Ten Novels And Their Authors (13 page)

He took his official duties lightly; he was a tireless sightseer and, whenever possible, went on a jaunt. He found in Rome friends who made much of him. But notwithstanding these distractions, he was hideously bored, and lonely; and, at the age of fifty-one, he made an offer of marriage to a young girl, the daughter of his laundress and of a minor employee at the consulate. To his mortification, the offer was refused, not, as one might have expected, because of his age and bad character, but because of his liberal opinions. In 1836 he persuaded his Minister to give him some small job that allowed him to live in Paris for three years, while someone else temporarily occupied his post. He was by then fatter than ever, and apoplectic, but this did not prevent him from dressing in the height of fashion, and a slighting remark on the cut of his coat or the style of his trousers deeply affronted him. He continued to make love, but with little success. He persuaded himself that he was still in love with Clémentine de Curial, and sought to resume some sort of relations with her. Ten years had passed since the break, and she very sensibly replied that one cannot light an extinct fire with embers. She told him that he must be content to be her first and best friend. Mérimée relates that he was shattered by the blow: ‘He could not pronounce her name without his voice changing … It was the only time I had seen him weep.’ But he seems to have recovered sufficiently within a month or two unsuccessfully to make advances to a certain Madame Gaulthier. At length, he was obliged to return to Civita Vecchia and there, two years later, he had a stroke. On his recovery he asked for leave of absence to consult a famous doctor at Geneva. He moved from there to Paris and resumed his
old life. He went to parties and talked with undiminished vivacity. One day in March, 1842, he attended an official dinner at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and that evening, while walking along the boulevard, had a second stroke. He was carried to his lodging and died next day. He had passed his life in the pursuit of happiness, and had never learnt that happiness is best attained when it is not sought; and, moreover, is only known when it is lost. It is doubtful whether anyone can say ‘I am happy’; but only ‘I was happy’. For happiness is not well-being, content, heart’s ease, pleasure, enjoyment: all these go to make happiness, but they are not happiness.

(4)

Stendhal was an eccentric. His character was even more incongruous than that of most men, and one is amazed that so many contradictory traits should co-exist in one and the same person. They do not form a harmony that is in any way plausible. He had great virtues and great defects. He was sensitive, emotional, diffident, talented, a hard worker when there was work to be done, cool and brave in danger, a good friend and of a remarkable originality. His prejudices were absurd, his aims unworthy. He was distrustful (and so an easy dupe), intolerant, uncharitable, none too conscientious, fatuously vain and vainglorious, sensual without delicacy, and licentious without passion. But if we know that he had these defects, it is because he has told us so himself. Stendhal was not a professional author, he was hardly even a man of letters, but he wrote incessantly, and he wrote almost entirely about himself. For years he kept a journal, of which great sections have come down to us, and it is plain that he wrote with no view to publication; but in his early fifties he wrote an autobiography in five hundred pages, which carried him to the age of seventeen, and this, though left unrevised at his death, he meant to
be read. In it he sometimes makes himself out more important than he really was, and claims to have done things he did not do, but on the whole it is truthful. He does not spare himself, and I imagine that few can read these books, and they are not easy to read, since they are in parts dull and often repetitive, without asking themselves whether, if they were unwise enough to expose themselves with so much frankness, they would make a much better showing.

When Stendhal died, only two Paris papers troubled to report the fact, and only three persons, of whom Mérimée was one, attended his funeral. It looked as though he would be entirely forgotten; and, indeed, he might well have been but for the efforts of two devoted friends who succeeded in persuading an important firm of publishers to issue an edition of his principal works. The public, however, notwithstanding two articles which the powerful critic, Sainte-Beuve, devoted to them, remained indifferent. That is not surprising, since Sainte-Beuve’s first article was concerned with Stendhal’s early works, which his contemporaries neglected and which posterity has decided to ignore, and in the second article he reserved his praise for Stendhal’s books of travel,
Promenades dans Rome
and
Mémoires d’un Touriste
, and found nothing to his liking in the novels. He claimed that the characters were puppets, ingeniously constructed, but whose every movement revealed the mechanism within; and the incidents he condemned as frankly incredible. Balzac, while Stendhal was still alive, had written a laudatory article on
La Chartreuse de Parme
; Sainte-Beuve wrote: ‘It is evident that I am far from sharing the enthusiasm of M. de Balzac for
La Chartreuse de Parme
. The simple fact is that he has written of Beyle, as a novelist, as he would have liked people to write of himself’; and then, a little later, rather maliciously, he tells how after Stendhal’s death among his papers was found one which showed that he had given or lent Balzac three thousand francs
(and with Balzac a loan always was a gift), and thus paid for the eulogy. Upon this Sainte-Beuve quoted: ‘Ce
mélange de gloire et de gain m’importune
.’ Perhaps he needn’t have been so censorious: his two articles on Stendhal were paid for by the publishers of the edition, and the two articles he wrote on Stendhal’s cousin, Pierre Daru, whose only distinction as a writer was that he had translated Horace and written a history of Venice in nine volumes, were commissioned as an act of piety by the family.

Stendhal never doubted that his works would survive, but he was prepared to wait till 1880, or even to 1900, to receive the appreciation that was his due. Many an author has consoled himself for the neglect of his contemporaries by a confidence that posterity will recognise his merits. It seldom does. Posterity is busy and careless and, when it concerns itself with the literary productions of the past, makes its choice among those that were successful in their own day. It is only by a remote chance that a dead author is rescued from the obscurity in which he languished during his lifetime. In the case of Stendhal, a professor, otherwise unknown, in his lectures at the École Normale enthusiastically praised his books, and there happened to be among his students some clever young men who later made a name for themselves. They read them, and finding in them something that suited the climate of opinion at the time prevalent among the young, became fanatical admirers. The ablest of these young men was Hippolyte Taine, and many years later, by which time he was become a well-known and influential man of letters, he wrote a long essay in which he called attention especially to Stendhal’s psychological insight. In passing, I should remark that when literary critics speak of a novelist’s psychology, they do not use the term in quite the sense that psychologists use it. So far as I can make out, what they mean is that the novelist lays a greater emphasis on the motives, thoughts and emotions of his characters than on their actions; but in
practice this results in the novelist chiefly displaying the more sinister parts of man’s nature, his envy, his malignity, his selfishness, his pettiness – in fact, his baser rather than his better nature; and this has an air of truth, for, unless we are pect fools, we are well aware how much there is in us all that is hateful. ‘But for the grace of God there goes John Bradford.’ Since Taine’s essay, an immense amount has been written about Stendhal, and it is generally agreed that he is one of the three great novelists that France produced in the nineteenth century.

His case is a very singular one. Most of the great novelists have been voluminous creators, and none more so than Balzac and Dickens. One can be pretty sure that, if they had lived to old age, they would have gone on concocting story after story. One would think that, of all the gifts a novelist needs, invention on a large scale is the most essential. This gift Stendhal almost completely lacked. Yet he is, perhaps, the most original of novelists. Just as, when in his youth he wanted to become a famous dramatist, he could never think of an idea on which to construct a play; so, when it came to writing novels, it looks as though he was unable to evolve a plot out of his own head. His first novel, as I have said, was
Armance
. The Duchesse de Duras had written two novels which by their somewhat daring subjects had had a
succès de scandale
, and a writer of some note in his day, by name Henri de Latouche, wrote one, which he issued anonymously, hoping it would be ascribed to the Duchess, and of which the hero was impotent. I have not read it, and can speak of it only from hearsay. From this I gather that Stendhal for
Armance
took not only the theme, but also the plot, of Latouche’s book. With what looks like brazen effrontery, he even gave his hero the same name as Latouche had given his, and it was only later that he changed it from Olivier to Octave. He embroidered upon the idea with what I suppose would be called psychological realism; but the novel remains a poor one: the incidents
are wildly improbable, and for my part I find it impossible to believe that a man suffering from the peculiar disability which gives the book its theme could fall passionately in love with a young girl. In
Le Rouge et le Noir
, as I shall show later, Stendhal followed closely the story of a young man who was the subject of a celebrated trial. The only part of
La Chartreuse de Parme
which Sainte-Beuve saw fit to praise is the description of the Battle of Waterloo, and Stendhal’s description was suggested by the memoirs of an English soldier who had been at the Battle of Vittoria. For the rest of that particular book he depended on old Italian annals and memoirs. Now, a novelist obviously gets his plots from somewhere, sometimes from incidents in real life that he has experienced, witnessed or been told of, but as a rule, I should say, from an elaboration of characters who have for some reason excited his imagination. I know of no novelist of the first rank, other than Stendhal, who has so directly found his inspiration in what he has read. I do not remark on this in disparagement, but merely as a curious fact. Stendhal was not greatly inventive; but, how it came about none can tell, nature had endowed this vulgar buffoon with a wonderful gift of accurate observation, and with a piercing insight into the intricacies, vagaries and bizarreries of the human heart. He had a very poor opinion of his fellow-creatures, but was intensely interested in them. In his
Mémoires d’un Touriste
there is a revealing passage in which he relates how, on a journey through France, he took a post-chaise in order to admire the scenery at his leisure, but after a while, finding himself desperately bored, abandoned it for the crowded stagecoach where he could talk to his fellow-travellers and, at
table d’hôte
, listen to their stories.

Though Stendhal’s travel books are lively and can still be read with pleasure, if only for what they tell you of their author’s singular character, his fame rests on two novels and on a few passages in
De 1’Amour
. One of these
was not original: early in 1817 he was at Bologna, and at a party a certain Madame Gherardi, ‘the prettiest woman that Brescia, the land of fine eyes, ever produced’, said to him:

‘There are four different kinds of love:

(1)   Physical love, that of beasts, savages and degraded Europeans.

(2)   Passionate love, that of Héloise for Abelard, of Julie d’Étange for Saint-Preux.

(3)   L’Amour Goût, which during the eighteenth century amused the French, and which Marivaux, Crébillon, Duclos, Madame D’Epinay have described with such grace. (I have left
l’amour goût
in French, because I do not know how to translate it. I think it means the kind of love you feel for a person to whom you have taken a fancy, and, if the word were in the Oxford Dictionary, I should prefer to call it ‘lech’ rather than love.)

(4)   Love from Vanity, that which made your Duchesse de Chaulnes say when she was about to marry M. de Gial: “For a commoner, a duchess is always thirty.”’

Then Stendhal adds: ‘the act of folly which makes one see every perfection in the object of one’s love, is called
crystallisation
in Madame Gherardi’s circle.’ It would have been unlike him not to seize upon the fruitful idea that was thus presented to him; but it was not till months later that, on what he called ‘a day of genius’, the analogy occurred to him which has since become famous. Here it is: ‘At the salt mines of Salzburg you throw into the depths of a disused shaft a leafless branch; two or three months afterwards you take it out covered with brilliant crystallisation: the smallest twigs, no bigger than a titmouse’s foot, are adorned with an infinity of scintillating
diamonds. One can no longer recognise the original branch.

‘What I call crystallisation is the operation of the mind that draws from everything around it the discovery that the beloved object has new perfections.’

Everyone who has fallen in, and fallen out of, love must recognise the aptness of the illustration.

(5)

Of the two great novels,
La Chartreuse de Parme
is the more agreeable to read. I do not think Sainte-Beuve was right when he called the characters lifeless puppets. It is true that Fabrice, the hero, and Clelia Conti, the heroine, are shadowy, and for the most part play a somewhat passive role in the story; but Count Mosca and the Duchess Sanseverino are intensely alive. The gay, licentious, unscrupulous duchess is a masterpiece of characterisation. But
Le Rouge et le Noir
is by far the more striking, the more original, and the more significant performance. It is because of it that Zola called Stendhal the father of the naturalistic school, and that Bourget and André Gide have claimed him (not quite accurately) as the originator of the psychological novel.