Stendhal On Love

1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-2-322-15152-3
Verlag: BoD - Books on Demand
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 419 Seiten

Mortimer came back trembling from a long journey; he loved Jenny; she had not answered her letters. When he arrived in London, he rides a horse and picks her up from his country house. He arrives, she was walking in the park; he runs there, his heart racing; he meets her, she extends her hand to him, receives him with trouble: he sees that he is loved. As she walked through the park alleys with her, Jenny's dress embarrassed herself in a thorny acacia bush. Later on, Mortimer was happy, but Jenny was unfaithful. I maintain that Jenny never loved him; he cites as proof of his love the way she received him when she returned from the continent, but he could never give me the slightest detail. Only he flinches visibly as soon as he sees an acacia bush; it is really the only distinct memory he has kept of the happiest moment of his life. Under the guise of a psychological and sociological analysis of love, he expresses his unfortunate passion for Matilde Viscontini Dembowski. It is in this book that he invents and describes the famous phenomenon of crystallization. An essay on the feeling of love in which he tries to categorize and analyze the different types of emotions. The most famous idea is that of "crystallization": the lover sees the loved one under the prism of perfection and makes an idealized image of him.

Stendhal, whose real name is Marie-Henri Beyle, born on 23 January 1783 in Grenoble and died on 23 March 1842 in Paris, is a French writer of the first half of the 19th century. He joined the army in 1800 and held mainly military administrative positions, as he did during the Russian campaign in 1812. An art lover and passionate about Italy, where he spent many years, he first wrote aesthetic essays under his real name as L'Histoire de la peinture (early 1817), but it was under the pseudonym "M. de Stendhal, officier de cavalerie" that he published Rome, Naples, Florence in September 1817. This pen name is inspired by a German town called "Stendal", the birthplace of the renowned art historian and archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann at the time, but above all close to where Stendhal lived in 1807-1808 a moment of great passion with Wilhelmine de Grisheim. Having added an H to further Germanize the name, he wanted to pronounce it "Standhal". His training novels Le Rouge et le Noir (1830), La Chartreuse de Parme (1839) and Lucien Leuwen (unfinished) made him, alongside Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert or Zola, one of the great representatives of 19th century French fiction. In his novels, characterized by a thrifty and tightened style, Stendhal searches for "Truth, the harsh truth" in the psychological field, and mainly portrays young people with romantic aspirations for vitality, strength of feeling and dreams of glory.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Stendhal

Leseproben

ON LOVE

That you should be made a fool of by a young woman, why, it is many an honest man's case.

The Pirate.

INTRODUCTORY PREFACE TO THE TRANSLATION

Stendhal's three prefaces to this work on Love are not an encouraging opening. Their main theme is the utter incomprehensibility of the book to all but a very select few—"a hundred readers only": they are rather warnings than introductions. Certainly, the early life of Stendhal's De l'Amour justifies this somewhat distant attitude towards the public. The first and second editions were phenomenal failures—not even a hundred readers were forthcoming. But Stendhal, writing in the early part of the nineteenth century, himself prophesied that the twentieth would find his ideas at least more comprehensible. The ideas of genius in one age are the normal spiritual food for superior intellect in the next. Stendhal is still something of a mystery to the general public; but the ideas, which he agitated, are at present regarded as some of the most important subjects for immediate enquiry by many of the keenest and most practical minds of Europe.

A glance at the headings of the chapters gives an idea of the breadth of Stendhal's treatment of love. He touches on every side of the social relationship between man and woman; and while considering the disposition of individual nations towards love, gives us a brilliant, if one-sided, general criticism of these nations, conscious throughout of the intimate connexion in any given age between its conceptions of love and the status of woman.

Stendhal's ideal of love has various names: it is generally "passion-love," but more particularly "love à l'italienne."[1] The thing in itself is always the same—it is the love of a man and a woman, not as husband and wife, not as mistress and lover, but as two human beings, who find the highest possible pleasure, not in passing so many hours of the day or night together, but in living one life. Still more, it is the attachment of two free fellow-creatures—not of master and slave.

Stendhal was born in 1783—eight years before Olympe de Gouges, the French Mary Wollstonecraft, published her Déclaration des Droits des Femmes. That is to say, by the time Stendhal had reached mental maturity, Europe had for some time been acquainted with the cry for Women's Rights, and heard the earliest statement of the demands, which have broadened out into what our age glibly calls the "Woman Question." How, may we ask, does Stendhal's standpoint correspond with his chronological position between the French Revolution and the "Votes for Women" campaign of the present day?

Stendhal is emphatically a champion of Women's Rights. It is true that the freedom, which Stendhal demands, is designed for other ends than are associated to-day with women's claims. Perhaps Stendhal, were he alive now, would cry out against what he would call a distortion of the movement he championed. Men, and still more women, must be free, Stendhal holds, in order to love; his chapters in this book on the education of women are all an earnest and brilliant plea to prove that an educated woman is not necessarily a pedant; that she is, on the contrary, far more lovable than the uneducated woman, whom our grandfathers brought up on the piano, needlework 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,...