ARRIGO BEYLE
MILANESE
SCRISSE
AMO
VISSE
ANN. LIX M. II
MORI IL XXIII MARZO
M.D.CCC.XLII.
[XIX]
BEYLE
Henri Beyle's is, without doubt, one of the most complex minds of the rich period to which he belongs. What chiefly distinguishes him from his brethren of the Romantic School is his direct intellectual descent from the severely rational sensationalistic philosophers of the eighteenth century. Not even in any short youthful or transition period is there a trace to be found in his soul of the Romantic reverence for religious tradition so prevalent in his day. All his life long he was the unfaltering philosophic antagonist of everything in the great Romantic movement which was of the nature of a reaction against the spirit of the eighteenth century. He was absolutely uninfluenced by Chateaubriand and Madame de Staël—was neither a colourist like the former nor eloquent like the latter; and absolutely uninfluenced by André Chénier, Hugo, and Lamartine—for he was wanting in the sense of metre, and was neither lyric nor pathetic. His models as a Romantic writer were not French; and his allegiance to Condillac and Helvetius, philosphers despised by the Romanticists of every country, never for a moment wavered, even at the time when the prejudice against them was universal.
He was a passionate atheist; that is to say, there was in his conviction that the world is not governed by any God the Father, as it were an element of enmity towards the being in whom he did not believe, an indignation at the horrors of life, which found expression in the sad and witty saying: "What excuses God is that he does not exist." Beyle never let slip an opportunity of displaying his dislike of so-called revealed religion. If he had occasion to write "the one true religion," he did not forget to add in parenthesis "(the reader's);" and when he touched on the subject of Christian morality, he was fond of remarking that it might be reduced to the calculation: "It is advisable not to eat truffles; they give you a stomach-ache."
As moral philosopher (and private individual) he was a pronounced epicurean. He acknowledged no mainspring of action but self-interest, that is to say, the desire of pleasure and the fear of pain; and, in his opinion, no other was necessary to explain even so-called heroic actions, since fear of self-contempt—i.e. fear of something that is painful—is quite enough to make a man, let us say, jump into the water to save another.[1] By virtuous actions, he understands actions which are attended with inconvenience or suffering to the actor, but are beneficial to others.
Psychological phenomena engrossed his attention to the exclusion of everything else; as the observant traveller, as the student of old chronicles, as the author of novels and stories, he was the psychologist, and that alone. His one constant study was the human soul, and he is one of the first modern thinkers who regard history as being in its essence psychology. But to Beyle, with his utilitarian philosophy, the science of the human soul and the science of happiness are one and the same thing. All his thoughts turn on happiness. By a man's character he understood the particular manner of seeking happiness which had become habitual to him; and the reason of his pronounced partiality to the Italians as a people was, that Italian men and women seemed to him to have found the most certain and direct way to happiness.
A man of an independent, original, ardent nature, he regarded it as the first condition of happiness to be one's self. Everywhere throughout his works we find, endlessly varied, the same warning: Be distrustful! Believe only what you have seen; admire nothing that does not appeal to you personally; always take it for granted that your neighbour has been paid to lie! The charge which he never wearies of bringing against the French is that they are too vain to know what happiness is, or rather, that they are unsusceptible to any higher happiness than that of gratified vanity, which he, personally, values very cheaply. According to Beyle, the Frenchman is perpetually asking his neighbour if he, the questioner, is feeling pleasure, is happy, &c.; he dare not decide the question for himself. The fear of not being like others, or of what others will say, is, in Beyle's opinion, the Frenchman's dominant feeling. He himself, on the contrary, not content with his natural originality, cherished a dislike of resembling others which led him into oddity and affectation. The man who was constantly ridiculing others for thinking of the opinion of their neighbours, who loved and exalted frankness, self-forgetfulness, straightforwardness, and simple-mindedness, was constantly keeping guard over himself, observing himself, prescribing to himself such duties as defiance of this neighbour, revenge upon that—and not neglecting to fulfil them. The thought of what his neighbour might say or do plagued him quite as much as it plagued the veriest philistine, merely with this difference, that the philistine was haunted by the thought of his neighbour because he desired to imitate him, Beyle because he wished to defy or avoid him. This eternal antagonism to the philistine is a genuinely Romantic trait. And it is also characteristically Romantic, that the man who was perpetually preaching and lauding naturalness and unconstraint should all his life have had a passion for concealment, disguise, and mystification, for hiding his personal experiences and thoughts under layer upon layer of wrappings and drapery.