Beyle's early years had been passed in profound spiritual solitude. An overflowing fount of feeling had been turned inwards. The child who had lost his mother, and who hated and was hated by his father, learned early to look upon himself as different from others—no doubt also as superior to others, though he defined his superiority as unlikeness.[2] He was conscious that this unlikeness would exclude him from any general sympathy and prevent his being generally understood. Hence his desire that it were possible for him to write his books in a language which should only be understood by a chosen few—a sacred language. Hence also his wish to find "un lecteur unique, unique dans tous les sens," and his dedication of La Chartreuse de Parme: "To the happy few."
This, too, was the real source of the inclination to concealment. Not only did Beyle publish all his books under a pseudonym (all, with one exception, under the name of De Stendhal, presumably derived from Stendal in Prussia, the birthplace of Winckelmann), but in many of them, De l'Amour_among the rest, the pseudonymous author assumes any number of second pseudonyms. Any sentiment which he does not care to acknowledge as his own, any anecdote which might shed light upon his private life, is laid to the account of an Albéric, or a Lisio, or the amiable Colonel So and So. And he has given himself as many occupations as names; now he is a cavalry officer, now an ironmonger, now a customs officer, now a commercial traveller; here he figures as a man, there as a woman; at one time he is of noble, at another of plebeian birth; at one time English, at another Italian. He would have liked to write in a cipher language for the initiated. This delight in leading his readers on the wrong track is in part to be ascribed to the secretiveness of the diplomatist; but in his private correspondence it was also due to a suspicion of the police which almost amounted to a mania. In his youth Beyle had made acquaintance with both Napoleon's and the Austrian police, and he always retained a fear of his letters being seized and opened. Therefore he hardly ever signed a private letter with his name. I have counted in his correspondence more than seventy pseudonymous signatures, varying from the strangest to the most ordinary names—Conickphile, Arnolphe II, C. de Seyssel, Chopin d'Ornonville, Toricelli, François Durand, &c., &c. He sometimes subscribes himself captain, sometimes marquis, sometimes engineer; sometimes gives his age, or the name of his street and number of his house. Grenoble he calls Culars, Civita Vecchia, Abeille. It amuses him at times to append a misleading indication of locality to his fictitious signature: for example, Théodore Bernard (du Rhône); he actually signs such a document as a public petition to Louis Philippe's Government for a new coat-of-arms for France:
Olagnier,
De Voiron (Isère).
Such satisfaction did it give him to make himself unrecognisable and hold himself aloof, that the words, Odi profanum vulgus et arceo, may be employed to express what to him was certainly one condition of happiness.
What did he himself regard as its conditions?—In his early days, evidently daring action and passionate love. The thrill with which a man, in his unbounded devotion to a cause or another man, risks his life; and the tremor communicated to the soul by happy love—these to him were the supreme moments of human existence. Writing of Milan in the introduction to La Chartreuse, he observes characteristically: "The departure of the last Austrian regiment marked the downfall of the old ideas. It became the fashion for men to hazard their lives. They saw that in order to be happy after centuries of hypocrisy and vapidity, they must love something with real passion, and be capable, on occasion, of risking their lives."
These two passions, love of war and love of woman, were in Beyle's case only two expressions of one fundamental passion, namely, love for what he was wont to call le divin imprévu—the passion which makes a poet of him. How war, especially war as conducted by Napoleon, satisfied his craving, requires no explanation. How women, and especially Italian women, satisfied it, Beyle tells us himself. In a letter from Milan, dated 4th September 1820, he writes: "As I have spent fifteen years in Paris, nothing on earth leaves me so completely indifferent as a pretty Frenchwoman. And my dislike of the commonplace and the affected often carries me beyond mere indifférence. When I meet a young Frenchwoman who has had the misfortune to have been well brought up, I am at once reminded of my own home and my sisters' upbringing; I foresee not only all her movements, but the most fugitive shades of her thoughts. That is why I am partial to bad company; it offers far more of the unforeseen. If I know myself at all, this is the chord in my soul which people and things in Italy set vibrating—the women first and foremost. Imagine my delight when I found out, what no writer of travels had deprived me of the pleasure of discovering, namely, that in that country it is in good society that there is most of the unforeseen. Nothing deters these remarkable geniuses except want of money or pure impossibility; if prejudices still exist, it is only in the lower classes."
In other words, what Beyle loves best is reckless energy, both in action and emotion—energy, whether revealing itself as the irresistibleness of the military genius or the boundless tenderness of the loving woman. Therefore he, the cold, dry cynic, positively worshipped Napoleon.[3] Therefore he loved the women of Milan. Therefore he understood and depicted the life of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy much better even than modern Italian life. A work which he long purposed writing was a History of Energy in Italy; and it is not too much to say that his Italian Chronicles, copied, adapted, or imitated from old manuscripts, are equivalent to a psychological analysis of Italian energy.
One utterance will suffice to show that the same love of the unforeseen which had irresistibly attracted him to the war, made of him, when the war was over, a traveller, an emigrant, a cosmopolitan. In a letter in which he tells that he has been transferred to another post and is going unwillingly because of the tender ties which bind him to the place where he is living, he expressly mentions the pleasure which he nevertheless involuntarily feels, "the moment there is any talk of travelling and seeing new life." And it is equally evident that the same love of the unforeseen, the same strong personality, the same recklessness, or, taking it in a profounder sense, genius, which attracted him to woman and made him love more passionately and tenderly than others, reveals itself in the devotion to music and plastic art which made of him the enthusiastic dilettante, cicerone, and biographer. His love for Cimarosa and Correggio, Ariosto and Byron, was a passion. Take his attitude to Byron. His published criticism of the great English poet was severe and cold; he was haughty in personal intercourse with him, disputed with him on the subject of Napoleon, &c.; he actually left unanswered a most charming letter which Byron wrote him seven years after their meeting, because he fancied there was a trace of hypocrisy in the English poet's defence of Sir Walter Scott. But observe the way in which, when he is writing unreservedly, he describes his feelings on the occasion of his first meeting with Byron: "I was at the time wildly enthusiastic on the subject of Lara. My second look no longer showed me Lord Byron as he really was, but the author of Lara as I thought he ought to be. When the conversation in the box flagged, Monsieur de Brême tried to get me to speak; but I simply could not; I was too full of awe and tenderness. If I had dared, I should have kissed Lord Byron's hand and burst into tears.... My tenderness made me urge him to take a carriage."[4]
Many other men in every age and country have loved war and travel, women and art; but what is peculiarly characteristic and distinctly modern in Beyle is his tendency and his ability to examine himself in the moment of action or of passion. He is constantly observing himself, has, so to speak, constantly his hand on his pulse; and with unfailing coolness he renders account to himself of his condition under all different circumstances, and draws a whole chain of general inferences from it. Let us follow him into a battle. During the cannonade at Bautzen he writes in his journal:
"Between twelve and three we see remarkably well all that can be seen of a battle, that is to say, nothing. The entertainment consists in one's being slightly [the "slightly" is very characteristic] excited by the certainty that something dreadful is happening before one's eyes. The majestic roar of the cannons contributes greatly to this effect; if they made a whistling sound I do not believe that the same degree of emotion would be produced. The whistle might be as terrible, but could not be so grand."