Stendhal

We've been spending a bit of time with Stendhal lately. The readaloud book at the Mr. and Mrs. Buce reading club has been Le Rouge et Le Noir (in Penguin English Scarlet and Black). I also got about halfway through Lucien Leuwen (but then, Stendhal didn't finish that one himself). In Arles, I picked up a copy of the enthusiastic essay that Balzac wrote about Charterhouse of Parma, back when Balzac was a big deal and Stendhal was a nobody. And I have a copy (unopened) of Souvenirs of Egotism, unread except for the warm introduction from Doris Lessing. I've got a bunch of thoughts, not necessarily well related or digested:

1. I first read Scarlet and Black 50 years ago. I enjoyed it, although I suppose I was mainly congratulating myself for reading a "big" book. This time, it made me laugh aloud, a lot. It's obvious now that it is a book about a pompous youth. What I thought about it back when I was a pompous youth, I can only guess at.
   
   
2. The charm of Stendhal is that he is at once a near-hopeless romantic and at the same time the most searching and subtle critic of his own romanticism. Once again, it is those pompous young men. It takes one to know one and you can't kid a kidder. Stendhal was so good at seeming through the visions and illusions of romanticism because he was so firmly wedded to it himself.


3. But here is the problem (Caution plot spoiler ahead): In the last few chapters of Scarlet and Black, after Julien has committed his great crime, when Julien is one his way to the guillotine, we see a great romantic set-piece--a masterpiece of Byronic self-dramatization, a fit literary companion to its almost exact contemporary, Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique. One is tempted to keep on laughing here--hey, it's a novel, after all, and the excesses are so, well, excessive.


4. But the trouble is, it isn't clear that Stendhal is in on the joke. For all his suave irony in so much of his work, there comes a point where Stendhal seems to slip his critical stun gun back into its holster and to let the posturing role.
   


5. In retrospect now, I can see that one feels the same way about his extraordinary essay, On Love--the one in which he invented the Salzburg Branch. It's a piece almost devastating in its acuity, yet at the same time we keep finding Stendhal as blind to the very torrent of romanticism that he himself sees through. Can he both see and not see? Yes, apparently he can. And in Charterhouse of Parma, still perhaps the best political novel ever written, we have that wonderful passion of the Princess Sanseverina for her almost entirely undeserving nephew. Can it be that Stendhal took it seriously? Yes, perhaps it can.
   


6. Footnote: one of the few fixed points in the Stendhalian firmament is Napoleon: the late, great colossus who bestrode the firmament just a heartbeat before Stendhal's own prime. And yet Stendhal's most direct exposure to Napoleon was on the march back from Moscow--an episode almost unmatched in the annals of misery and squalor. Not Napoleon's fault, Stendhal seems to have believed.
   


7. I'm tempted to say that all these contradictions make Stendhal all the more interesting--is he, or is he not, an acute self-critic? I suppose I could defend that assertion, but it smells a lot of making a virtue of of necessity. If he is interesting--well, strike that, he is interesting--it as much for his human failings as it is for his extraordinary double vision.