On Love. Stendhal

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СКАЧАТЬ and the Catechism; in fine, that intellectual sympathy is the true basis of happiness in the relations of the two sexes. Modern exponents of Women's Rights will say that this is true, but only half the truth. It would be more correct to say that Stendhal saw the whole truth, but forbore to follow it out to its logical conclusion with the blind intransigeance of the modern propagandist. Be that as it may, Stendhal certainly deserves more acknowledgment, as one of the pioneers in the movement, than he generally receives from its present-day supporters.

      Stendhal was continually lamenting his want of ability to write. According to him, a perusal of the Code Civil, before composition, was the best way he had found of grooming his style. This may well have something to do with the opinion, handed on from one history of French literature to another, that Stendhal, like Balzac—it is usually put in these very words—had no style. It is not, correctly speaking, what the critics themselves mean: to have no style would be to chop and change from one method of expression to another, and nothing could be less truly said of either of these writers. They mean that he had a bad style, and that is certainly a matter of taste. Perhaps the critics, while condemning, condemn themselves. It is the severe beauty of the Code Civil which, makes them uncomfortable. An eye for an eye and a spade for a spade is Stendhal's way. He is suspicious of the slightest adornment: everything that is thought clearly can be written simply. Other writers have had as simplified a style—Montesquieu or Voltaire, for example—but there is scant merit in telling simply a simple lie, and Voltaire, as Stendhal himself says, was afraid of things which are difficult to put into words. This kind of daintiness is not Stendhal's simplicity: he is merely uncompromising and blunt. True, his bluntness is excessive. A nice balance between the severity of the Code Civil and the "drums and tramplings" of Elizabethan English comes as naturally to an indifferent pen, whipped into a state of false enthusiasm, as it is foreign to the warmth of genuine conviction. Had Stendhal been a little less vehement and a little less hard-headed, there might have been fewer modifications, a few less repetitions, contradictions, ellipses—but then so much the less Stendhal. In that case he might have trusted himself: as it was he knew his own tendency too well and took fright. Sometimes in reading Carlyle, one wishes that he had felt the same kind of modesty: he, certainly, could never have kept to the thin centre line, and we should have had another great writer "without a style." Effect meant little to Stendhal, hard fact and clearness everything. Perhaps, he would often have made his meaning clearer, if he had been less suspicious of studied effect and elaborate writing. Not infrequently he succeeds in being colloquial and matter-of-fact, without being definite.

Stendhal was beset with a horror of being artistic. Was it not he who said of an artist, whose dress was particularly elaborate: "Depend upon it, a man who adorns his person will also adorn his work"? Stendhal was a soldier first, then a writer—Salviati[2] is a soldier. Certainly it is his contempt for the type of person—even commoner, perhaps, in 1914 than in 1814—who carries his emotions on his sleeve, which accounts for Stendhal's naive disclaimer of personal responsibility, the invention of Lisio[3] and Salviati, mythical authors of this work on love—all a thin screen to hide his own obsession, which manages, none the less, to break through unmasked on almost every page.

The translation makes no attempt to hide these peculiarities or even to make too definite a sense from a necessarily doubtful passage.[4] Its whole aim is to reproduce Stendhal's essay in English, just as it stands in French. No other English translation of the whole work exists: only a selection of its maxims translated piece-meal.[5] Had a translation existed, we should certainly not have undertaken another. As it is, we have relied upon a great sympathy with the author, and a studied adhesion to what he said, in order to reconstruct this essay—encouraged by the conviction that the one is as necessary as the other in order to obtain a satisfactory result. Charles Cotton's Montaigne seems to us the pattern of all good translations.

In spite of the four prefaces of the original, we felt it advisable to add still another to the English translation. Stendhal said that no book stood in greater need of a word of introduction. That was in Paris—here it is a foreigner, dressed up, we trust, quite à l'anglaise, but still, perhaps, a little awkward, and certainly in need of something more than the chilly announcement of the title page—about as encouraging as the voice of the flunkey, who bawls out your name at a party over the heads of the crowd already assembled. True, the old English treatment of foreigners has sadly degenerated: more bows than brickbats are their portion, now London knows the charm of cabarets, revues and cheap French cooking.[6]

      The work in itself is conspicuous, if not unique. Books on Love are legion: how could it be otherwise? It was probably the first topic of conversation, and none has since been found more interesting. But Stendhal has devised a new treatment of the subject. His method is analytical and scientific, but, at the same time, there is no attempt at bringing the subject into line with a science; it is no part of erotology—there is no

      Greek ending with a little passing bell

That signifies some faith about to die.[7]

      His faith is unimpeachable and his curiosity and honesty unbounded: this is what makes him conspicuous. In claiming to be scientific, Stendhal meant nothing more than that his essay was based purely upon unbiassed observation; that he accepted nothing upon vague hearsay or from tradition; that even the finer shades of sentiment could be observed with as much disinterested precision, if not made to yield as definite results, as any other natural phenomena. "The man who has known love finds all else unsatisfying"—is, properly speaking, a scientific fact.

      Analytical, however, is the best word to characterise the Stendhalian method. Scientific suggests, perhaps, more naturally the broader treatment of love, which is familiar in Greek literature, lives all through the Middle Ages, is typified in Dante, and survives later in a host of Renaissance dialogues and treatises on Love. This love—see it in the Symposium of Plato, in Dante or in the Dialoghi of Leone Ebreo—is more than a human passion, it is also the amor che muove il sole e le altre stelle, the force of attraction which, combined with hate, the force of repulsion, is the cause of universal movement. In this way love is not only scientifically treated, it embraces all other sciences within it. Scientists will smile, but the day of Science and Art with a contemptuous smile for each other is over. True, the feeling underlying this cosmic treatment of love is very human, very simple—a conviction that love, as a human passion, is all-important, and a desire to justify its importance by finding it a place in a larger order of things, in the "mystical mathematics of the kingdom of Heaven." Weaker heads than Plato are also pleased to call love divine, without knowing very clearly what they mean by divinity. Their ignorance is relative; the allegorical representation of Eros—damned and deified alternately by the poets—is in motive, perhaps, not so far from what we have called the scientific, but, perhaps, might better have named the cosmic, treatment.

      In a rough classification of books on Love one can imagine a large number collected under the heading—"Academic." One looks for something to express that want of plain dealing, of terre-à-terre frankness, which is so deplorable in the literature of Love, and is yet the distinctive mark of so much of it. "Academic" comprehends a wide range of works all based on a more or less set or conventional theory of the passions. It includes the average modern novel, in which convention is supreme and experience negligible—just a traditional, lifeless affair, in which there is not even a pretence of curiosity or love of truth. And, at the same time, "academic" is the label for the kind of book in which convention is rather on the surface, rather in the form than in the matter. Tullia of Aragon, for example, was no tyro in the theory and practice of love, but her Dialogo d'Amore is still distinctly academic. Of course it is easy to be misled by a stiff varnish of old-fashioned phrase; СКАЧАТЬ