Or let us listen to him when he is in love. He writes:—
OF THE BIRTH OF LOVE.
What takes place in the soul is:
1. Admiration.
2. One says to one's self: "What happiness it would be to kiss her, to be kissed by her, &c."
3. Hope.
One studies the perfections of the object of one's admiration ... the eyes of even the most reserved women flush in the moment of hope; the passion is so vehement, the pleasure so ardent, that it betrays itself by unmistakable signs.
4. Love is born.
To love is to have pleasure in seeing, touching, perceiving by all the senses, in as close contact as possible, a lovable person who loves us.
5. The first crystallisation begins.
One takes pleasure in adorning with a thousand perfections the woman of whose love one is sure; one rehearses all the details of one's happiness with infinite satisfaction.
Allow the brain of a lover to work for twenty-four hours, and the result will resemble what happens at Salzburg when a leafless branch is let down into the deserted depths of the salt mines. When it is drawn up again two or three months later, it is covered with sparkling crystals; the smallest twigs, those that are not thicker than a titmouse's claw, are decked with myriads of dazzling, twinkling diamonds; the original branch is unrecognisable. What I denominate crystallisation is the operation of the mind which, from everything that presents itself, draws the discovery of fresh perfections in the beloved object. A traveller speaks of the coolness of the orange groves near Genoa during the scorching summer heat—what a pleasure it would be to enjoy their coolness with her!... This phenomenon which I take the liberty of naming crystallisation, is a product of the nature which ordains that we shall feel pleasure and that the blood shall rush to our heads, of the feeling that our pleasure increases with the perfections of the beloved object, and of the idea: she is mine. The savage has not time to proceed further than the first step. He feels pleasure, but the energy of his brain is employed in the chase of the deer which is to provide him with food.... The man who is passionately in love sees every perfection in the woman he loves; nevertheless his attention may still be distracted, for the mind tires of everything that is monotonous, even of perfect happiness. But then comes what rivets attention:
6. Doubt is born.
After ten or twelve looks or any other series of actions have inspired the lover with hope and strengthened his hope ... he demands more positive proofs of his happiness. Coldness, indifference, or even anger is displayed if he shows too much assurance.... He begins to doubt his certainty of the happiness he had promised himself. He determines to solace himself with the other pleasures of life, but finds that they no longer exist for him. Fear of a dreadful misfortune attacks him, and his attention is concentrated.
7. Second crystallisation.
Its diamonds are confirmations of the idea: She loves me. Every quarter of an hour during the night which follows the birth of doubt, the lover, after a moment of terrible suffering, says to himself: Yes, she loves me; and he discovers new charms. Then doubt attacks him again; he sits up, forgets to breathe, asks himself: But does she really love me? And in the midst of these distressing and delightful reflections the poor lover feels with ever greater certainty: She would give me pleasures which she alone in all the world is capable of giving me."
Few such acute and delicate analyses of a passion exist. Not without reason have Beyle's descriptions of what happens in the human soul when it is under the influence of a passion, reminded his best critics, Taine and Bourget, of the third part of Spinoza's Ethics, the masterly De Affectibus. In this soldier, administrator, diplomatist, and lover there was a good deal of the philosopher. He endeavoured to resolve every phenomenon of emotional life into its elements, and, on the other hand, he showed the connection between the ideas and emotions, which, united into a system, constitute the disposition and character of the individual. He paid as much attention to the comparative strength of the emotions as to the variety of their connections and concatenations; he traced peculiarities of character to the deepest lying national and climatic causes; he sketched a psychology of race; and, though he did not adhere to strictly scientific methods, there was a strong scientific tendency in his psychological studies. He loved to define by the aid of numbers, measure, weight. Writing of a king's visit to a little town, he describes the procession, the Te Deum and clouds of incense within the church, the salvoes of artillery outside, and concludes: "The peasants were beside themselves with joy and piety; one such day undoes the work of a hundred issues of the Jacobin newspapers." In one of his books, an exiled revolutionist is telling how the revolt he headed failed because he would not consent to the execution of three men, and would not divide among his followers seven or eight millions of francs contained in a box of which he had the key. "Who wills the end must will the means," says Beyle's hero; "if, instead of being an atom, I were a power, I would hang three men to save four,"[5]—a stupid and indefensible theory, by the way, based on the childish premise that any four men are of more value than any three.
It is plain enough that in Beyle's case the final condition of happiness was understanding. The real aim and object of all his endeavour was a clear understanding of the state of his own mind, and insight into the mechanism of the human soul generally. He was of opinion that prosperity, happiness in love, happiness generally, clears the understanding and sharpens the critical faculty, but was equally convinced that nothing contributes so much to make a man unhappy as want of clear-sightedness. In a letter to a friend, dated Moscow, 1812, he writes characteristically: "The happiness you now enjoy ought to lead you back naturally to the principles of pure Beylism. I read Rousseau's Confessions last week. It was simply for want of two or three Beylean principles that he was so unhappy. The mania of seeing duties and virtues everywhere made his style pedantic, his life miserable. After three weeks of friendly intercourse with a man—crash! the duties of friendship, &c." Two years afterwards the man in question has forgotten him; Rousseau seeks and finds some pessimistic explanation. Beylism would have told him: "Two bodies approach each other; warmth and a fermentation result; but every such state is transitory. It is a flower to be voluptuously enjoyed." These words contain a fragment of excellent practical philosophy, and would testify to an unusually well-balanced mind if the practice of their writer's life had corresponded to his theory. But although Beyle was by nature a robust sensualist, and had accustomed himself to a cynical boldness of expression (he shocked George Sand by his cynicism when she and De Musset met him on their way to Italy), and although as a thinker he was what he required a philosopher to be, namely, clear-headed, unimpressionable, and free from illusions (he used to say that to have been a banker was to have gone through the best preparatory school for philosophy), there lay behind the robust temperament and the dryness of the logician an artistic receptivity to every impression, an irritability and feminine sensitiveness which did not fall far short of Rousseau's. And this sensitiveness Beyle retained to the end of his life. In the autobiography (Vie de Henri Brulard) which was found amongst his papers, we come upon the following confession: "My sensitiveness is excessive; what only grazes another man's skin draws blood from me. Such was I in 1799; such am I in 1840. But I have learned to hide it all under an irony which the vulgar do not understand."
Seldom has a character combined so great a love of spontaneity and straightforwardness with so much calculation and subterfuge; seldom has a mind been so truthful and at the same time so addicted to dissimulation, so ardent in its hatred of hypocrisy and yet so lacking in openness and straightforwardness.
[1] See Beyle's dissertation on the subject in a most interesting letter, dated 28th December 1829.
[2] In a letter of July 16, 1813, he writes: "If the so-called superiority is only a superiority of some few degrees, it makes its possessor amiable and attractive to others—see Fontenelle. If it is more, it destroys every relation between him and other men. This is the unfortunate position in which the superior man, or, to speak more correctly, the man who is different from others, finds himself. Those who surround him can contribute nothing to his happiness. The praise of all these people would very soon disgust me, and their criticism would gall me."
And in the fourth chapter of La Chartreuse de Parme we read: "His comrades found out that Fabrice was very unlike themselves, at which they took umbrage; he, on the contrary, began to have a very friendly feeling towards them."
[3] In the letter which he wrote, but did not send, to Byron, he writes of Napoleon as "le héros que j'ai adoré." And a letter of 10th July 1818 contains the following lyrical outburst—probably the only one in his twenty volumes: "O Sainte-Hélène! roc désormais si célèbre, tu es l'écueil de la gloire anglaise." We are reminded of Hugo and Heine.