The First of the Moderns
I
WHEN Henri-Marie Beyle, aged fifty-nine, died in 1842, he had published, under the assumed name of Stendhal, a dozen or so unsuccessful books and had been a familiar, though hardly a popular, figure of the literary salons of Paris. He had few friends, many enemies, and the reputation of a pretentious and troublesome dilettante, a too-clever coiner of unimportant paradoxes, a poseur and crank, a kind of self-made sphinx whose secret was that it had none worth bothering about. To the general public he was practically unknown, and his scanty obituary notices in the Paris dailies misspelled his name.
Snubbed by his own age, he sought comfort in making, as one of his biographers puts it, a rendezvous with posterity. He said that he would be understood in 1880; he called his literary work a lottery, the prize of which was: to be read in 1935. It is the usual dodge of the rebutted artist. What makes Stendhal’s case exceptional is that for once the dodge worked. Posterity kept the tryst; what is more, it was strictly on time. In 1830 his chief novel, Lc Rouge et le Noir, was denounced as crazy, dull, and immoral, a worthless shocker unfit to be read by ladies. Thirty-five years later Taine, already in the front rank of critics, proclaimed him, on the strength of the same book, as the greatest psychologist of the age, ‘perhaps of all ages.’ By 1880 he was not only understood, but also beloved and worshiped by a generation whose spokesman, Zola, hailed him in a famous essay as the father of all moderns. His fame has been constantly growing since. Far from being a mere classic on a bookshelf, to-day, ninety-two years after his death, he is one of the most widely read, and certainly the most persistently discussed, French authors of the nineteenth century. The various editions of his works, some of them translated into a dozen languages, his biographies, and the critical appreciations and commentaries of his writings fill a fair-sized library. He has become the hero and the patron saint of a literary cult, with the remotest corners of his life explored, the abstrusest windings of his fancy traced, the obscurest of his scribblings deciphered, published, and expounded by a band of passionate and scholarly devotees. ‘We shall never stop talking about Stendhal,’ says M. Paul Valery.
All his critics have felt that this very fullness of posthumous justice, no less than the accuracy with which he predicted it, calls for an explanation; that it is one of the aspects of that mystery which already in his lifetime surrounded him and which, as Zola noted, has been obscured rather than cleared by the efforts of his commentators. ‘Rare enough,’writes M. Leon Blum, ‘are the writers to whom posterity showed more favor than the judgment of their contemporaries. But Stendhal is perhaps the only one who, ignored or misunderstood in his lifetime, found himself in an intimate accord, in close kinship, with the thought and sentiment of another period.’ In his own age he was an alien, even an outcast, driven from exile to exile; why should he, one born before the French Revolution and dead in the days of Louis-Philippe, be thus naturalized as a citizen of the twentieth century?
The answer to that question is contained in one word — a word first uttered in print by an American critic. Stendhal, writes Mr. Joseph Wood Krutch, was a neurotic. Those conflicts of his soul which he so ruthlessly bared and which his contemporaries found both incomprehensible and repellent are the very agonies of the inhibited Will struggling for release which the writings of Freud, Adler, and their followers have revealed at the bottom of our own torments. Mr. Krutch guesses that Stendhal’s modernity consists partly ‘in the fact that he displayed the evidences of his complex maladjustments more freely than most authors before his time had done,’ but here he falls wide of the mark. What is new in Stendhal is not his frankness about his maladjustments; it is his maladjustments. Stendhal was not only a neurotic; he was the first neurotic.
II
Mdern psychopathology reveals the neurotic as a social misfit, and traces his troubles to a clash between what he wants and thinks he ought to get, and the exactions and vetoes of civilized existence. But modern psychopathology, like its parent, eighteenthcentury rationalism, ignores history and identifies a mere local and chronological phase — the psychic constitution of Western man under modern democracy — with the universal and eternal condition of mankind. Whether we hold, with Freud, that the soul is moved by sexual desire, or, with Adler, that it is driven by the power impulse, the striving for mastery over fellow men, we interpret neurosis as the thwarting of that paramount motive, as the frustration of the Ego. Sexual gratification, as Adler points out, is a form of achieved mastery; the Freudian ‘repressed sex’ is an aspect of the repressed Self. But the repressed Self will break out in a social disturbance (and neurotic disease is a social disturbance) only in a society which proceeds from the basic postulate that nothing should repress the Self. This postulate is comparatively new — four hundred years old, at most — in our civilization; it is unknown in other civilizations such as the Buddhist.
Neurosis as we know it is the upset of the individual’s psychic equilibrium occurring only in a society which conceives self-fulfillment in terms of Power, and regards it as every man’s birthright; it did not occur in mediaeval society, which conceived self-fulfillment in terms of Salvation, and regarded it as a rare gift awarded to the just by a transcendent Judge. Neurosis, then, is the psychic scourge of an age which has dethroned God and enthroned in His place the Sovereign Ego; of an age, moreover, which cancels its promise of limitless self-fulfillment by extending it to all selves and thus sets up their clash as the limiting principle in the place of the abolished divine command.
The modern dogma of the Sovereign Self was invented in the sixteenth century, worked out in the seventeenth, turned into a standardized mass product of theory in the eighteenth, and established as the basic concept of a new dispensation by the French Revolution, which at the same time undermined it by making its power promise universal and thus unfulfillable through the principle of Equality. Stendhal belonged to a generation which found its expectancy of limitless self-fulfillment, seemingly realized by the brief Napoleonic interlude, blocked by Waterloo; to a generation which, in the words of Alfred de Vigny, ‘had been nourished on the Emperor’s bulletins and always had a naked sword before its eyes,’ and which now discovered that ‘the times were not great enough.’ Baffled in their quest of glory, they changed the venue and sought self-fulfillment in happiness — only to find themselves baffled once more. They looked for an explanation, and found it in the formula, ‘grandeur unappreciated.’ They were baffled precisely because they dared to be great in a world that would not tolerate greatness; their failure was the proof and direct consequence of their superiority. Rejecting the reality which had rejected them, they solved their problem by retreating into a different, a better world, constructed of the ingredients of far away and long ago, a world attained only by the road toward the unattainable, a world in which their very defeat on the plane of mediocrity counted as victory, a world in which their selves, unhampered by the sordid facts and base exactions of society, could reign supreme. This exodus of the chosen people of superior souls into the promised land of fictitious greatness became known as the Romantic Movement.
In analyzing two of the minor heroes of Stendhal, Octave of Armance and Lucien Leuwen of the unfinished novel bearing that name, M. Leon Blum finds the key to their solitude, their disenchantment, their ‘inevitable defeat,’ in a secret flaw of their own souls — in the ‘fundamental ineptitude of their being, the measureless greed of their appetites, the chimerical intensity of their exactions.’ These traits, M. Blum adds, are not peculiar to the Stendhalian protagonists; they stamp the whole Romantic generation. In the language of present-day psychology that ‘secret flaw,’ that ‘fundamental ineptitude,’ are called the inferiority complex, and that ‘measureless greed of appetite,’that ‘chimerical intensity of exactions,’ are called overcompensation.
The twentieth-century neurotic, like the Romantic of a hundred years ago, finds his claim of unlimited self-fulfillment rejected by a hostile and unappreciative world; so he, like the Romantic, retreats into an imaginary El Dorado, a private reality where his Ego achieves absolute mastery by means of fictitious proofs of grandeur unchallenged by the tests of public verification. We might say that the modern neurotic is a belated Romantic minus the glamour of Romanticism; and that the early Romantic was a precocious neurotic who as yet had no suspicion as to the meaning of neurosis. Or else we might say that the Romantic is a neurotic dressed up by poetry, and the neurotic is a Romantic stripped by science. What is essential is that both are Dupes: self-deceived victims of ingrowing grandeur, pathetic incarnations of the Fallacy of the Sovereign Ego.
Stendhal was one of the first exponents of the Romantic movement. He launched, says Gustave Lanson, its first manifesto, the treatise Racine et Shakespeare, to this day one of the great briefs of the Romantic ease against Classicism. He did more: in his Charterhouse of Parma he created what is probably the greatest example of those fictive escapes into other ages and climes whereby the Romantics sought to deliver the Sovereign Self from the meshes of the competitive order. He never ceased to voice the aspirations of the Romantics, their abhorrence of the common ruck, their claims of a superior sensibility, the glories and sorrows of the chase of an ever-receding rainbow of happiness, the disillusionment with the flattening out of desire fulfilled. But, even as a Romantic, Stendhal was obsessed with a distinctly un-Romantic, even anti-Romantic, clarity of vision, with a capacity for grasping the logical implications of a world outlook supposed by its other adherents to be at eternal loggerheads with mere reason. The life philosophy which he called Beylisme is the result of his thinking out the Romantic cult of the Self to its last logical limits: a gospel of the Romantic Incarnation, a hieratic portrayal of a twice-life-size Henri-Marie Beyle surrounded by a halo as the goal of a human evolution of which ordinary individuals merely served as stepping-stones. Beylisme is the creed of Nietzsche’s Superman in a Gallo-Latin edition issued fifty years before Nietzsche’s time, the ‘blonde beast ’ with a Mediterranean pigmentation and house-broke by the heritage of Mediterranean culture.
But this very clearness of vision, this preoccupation with what he himself was pleased to call LO-gique which caused him to anticipate the last flower of Romanticism, also made him uncover its root. It is here that Stendhal, one of the greatest Romantic artists, parted company with his fellows. He was not content with living and describing the Romantic Ego; he insisted on examining it in the light of cold analysis. This examination resulted in his unmasking the Romantic superiority as inferiority saving its face, the victory of the Romantic personality as the make-believe of the defeated. Thus the supreme psychological importance of Stendhal consists in this: in him the basic conflict of the soul under democracy, the clash of the individual’s sovereignty claim with the similar claims of all other individuals as expressed by the principle of Equality, became articulate for the first time. That conflict remained latent in all other Romantics; Stendhal dragged it to daylight. The Romantics had invented a wonderful new toy: the Self decked out in a cloak woven of starlight and threaded gold from the Incas’ treasure and studded with the pearls and emeralds of the Indies; a toy producing lovely sounds, chiefly in the form of adjectives, of a mysterious haunting sadness, of longing inexpressible and unquenched, of dreams beyond the dreams of this world. Stendhal ripped this toy open and showed that it worked by the self-inflation of Insufficiency.
It was precisely this exposure that his fellow Romantics could never forgive him. The Romantic Movement was a conspiracy to maintain the pretensions of the inflated self. One of the arch-conspirators now turned informant. No wonder that his accomplices hated him with a hatred that was to last beyond the grave. His very friend Mérimée denounced him bitterly for ‘expressing odious truths,’ for ‘exposing to the light of day certain sores of the human heart too foul to be seen.’ We may sympathize with his bitterness; for those odious truths, those foul sores, were the truths and the sores of Mérimée’s own heart.
Contemporary detractors and latterday champions alike attributed Stendhal’s analytical bent to his roots in eighteenth-century rationalism; did n’t he regard himself as the disciple of Condillac and Helvetius? What neither the detractors nor the champions realized, but what he himself sensed with prophetic intuition, was that in Stendhal’s disclosure spoke not the past but the future; his analysis was not a shadow of the Enlightenment, but the light of the Neurotic Age dawning below the horizon. We shall see that Stendhal’s anticipation of future modes of thought and feeling was itself a neurotic escape device, but a device whereby the neurotic, one neurotic in ten million, breaks his deadlock and ceases to be one. For the moment suffice it to state that the theme of Stendhal’s chief novel, indeed of all his novels, is the individual’s struggle to impose upon a resisting society an exaggerated conceit of his own importance, an overdrawn selfimage which compensates him for his sense of inferiority; It is a theme which Stendhal invented, and which was to become the theme of the Great Art of democracy, the theme of Madame Bovary and of Jude the Obscure, of Peer Gyni and The Way of All Flesh, of The Egoist, Lord Jim, and Of Human Bondage. But it was also the theme of Stendhal’s life. And whereas in his novels he treated it in terms of ‘the world as Art,’ expressing it through the timeless objects we call images, he also left a variant of that theme in terms of ‘the world as History,’in the fragment called La Vie de Henri Brulard, the profoundest, subtlest, and most moving of all autobiographies.
This double treatment of a single motif is what M. Albert Thibaudet has in mind when he speaks of Le Rouge et le Noir and Brulard as the dessus and dessous, the obverse and reverse, of Stendhal’s creation. By chiseling a self-portrait in the round, as it were, instead of the mere relief of other artists, Stendhal has bequeathed to the age which he helped to create and which was to do him belated justice a monument of Modern Man in the fullness of his sham splendor and his authentic misery, strutting with a strength that is but an armor plate forged of dreams to shield his weakness; fancying himself the master of his destiny, but knowing in his heart that he is the puppet of his desires; and yet rising at last we shall see by what self-wrought miracle from the defeat of his poor seifduped Ego to t he deathless triumph of Genius.
III
To say, as people often do, that we are all ‘ more or less ’ neurotic nowadays is merely a rough-and-ready way of stating the psychological truth that, since the goal of omnipotence which Modern Man has posited for himself is unattainable, we have, all of us, to eke out our self-conceit by resorting to fictions: by pretending, for instance, that distinctions like luxurious living, social exclusiveness, sporting records, and so forth, are marks of true superiority. If we, again, say that ‘the majority are normal,’ we merely mean that the particular tokens of fictitious self-fulfillment which are current among them are accepted as valid by large numbers. Under the democratic dispensation, psychic normality, like all other values, is established by taking a vote. The neurotic recognized as such is he who feels the defeat of his sovereignty claim more keenly than the rest, and is thereby driven to save his self-conceit by more drastic methods of self-deception: by coining private superiority fictions which are rejected by others. This keener sensibility has its origin in what Alfred Adler calls an infantile inferiority situation. The ‘neurotic proper’ is thus the product of a baffled and warped childhood.
The story of Stendhal’s early years, as related by himself in Henri Brulard, is probably the most complete literary record of an infantile inferiority situation that we possess. There is the ‘excessively harsh environment’: a home in which laughter and amusement were forever taboo after his mother’s untimely death; the stupid well-meaning severity of his father; the stupid venomous severity of his Aunt Séraphie; the bigotry and exactions of his clerical tutors; the ban on all games, deemed both unsafe and unrefined; complete isolation from other little boys for fear of vulgar contacts. There is an early sense of ‘organ inferiority,’ of physical weakness, of ‘ being no better than a little girl.’ The child conceives the notion that he is despised, slighted, persecuted; that ‘the world’ hates him because he is not like others.
Over-compensation sets in with a vengeance: he feels that he is the smallest of the small, and decides that he must become the greatest of the great — the greatest French playwright, the greatest mathematician, the greatest general. ‘The world being the enemy, he comes to distrust everybody, turns into a little savage: he remembers that at the age of two he bit the cheek of a woman who tried to kiss him; that at the age of four he dropped a knife on another from a balcony. His greatest fear is that of being duped: a priest teaches him the Ptolemaic system; his agnostic grandfather tells him that it is rubbish; to the end of his days he will regard all priests as liars and rogues. He develops a terrific thirst for knowledge, reads every book that comes his way, partly as an escape from his gloomy home, and partly because he early realizes that knowledge is a weapon. He is only nine when he discovers that lying is the natural self-defense of the oppressed; thereupon he sets out to practise lying as a swordsman practises fencing. At the age of eleven he turns to attack: he forges a letter to wheedle a concession out of his father; his account of the episode is a perfect little case-history of criminal psychology, revealing the offender as the megalomaniac at bay. He becomes a ‘dangerous radical’: at the age of ten he rejoices when he hears the news of the execution of Louis XVI. But a little later he fires a pistol at the Tree of Liberty erected by the revolutionaries in a public square. Some of his biographers gravely point out that both reminiscences cannot be true: that if he was a little Jacobin he could not also be a little royalist. Could n’t he? In both instances he simply rebelled against established authority. In his royalist home he was a Jacobin; in the Jacobin street he turned royalist. The pattern repeats itself later: during the Empire he was an ardent republican; no sooner did the Bourbons return than he became a no less ardent Bonapartist, one of the founders of a literary Napoleonworship.
Routed by an overwhelming hostile reality, the boy finds refuge in a tremendous discovery: he has a Mind, an Inner Life, where he is free and safe, and where he can picture himself as being better, stronger, cleverer, more brilliant, more powerful, than anybody he knows. At the age of fourteen he has an inspiration; he himself calls it a stroke of genius: ‘Mathematics will deliver me from Grenoble.’ He means: if he wins a prize in mathematics at school, ‘they’ will send him to Paris — the gateway of freedom, greatness, happiness, conquest. A very young general of artillery was just then leading the armies of the Republic from victory to victory. . . . And this young general, Bonaparte by name, had also started out as a student of mathematics. . . .
Two years later the boy wins his prize, and is sent by his father to the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, the nursery of artillery generals. He arrives a few days after the 18th Brumaire when that other mathematician made himself dictator of France by a military coup. For the boy there was still an entrance examination to pass. When the morning came Henri Beyle stayed in bed.
IV
All his biographers have perceived t hat there is something symbolic in this sudden dereliction. But symbolic — of what? It could not have been the mere fear of being ‘ploughed.’ The youth had just passed a difficult test with flying colors. He had an immense conceit of his capacities, and a no less immense ambition. It was an age of meteoric careers; he was seventeen; his cousin Pierre Daru was one of the most important men in the War Department; as a graduate of the Polytechnique, and with Daru to back him, he could count on being a general at thirty. Other young men, quite uncousined, had done as much. Moreover, in his later life Beyle gave ample proof that, whatever else he may have been, he was no coward, physical or moral. No, his truancy could not have been due to ordinary funk.
The puzzle is solved by the Adlerian theory of the neurotic deadlock. The normal person craves success and dreads failure. The neurotic, too, dreads failure; but more than failure he dreads success. For failure only means humiliation on the spot; the worst is over, and done with. But success may mean a long chain of humiliations deferred; it means facing new difficulties, shouldering responsibility and the obligation of keeping up to the mark. Now the neurotic knows that he cannot keep up to the mark. To him achievement seems a mere prelude to being found out. Being ploughed would have meant an unbearable blow to Henri Beyle’s self-conceit as a great mathematician; still he could always comfort himself with the thought that he was a great poet. But being passed would have imposed on him the unbearable strain of having to act like any normal young man; and acting like a normal young man was precisely what he knew he could not do. Defeat could be explained away; but victory must be followed up. He solved his dilemma by shirking it. He stayed in bed, and went on dreaming dreams of grandeur that were not to be shattered by the vulgar grind and hustle of mere fulfillment.
Evasion of all tests is the essence of that compromise whereby the neurotic manages to keep a perpetual loophole open for his self-conceit, and escapes a final answer to the question which corrodes his soul: ‘Am I a genius or a rotter?’ And the inarticulate guess of the biographers is right; Stendhal’s failure to show up at the Polytechnique examination sets the pattern of his life for the next twenty-nine years. All his vacillations and delinquencies, his selfcontradictions and bizarreries, his brilliant starts quickly sidestepped, his panicky retreats from victories all but won, represent elaborations of that single pattern. ‘To determine the truth of Stendhal’s character is difficult; to reduce it to unity is doubtless impossible,’ writes the profoundest and subtlest of his biographers, M. Leon Blum. He is wrong. The formula of which he despairs is supplied by the principle of neurotic ambivalence. The term ‘ambivalence’ has become, with ‘fixation’ and ‘Œdipus complex,’ the principal stock in trade of bootleg psychology, dispensed freely at Freudian cocktail parties and in Adlerian speak-easies. In its genuine form the principle of ambivalence states that the neurotic is forever torn between two extremes of self-appraisal; that he is unable to decide which is true, — his conviction of insufficiency or his conviction of greatness, his ‘complex’ or his ‘over-compensation,’ — so that his behavior is dominated now by the one, now by the other, with the result that his actions cancel out one another, and he gets nowhere. To put the same idea flippantly yet accurately, the neurotic sets out to eat his cake and have it too, and ends by falling between two stools.
The pattern repeats itself in the succession of Stendhal’s abortive careers as clerk in the War Department, cavalry officer in Italy, and grocer’s assistant at Marseilles — the last being his idea of training for the career of a get-rich-quick financier. The pattern repeats itself in his relation to women. He invented an infallible recipe for dealing with women: ‘The moment you find yourself alone in a room with one, rape her.’ An excellent plan, no doubt; but not once in his long amorous career did he even try to carry it out. Instead, he had to be encouraged for six months or so by the prospective victim of rape before he dared to touch her hands. The stupid Freudian cliche has been invoked to explain the discrepancy: we are told that he had a mother fixation; that he saw in women understudies for incest, and shrank from them because he feared that they would not measure up to the idealized image of his mother. Stuff and nonsense. What he feared was a snub; but what he feared still more was a welcome. For being welcomed by the beloved one would have meant a Test — a test of his masculinity, which he doubted; and also a test of his capacity for proving himself a man in other fields than the sexual. He utilized ‘being in love’ as an excuse for postponing all action; he told himself, ‘I cannot think of anything except Melanie [or Angela, or Mathilde, or Clementine, as the case might be]; I am paralyzed by desire; I cannot concentrate; but once I possess her I shall begin to work in earnest.’ This is the well-known neurotic formula: ‘If I get this, I shall do that* In other words, the neurotic wants to be paid in advance by life; he demands greatness without effort; and once he has pocketed the advance he usually loses interest in delivering the manuscript — non-delivery is an excellent way of nipping rejection in the bud.
Every woman that he ever loved represented to Stendhal another Polytechnique examination; with this important difference, that while the Polytechnique did not cajole or bully him into passing the test, some of the women did. This great theoretical violator of virtue waited, in practice, to be violated. And once he was violated he was ‘disappointed.’ That was his way of showing the woman that he was a Superior Being: ‘You don’t come up to my expectations; you are n’t good enough for ME by half.’ Disillusionment was, of course, a release from the obligation implied in the neurotic if-clause; he did get this, but he still refused to do that. Disillusionment meant Freedom; he was free to start the same game over again, to collect another advance on the royalties of self-fulfillment.
The last truth of Stendhal’s relation with women was that this professional seducer, this would-be Casanova, was mortally afraid of them. His bragging about rape was the amplified echo of a scared child’s whistling in the dark. For he did have an infantile fixation; only its object was not the mother he loved, but that virago of an aunt whom he hated and dreaded. Seraphic had been the rock on which all his infantile craving for mastery foundered. His ‘fixation’ was not the incest complex, that overworked rabbit out of the Freudian conjurer’s hat; it was the fear of being spanked. With all his theorizing about rape as an act of courtesy toward expectant ladies, with all his studiously fostered reputation as a sensualist, Stendhal was, as M. Leon Blum alone among his biographers has perceived, in practice almost undersexed. What he really wanted from women was not lust but a sense of power; subduing haughty beauties was his way of getting even with Aunt Séraphie.
V
The patronage of his cousin, now become the great Count Daru, one of Napoleon’s ‘organizers of victory,’ thrust on him, in the end, a career in spite of himself. For eight years as an official of the Imperial War Commissariat he has his share of authority, responsibility, adventure, luxury; he tastes worldly success, and finds it to his liking. He surprises his protector, possibly even himself, by proving himself not only as good as any man, but better than most; he wins distinction by unusual competency, devotion to duty, and cool unflinching courage in danger. He is promoted, and promoted again. But this steady advance along a single track proves, in the long run, too much for him; for he is a Superior Person, and a superior person must be Free — free to dream himself supreme. So he is positively relieved when the Napoleonic power house of cards collapses and his career is over. His comment is magnificently curt: ‘In 1814 I fell with Napoleon.’ What a narrow escape from the humdrum prospect of becoming a Prefect or Ambassador!
The next six years are the happiest of his life. A decade and a half earlier, as a youthful lieutenant of dragoons, he was garrisoned at Milan; and Milan has become, in retrospect, the Golden Age of his dreams. He now returns, and a miracle happens: the dream comes true. A miracle? Not really; rather, an exceptionally favorable constellation for the blossoming out of the neurotic pattern. All his life Beyle had been dragged down to the depths of misery by his exaggerated notion of his own importance which ‘the world’ — that is, his native environment — persistently tested and rejected. But in Milan there were no more tests; Milan accepted him at his face value fixed by himself simply because he was a stranger whose claims were not important enough to call for verification. When in 1814 he was charged with organizing the defense of his native Grenoble against the Austrians, he signed a poster as de Beyle. The usurped particle of nobility set the whole town laughing: ‘Fancy the son of old Lawyer Beyle giving himself airs!’ Milan knew nothing of old Lawyer Beyle. In Milan, as M. Leon Blum brilliantly puts it, he could acquire the habit of not being judged. He was docketed, for the asking, as M. de Beyle, a distinguished retired high official of the Empire.’ The dream that had come true was the dream of all neurotics: the dream of Greatness without Effort. What Beyle discovered in Milan was the psychological trick of turning the status of outsider into a device of Superiority, the sleight-of-mind substituting ‘ above ’ for ‘apart from’ in his relation to his environment. In a word, at Milan Henri Beyle, the first neurotic, became the first Expatriate.
But the satisfactions of irresponsible love-making, of evenings spent at the opera or in the salons of the Milanese nobility, of fraternizing with Lord Byron and other lions of passage, were not enough for Stendhal. He knew that by contenting himself with the offerings of the moment he sidestepped the quest of his life: the quest not of happiness, but of grandeur. He must show that even Milan was not good enough for Henri Beyle. Running away from the competitive game was not enough; he decided to beat the game; he resorted to the ultima ratio of the baffled megalomaniac — to crime. He became a thief: he translated from the Italian a life of Haydn, changed a passage here and there, and published it as his own — an amplified echo of his forgery at the age of eleven. He was found out in no time; in a letter to a newspaper he met the disclosure with superb effrontery. The Life of Haydn was his first plagiarism; it was not to remain the last. In his subsequent books he pilfered whole pages from Dr. Johnson, of all men, and from the Edinburgh Review; parts of the famous description of the battle of Waterloo, in the Charter- house of Parma, he copied out of the published diary of a Scots private who, unlike him, had been there.
By 1821 the dream came to an end. His funds run dry; his last love affair peters out in a tragic mess; he has trouble with the Austrian political police; he clears out. He returns to Paris, to grapple with that reality which he took so much pains to dodge. Start after start had only brought him up against a blank wall; only one outlet was still open — literature. He writes half a dozen books and gets them published; but no one reads them except the reviewers, and these find little good to say. Still, his books secure him a certain status in the salons; he is a brilliant talker, but offensive on purpose, and if his wit earns him invitations to dinner, it earns him still more enemies. He is regarded as ‘destructive,’ but he does not mind that; it is a distinction anyhow. By and by, however, his sallies provoke less indignation and more yawns. ’Old Stendhal is getting to be a bore.’ Old Stendhal! Yes, it’s no use concealing it: he has turned forty-five, forty-six — an elderly pot-bellied dilettante with a brilliant future behind him. . . . Invitations to dinner grow scarce; he is sinking deeper and deeper in debt; to save money he walks in the park during the luncheon hour — he has plenty of time on his hands to take stock of a life of missed opportunities, a life wasted by his own folly. He feels he has reached the end of his tether. Suicide — why not?
Then one day — it is just after New Year, 1830 — he shuts himself up in his shabby little furnished room and begins to write. For three months he writes and writes — he is dead to the world; then he emerges with a manuscript. A novel — Le Rouge et le Noir. A publisher takes a chance. A flop, like the others, if not worse. Yet he is not discouraged; he trusts the verdict of posterity. ‘I shall be understood in 1880.’ Another device to dodge that here and now which he could never face — another expatriation, in the fourth dimension, for a change. Eighteen hundred and eighty: his Milan in Time. . . .
By 1880Le Rouge et le Noir is acclaimed as the greatest of novels.
VI
How did he do it? How did it come about that Stendhal, this ex-lieutenant of dragoons turned grocer’s clerk, eximperial official turned remittance man and loafer in foreign cafes, ex-anything that he ever tried to be, this plagiarist, snob, liar, braggart, shirker, quitter, parasite, wastrel, deadbeat — that this all-round failure achieved, on the brink of throwing up the sponge, one of the greatest masterpieces of all literature? Character, said Heraclitus, is fate — was there ever a man less fated by his apparent, his only-too-obvious, character for immortal achievement than Henri-Marie Beyle? That masterful summarizes Sainte-Beuve, summarized his case in a brief sentence: ‘He was not meant to become such a great man.’ Agreed; but he did become great. How docs a man who was not meant to become great become great?
We know that he was a neurotic. And modern psychology tells us that artistic creation has a neurotic origin. Freud explains art as the sublimation of the repressed sexual wish. But Freud does not explain why the repressed sexual wish issues in the case of A in sublimation, — that is, art,.— in the case of B in homosexuality, in the case of C in a compulsion to walk nearest to the curb or to avoid railway trips. On the contrary: Freud admits, in his study of Leonardo, that he cannot, and does not even hope to, explain this. Adler does not explain artistic creation at all; he is not particularly interested in it. But the work of art can be explained, in terms of his system, as the neurotic’s private superiority fiction raised to public validity. Yes, but raised how, and why, and when? Art is a product of over-compensation. Quite; but all neurotics over-compensate; why does only one neurotic in a million over-compensate by way of a masterpiece?
We have followed Stendhal along the dark tortuous passages of his neurotic soul; at last we stand in the final antechamber of his riddle. And not of his riddle alone. The riddle of Stendhal is that of all modern art. Why, how, and when does the neurotic called Stendhal turn into a genius, while the neurotics called Tom, Dick, and Harry remain neurotics? Is it possible to determine the moment, the process, and the cause of that quasimiraculous transformation?
It is possible. The key to Stendhal’s riddle has been supplied by Stendhal himself. It appears on pages 509-511 of the second volume of his Correspondence. It has thus been public property ever since that Correspondence was published in 1908. Thousands have read the passage in question; at least two of his commentators, Leon Blum and Georg Brandes, refer to it; both have missed its significance. The key has not been recognized as a key.
VII
It was on the 18th of December, 1829, that Stendhal met Lieutenant Louaut.
The meeting was an accident, but the sort of accident that would happen to Stendhal. He thinks of challenging the philosopher Victor Cousin to a newspaper debate about the motives of human action. He reads in the newspaper Constitutionnel the account of how Lieutenant Louaut, an elderly army officer on half pay, plunged into the Seine after a drowning bargee and saved him at the risk of his own life. Stendhal goes to see him. ‘Would you mind telling me why you did it?’ Louaut does not mind in the least. ‘The newspapers call me a hero. I am nothing of the sort. I saw the man fall into the river. I am a good swimmer; but I am old, I suffer from the gout, the water is cold, I might catch pneumonia and die. So I turn around and walk away. But I still hear his screams; it is terrible. I run until I cannot hear him screaming any more. And then somebody says, just quiet-like: “Lieutenant Louaut, you are a coward!” What the devil! I look around, there is nobody. I run back, dive in, drag out the beggar. That was all. You see, I really did it because I was afraid of being a coward. I only hope I shan’t be laid up in bed for three months. I’d be bored to death.’
Stendhal tells this story in a letter to his English friend Sutton Sharpe, dated December 28, 1829. The newspaper debate with Cousin did not come off’. But three months later the man who had never finished anything finished the manuscript of the first and greatest modern novel, Le Rouge et le Noir.
There is no external, documentary evidence to connect the episode of Lieutenant Louaut with Stendhal’s achieving Le Rouge et le Noir. His own comment on the officer’s narrative with which he concludes the letter to Sutton Sharpe is singularly beside the point, a bit of amateurish and unconvincing philosophizing in the vein of his eighteenth-century masters. But there is internal evidence, and it is conclusive. It consists in this: the story of Julien Sorel is the story of the man who became a hero because he was afraid of being a coward. The leitmotiv ‘Courage is the fear of fear’ appears in a hundred variations of astonishing depth and subtlety; it is dramatized in some of the most famous passages of the book: in the scene where Julien, by superhuman effort, forces himself to take hold, in the dark, of the hand of his employer’s wife whom he does not love, just to show her, and himself, that he dares; in that other scene where he climbs the ladder to Mademoiselle de la Mole’s window, fully expecting to land in an ambush laid by her brother. It is the secret of Julien’s rise front poor peasant boy to nobleman and diplomat, and also of his half-tragic, half-absurd end under the guillotine. But ‘ Courage is the fear of fear’ is the leitmotiv, also, of Stendhal’s life. In Brulard he tells the story of a duel he fought, at the age of thirteen, with a classmate over some childish row. They fired pistols at one another at a range of twenty paces. No one was hurt. Beyle behaved nobly; but on the way home he said to his second:
‘ When Odru was aiming at me I looked steadily at the little rock above Seyssins not to show how scared I was.’ ‘Shut up, idiot, one does not say such beastly things,’ scolded the other boy, scandalized, as Merimee was to be half a century later, by such exposure of the ‘odious truths and foul sores’ of the heart. Sixteen years passed: the duelist was running for dear life across endless leagues of Russian snow, in the company of Napoleon and a handful of half-starved wretches in rags — the remnants of the Grande Armee. The Cossacks were at their heels; there were days when they dined off a chunk of stale bread or three potatoes each; they nearly died of the cold; but morning after morning Beyle showed up cleanshaven and immaculately dressed, as if the Retreat from Moscow were a levee at Malmaison. ‘You area brave man, M. Beyle,’ said Count Daru. To shave with the enemy almost peering over one’s shoulder takes pluck. . . . We know why he shaved.
VIII
Stendhal derived the plot of Le Rouge from a criminal case of 18271828, the trial of Antoine Berthet, a seminarist and private tutor condemned to death by the Grenoble assizes and beheaded for the attempted murder of his employer’s wife. For three years Stendhal made no headway. He was still enmeshed in his struggle to impose his self-conceit on the world; he still was trying to show what a fine fellow he was, and to conceal that he was not quite sure about it. His neurotic ambition sent him swirling around the axis of his grandeur dream; like a squirrel in its revolving cage, he was never at rest, and, like the squirrel, he got nowhere. He could not achieve anything truly great, for he willed achievement too much. There is an old German nursery tale about the alchemist who discovered the secret of turning powdered lead into gold: one had to heat it in an alembic, that was all. But a condition was attached: while heating the lead the gold-maker must not think of gold. The recipe was infallible; but gold was never made.
Stendhal continued his frantic attempts to turn lead into gold — till he met Lieutenant Louaut. Then he stopped, just for a moment. But at that moment he saw. He saw himself as Louaut; he saw in Louaut’s running away from the cold river the allegory of his own derelictions; he saw in Louaut’s plunge after the drowning man the allegory of his own conduct during the Retreat from Moscow, when he, time and again, had braved the Cossack lances to procure a little bread for his starving comrades. And suddenly he also saw himself as Berthet — as the poor peasant boy who was guillotined because he had striven to become too great. From the lightning-like contact of these two symbols, Louaut and Berthet, was born the life story of Julien Sorel: the symbol whereby Stendhal sought to fix forever his relation to the world which he wished to conquer and which defeated him. But, once Julien Sorel was born, Stendhal did not think of himself any more. He thought only of Louaut and of Berthet; of the man who saved two lives because he would lose his own; of the other man who lost his life because he loved it too much. In the parables of these two men, now fused into one, Stendhal, who had always preached and tried to practise energy, self-fulfillment, will-to-power, joy, pleasure, irreligion, touched, for a moment, on the Schopenhauerian recognition that the will-to-life is the will-to-death, that only by denying the will can the will achieve something better than mere life; he glimpsed the truth that had been pronounced by a greater master than Schopenhauer, in much simpler words than his, eighteen hundred years before Schopenhauer’s time.
IX
Like the neurotic, the artist flees a hostile reality and takes refuge in an inner life built of fictions which he calls truth — h is truth, created in his own image. But the neurotic remains forever a prisoner of his truth, of his inflated Self which the world weighs and finds wanting; he loses his life because he is too intent on saving it. But in the case of the artist something unexpected happens: all of a sudden the world accepts his truth, believes in the fictions called Julien Sorel, Tess, Jude, Madame Bovary, as if they were part of reality. What happened is this: a certain neurotic by the name of Stendhal, or Hardy, or Flaubert, suddenly breaks the deadlock brought about by his wanting everything and the opposite of everything, by the ‘measureless greed and chimerical exactions’ of his Self. And he breaks that deadlock because he breaks his Self. He comes to recognize that his quest of Self was futile, that the Will is futile, that he was chasing the phantom of his own Godlikeness — and he gives it up. He thus achieves that supreme act of the Will which is the Will’s denial of itself; and because he surrenders his Will, and with it his paltry personal truth, he comes to see, for the first time, Reality—the one Truth that is the truth of God, though he may not call it His. The birth of Genius is a sudden burst of light where there was darkness; of a light lit by that change of the inner man, that conversion of the Self, which is expressed by the Greek word metanoia, the mind’s turning against itself, rendered into English by the word ‘ penance.’ The greatest good, says Augustine, is God; but God is Truth, and man can only attain to the vision of Truth by disengaging himself from the restless struggle of his Will; the last task of the Will is to surrender itself and to lie still in the radiance of divine knowledge.
And thus that parable of Genius which Stendhal perceived in the story of Louaut also appears in that scene of Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage where Philip, reviewing the wreck of his past, recognizes that the secret of life’s burden is that it must be borne, and exclaims, ‘O Life, where is thy sting?’ At that moment Philip, and in him his author, achieved that knowledge which Schopenhauer defined as the complete divorce of understanding from willing, and which we call by the single word ‘Genius.’ By renouncing his will — his lust for greatness, for the fullness of power, for Godlikeness — Genius achieves what he has renounced; for he creates. By eliminating the mortal, self-destroying principle of Self from lus personal truth he comes to impose that truth on the world — not, indeed, as mere reality, but as something better: as an immortal object, as something that does not exist in Time, but subsists outside and beyond Time — as a work of art.
Genius, then, is he who rises to life from death in life. Like Job, he must lose his all before he can win his own soul. He must be submerged in defeat, remorse, solitude, self-contempt. He must be deserted by his friends; for as long as they believe in him their faith supports his dream of greatness, and it remains a dream. Above all he must lose his faith in himself; for that faith was nothing but his self-deceit, and he must be undeceived. He must come to see that his defeat was due to his insane presumption to imagine that he could be great without furnishing proofs of his greatness; that he has fallen because he strove to justify himself by his faith, and by faith alone. Thus in his own person Genius lives the whole tragedy of the Modern Ego, placed on his tottering throne of mock sovereignty by that sola fides wherewith four hundred years ago a fear-maddened German monk attempted to ransom his soul from hell-fire. We see to-day to what pass that doctrine has brought Western man; for the world around us is full of people who seek to justify themselves by their faith and by nothing else; and we call them neurotics. But it is precisely by losing his faith in himself that Genius ceases to be a neurotic, and sets out to save his soul by Works.
X
Two years after he had finished Le Rouge et le Noir Stendhal sat in judgment over himself, and returned the verdict: ‘A dreamer.’ He confesses that all his life there was one thing, and one only, that he really loved to do: dreaming. In La Vie de Henri Brulard he sets out to redream a life that was nothing but a dream. But now the strife, the discord, the bitterness of trying anti failing, have gone out of it; he does not want any more, does not will any more, docs not suffer any more; he is content to look on, to see, and to understand. ‘I am getting on to fifty, it is time to know myself.’ That simple, unemphatic sentence in Brulard is Stendhal’s ‘O Life, where is thy sting?’
He was an unbeliever, and proud of it. Yet he knew, and by Henri Brulard publicly professed his knowledge, that art is not self-expression, but something better: it is self-justification before a tribunal that transcends the Self. All great work of any great writer is an apologia pro vita sua. But one apologizes only if one has repented; and that elimination of the willing Self without which no great work of art has ever been achieved is an act of Penance for the guilt of Willing. Clever craftsmen may go on asserting and expressing themselves in clever books, and earn the rewards of the market place; but Genius knows better. Genius knows that not by asserting, but only by denying himself can man ever hope to rise above the meaningless strife of this world, and to dwell, be it for a brief second, with the angels who according to Saint Thomas Aquinas are pure intelligence, and who see in the fleeting spectacle the divine Idea that alone has meaning and permanence.