The Duality of Stendhal

What makes Stendhal so memorable is that he is at once the great romantic and the great critic of romanticism. He understands the big dream and the grand gesture, but he sees through them and understands their vanity as well.

Arnold Hauser has always had more than a whiff of vulgar Marxism around him. That’s probably enough to make almost anyone dismiss him today as passé. It’s a fair cop, but the dismissal is unfortunate, because the charge obscures the extent to which his vulgar Marxism gives him a feel for the social and political context of art, particularly the novel (the same can be said about the Hungarian sometimes-Stalinist, Gyorgy Lukacs). Anyway, here is Hauser on Stendhal:

The social problem consists…in the face of those ambitious young people rising from the lower classes and uprooted by their education, who find themselves without money and without connections at the end of the revolutionary period, and who, deluded, on the one hand, by the opportunities of the Revolution, on the other, by Napoleon’s good fortune, want to play a role in society in accordance with their talents and ambitions. But now they discover that all power, all influence, all important posts are held by the old nobility and the new financial aristocracy and that superior gifts and greater intelligence are being displaced everywhere by mediocrity. … [Julien Sorel, hero of Le Rouge et Le Noir] was born too late or too early, and stands between the times, just as he stands between the classes. Where does he belong, whose side is he really on? It is the old familiar question, the problem of romanticism …”

--Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art
Vol. IV at 29 (RKP Paperback 1962)

Stendhal rode back from Moscow with Napoleon at the age of 29. On December 7, 1812, from Vilna, he wrote to his sister Pauline:

I am in good health, my dearest. I often thought of you on the long march from Moscow, which took fifty days. I have lost everything and have only the clothes I am wearing. What is much better is that I am thin. I have had much physical hardship, and no spiritual pleasure: but all that us done with, and I am ready to start again in the service of His Majesty.

Stendhal, To the Happy Few: Selected Letters
(Norman Cameron trans., Soho Press, 1986)

In fact, nothing so grand ever happened to him again. He collapsed of apoplexy in a Paris street and died, in 1842.