Chapter XIX: Beyle

Henri Beyle's is, without doubt, one of the most complex minds of the rich period to which he belongs. What chiefly distinguishes him from his brethren of the Romantic School is his direct intellectual descent from the severely rational sensationalistic philosophers of the eighteenth century. Not even in any short youthful or transition period is there a trace to be found in his soul of the Romantic reverence for religious tradition so prevalent in his day. All his life long he was the unfaltering philosophic antagonist of everything in the great Romantic movement which was of the nature of a reaction against the spirit of the eighteenth century. He was absolutely uninfluenced by Chateaubriand and Madame de Staël--was neither a colourist like the former nor eloquent like the latter; and absolutely uninfluenced by André Chénier, Hugo, and Lamartine--for he was wanting in the sense of metre, and was neither lyric nor pathetic. His models as a Romantic writer were not French; and his allegiance to Condillac and Helvetius, philosphers despised by the Romanticists of every country, never for a moment wavered, even at the time when the prejudice against them was universal.

He was a passionate atheist; that is to say, there was in his conviction that the world is not governed by any God the Father, as it were an element of enmity towards the being in whom he did not believe, an indignation at the horrors of life, which found expression in the sad and witty saying: "What excuses God is that he does not exist." Beyle never let slip an opportunity of displaying his dislike of so-called revealed religion. If he had occasion to write "the one true religion," he did not forget to add in parenthesis "(the reader's);" and when he touched on the subject of Christian morality, he was fond of remarking that it might be reduced to the calculation: "It is advisable not to eat truffles; they give you a stomach-ache."

As moral philosopher (and private individual) he was a pronounced epicurean. He acknowledged no mainspring of action but self-interest, that is to say, the desire of pleasure and the fear of pain; and, in his opinion, no other was necessary to explain even so-called heroic actions, since fear of self-contempt--_i.e._ fear of something that is painful--is quite enough to make a man, let us say, jump into the water to save another.[1] By virtuous actions, he understands actions which are attended with inconvenience or suffering to the actor, but are beneficial to others.

Psychological phenomena engrossed his attention to the exclusion of everything else; as the observant traveller, as the student of old chronicles, as the author of novels and stories, he was the psychologist, and that alone. His one constant study was the human soul, and he is one of the first modern thinkers who regard history as being in its essence psychology. But to Beyle, with his utilitarian philosophy, the science of the human soul and the science of happiness are one and the same thing. All his thoughts turn on happiness. By a man's character he understood the particular manner of seeking happiness which had become habitual to him; and the reason of his pronounced partiality to the Italians as a people was, that Italian men and women seemed to him to have found the most certain and direct way to happiness.

A man of an independent, original, ardent nature, he regarded it as the first condition of happiness to be one's self. Everywhere throughout his works we find, endlessly varied, the same warning: Be distrustful! Believe only what you have seen; admire nothing that does not appeal to you personally; always take it for granted that your neighbour has been paid to lie! The charge which he never wearies of bringing against the French is that they are too vain to know what happiness is, or rather, that they are unsusceptible to any higher happiness than that of gratified vanity, which he, personally, values very cheaply. According to Beyle, the Frenchman is perpetually asking his neighbour if he, the questioner, is feeling pleasure, is happy, &c.; he dare not decide the question for himself. The fear of not being like others, or of what others will say, is, in Beyle's opinion, the Frenchman's dominant feeling. He himself, on the contrary, not content with his natural originality, cherished a dislike of resembling others which led him into oddity and affectation. The man who was constantly ridiculing others for thinking of the opinion of their neighbours, who loved and exalted frankness, self-forgetfulness, straightforwardness, and simple-mindedness, was constantly keeping guard over himself, observing himself, prescribing to himself such duties as defiance of this neighbour, revenge upon that--and not neglecting to fulfil them. The thought of what his neighbour might say or do plagued him quite as much as it plagued the veriest philistine, merely with this difference, that the philistine was haunted by the thought of his neighbour because he desired to imitate him, Beyle because he wished to defy or avoid him. This eternal antagonism to the philistine is a genuinely Romantic trait. And it is also characteristically Romantic, that the man who was perpetually preaching and lauding naturalness and unconstraint should all his life have had a passion for concealment, disguise, and mystification, for hiding his personal experiences and thoughts under layer upon layer of wrappings and drapery.

Beyle's early years had been passed in profound spiritual solitude. An overflowing fount of feeling had been turned inwards. The child who had lost his mother, and who hated and was hated by his father, learned early to look upon himself as different from others--no doubt also as superior to others, though he defined his superiority as unlikeness.[2] He was conscious that this unlikeness would exclude him from any general sympathy and prevent his being generally understood. Hence his desire that it were possible for him to write his books in a language which should only be understood by a chosen few--a sacred language. Hence also his wish to find "un lecteur unique, unique dans tous les sens," and his dedication of _La Chartreuse de Parme_: "To the happy few."

This, too, was the real source of the inclination to concealment. Not only did Beyle publish all his books under a pseudonym (all, with one exception, under the name of _De Stendhal_, presumably derived from Stendal in Prussia, the birthplace of Winckelmann), but in many of them, _De l'Amour_ among the rest, the pseudonymous author assumes any number of second pseudonyms. Any sentiment which he does not care to acknowledge as his own, any anecdote which might shed light upon his private life, is laid to the account of an Albéric, or a Lisio, or the amiable Colonel So and So. And he has given himself as many occupations as names; now he is a cavalry officer, now an ironmonger, now a customs officer, now a commercial traveller; here he figures as a man, there as a woman; at one time he is of noble, at another of plebeian birth; at one time English, at another Italian. He would have liked to write in a cipher language for the initiated. This delight in leading his readers on the wrong track is in part to be ascribed to the secretiveness of the diplomatist; but in his private correspondence it was also due to a suspicion of the police which almost amounted to a mania. In his youth Beyle had made acquaintance with both Napoleon's and the Austrian police, and he always retained a fear of his letters being seized and opened. Therefore he hardly ever signed a private letter with his name. I have counted in his correspondence more than seventy pseudonymous signatures, varying from the strangest to the most ordinary names--Conickphile, Arnolphe II, C. de Seyssel, Chopin d'Ornonville, Toricelli, François Durand, &c, &c. He sometimes subscribes himself captain, sometimes marquis, sometimes engineer; sometimes gives his age, or the name of his street and number of his house. Grenoble he calls Culars, Civita Vecchia, Abeille. It amuses him at times to append a misleading indication of locality to his fictitious signature: for example, Théodore Bernard (du Rhône); he actually signs such a document as a public petition to Louis Philippe's Government for a new coat-of-arms for France:

Olagnier,
De Voiron (Isère).

Such satisfaction did it give him to make himself unrecognisable and hold himself aloof, that the words, _Odi profanum vulgus et arceo_, may be employed to express what to him was certainly one condition of happiness.

What did he himself regard as its conditions?--In his early days, evidently daring action and passionate love. The thrill with which a man, in his unbounded devotion to a cause or another man, risks his life; and the tremor communicated to the soul by happy love--these to him were the supreme moments of human existence. Writing of Milan in the introduction to _La Chartreuse_, he observes characteristically: "The departure of the last Austrian regiment marked the downfall of the old ideas. It became the fashion for men to hazard their lives. They saw that in order to be happy after centuries of hypocrisy and vapidity, they must love something with real passion, and be capable, on occasion, of risking their lives."

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. And my dislike of the commonplace and the affected often carries me beyond mere indifférence. When I meet a young Frenchwoman who has had the misfortune to have been well brought up, I am at once reminded of my own home and my sisters' upbringing; I foresee not only all her movements, but the most fugitive shades of her thoughts. That is why I am partial to bad company; it offers far more of the unforeseen. If I know myself at all, this is the chord in my soul which people and things in Italy set vibrating--the women first and foremost. 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. Therefore he, the cold, dry cynic, positively worshipped Napoleon.[3] Therefore he loved the women of Milan. Therefore he understood and depicted the life of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy much better even than modern Italian life. A work which he long purposed writing was a _History of Energy in Italy_; and it is not too much to say that his Italian Chronicles, copied, adapted, or imitated from old manuscripts, are equivalent to a psychological analysis of Italian energy.

One utterance will suffice to show that the same love of the unforeseen which had irresistibly attracted him to the war, made of him, when the war was over, a traveller, an emigrant, a cosmopolitan. In a letter in which he tells that he has been transferred to another post and is going unwillingly because of the tender ties which bind him to the place where he is living, he expressly mentions the pleasure which he nevertheless involuntarily feels, "the moment there is any talk of travelling and seeing new life." And it is equally evident that the same love of the unforeseen, the same strong personality, the same recklessness, or, taking it in a profounder sense, genius, which attracted him to woman and made him love more passionately and tenderly than others, reveals itself in the devotion to music and plastic art which made of him the enthusiastic dilettante, cicerone, and biographer. His love for Cimarosa and Correggio, Ariosto and Byron, was a passion. Take his attitude to Byron. His published criticism of the great English poet was severe and cold; he was haughty in personal intercourse with him, disputed with him on the subject of Napoleon, &c.; he actually left unanswered a most charming letter which Byron wrote him seven years after their meeting, because he fancied there was a trace of hypocrisy in the English poet's defence of Sir Walter Scott. But observe the way in which, when he is writing unreservedly, he describes his feelings on the occasion of his first meeting with Byron: "I was at the time wildly enthusiastic on the subject of _Lara_. My second look no longer showed me Lord Byron as he really was, but the author of _Lara_ as I thought he ought to be. When the conversation in the box flagged, Monsieur de Brême tried to get me to speak; but I simply could not; I was too full of awe and tenderness. If I had dared, I should have kissed Lord Byron's hand and burst into tears.... My tenderness made me urge him to take a carriage."[4]

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; and with unfailing coolness he renders account to himself of his condition under all different circumstances, and draws a whole chain of general inferences from it. Let us follow him into a battle. During the cannonade at Bautzen he writes in his journal:

"Between twelve and three we see remarkably well all that can be seen of a battle, that is to say, nothing. The entertainment consists in one's being slightly [the "slightly" is very characteristic] excited by the certainty that something dreadful is happening before one's eyes. The majestic roar of the cannons contributes greatly to this effect; if they made a whistling sound I do not believe that the same degree of emotion would be produced. The whistle might be as terrible, but could not be so grand."

Or let us listen to him when he is in love. He writes:--

OF THE BIRTH OF LOVE.

What takes place in the soul is:

1. Admiration.

2. One says to one's self: "What happiness it would be to kiss her, to be kissed by her, &c."

3. Hope.

One studies the perfections of the object of one's admiration ... the eyes of even the most reserved women flush in the moment of hope; the passion is so vehement, the pleasure so ardent, that it betrays itself by unmistakable signs.

4. Love is born.

To love is to have pleasure in seeing, touching, perceiving by all the senses, in as close contact as possible, a lovable person who loves us.

5. The first crystallisation begins.

One takes pleasure in adorning with a thousand perfections the woman of whose love one is sure; one rehearses all the details of one's happiness with infinite satisfaction.

Allow the brain of a lover to work for twenty-four hours, and the result will resemble what happens at Salzburg when a leafless branch is let down into the deserted depths of the salt mines. When it is drawn up again two or three months later, it is covered with sparkling crystals; the smallest twigs, those that are not thicker than a titmouse's claw, are decked with myriads of dazzling, twinkling diamonds; the original branch is unrecognisable. What I denominate crystallisation is the operation of the mind which, from everything that presents itself, draws the discovery of fresh perfections in the beloved object. A traveller speaks of the coolness of the orange groves near Genoa during the scorching summer heat--what a pleasure it would be to enjoy their coolness with her!... This phenomenon which I take the liberty of naming crystallisation, is a product of the nature which ordains that we shall feel pleasure and that the blood shall rush to our heads, of the feeling that our pleasure increases with the perfections of the beloved object, and of the idea: she is mine. The savage has not time to proceed further than the first step. He feels pleasure, but the energy of his brain is employed in the chase of the deer which is to provide him with food.... The man who is passionately in love sees every perfection in the woman he loves; nevertheless his attention may still be distracted, for the mind tires of everything that is monotonous, even of perfect happiness. But then comes what rivets attention:

6. Doubt is born.

After ten or twelve looks or any other series of actions have inspired the lover with hope and strengthened his hope ... he demands more positive proofs of his happiness. Coldness, indifference, or even anger is displayed if he shows too much assurance.... He begins to doubt his certainty of the happiness he had promised himself. He determines to solace himself with the other pleasures of life, but finds that they no longer exist for him. Fear of a dreadful misfortune attacks him, and his attention is concentrated.

7. Second crystallisation.

Its diamonds are confirmations of the idea: She loves me. Every quarter of an hour during the night which follows the birth of doubt, the lover, after a moment of terrible suffering, says to himself: Yes, she loves me; and he discovers new charms. Then doubt attacks him again; he sits up, forgets to breathe, asks himself: But does she really love me? And in the midst of these distressing and delightful reflections the poor lover feels with ever greater certainty: She would give me pleasures which she alone in all the world is capable of giving me."

Few such acute and delicate analyses of a passion exist. Not without reason have Beyle's descriptions of what happens in the human soul when it is under the influence of a passion, reminded his best critics, Taine and Bourget, of the third part of Spinoza's Ethics, the masterly _De Affectibus. In this soldier, administrator, diplomatist, and lover there was a good deal of the philosopher. He endeavoured to resolve every phenomenon of emotional life into its elements, and, on the other hand, he showed the connection between the ideas and emotions, which, united into a system, constitute the disposition and character of the individual. He paid as much attention to the comparative strength of the emotions as to the variety of their connections and concatenations; he traced peculiarities of character to the deepest lying national and climatic causes; he sketched a psychology of race; and, though he did not adhere to strictly scientific methods, there was a strong scientific tendency in his psychological studies. He loved to define by the aid of numbers, measure, weight. Writing of a king's visit to a little town, he describes the procession, the Te Deum and clouds of incense within the church, the salvoes of artillery outside, and concludes: "The peasants were beside themselves with joy and piety; _one such day undoes the work of a hundred issues of the Jacobin newspapers_." In one of his books, an exiled revolutionist is telling how the revolt he headed failed because he would not consent to the execution of three men, and would not divide among his followers seven or eight millions of francs contained in a box of which he had the key. "Who wills the end must will the means," says Beyle's hero; "if, instead of being an atom, I were a power, _I would hang three men to save four_,"[5]--a stupid and indefensible theory, by the way, based on the childish premise that any four men are of more value than any three.

It is plain enough that in Beyle's case the final condition of happiness was understanding. The real aim and object of all his endeavour was a clear understanding of the state of his own mind, and insight into the mechanism of the human soul generally. He was of opinion that prosperity, happiness in love, happiness generally, clears the understanding and sharpens the critical faculty, but was equally convinced that nothing contributes so much to make a man unhappy as want of clear-sightedness. In a letter to a friend, dated Moscow, 1812, he writes characteristically: "The happiness you now enjoy ought to lead you back naturally to the principles of pure _Beylism_. I read Rousseau's _Confessions_ last week. It was simply for want of two or three _Beylean_ principles that he was so unhappy. _The mania of seeing duties and virtues everywhere_ made his style pedantic, his life miserable. After three weeks of friendly intercourse with a man--crash! the duties of friendship, &c." Two years afterwards the man in question has forgotten him; Rousseau seeks and finds some pessimistic explanation. _Beylism_ would have told him: "Two bodies approach each other; warmth and a fermentation result; but every such state is transitory. It is a flower to be voluptuously enjoyed." These words contain a fragment of excellent practical philosophy, and would testify to an unusually well-balanced mind if the practice of their writer's life had corresponded to his theory. But although Beyle was by nature a robust sensualist, and had accustomed himself to a cynical boldness of expression (he shocked George Sand by his cynicism when she and De Musset met him on their way to Italy), and although as a thinker he was what he required a philosopher to be, namely, clear-headed, unimpressionable, and free from illusions (he used to say that to have been a banker was to have gone through the best preparatory school for philosophy), there lay behind the robust temperament and the dryness of the logician an artistic receptivity to every impression, an irritability and feminine sensitiveness which did not fall far short of Rousseau's. And this sensitiveness Beyle retained to the end of his life. In the autobiography (_Vie de Henri Brulard_) which was found amongst his papers, we come upon the following confession: "My sensitiveness is excessive; what only grazes another man's skin draws blood from me. Such was I in 1799; such am I in 1840. But I have learned to hide it all under an irony which the vulgar do not understand."

Seldom has a character combined so great a love of spontaneity and straightforwardness with so much calculation and subterfuge; seldom has a mind been so truthful and at the same time so addicted to dissimulation, so ardent in its hatred of hypocrisy and yet so lacking in openness and straightforwardness.

[1] See Beyle's dissertation on the subject in a most interesting letter, dated 28th December 1829.

[2] In a letter of July 16, 1813, he writes: "If the so-called superiority is only a superiority of some few degrees, it makes its possessor amiable and attractive to others--see Fontenelle. If it is more, it destroys every relation between him and other men. This is the unfortunate position in which the superior man, or, to speak more correctly, the man who is different from others, finds himself. Those who surround him can contribute nothing to his happiness. The praise of all these people would very soon disgust me, and their criticism would gall me."

And in the fourth chapter of _La Chartreuse de Parme_ we read: "His comrades found out that Fabrice was very _unlike_ themselves, at which they took umbrage; he, on the contrary, began to have a very friendly feeling towards them."

[3] In the letter which he wrote, but did not send, to Byron, he writes of Napoleon as "le héros que j'ai adoré." And a letter of 10th July 1818 contains the following lyrical outburst--probably the only one in his twenty volumes: "O Sainte-Hélène! roc désormais si célèbre, tu es l'écueil de la gloire anglaise." We are reminded of Hugo and Heine.

[4] For references to Lord Byron in Beyle's works, see the essay "Lord Byron en Italie" in the volume entitled _Racine et Shakespeare_, 261; and _Lettres à ses Amis_, i. 273, &c.: ii. 71, &c.

[5] _Rouge et Noir_, i. 105; ii. 45.