On Love. Stendhal

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СКАЧАТЬ expressed, not in the manner of expression. There is more to be learnt about love from Werther, with all his wordy sorrows, than from the slick tongue of Yorick, who found it a singular blessing of his life "to be almost every hour of it miserably in love with someone." But, then, just because Werther is wordy, all his feelings come out, expressed one way or another. With Tullia, and others like her, one feels that so much is suppressed, because it did not fit the conventional frame. What she says she felt, but she must have felt so much more or have known that others felt more.

      This suppression of truth has, of course, nothing to do with the partial treatment of love necessary often in purely imaginative literature. No one goes to poetry for an anatomy of love. Not love, but people in love, are the business of a playwright or a novelist. The difference is very great. The purely imaginative writer is dealing with situations first, and then with the passions that cause them.

Here it is interesting to observe that Stendhal, in gathering his evidence, makes use of works of imagination as often as works based upon fact or his own actual experience.[8] Characters from Scott are called in as witnesses, side by side with Mademoiselle de Lespinasse or Mariana Alcaforado.

The books mentioned by Stendhal are of two distinct kinds. There are those, from which he draws evidence and support for his own theories, and in which the connexion with love is only incidental (Shakespeare's Plays, for example, Don Juan or the Nouvelle Héloïse), and others whose authors are really his forerunners, such as André le Chapelain.[9] Stendhal gives some account of this curious writer, who perhaps comes nearer his own analytical method than any later writer. In fact, we have called Stendhal unique perhaps too rashly—there are others he does not mention, who, in a less sustained and intentional way, have attempted an analytical, and still imaginative, study of love. Stendhal makes no mention of a short essay on Love by Pascal, which certainly falls in the same category as his own. It is less illuminating than one might expect, but to read it is to appreciate still more the restraint, which Stendhal has consciously forced upon himself. Others also since Stendhal—Baudelaire, for instance—have made casual and valuable investigations in the Stendhalian method. Baudelaire has here and there a maxim which, in brilliance and exactitude, equals almost anything in this volume.[10]

      And then—though this is no place for a bibliography of love—there is Hazlitt's Liber Amoris. Stendhal would have loved that patient, impartial chronicle of love's ravages: instead of Parisian salons and Duchesses it is all servant-girls and Bloomsbury lodging-houses; but the Liber Amoris is no less pitiful and, if possible, more real than the diary of Salviati.

      There are certain books which, for the frequency of their mention in this work, demand especial attention of the reader—they are its commentary and furnish much of the material for its ideas.

      In number CLXV of "Scattered Fragments" (below, p. 328) Stendhal gives the list as follows:—

       The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini.

       The novels of Cervantes and Scarron.

       Manon Lescaut and Le Doyen de Killerine, by the Abbé Prévôt.

       The Latin Letters of Héloïse to Abelard.

       Tom Jones.

       Letters of a Portuguese Nun.

       Two or three stories by Auguste La Fontaine.

       Pignotti's History of Tuscany.

       Werther.

       Brantôme.

       Memoirs of Carlo Gozzi (Venice, 1760)—only the eighty pages on the history of his love affairs.

       The Memoirs of Lauzun, Saint-Simon, d'Épinay, de Staël, Marmontel, Bezenval, Roland, Duclos, Horace Walpole, Evelyn, Hutchinson.

       Letters of Mademoiselle Lespinasse.

All these are more or less famous works, with which, at least by name, the general reader is familiar. Brantôme's witty and entertaining writings, the Letters of a Portuguese Nun and those of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, perhaps the sublimest letters that have ever been written, are far less read than they deserve. The rest—excepting perhaps Scarron, Carlo Gozzi, Auguste La Fontaine, and one or two of the less-known Memoirs—are the common reading of a very large public.

This list of books is mentioned as the select library of Lisio Visconti, who "was anything but a great reader." Lisio Visconti is one of the many imaginary figures, behind which hides Stendhal himself; we have already suggested one reason for this curious trait. Besides Lisio Visconti and Salviati, we meet Del Rosso, Scotti, Delfante, Pignatelli, Zilietti, Baron de Bottmer, etc. etc. Often these phantom people are mentioned side by side with a character from a book or a play or with someone Stendhal had actually met in life. General Teulié[11] is a real person—Stendhal's superior officer on his first expedition in Italy: Schiassetti is a fiction. In the same way the dates, which the reader will often find appended to a story or a note, sometimes give the date of a real event in Stendhal's life, while at other times it can be proved that, at the particular time given, the event mentioned could not have taken place. This falsification of names and dates was a mania with Stendhal. To most of his friends he gave a name completely different from their real one, and adopted with each of them a special pseudonym for himself. The list of Stendhal's pseudonyms is extensive and amusing.[12] But he was not always thorough in his system of disguise: he is even known to have written from Italy a letter in cypher, enclosing at the same time the key to the cypher!

We have only to make a few additions to Lisio Visconti's list of books already mentioned, in order to have a pretty fair account of the main sources of reference and suggestion, to which Stendhal turned in writing his De l'Amour.[13] There are Rousseau's Nouvelle Héloïse and Émile. Stendhal holds that, except for very green youth, the Nouvelle Héloïse is unreadable. Yet in spite of its affectation, it remained for him one of the most important works for the study of genuine passion. Then we must add the Liaisons Dangereuses—a work which bears certain resemblances to Stendhal's De l'Amour. Both are the work of a soldier and both have a soldierly directness; for perfect balance and strength of construction few books have come near the Liaisons Dangereuses—none have ever surpassed it. There is the Princesse de Clèves of Madame de Lafayette and Corinne by Madame de Staël, whose typically German and extravagant admiration for Italy touched a weak spot in Stendhal. After Chateaubriand's Génie du Christianisme, which Stendhal also refers to more than once, the works of Madame de Staël were, perhaps, the greatest working influence in the rise of Romanticism. What wonder, then, that Stendhal was interested? To the letters of Mlle. de Lespinasse and of the Portuguese Nun we must add the letters of Mirabeau, written during his imprisonment at Vincennes, to Sophie de Monnier. Further, we must add the writings of certain moral teachers whose names occur frequently in the following pages: Helvétius, whom Clarétie[14] amusingly calls the enfant terrible of the philosophers; de Tracy[15]; Volney, author of the once celebrated Ruines, traveller and philosopher. These names are only the most important. Stendhal's reading was extensive, and we might swell the list with the names of Montesquieu, Condillac, Condorcet, Chamfort, Diderot—to name only the moralists.

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