The Stendhal Revival

by MATTHEW JOSEPHSON

1

THE first centenary since the death of Stendhal in Paris, March 23, 1842, came and passed off quietly in a season when France, four years ago, seemed crushed in defeat and moral confusion. For, how could men have stomach for such civilizing activities as the commemoration of a long-dead author — at such a time? And yet Stendhal, despite the absence of ceremony, was alive in men’s minds: far from being neglected, he was actually enjoying another of his recurrent revivals before his posthumous public.

It is significant, also, that this latest revival gathered force during those very dark years of the German occupation, between 1940 and 1944, when so many young men were being drawn into the desperate Resistance movement against the Nazis and their French caretakers.

“Our young writers have made a cult of Stendhal and of Julien Sorel,” I was told late in 1944 by a French author who came here on a mission of war. Julien Sorel, the principal figure of The Red and the Black, is of course the embodiment of Stendhalian dissent as practiced in the gloomy time of the Bourbon restoration, after Waterloo. With France once more conquered and invaded, men read Stendhal’s books again with a secret fervor, as if to draw from him those lessons in moral resistance which he had once taught with so much wit. For who could tell what “Papa ” Pétain and his informers would think of those who read an author so subversive? Though he was a hundred years dead, the name of Stendhal was still a challenge.

The history of his posthumous reputation is in itself a singular thing. Like Blake, Melville, and the later Samuel Butler, he was not honored by the public of his own time — only to be resurrected a full two generations after his death, as a lost genius, an unknown Voltaire, at last restored to glory.

It was one day in 1890 that the lively ghost called Stendhal, — whose real name was Henri Beyle, - muttering characteristic aphorisms, emerged from his grave in the collars of the old Bibliothèque Publique of Grenoble, his native city. There, the most important part of his writings, in the opinion of modern devotees, his voluminous private and autobiographical papers, had lain hidden for almost half a century, because they were held too godless and scandalizing to be read by his contemporaries.

To be sure, his two complete novels, The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma, had been more or less available (though often out of print) to the “happy few” to whom he knowingly addressed them. One of these few, Balzac, had sung his praises in vain. Later Taine, in the 1860’s, strove to make him more widely known. Yet it was the appearance of Stendhal’s unpublished papers, during the 1890’s, that gave the signal for a tremendous revival that brought to his forgotten novels literally hundreds of thousands of readers in many lands. The diffusion of knowledge about his complex personality was highly necessary for the understanding of his novels and essays.

Soon his letters, journals, and memoirs, in editions of a dozen volumes or more, were being preferred by modern readers to his other writings. They appeared as the truthful record, without rhetoric or pretension, of a man of singular intellectual honesty; and in their light, his novels appeared all the more authentic and consistent. Even the fragment of his autobiography, Henri Brulard, a brief chronicle of his boyhood and youth, appealed to those who could now read it as a unique psychological document, the most unsparingly candid memoirs written since Rousseau’s Confessions. But more impressive still was the air of modernity that attached to almost everything he wrote.

It is with a constant feeling of surprise that one recollects that he was born during the later years of Louis XVI’s reign and died shortly after Queen Victoria’s regime began. How, we wonder, could Stendhal have held so many ideas and convictions that we consider peculiarly the property of our own twentieth century? How could he have known — though writing more than a hundred years ago - about Suppressed Desires, or the Father Complex, as demonstrated in his memoirs and novels? Or how could he have spoken in such modern accents on power politics, sex, religion, history, art, and all the subjects that most absorb us today?

He had once walked the streets of an Italian city with Lord Byron, who enjoyed his talk. But it was in the ranks of the great social realists who appeared at the end of the last century that he naturally seemed to take his place. As early as 1819 (in his “Treatise on Love”), he wrote on domestic questions, and especially the sex problem, in the terms of some future Ibsen or Strindberg. “Prudery,” he said, “is a form of avarice, and the lowest of all.”

An enthusiastic feminist long before Bernard Shaw was born, he urged that women should be taught mathematics and science “like men”; also that they be liberated from marriages of money or convenience, arranged by their parents and sanctified by “three words Uttered in a church.” For, to a young girl, relations “with a man she has seen perhaps twice in her life involve a much greater violation of modesty . . . than yielding herself to a lover she has adored for two years.”

2

IF Stendhal is now regarded as one of the most prophetic of novelists, and master of the novel of ideas, he was at all events no pedant ripened amid the dust of libraries, but an enemy to solemn dullness. His claims to eminence as a moral philosopher are serious enough; but surely he was one of that breed of philosophers we tend to call “intoxicated,’ because they seem forever drunk with the wine of life.

From the time of his youth the study of human nature, “the observation of the human heart and its passions,” was his constant preoccupation. But where could he study the passions better than in himself? Though he lived exuberantly, submitting himself to experience with an abandon that few men of letters have really relished, he went on incessantly writing down everything that happened to him just as it happened.

He had been so imbued with the eighteenthcentury spirit of scientific curiosity that he was even led to perform some remarkable experiments upon himself — always in pursuit of light upon human morals. That which he had witnessed or experienced was then set forth with a sober accuracy designed to correct all tendency to romantic exaggeration. The more horrid his confessions, the more he blushed inwardly at human frailty demonstrated in himself, the more unsparingly he wrote; for he possessed, as Nietzsche said in after years, “the psychologist’s eye,” and was perhaps truly, as Nietzsche added, “the last of the great French moralists.”

No author ever told us more about himself than Stendhal, and yet none was ever more difficult to know. For he lived under many different masks. At various times he laid claim to having been a soldier, a man of fortune, a great lover, a society wit, a diplomat, a traveler, and even, sometimes, a revolutionary conspirator. (There was some truth in all these claims.) In his day he acquired a passing reputation as an “immoral philosopher” and rather enjoyed that. He posed, and he travestied his own poses. He also loved to conceal his own identity — as if he felt himself forever hunted by the secret police or threatened by the censors — under scores of different pseudonyms. Christened, in plain French, Marie Henri Beyle, he called himself “Baron de Stendhal,” or “Henri Brulard,” or “Dominique,” or “César Bombet,” but most often “Stendhal,” the name which he has made immortal.

He believed there was such a thing as an “art of life,” and busied himself devising various “systems” for the pursuit of happiness which, like the Encyclopedists, he conceived as man’s prime object. Therefore he mentally reviewed almost every act of his life, whether at a salon gathering or in the transports of love, in order to learn what lessons analysis and reflection might afford.

One tenet of his system required that he must be constantly in love or falling out of love, so that pursuit of a series of mistresses became his main business in life - “and after them came my books.” Fat, red-faced, rather fierce-looking, he dressed always in the height of fashion, like one of the Incredibles of Directoire times. His counsel for the campaigns of love was: “Attack, attack, attack!” He would say, “What does it matter if we experience nineteen humiliations or rebuffs, if on the twentieth trial our efforts are crowned with success?” And yet he was no Casanova with a single-track mind; for not pure act but the sufferings or modulations of his sensibility were virtually the end-object of adventures, so often comic or unhappy, so often misadventures.

Another article of his faith stressed cosmopolitan culture and the enjoyments of travel, even though by creaking diligence on bandit-infested roads. To know only one’s own country was not enough. “One must not fall asleep with his mind, . . . One must shake off the yoke of life.” Thus he played the Good European long before that role was widely appreciated. A typical Frenchman by birth, he lampooned the ways of his countrymen, preferred to live in Italy, and assumed a Teutonic nom de plume, though he cared little for Germany.

Since public glory did not fall to him, either in a political role (which he would have enjoyed) or as a successful author, he renounced it, though not without regret, being human. “The approval of others is a certificate of resemblance,” he remarked. Instead of seeking to please others, he cultivated his originality at all costs, and I may say, his singularities. But there was more than pose in this attitude. Instinctively he perceived that to convert his product, during those reactionary times, into something politically and commercially salable would lower its ultimate value. Therefore he wrote but to please or distract himself, “as one smokes a cigar,” and clung to his unpublished manuscripts, with all their original inventions and secrets, much as the owner of some new device of science dreads to part with it in making it public property.

Nevertheless Stendhal clearly prophesied his own posthumous success, for he wrote repeatedly in his journals, “I shall be read only in 1880, or 1900.” Sometimes the date was set later, “Literary fame is a lottery. I have taken out a ticket marked 1935.” Often, in his solitude, he addressed himself directly to posterity — “Oh, reader of 1900” — as if appealing to it over the heads of the public of his own time. Thus he actually pursued “a policy of immortality,” as Paul Valéry has said; and with good reason. He felt himself distinctly a man of transition, one of a “lost generation,” as we say nowadays, trapped between two great swings, forward and backward, of the historical pendulum.

3

BORN in 1783, as a son of the old provincial bourgeoisie, he had suffered the loss of his mother in childhood, then felt himself stifled by the pious hypocrisy and constraints of his home and family, dominated by his father, a devout royalist of the old school, for whom he conceived a lasting hatred. The coming of the great French Revolution liberated him in the broadest sense; it deeply molded his youthful mind; it permitted him freedom to escape his severe parent and course about the world in search of a career worthy of his talents. Believing in the Goddess of Reason, as in equality and liberty, he had willingly gone to fight in the armies of the Republic and of the young Napoleon, who had arisen as the “liberator” of Europe.

“I thirsted to witness great events,” Stendhal tells us. He saw the collapse of thrones; the fall of great capitals, Milan, Vienna, and Berlin; the burning of Moscow — “the most beautiful incendiarism in all the world.” He knew moments of worldly success, but also a constant, poignant sense of disillusionment. Were all Napoleon’s victories worth as much as one opera by Cimarosa or Mozart, he asked himself, during the voyage to Russia.

Then, on the morrow of Waterloo, the restoration of the ancien régime, embodied in legitimate throne and altar, made a turning point in his own career as an Imperial officeholder. Fervent Jacobin that he was, liberal in politics, materialist in religion, it seemed to him that the imposition of Bourbon rule in France by means of foreign conquerors was a return to the Dark Ages. The long reign of Prince Metternich over Europe had begun and with it, as Stendhal conceived, a time of “black reaction,” directed by secret police and Jesuit priests who now looked to the education of the people but yesterday so allured by freedom.

Other writers chose conformity; they imitated Chateaubriand, the romantic Catholic, and other apologists of ultra-royalism. They wrote for a controlled and censored press. Stendhal continued to believe in the teachings of his eighteenth-century Philosophes, the expounders of rational and democratic ideas, who were now being discarded as “old-fashioned.” In the Restoration years, he too was often treated as a belated reveler, belonging to the time of Diderot and Condorcet. Yet he clung stubbornly to his convictions that the recurrence of political absolutism (paralleling that of Fascism in our own century) would be limited in time; that further social upheavals impended; that the drives of common men toward self-improvement, directed by reason, scientific method, and humane ideas, would in the long run shape the future, and not the dogmas of authoritarians and obscurantists.

In fifty or a hundred years all that his contemporaries were saying and writing — so much “rightthinking” cant and nonsense, conceived to appease the censor or win favor from the King’s Ministers — would be forgotten in the rubbish heap of history. Stendhal steered his own course away from fashionable or authorized modes of thought. Almost singlehanded he carried on a Resistance movement of his own, in a sort of intellectual Underground of his own, read by few men, vet saying to himself, “I write what I myself think and not what they think.” For years he chose “exile” in Italy, until, expelled by the Austrian police, he returned to live as an “exile” in France.

Steadfastly he protested at his times, holding that they, and not he, were out of key with realities. It was also in accord with his role as an eternal dissenter that he proceeded to break with all the rules of style and literary form then enjoying credit, and to write novels severely condemned by the men of the Romantic school. To vex the Academicians he had helped launch Romanticism in France, then quickly deserted it. His pioneering in the social novel was ill regarded; his overweening interest in the psychological analysis of the human passions, his picture of the modern ego in revolt against society, embodied in The Red and the Black, was held unpleasant, subversive, and immoral — though later generations would take a wholly different view of the case, discovering in him one of the great precursors of modern psychology.

The Red and the Black is still strong meat to most readers. At the period when the contemporary lords of language were writing imitations of Scott’s antiquarian romances, — in order to beguile the public, as Stendhal believed, — he set out to write “a chronicle of the nineteenth century.” That is the subtitle of his novel.

He saw more clearly than others that, despite Metternich’s absolute princes, all costumed in the genteel tradition, the new century was to become an affair of coal and iron; it was to be given over to the naked struggles of individuals and classes for power; landmarks of social morality and religious faith were to be engulfed. Aroused by education and the new opportunities they beheld, men of the lower orders would go trampling each other, in great hurrying throngs, along the stairways of that invisible “escalator” that carried some upward to power and wealth, and others downward to their ruin.

Stendhal, long before Nietzsche, attempted to present a transvaluation of moral values: “I have been ambitious, I have followed the [real] morals of my time,” cries Julien Sorel, the “rebellious plebeian,” in recapitulation. This is the significance of the drama of a peasant’s son who has gained an education and climbed to the heights of society. In other days, under the Republic or Napoleon, he would have worn the red uniform of a soldier and sought glory; now it is the black cassock of the priest that he chooses as a way to power and without religious faith. But with a slight change of costume, Stendhal’s study of the tactics of power, done with such extraordinary finesse, applies perfectly to our own day.

Julien Sorel is a possible version of Stendhal himself; he is, on the one hand, a brilliant raisonneur, coldly analyzing each maneuver in the contest for power, or each ruse practiced in a love affair that must further ambition; on the other hand, he can terminate his introspections and become a man of energy and will, equal even to crime. For Stendhal, under the shadow of Napoleon and of the leaders of the French Revolution, was obsessed by the concept of human will, as the philosophers who came after him, from Schopenhauer to Bergson, were to be obsessed by it.

What is the secret of this novel’s art? The principal characters, as in his other novels, are superior types — superior in wit and sensibility. But, while being primarily a novel of ideas, The Red and the Black communicates effects of truth and “realism" with an intensity approached only by later novelists of psychological genius such as Dostoevski. Stendhal, moreover, writes with a restraint suggesting the classical authors he esteemed. In comparing his method to Balzac’s we find that the author of the Comédie Humaine, like Flaubert later, saw his characters always in the ensemble of their physical setting; their homes, their clothing, their appearance, were all described with a painter’s eye, and by a predominantly sensuous method.

Stendhal, using only the most frugal descriptions, locates or fixes his characters within the pattern of their mental habits, observed by an analytical, rather than a sensuous, process. He peers beneath the surface; his lifelong disposition to be a scientific observer has taught him what there is inside people that makes them different from one another. Hence even his exceptional or superior characters, like Julien, appear consistent, credible, alive; also manysided, in contrast with Balzac’s simpler “beasts of prey,” with their single appetites for money or sex. For, even the subconscious reveries of Stendhal’s characters are set forth in richest detail. It is on this side that he has made his appeal to the greatest of modern authors, such as Marcel Proust, André Gide, and the earlier James Joyce. His Julien Sorel was no more the romantic egoist of Rousseau or Byron, but truly modern man.

4

IT IS one of Stendhal’s chief claims to the admiration of later men that, while he waited for the end of the political and cultural night that seemed to have fallen over Europe during his lifetime, he retained his sanity, his love of life, his readiness to laugh at himself and at the world, to an uncommon degree. The mellower novel written in his late years, The Charterhouse of Parma, pictures for us “the art of happiness” as it might be pursued in an Italy that is really of the Renaissance, though placed in the nineteenth century. It is more nearly representative of his true temper, and to devoted Stendhalians surpasses his earlier work. Count Mosca, middle-aged lover, and prime minister of Parma, is both Machiavellian and humanist. We may safely assume that he is the carrier of Stendhal’s moral and political beliefs in later years. And how the talk sparkles here! The learned Taine confessed that he had read this novel eighty-four times.

For Stendhal’s satire at its best, as in this work, was expressed with an irony that was good-humored as well as subtle. Thus he defended his own individuality, his sensibility, his vision, by use of a whole “system” of satirical stratagems and concealments that are a marked feature of the Stendhalian wit. He does not say in so many words that the divine right of legitimate princes is founded on absurdities; instead he exhibits, as “passports,” some statements that might be construed as favorable toward benevolent despots.

Meanwhile, in The Charterhouse of Parma, he gives us a most amusing picture of the education for life of a young Italian nobleman who has got into scrapes through his generous impulses and his sympathies with liberal ideas. Taken in hand by his protectors, he is ordered (1) to take a clever confessor; (2) to avoid “persons reputed to be intelligent”; (3) to pay court to one of the pretty women of the noble class, in order to show “that he does not have a somber and discontented cast of mind.” For, he is assured, the qualities making for success, henceforth, are “lack of enthusiasm and want of cleverness.”

His mentor goes on to say: “ Believe or do not believe that which you are taught, but never offer any objections. Consider that you are learning the rules of a game like whist. Would you object to the rules of the game you are to play?”

Stendhal hints to us — in such double-meanings as may be used in writing under the eyes of despots and their censors — that life in this time of reaction had become a game, full of fraud; and success meant mastering the rules of the game.

Harmless in itself, Stendhal’s indirection scarcely impugned his real honesty, yet it contributed to the strategy of resistance, as we may call it, that enabled him to survive. This strategy that one follows between the lines was to bring deep comfort to men who read him in later times as war-weary and confused as his own. For he spoke with the wisdom and the stoicism of a man who was no dupe, who had seen the mutations of history and violent changes in his own personal fortunes, yet refused to despair, refused to believe that men would surrender their heritage of knowledge to become forever the unthinking victims of regimes of retrogression.

The recurrent revivals of Stendhal are certainly traceable to the parallels between his own situation and that of modern men. At the very height of the world’s terror over a new despot, as in the time of Munich, one could find consolation in reading over again the letters and journals of this man of singular humor who had once served Napoleon at his court, and had marched in the terrible retreat of the Grande Armée from Moscow.

The young French writers of the Resistance movement often read him in prison; for did not Stendhal’s heroes dwell in prisons at moments when it was the great good place for men who loved freedom and made a show of energy? Thus my friend Robert Desnos, whom I knew as a gifted young Stendhalian, was fated to die, in 1945, in a German concentration camp. Another, Jean Prévost, who had recently completed one of the best critical studies of Stendhal, had fallen the year before, as an officer of the Maquis.

For those who hold that the teachings of Stendhal are but counsels of disillusionment, we must call to mind the closing chapter of The Red and the Black, with its account of the trial and sacrificial death of Julien Sorel. Offered the alternative of gaining his freedom by feigning a repentance he does not feel, or facing death at the guillotine, Julien rejects the course he holds shameful, exclaiming, “And what would become of me if I despised myself? . . . One has his duties in accordance with the range of his ideas.”

Stendhal bears rereading in difficult times. M. Léon Blum, who is a most penetrating literary critic as well as a man of politics, was quite right in saying long ago that the habit of reading Stendhal “takes hold of one like a drug.” A drug, one might add, stimulative and sedative at once. In America, as in Europe, I have met “Beylistes” who read at least a page of his work every day; such adepts form a curious international freemasonry bound together by no other secrets than those of the wit and philosophy of the master. One of these said to me recently, “I read him not as a dead author, but as an endlessly amusing and wise old friend who is always at my side.”