On Love. Stendhal

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СКАЧАТЬ vanity is stranger, and which he would be very ashamed to see divulged in the salons.

      I am sure to displease those women who capture the consideration of these very salons by an affectation that never lapses for an instant. Some of these for a moment I have surprised in good earnest, and so astonished, that, asking themselves the question, they could no longer tell whether such and such a sentiment, as they had just expressed, was natural or affected. How could such women judge of the portraiture of real feelings? In fact this work has been their bête noire: they say that the author must be a wretch.

To blush suddenly at the thought of certain youthful doings; to have committed follies through sensibility and to suffer for them, not because you cut a silly figure in the eyes of the salon, but in the eyes of a certain person in the salon; to be in love at the age of twenty-six in good earnest with a woman who loves another, or even (but the case is so rare that I scarcely dare write it, for fear of sinking again into the unintelligible, as in the first edition)—or even to enter the salon where the woman is whom you fancy that you love, and to think only of reading in her eyes her opinion of you at the moment, without any idea of putting on a love-lorn expression yourself—these are the antecedents I shall ask of my reader. The description of many of these rare and subtle feelings has appeared obscure to people with positive ideas. How manage to be clear in their eyes? Tell them of a rise of fifty centimes or a change in the tariff of Columbia.[2]

      The book before you explains simply and mathematically, so to speak, the curious feelings which succeed each other and form a whole called the Passion of Love.

      Imagine a fairly complicated geometrical figure, drawn with white chalk on a large blackboard. Well, I am going to explain that geometrical figure, but on one condition—that it exists already on the blackboard, for I personally cannot draw it. It is this impossibility that makes it so difficult to write on Love a book which is not a novel. In order to follow with interest a philosophic examination of this feeling, something is wanted in the reader besides understanding: it is absolutely necessary that Love has been seen by him. But then where can a passion be seen?

      This is a cause of obscurity that I shall never be able to eliminate.

Love resembles what we call the Milky Way in heaven, a gleaming mass formed by thousands of little stars, each of which may be a nebula. Books have noted four or five hundred of the little feelings hanging together and so hard to recognise, which compose this passion. But even in these, the least refined, they have often blundered and taken the accessory for the principal. The best of these books, such as the Nouvelle Héloïse, the novels of Madame Cottin, the Letters of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse and Manon Lescaut, have been written in France, where the plant called Love is always in fear of ridicule, is overgrown by the demands of vanity, the national passion, and reaches its full height scarcely ever.

      What is a knowledge of Love got from novels? After seeing it described—without ever feeling it—in hundreds of celebrated volumes, what is to be said of seeking in mine the explanation of this madness? I answer like an echo: "'Tis madness."

      Poor disillusioned young lady, would you enjoy again that which busied you so some years ago, which you dared mention to no one, which almost cost you your honour? It is for you that I have refashioned this book and tried to make it clearer. After reading it, never speak of it without a little scornful turn, and throw it in your citron bookcase behind the other books—I should even leave a few pages uncut.

      'Tis not only a few pages that will be left uncut by the imperfect creature, who thinks himself philosopher, because he has remained always stranger to those reckless emotions, which cause all our happiness of a week to depend upon a glance. Some people, coming to the age of discretion, use the whole force of their vanity to forget that there was a day when they were able to stoop so low as to court a woman and expose themselves to the humiliation of a refusal: this book will win their hatred. Among the many clever people, whom I have seen condemn this work, for different reasons but all angrily, those only seemed to me ridiculous, who had the twofold conceit to pretend always to have been above the weakness of sensibility, and yet to possess enough penetration to judge a priori of the degree of exactitude of a philosophic treatise, which is nothing but an ordered description of these weaknesses.

      The grave persons, who enjoy in society their reputation as safe men with no romantic nonsense, are far nearer to the understanding of a novel, however impassioned, than of a book of philosophy, wherein the author describes coldly the various stages of the malady of the soul called Love. The novel moves them a little; but before the philosophic treatise these sensible people are like blind men, who getting a description of the pictures in a museum read out to them, would say to the author: "You must agree, sir, that your work is horribly obscure." What is to happen if these blind men chance to be wits, established long since in possession of that title and with sovereign claims to clairvoyance? The poor author will be treated prettily. In fact, it is what happened to him at the time of the first edition. Several copies were actually burnt through the raging vanity of very clever people. I do not speak of insults all the more flattering for their fury: the author was proclaimed to be coarse, immoral, a writer for the people, a suspicious character, etc. In countries outworn by monarchy, these titles are the surest reward for whoever thinks good to write on morals and does not dedicate his book to the Mme. Dubarry of the day. Blessed literature, if it were not in fashion, and interested those alone for whom it was written!

In the time of the Cid, Corneille was nothing for M. le Marquis de Danjeau[3] but "a good fellow." Today the whole world thinks itself made to read M. de Lamartine: so much the better for his publisher, but so much the worse, and a hundred times the worse, for that great poet. In our days genius offers accommodation to people to whom, under penalty of losing caste, it should never so much as give a thought.

      The laborious and active, very estimable and very positive life of a counsellor of State, of a manufacturer of cotton goods or of a banker with a keen eye for loans finds its reward in millions, not in tender sensation. Little by little the heart of these gentlemen ossifies: the positive and the useful are for them everything, and their soul is closed to that feeling, which of all others has the greatest need of our leisure and makes us most unfit for any rational and steady occupation.

      The only object of this preface is to proclaim that this book has the misfortune of being incomprehensible to all who have not found time to play the fool. Many people will feel offended and I trust they will go no further.

[1] [May, 1826.—Tr.]

[2] "Cut this passage out," say my friends. "Nothing could be truer, but beware of the men of business: they'll cry out on the aristocrat." In 1812 I was not afraid of the Treasury: so why should I be afraid of the millionaire in 1820? The ships supplied to the Pasha of Egypt have opened my eyes in their direction, and I fear nothing but what I respect.

[3] Vide p. 120 of Mémoires de Danjeau (Édition Genlis).

PREFACE[1]

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      I write for a hundred readers only and of these unhappy charming beings, without hypocrisy or moral cant, whom I would please, I know scarcely a couple. Of such as lie to gain consideration as writers, I take little heed. Certain fine ladies should keep СКАЧАТЬ