Liveblogging Napoleon's Russian Invasion: Stendahl Observes Moscow Aflame

Henri Beyle, later to be known as Stendhal, confronts the fire that destroyed Moscow with a curious jauntiness:

The conflagration was rapidly approaching the huse we had quitted., Our carriasge remained on the boulevard for five or six hours. Bored by this inaction, I went to see the fire and spent an hour or two with Joinville. I admired the voluptuosity of his house's furnishings: we drank there with Gillet and Busche, consuming three bottles of wine, which gave us new life.

While I was there I read a few lines of an English translation of Virginie, which, amidst all the general coarseness of existence here, turned me back, to some slight extent, into a moral being.

I went with Louis to look at the conflagration. We saw one Savoye, a mounted artilleryman, drunk, flogging a Guards officer with the flat of his sword and hurling silly abuse at him. He was in the wrong, and finally had to apologise. One of his comrades in pillage plunged down a blazing street, where he was probably roasted.

--Beyle to Félix Faure, 4 October 1812

[Letter 64 in To the Happy Few: Selected Letters 140-145, 141 (1986)]

Liveblogging Napoleon's Russian Invasion: Stendhal Finds it All Vulgar

Henri Beyle, not yet the world-famous novelist known as Stendhal, accompanied the forces of Napoleon all the way to Moscow and back. On August 24, 1812, writing from Smolensk, he gives his general view of matters:

My own happiness at being here is not great, How a man changes! My old thirst for new sights has been entirely quenched. Ever since I saw Milan and Italy, everything I see repels me with its crudity. Would you believe it that, without any vexation that affects me more than anybody else, and without any personal sorrow, I am sometimes on the point of bursting into tears? In this ocean of barbarity there is not a sound that finds an echo in my soul! Everything is coarse, dirty, both physically and morally sinking. I have found some small pleasure only in having a little music played to me on an untuned piano by an individual whose feeling for music is on a level with my feeling for mass. Ambition no longer has any influence over me: the most handsome ribbon would seem to me no compensation for the mire in which I am sunk. I imagine the heights that my soul inhabits--that soul which composes works, listens to Cimarosa and is in love with Angela, amidst a beautiful climate--I imagine the heights as delicious hills. Far from these hills, down in the plain, are fetid marshes--and here I am plunged, and nothing in the world except the sight of a map can remind me of my hills.

--Beyle to Félix Faure, 24 August 1812
[Letter 64 in To the Happy Few: Selected Letters 138-40, 139 (1986)]

Faure was sometimes First President of the Royal Court at Grenoble. Beyle addresses a number of letters to Faure, although he elsewhere (in Vie de Henri Brulard) he desribes Faure as sometimes "about the dullest of my friends."

January

Mainz, January 1813

My dear cousin, at last I write to you! Try to picture the physical condition of my brothers-in-arms and myself. We are appalling, revoltingly dirty, and we go down on our knees at the sight of a potato. When I endure such things by myself, I fall under the sway of their romantic quality, and can take an interest in them. But the presence of my brothers-in-arms makes my knees turn to water. On the whole, it was a destestable life, worse than what I suffered in Spaiin.

Farewell; write to me; a letter from France holds me in rapture for two days.

--That's Henri Beyle, aka Stendhal, to Félix Faure (not the Félix Faure who was later President of France). Beyle had just ridden back with the French Imperial Army from Moscow, after the cataclysmic defeat that effectively ended Napoleon's dreams of empire. Spain was, indeed, another nasty piece of business for the Napoleonic forces, but Beyle was never in Spain. Source: Stendhal, To the Happy Few: Selected Letters 153 (Norman Cameron ed., 1986).

Shock of Recognition: Auerbach on the Politics of Boredom

One measure of the power of an artist is the response he induces in others--the "shock of recognition," as Thoreau Melville (and Edmund Wilson) said. Stendhal--vain, chubby, self-absorbed, probably a stalker, who said he wouldn't be appreciated for 100 years--has an almost unmatched knack for provoking this kind of response, beginning with his peer Balzac, who saluted him Balzac was already famous and Stendhal was still an unkown: "never before have the hearts of princes, ministers, courtiers, and women been depicted like this," said Balzac, of Charterhouse of Parma.

In Mimesis, on of the monuments of 20th Century literary criticism, Eric Auerbach offers an appreciation of Stendhal's other great novel, Le Rouge et le Noir. In particular, Auerbach shows how precisely Stendhal captures a specific moment in time--Paris, on the eve of the 1830 Revolution:

Even the boredom which reigns in the dining room and salon of [the Hôtel de la Mole] is no ordinary boredom. It does not arise from the fortuitous personal dullness of the people who are brought together there; among them there are highly educated, witty, and sometimes important people, and the master of the house is intelligent and amiable. Rather, we are confronted, in their boredom, by a phenomenon politically and ideologically characteristic of the Restoration period. In the seventeenth century, and even more in the eighteenth, the corresponding salons were anything but boring. But the inadequately implemented attempt which the Bourbon regime made to restore conditions long since made obsolete by events, creates, among its adherents in the official and ruling classes, an atmosphere off pure convention, of limitation, of constraint and lack of freedom, against which the intelligence and good will of the persons involved are powerless. In these salons the things which interest everyone--the political and religious problems of the present, and consequently most of the subjects of its literature or that of the very recent past--could not be discussed, or at best could be discussed only in official phrases s mendacious that a man of taste and tact would rather avoid them. ... [L]ife is governed by the fear that the catastrophe of 1793 might be repeated. As these people are conscious that they no longer themselves believe in the thing they represent, and that they are bound to be defeated in any public argument, they choose to talk of nothing but the weather, music, and court gossip. In addition, they are obliged to accept as allies snobbish and corrupt people from among the newly-rich bourgeoisie, who, with the unashamed baseness of their ambition and with their fear for their ill-gotten wealth, completely vitiate the atmosphere of society.

So much for the prevailing boredom.

--Eric Auerbach, Mimesis 455-6 (Princeton Paperback 1968)

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.
   

Arnold Hauser on Getting Your Timing Right

In The Social History of Art, Arnold Hauser achieves what many have attempted: he makes a kind of “Marxist art criticism” at once interesting and (somewhat) plausible. Necessarily, it works better with some people/works than others. Probably no single author suits Hauser’s purposes better than Stendhal:

The social problem consists … ion the face of these 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 aaristocracy and that superior gifts and greater intelligence are being displaced everywhere by mediocrity. … [Julien Sorel, the hero of The Red and the Black] 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 IV at 29 (RKP ed. 1962)

Nice Girls Carry Protection

Julien has invited himself into his lady's boudoir by the expedient of posting a 25-foot ladder to her window. Now he has to figure out what to do with the ladder:

"You mustn't break the windows," Mathilde answered, trying in vain to adopt the tone of ordinary conversation. "You could possibly lower the ladder, I think, by tying a rope to the top rung. I've always plenty of ropes in my room."

--Stendhal, Scarlet and Black 349 (Margaret Shaw trans. 1953)

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.

War and Peace is Too Short

Terry Teachout resolves to read War and Peace (link). He makes it sound like a chore, as if he were resolving to visit his Aunt Minnie in the nursing home once a week.

Here is news for Terry: War and Peace is too short. Indeed, the only dull sentence in it is the first one--a bit of a hurdle if you don't get it, but not an overpowering blockade. Other than that, you read like the fit is on you.

Here's another piece of news. It's not really a long book at all. It is a series of individual scenes, each inimitably and intensely realized and entirely capable of standing on its own. Read them until you are exhausted, then fall back and regroup and read some more.

I know whereof I speak. I read W&P for the first time in my 30th year. I was working at an indoor job in Washington DC, but I would sneak out into Lafayette Park to get my novelistic fix (this inattention to my nominal duties may explain why I am not President of the United States). Mrs. Buce and I read it again a couple of years ago; I found I understood it better, but that it was otherwise none the worse for wear.

For a long time I said it was my favorite novel. Tastes change. In my 40s, I had a girlfriend who instructed me to correct a cultural deficiency by reading Middlemarch. She was right; I don't know of any novel anywhere that creates a more fully realized sense of place. In my 50s, my daughter told me to go back and take a second look at Charterhouse of Parma, which I had earlier slogged through without comprehension. And she was right; these things take a certain maturity, and some of us grow up faster than others.

I also would have said W&P was the great historical novel. On seasoned reflection, I think that may miss the mark. The magic of W&P is the way it captures life in tooth and claw--but not specifically Napoleonic life, however plausible the telling. For capturing a vanished past, and for catching the sense of a dynamic past, I might now favor l'Education Sentimentale (not least because it makes me as cool as Woody Allen).

Terry resolves also to read Little Dorrit, and bully for him: I'm not a super Dickens fan, but I'd say it is the one I like best of the (not very many) I've read. But for W&P--let's just say I envy him the pleasure of having this to look foward to.

Afterthought: If he is still doubtful and wants a warmup lap, he might try Hadji Murat. It's just as good as W&P and only a fraction as long