Henri Beyle

“ Partly by temperament, partly it is said owing to some childish experience, when he discovered that he had been duped and determined never to be so again, not least owing to the example of Henri Beyle (Stendhal) , who was a friend of his family, and of whom he saw much, Mérimée appears at a comparatively early age to have imposed upon himself as a duty the maintenance of an attitude of sceptical indifference and sarcastic criticism. Although a man of singularly warm and affectionate feelings, he obtained the credit of being a cold-hearted cynic ”

“ It is interesting to note the device which Mérimée uses to add reality to his narrative—he tells us that the story, the characters, the place, the fight, are real. Even those who stand in the wings, flitting [Pg 111] across the stage but once as if to say, “I am flesh and blood, and not a mere stuffed figure like the doll whose only pains were in her sawdust”—even they have names and personalities dimly veiled under the initial and the dash.
Mérimée’s friend, the “military man” from whom he got the story, is Henri Marie Beyle—who called himself de Stendhal. ”

“ Mélanie Guilbert, however, soon abandoned him to marry a Russian, and Beyle returned to Paris. Through the influence of Daru he obtained a place in the commissariat, which he filled with some distinction from 1806 to 1814. Charged with raising a levy in Brunswick of five million francs, he extracted seven; and during the retreat from Moscow he discharged his duties with efficiency. On the fall of Napoleon he refused to accept a place under the new régime, and retired to Milan, where he met Silvio Pellico, Manzoni, Lord Byron and other men of note. ”

“ Perhaps, however, his most remarkable work was Mérimée, of whose family he was a friend, and who, far excelling him in merit of style if not in freshness of thought, learnt beyond all doubt from him his peculiar and half-affected cynicism of tone, his curious predilection for the apparently opposed literatures of England and Southern Europe, and not improbably also his imperialism. Beyle is a difficult author to judge briefly, the contradictions, affectations, and oddities in him demanding minute examination. Of his power, intrinsic and exerted on others, there is no doubt. ”

“ He did not, like Voltaire or Hugo, strike a note to which the whole national genius vibrated in response. He has never been, it is unlikely that he ever will be, a popular writer. His literary reputation in France has been confined, until perhaps quite lately, to a small distinguished circle. 'On me lira,' he was fond of saying, 'vers 1880'; and the 'Beylistes' point to the remark in triumph as one further proof of the almost divine prescience of the great man. But in truth Beyle was always read by the élite of French critics and writers—'the happy few,' as he used to call them ”

“ Stendhal’s reputation practically rests on the two novels Le Rouge et le noir and La Chartreuse de Parme. In the former of these he borrowed his plot from events which had actually happened some years previously. Julien Sorel in the novel is tutor in a noble family and seduces his pupil’s mother. He eventually kills her to avenge a letter accusing him to the family of his betrothed, Mlle de la Mole. Julien is a picture of Beyle as he imagined himself to be. The Chartreuse de Parme has less unity of purpose than Le Rouge et le noir. ”

“ Imagine my delight when I found out, what no writer of travels had deprived me of the pleasure of discovering, namely, that in that country it is in good society that there is most of the unforeseen. Nothing deters these remarkable geniuses except want of money or pure impossibility; if prejudices still exist, it is only in the lower classes."
In other words, what Beyle loves best is reckless energy, both in action and emotion—energy, whether revealing itself as the irresistibleness of the military genius or the boundless tenderness of the loving woman. ”

“ Many other men in every age and country have loved war and travel, women and art; but what is peculiarly characteristic and distinctly modern in Beyle is his tendency and his ability to examine himself in the moment of action or of passion. He is constantly observing himself, has, so to speak, constantly his hand on his pulse ”

“ It is singular that so original a writer should have descended to pilfering. But Beyle was nothing if not inconsistent. With all his Classicism he detested Racine; with all his love of music he could see nothing in Beethoven; he adored Italy, and, so soon as he was given his Italian consulate, he was usually to be found in Paris. As his life advanced he grew more and more wayward, capricious, and eccentric. ”

“ He is only an utterly selfish, arrogant, envious, and generally bad-blooded [137] young man, whom circumstances partly, and his own misdeeds helping them, first corrupt and then destroy. You never sympathise with him for one moment, except in a peculiar fashion to be noted presently; but at the same time he neither quite bores you nor quite disgusts you. Homo est, and it is Beyle's having made him so that makes Beyle a sort of genius and much more than a sort of novelist. ”

“ Beyle's work falls into two distinct groups—the first consisting of his novels, and the second of his miscellaneous writings, which include several biographies, a dissertation on Love, some books of criticism and travel, his letters and various autobiographical fragments. The bulk of the latter group is large; much of it has only lately seen the light; and more of it, at present in MS. at the library of Grenoble, is promised us by the indefatigable editors of the new complete edition which is now appearing in Paris. ”

“ No other novelist approaches Beyle in the gift of unveiling the secret struggles of ideas and of the emotions which the ideas produce. He shows us, as if through a microscope, or in an anatomical preparation where the minutest veins are made visible by the injection of colouring matter, the fluctuations of the feelings of happiness and unhappiness in acting, suffering human beings, and also their relative strength. Mosca has received an anonymous letter which tells him that his mistress loves another. ”

“ That it is a powerful one follows almost in the same way. But what has to be said, for the first, if not also the last, time in reference to Beyle's fiction, is that it is interesting.
Julien Sorel and Mathilde de la Mole.
The interest depends almost entirely—I really do not think it would be rash to say entirely—upon the hero and one of the heroines. The other personages are dramatically and psychologically competent, but Beyle has—perhaps save in one or two cases intentionally—made them something of comparses or "supers." ”

“ Nevertheless, a story as communicated by Mérimée conveys such a different meaning from a story as communicated by Beyle, that it is easy to determine the limits of the elder man's influence upon the younger. Beyle's salient characteristic is the tendency to generalise. The trait of character which is exhibited in any given action, is to him only an instance ”

“ He has, however, the distinctive sign of the true man of science; he never speaks of what he does not understand; he never indulges in random conjectures or ingenious paradoxes; he progresses step by step. At times he may be dry and wooden, but he never makes a mistake.
If Mérimée is the sober, uninspired man of science, Beyle is the inspired scientific dilettante, with all the signs of genius, but also all the signs of dilettantism. ”

“ In the last twenty years or so, however, a great deal of new light has been shed, by fresh publication, on Beyle and not a very little on Mérimée: and this has rather altered the complexion of the rapport between the two. Each has been shown to have been, in familiar phrase, a much better fellow than he pretended to be: while, on the other hand, the morbid and warped strains in each have been more clearly demonstrated and illustrated. ”

“ Beyle was a psychologist and a poet, but not an artist; Mérimée was an artist to his finger-tips. It is as the artist and as the artist alone that he is great; and his superiority to Beyle lies in his artistic skill. ”

“ But immediately upon it follows one which astonishes us equally by its profundity and its wit: "Dans les hautes classes de la société de Paris, où Mathilde avait vécu, la passion ne peut que bien rarement se dépouiller de la prudence, et c'est du cinquième étage qu'on se jette par la fenêtre."
[3] The best appreciations of Beyle are Balzac's criticism of La Chartreuse; Taine's of Rouge et Noir; Mérimée's notice in the introduction to Beyle's Correspondance inédite, somewhat amplified in Portraits historiques ”

“ That they have more in common with each other, not merely than either has with Hugo or Dumas, or even George Sand, but than either of these three has with the others, few will deny. And as a practising novelist Beyle has hardly substance enough to stand by himself, though as an influence—for a time and that no short one and still existing—scarcely any writer in our whole list has been more efficacious. ”

“ Beyle was a materialist of the school of the Encyclopedists, and as such had firm beliefs. He had his philosophy—Epicureanism, to which he adhered faithfully; his method—psychological analysis; his religion—the worship of beauty in life, in music, in the plastic arts, and in literature. Mérimée has no philosophy; one cannot imagine anything less dogmatic than his half-stoical, half-sensual turn of mind; and he has no religion; he worships nothing. He avoids enthusiasm as carefully as if it were a disease. ”

“ These two passions, love of war and love of woman, were in Beyle's case only two expressions of one fundamental passion, namely, love for what he was wont to call le divin imprévu—the passion which makes a poet of him. How war, especially war as conducted by Napoleon, satisfied his craving, requires no explanation. How women, and especially Italian women, satisfied it, Beyle tells us himself. In a letter from Milan, dated 4th September 1820, he writes: "As I have spent fifteen years in Paris, nothing on earth leaves me so completely indifferent as a pretty Frenchwoman. ”

“ But here again, in reality, it is not the question at issue that is interesting—one learns more of the true nature of Love in one or two of La Bruyère's short sentences than in all Beyle's three hundred pages of disquisition; but what is absorbing is the sense that comes to one, as one reads it, of the presence, running through it all, of a restless and problematical spirit. 'Le Beylisme' is certainly not susceptible of any exact definition; its author was too capricious, too unmethodical, in spite of his lo-gique, ever to have framed a coherent philosophy ”

“ In 1812 Beyle served in the Moscow campaign, having obtained a position in the commissariat department. It is characteristic that he should have kept his nerve during the whole of that panic-stricken retreat, shaving every day, and repelling with considerable sangfroid and bravery an attack by the enemy on a hospital of wounded. Disgusted by the [Pg 11] Restoration, he settled in Milan in 1814, resumed his relationship with Mme. Angelina Pietragrua, who would appear to have systematically deceived him, and lived generally the life of the dilettante and the man of letters. ”

“ The 'chasse au bonheur' which Beyle was always advocating was no respectable epicureanism; it had about it a touch of the fanatical. There was anarchy in it—a hatred of authority, an impatience with custom, above all a scorn for the commonplace dictates of ordinary morality. Writing his memoirs at the age of fifty-two, Beyle looked back with pride on the joy that he had felt, as a child of ten, amid his royalist family at Grenoble, when the news came of the execution of Louis XVI. His father announced it:
—C'en est fait, dit-il avec un gros soupir, ils l'ont assassiné. ”

“ But with this Romanticism of energy and daring deeds Beyle combines the form of Romantic enthusiasm peculiar to the France of 1830. His Julien, the gifted plebeian who is kept from rising by the spirit of the Restoration period, who feels himself eclipsed by the all-prevailing gilded mediocrity, is consumed by hunger and thirst for adventures and impressions, and employs, when he is reduced to impotent hatred, every possible means to raise himself above his original social position, but remains, even when he is for the moment successful, at war with his surroundings and unsatisfied. ”

“ It is not till it is accomplished that it seems possible to the ordinary mortal." In these two short quotations, two uncommon female characters of opposite types, the self-sacrificing and the foolhardy, are outlined with the hand of a master. We feel that Beyle was absolutely correct when, in his letter to Balzac, he defines his artistic method as follows: "I take some person or other whom I know well ”

“ It is, however, in his psychological studies that the detached and intellectual nature of Beyle's method is most clearly seen. When he is describing, for instance, the development of Julien Sorel's mind in Le Rouge et Le Noir, when he shows us the soul of the young peasant with its ignorance, its ambition, its pride, going step by step into the whirling vortex of life—then we seem to be witnessing not so much the presentment of a fiction as the unfolding of some scientific fact. ”

“ The more intense and tender Mérimée's emotion originally was, the prouder is its outward bearing. There is nothing feminine in him. Even in his female characters it is not their femininity which he brings out. Beyle, a marked contrast to him in this respect, makes, in writing to him, the true and apt observation, that his novels are wanting in "delicate tenderness." [1] His women are masculine and logical in their passions; almost all of them are powerful individualities; even the most frivolous and immoral meet death with quiet fortitude (Arsène Guillot, Julie de Chaverney, Carmen) . ”