and sensations. A French epicurean, his pendulum swings between love and war—the adoration of energy and the adoration of pleasure. What complicates his problem is the mixture of warrior and psychologist. That the man who followed Napoleon through several of his campaigns, serving successfully as a practical commissary and fighter, should have been an adorer of women, was less strange than that he should have proved to be the possessor of such vibrating sensibility. Jules Lemaitre sees him as "a grand man of action paralysed little by little because of his incomparable analysis." Yet he never betrayed unreadiness when confronted by peril. He read Voltaire and Plato during the burning of Moscow—which he described as a beautiful spectacle—and he never failed to present himself before his kinsman and patron, Marshal Daru, with a clean-shaved face, even when the Grand Army was a mass of stragglers.
"You are a man of heart," said Daru, Frenchman in that phrase. When Napoleon demanded five millions of francs from a German province, Stendhal—who adopted this pen-name from the archæologist Winckelmann's birthplace, a Prussian town—raised seven millions and was in consequence execrated by the people. Napoleon asked on receiving the money the name of the agent, adding, "c'est bien!" We are constrained to believe Mérimée's assertion that Stendhal was the soul of honour, and incapable of baseness, after this proof. At a time when plunder was the order of the day's doings, the poor young aide-de-camp could have pocketed with ease at least a million of the excess tax. He did not do this, nor did he, in his letters or memoirs, betray any remorse for his honesty.
Sainte-Beuve said that Beyle was the dupe of his fear of being duped. This was confirmed by Mérimée in the concise little study prefixed to the Correspondence. It is doubtful if these two men were drawn to each other save by a certain contemptuous way of viewing mankind. Stendhal was the more sentimental of the pair; he frequently reproached Mérimée for his cold heart. He had also a greater sense of humour. That each distrusted the other is not to be denied. Augustin Filon, in his brochure on Mérimée, said that "the influence exercised by Stendhal on Mérimée during the decisive years in which his literary eclecticism was formed, was considerable, even more than Mérimée himself was aware." But the author of Carmen was a much finer artist. The Danish critic, Georg Brandes, has described Beyle's relation to Balzac as "that of the reflective to the observant mind; of the thinker in art to the seer. We see into the hearts of Balzac's characters, into the 'dark-red mill of passion' which is the motive force of their action; Beyle's characters receive their impulse from the head, the 'open light-and-sound chamber'; the reason being that Beyle was a logician, and Balzac a man of an effusively rich animal nature. Beyle stands to Victor Hugo in much the same position as Leonardo da Vinci to Michaelangelo. Hugo's plastic imagination creates a supernaturally colossal and muscular humanity fixed in an eternal attitude of struggle and suffering; Beyle's mysterious, complicated, refined intellect produces a small series of male and female portraits, which exercise an almost magic fascination on us with their far-away, enigmatic expressions, and their sweet, wicked smile. Beyle is the metaphysician among the French authors of his day, as Leonardo was the metaphysician among the great painters of the Renaissance."
According to Bourget, Beyle's advent into letters marked the "tragic dawn of pessimism." But is it precise to call him a pessimist? He was of too vigorous a temper, too healthy in body, to be classed with the decadents. His was the soul of a sixteenth-century Italian, one who had read and practised the cheerful scepticism of Montaigne. As he served bravely when a soldier, so, stout and subtle in after life, he waged war with the blue devils—his chief foe. Disease weakened his physique, weakened his mentality, yet he fought life to its dull end. He was pursued by the secret police, and this led him to all sorts of comical disguises and pseudonyms. And to the last he experienced a childish delight in the invention of odd names for himself.
Félix Fénéon, in speaking of Arthur Rimbaud, asserted that his work was, perhaps, "outside of literature." This, with some modification, may be said of Beyle. His stories are always interesting; they may ramble and halt, digress and wander into strange places; but the psychologic vision of the writer never weakens. His chief concern is the mind or soul of his characters. He hitches his kite to earth, yet there is the paper air-ship floating above you, lending a touch of the ideal to his most matter-of-fact tales. He uses both the microscope and scalpel. He writes, as has been too often said, indifferently; his formal sense is nearly nil; much of his art criticism mere gossip; he has little feeling for colour; yet he describes a soul and its manifold movements in precise terms, and while he is at furthest remove from symbolism, he often has an irritating spiritual suggestiveness. The analogue here to plastic art—he, the least plastic of writers—is unescapable. Stendhal, whatever else he may be, is an incomparable etcher of character. His acid phrases "bite" his arbitrary lines deeply; the sharp contrasts of black and white enable him to portray, without the fiery-hued rhetoric of either Chateaubriand or Hugo, the finest split shades of thought and emotion. Never colour, only nuance—and the slash and sweep of a drastic imagination.
He was an inveterate illusionist in all that concerned himself; even with himself he was not always sincere—and he usually wrote of himself. His many books are a masquerade behind which one discerns the posture of the mocker, the sensibility of a reversed idealist, and the spirit of a bitter analyst. This sensibility must not be confounded with the sensibilité of a Maurice de Guérin. Rather it is the morbid sensitiveness of a Swift combined with an unusual receptivity to sentimental and artistic impressions. Professor Walter Raleigh thus, describes the sensibility of those times: "The sensibility that came into vogue during the eighteenth century was of a finer grain than its modern counterpart. It studied delicacy, and sought a cultivated enjoyment in evanescent shades of feeling, and the fantasies of unsubstantial grief." Vanity ruled in Stendhal. Who shall say how much his unyielding spirit suffered because of his poverty, his enormous ambitions? His motto might have been: Blessed are the proud of spirit, for they shall inherit the Kingdom of Earth. He wrote in 1819: "I have had three passions in my life. Ambition—1800–1811; love for a woman who deceived me, 1811–1818; and in 1818 a new passion." But then he was ever on the verge of a new passion, ever deceived—at least he believed himself to be—and he, the fearless theoretician of passion, often was, he has admitted, in practice the timid amateur. He planned the attack upon a woman's heart as a general plans the taking of an enemy's citadel. He wrote L'Amour for himself. He defined the rules of the game, but shivered when he saw the battle-field. Magnificent he was in precept, though not always in action. He was for this reason never blasé, despite continual grumblings over his ennui. In his later years at Cività Vecchia he yearned for companionship like a girl, and, a despiser of Paris and the Parisians, he suffered from the nostalgia of the boulevard. He adored