Books: Crystallized Romantic

STENDHAL (506 pp.)—Matthew Josephson—Doubleday ($4).

THE SHORTER NOVELS OF STENDHAL (552 pp.)—LIverighf ($2.49).

Rotund, romantic Lieut. Henri-Marie Beyle—who had never ridden a horse or seen a battle—hoisted his huge rump into the saddle and galloped off to war. His armor included two pistols, a large saber and the works of Homer, Virgil, Horace, Racine and Moliere.

“You will be spitted like a hog,” muttered one of Napoleon’s unimaginative professionals. But Henri Beyle, in whom genius and absurdity were uniquely compounded, somehow survived—and under the pen name of “Stendhal” immortalized his adventures in soldiery in two great works of fiction: The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma.

Like most “definitive” biographies, Matthew Josephson’s Stendhal is heavily ballasted with tinkling trifles. It lacks, for all its efforts, the dazzling high spiritedness that poured like a flood out of Stendhal himself. Nonetheless, like Josephson’s Victor Hugo (TIME, Oct. 19, 1942), it is the best and most comprehensive English study of its subject, a careful collection of material, skillfully assembled and organized.

Insatiable Appetite. When Freud read Stendhal’s memoirs of his childhood and adolescence he called them “a manifestation of psychological genius.” Stendhal, he saw, had been a Freudian some 70 years before Freud himself.

With his usual devastating honesty, Stendhal recorded in his autobiography (The Life of Henri Brulard) that he had loved his mother “with a mad passion”—”as criminal as possible” and indistinguishable from the love he felt for his mistresses in later years. His hatred of his chief rival was so violent that even in middle age he generally referred to his unfortunate father as “the bastard.”

When his mother died, her place in the gloomy Beyle home at Grenoble was filled by insipid maiden aunts and didactic priests and governesses. Young Henri’s life was soon charged with the ideas and feelings that persisted until the day he died—a horror of the established order in family, church and state, and an insatiable appetite for romantic passion.

Henri welcomed the French Revolution, and loved the period that followed—when the ladies promenaded “in flowing ‘Roman’ garments that exposed their arms and shoulders and nearly all of their bosoms,” and the dandies courted them “gotten up like peacocks, in embroidered coats, with ruffles . . . immense green cravats, and rare knotted walking sticks.”

By the time he returned with Napoleon’s army from the invasion of Italy, Henri was, and remained, says Author Josephson, “the eternal strategist in the game of life and sex, always armed with . . . systems, prescriptions, stratagems, and nearly always, comically enough, fated to lose his weapons, and his plans, midway in the contest.” He needed stratagems. By his own admission, he was as fat and homely as an “Italian butcher boy”; and despite his talkative, romantic arrogance and fashionable dress, he was terrified of ridicule and feminine rebuffs.

Glittering Notoriety. Yet he was no flop. Before he was 30 he had risen to the post of supply commissary in the Grand Army, and served as military governor of Brunswick in occupied Prussia (he took his pen name from the little German town of Stendal). He returned to France a member of “that hierarchy of five or six hundred top officials through whom the Empire was ruled.”

But the pursuit of beauty, the attainment by “great souls” of the maximum “passional love,” still seemed to him “the wonder of civilization.” His own ardor was overshadowed by his egotism, his thirst for glory and prestige under the Emperor. “I looked superb,” he noted one day during this glittering period, “my hair done in thick black curls, my face fine; cravat, jabot, two vests—superb; breeches of cashmere . . . noble and assured carriage.”

His sharp tongue (he once described Novelist Sir Walter Scott as “a dwarf who is determined not to lose an inch of his stature”), his always unexpected views (“It gives one somewhat the desire to be buried,” he remarked on seeing the tombs of Machiavelli and Michelangelo), his dogmatic epigrams (“The only excuse for God is that he doesn’t exist”) won him a drawing-room notoriety that his face and figure could never have won.

Sparkling Crystals. When Napoleon fell, Henri Beyle, who had participated in the disastrous invasion of Russia, fell with him. Disgraced, penniless, the young, atheistic republican stood on a Paris sidewalk and stared at the “hideous apparition” of “fat King Louis XVIII.” Henri fled to Italy.

There he wrote his famed study De I’Amour, in which he presented his theory (now commonplace among psychologists) of love as a process of “crystallization.” Love, he claimed, was like a ragged, bare branch that falls into a salt-mine, and when taken out a few months later is so richly coated with sparkling crystals that it appears beautiful beyond belief. Thus the passionate imagination of love renders a loved one beautiful—and, in the process, stimulates the soul of the lover to triumphs of estheticism.

In monarchist, classicist France, a few young, unknown romantics such as Victor Hugo took fire from De I’Amour. But it received only two reviews—both of which were written secretly by Stendhal himself. In Germany, the aging Goethe read History of Painting in Italy and Rome, Naples and Florence—the enthusiastic studies of Italian painters and passions signed “M. de Stendhal, former cavalry officer,” and remarked appreciatively, “This man knows how to use others with skill.” It was an apt remark, for it was Stendhal’s habit to lift his material from others’ books and then calmly “crystallize” it into his own extravagant views.

Romantic Disguise. He likewise crystallized the facts of life. There were the endless pursuits—sometimes in romantic disguise—of ladies of fashion; once, even, there were three ecstatic days spent hidden in the pitch-black cellar of a chateau, while the loved one (whose husband had come home unexpectedly) periodically lowered food, a chamber pot, and herself on the end of a rope.

Even these delights palled when Stendhal became convinced that his every move was watched by agents of Louis XVIII. He adopted fantastically naive measures to outwit them, such as writing illegible letters in anagrams and using at least 1,000 pseudonyms, including “Th. Jefferson.” Recent research has shown that Louis XVIII’s agents did indeed have a dossier on dashing Henri Beyle—but only a drab, uncrystallized report, beginning: “He is a fat fellow . . . always lives with some actress . . . and comes home every night at twelve.”

Immense Pyramid. “It was you who created romanticism,” wrote one of his admirers, “but you created it pure, natural, charming, amusing . . . and they [Victor Hugo and his followers] made of it a howling monster. Create something else.”

Stendhal proceeded to do just that; at the age of 40 he began his career as a novelist. His material was mostly at hand—including a hundred volumes of carefully collected MSS. recording the wild history of prominent Italian families, out of which Stendhal concocted five of the six Shorter Novels (The Abbess of Castro, The Duchess of Palliano, Vanina Vanini, Vittoria Accoramboni, The Cenci, Armance), now reprinted for the first time in one volume by Publisher Liveright. But the bulk of the material was diaries and journals containing his own precise, day-to-day reports on just about everything he had ever felt or witnessed.

Through most of the pages of his principal novels (The Red and the Black, The Charterhouse of Parma, Lucien Leuwen, Lamiel) raced, inevitably, a youthful, arrogant hero, slimmer and handsomer than Stendhal himself but carrying with incredible fire and vitality the torch of pride, passion and crystallization. Around this central figure were grouped the numerous personalities of Stendhal’s vast experience as rebel, soldier, courtier, and student-in-exile.

Lottery Ticket. Unlike his wilder contemporaries’ romanticism, Stendhal’s was cool, calculated, psychological and bursting with witty self-ridicule—the first portrayal, says Author Josephson, of “the neurotic personality that appears in legions in the 20th Century.” It was so far ahead of his time that Stendhal expected no readers for 100 years. “I have taken,” he said, “a ticket in a lottery, in which the winning number is 1936.” Not until the turn of the century did France discover Stendhal—60 years after self-exiled Henri Beyle had succumbed to a heart attack. He embraced death as he had embraced his ladies, with a crystallizing eye:

“But Madame,” he wrote, “death is only a word, devoid of sense for most men. It takes only an instant, and in general one does not feel it. One suffers, one is astonished at strange sensations which come upon him, and suddenly one suffers no more, the moment is past, one is dead. Have you ever ridden in a boat through the rapids under the bridge of the Saint-Esprit on the Rhone, near Avignon? The passengers all talk about it in advance; they are afraid; finally they perceive the passage ahead at a certain distance ; all at once the boat is seized by the current and in the twinkling of an eye one sees the bridge left behind.”