The Analysis of Stendhal
To the Happy Few: Selected Letters of Stendhal. Translated by Norman Cameron. (Lehmann. 21s.) Stendhal par lui-meme. Images et textes presentes par Claude Roy. (Aux Editions du Seuil, Paris. 300 fr.) "IT would be a very good thing," wrote Prosper Merimee, "if Beyle's letters tere to be published one day; then people would come to know and love a man-whose intelligence and fine qualities dwell only in the memory of a small number of his friends." It was not necessary for the world to wait for the publication of the letters, of which a complete edition did not appear till 1934. The two great novels that Beyle had written under the pseudonym of Stendhal won him readers vastly in excess of the "happy few" whom he had looked forward to as his eventual audience. The letters are of tertiary interest; they come next in importance to his autobiographical writings; which are themselves secondary only to Le Rouge et le Noir and La Chartreuse de Parme. But nothing that Beyle wrote is negligible. For, in the words of Paul Valery, "we shall never be done with Stendhal, and there can be no higher praise than that." One has to enjoy the novels before one turns to the Correspondance. For Stendhal is of a piece; the whole of his experience went into his writing; the author and the private citizen completely coincide. One cannot, as one can with Flaubert, feel sympathy with the man as he revealed himself to his friends while rejecting his books.
Stendhal wrote as he talked. "To have a good epistolary style," he told his sister, "one must write exactly what one would say to the person if one saw him." In a similar way, La Chartreuse was dictated at high speed to an amanuensis. He never corrected single words, but sometimes altered whole scenes. His letters, therefore, are spontaneous, full of personalities and minor incidents that require more annotation than they have received from their present editor. Furthermore they are often deliberately obscure, owing to Stendhal's fear of a police censorship, which probably existed chiefly in his imagination. He gives us sidelights on every- thing, a full view of almost nothing. But these little incidents, these sidelights, are the seeds from which spring the great scenes of the novels. "A cat has died in your street," he wrote to a friend, "Tell me about it." His affair with Madame Dembowska comes to grief, and he records the stages of his despair in his extremely acute letters to the lady herself. Real happenings, trivial or great, were the stuff of which he built his novels; invention served only to help him out when reality failed. His heroes were facets of himself, each of whom he equipped with a portion of his own experience; and the getting of that experience is plotted, higgledy-piggledy, in all the disorder of life itself, in the letters he wrote to his friends.
A third of the present selection is taken up with those to his favourite sister Pauline, in which he instructed her in the rudiments of what our contemporary S. Potter has called the art of "Lifeman- ship." Stendhal was a master lifeman, who believed that happiness —for him the highest good—could be obtained by intelligent social manoeuvring. His code, when set out baldly for Pauline's benefit, might appear, cynical, were it not clear that his application of it was essentially defensive. He was a shy man, whose kindness shines out of each of his portraits reproduced by M. Roy; and his desire was rather to safeguard himself than to score off others.
His advice to her about the choice of a husband is, nevertheless, unpleasantly reminiscent of that classic novel of offensive lifemanship, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, in which the game of seduction is played according to military rules. Rousseau, however, influenced him in another direction. Passion was to Stendhal, as to the author of the Cottfessions, the supreme happiness, and this could not be attained by calculating methods. He lacked strong emotion, tried con- sciously to work it up, lost himself in a web of cerebration, and emerged—bored and weary. The battle between his acute mind and his blundering heart is perhaps the main subject of these letterg which contain incidental descriptions of the Moscow campaign and of his meetings with Byron; also records of his opinions literary and political.
Mr. Norman Cameron- is usually a sensitive translator. In the case of these letters, however, although sometimes catching Stendhal's conversational tone to a nicety, he tends on the whole to choose too literary a vocabulary. Occasionally he lapses into quite unfor- givable infelicities : "The twelve or fifteen first Roman Emperors," "Remind me to my old colleague," "half-fools" (for half-wits), "precious" (for rare) trees, and "sculpture" for the porcelain figures made at the Sevres works. Imperfections of this sort should surely have been noticed ia.the publisher's office, even if the translator failed to pick them up on revision. The publisher's part in this book, which translates a recent French selection from the Correspondance, has been a little perfunctory. The addition of a few more footnotes, which could have been taken from the complete edition, would greatly have helped the reader in places where Stendhal's meaning is far from clear.
Stendhal par Iiii-meme sets out by means of skilfully selected short quotations from all his writings to prove him a more systematic thinker than a volume of his letters would suggest. Claude Roy; France's leading Communist critic, claims that Stendhal was con- sistently progressive and anti-clerical; and his introductory essay presents a great deal in a small space, though it fails to establish the case for Stendhal's enthusiasm for the proletariat, whom he seldom mentioned without some reference to the odour of the crowd. Stendhal's disgust with both royalist and bourgeois was surely rather an artist's reaction to incomprehension than the expres- sion of a political belief in a class whose taste, were they to gain power,.would certainly be even worse.
Stendhal was an aristocrat who had lost faith in his fellow aristo- crats; a liberal out of protest against the stupidities and cruelties so plentifully recorded in his letters. Though it is impossible to accept M. Roy's standpoint, one cannot overpraise his selection of texts, which are so arranged as to show the facets of Stendhal's mind, and which conclusively demonstrate the relation between his epistolary jottings, his autobiographical ruminations and the quint- essential experience distilled into the novels, to which it acts as a very useful supplement. It is the latest volume in a most competent and inexpensive series, the like of which we could do with in this
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