Barbara Hardy on Stendhal

Near the beginning and the end of her book, Margaret Tillett meditates on a passage from the Vie de Henry Bruleur in which Beyle/

Stendhal/Bruleur, at fifty-two, says he is prepared for horrible sufferings in the rest

of his life just as long as, dying, he shall not

say, 'Je ne veux pas recommencer'. Stend- hal's case seems to urge us to define ima- gination afresh, as a capacity for joy, passion and faith balanced and tested by sceptical reason. His feat of creative energy was to live ironically without losing heart. In his life and in his work, he stands as a challenge to the easier wish fulfilments of the nineteenth-,

century Bildungsroman. Julien Sorel, Fabrice

del Dongo, and Lucien Leuwen make the moral heroics of Dickens and George Eliot look rather less attractive to grown-up people than we tend to think. One should add that Stendhal rebukes the ironists as well as the meliorists. He makes the scepticism of Thackeray and Clough, for instahce, candid and flexible though they were, look by comparison erratic and frail. Stendhal provides the record and exploration of a psychological and social venture which simply doesn't exist in our own literature. We can't afford to neglect him.

Margaret Tillett's study of the 'Back- ground' to his novels has a typically exact and modest title: unlike so many back- ground studies, this one moves on several fronts at once, so that we always know what the background is a background to, and hence the point of examining it. It is the background of society, of the Revolution, Napoleon, and the July Monarchy, of Stend- hal's career and friendships. It is also the background of the works of non-fiction, in which we find a bridge between the life and the fictions proper. Background is related to the foreground in art, to the novels them- selves, which are looked at with a pene- trating eye for argument, passion, and ex- periments in character. The book has the unity of its author's profound and brilliant appreciation of the Stendhalian experiment, and is an enlightening study of what looks like an exceptionally lucid and integrated life.

Margaret Tillett writes warmly but quietly, herself effaced in most ways, but implicitly

present in the act of humane evaluation,

which works equally well on literary, social and moral problems. She presents quite a lot through the insights of Stendhal himself,

particularly in the central account of the time gene reuse, noble, sensitive, actively

benevolent but recognisably prompted by the

pleasure principle : `No particular praise is deserved; the dine genereuse can no more avoid committing the action genereuse than

the acorn can avoid growing into an oak and not a weed'. She hastens to add Stendhal's awareness that this admission does not un- dermine the sense that action justifies itself. She also brings out as a key insight Stend- hal's persistent testing and destruction of the

tune ginereuse, which over and over again throws away 'what looks like a winning

hand'. Faith in love and power conflict with a killing reality. What happens to Fabrice, I take it, is what Dickens dared not let hap- pen to Little Dorrit or George Eliot to Mag-

gie, though at one moment towards the end of The Portrait of a Lady Henry James al-

most lets it happen to Isabel Archer. The reason for this profound and cruel exposure of love is perhaps partly to be found in Stendhal's utterly logical atheism and in his knowledge of psychological and political complexity. The result is a sense of the gifted individual—Stendhal, Julien, Fabrice, Count Mosca—tested by but also testing historical experience. The test is sometimes made through a kind of political Satanism

by which the'dine gendreuse learns and lives with uncongenial modes and institutions in

order to know and to reject, though at times, as in the case of Beyle's own survival and compromise, there is a sense of a conformity for which the concept of experimental com-

promise or cynical survival is inadequate. To say it another way, the ame genereuse in

Julien and Fabrice was mortal, but in Stend- hal it was not destroyed; he was what his characters were not, an artist.

This seemed to me one of the book's most valuable comments, emerging as it does from a recognition that in so many experiences, political and erotic, author and characters followed a common pattern. Particularly in- teresting in life' and novels is the relation between the political and the sexual life, sometimes causal, sometimes analogical. Stendhal's drama of the experimental, his- trionic and unsteady course of love is insep- arable from that of the political experiments performed by Julien and Count Mosca, both capable of the generous devotion beyond self, and also of extreme lassitude, coldness, and fallibility. Margaret Tillett also brings out what is so impressive to the English reader, frequently unschooled in the finer points of sentimental education, that recog- nition of the changeability and arbitrariness of strong passions. The account of Stendhal's 'operatic' presentation of emotion, as she calls it, struck me as an especially sensitive piece of literary observation.

To return: the author knows that there is a limit to the common experience of those Passionate ironists, Stendhal and his char- acters. The heroes and heroines of his novels were not novelists. Stendhal's political sur- vival and his energy in human relations owe something, she implies, to his career in art. It involved the minimum of compromise and the maximum of honest and sceptical reflec- tion. Moreover, it enabled the artist, as he appeared to know, to make a communica- tion, social and personal, to the generous spirits gone and still to come. I do not entirely agree that the characters are not artists. Of course they are not in any literal sense, but their quality and power of ima- gination seem to derive from Stendhal's novelistic experience, their life-fictions from his real fictions. And his multiplication of personae, his shifts from fiction, and the layers in his non-fiction, seem very like the deliberate and passionate shifts of Julien, Fabrice and Count Mosca. But her sense of Stendhal's enabling art is surely right. It adds a dimension to her finely established range of Stendhal's pleasures and resources and, more importantly, gives a ring of genuine- ness to what she has to say about his rele- vance in our time. The conversation, `with, out rancour' between youth and age, the dilemma of 'ageing liberals' caught between conservatism and anarchy, the mature recog- nition . of the limitations of concepts of maturity, the hope for a better deal, through education and social progress, in the twentieth century—these speak with peculiar sharpness to the modern reader. Margaret Tillett of course acknowledges Stendhal's dark vein, and the experience of violence, War, revolution. I want to add a claim that his art valuably offers a feeling rationality at a time when irrationality is so temptingly Identified with love, passion, and generosity.

rosity, Barbara Hardy is Professor of English Literature at Birk beck College and author of a forthcoming study of Thackeray