In 1842, Stendhal, with his physical and intellectual faculties still unimpaired, died suddenly at the age of fifty-nine. Like his hero Julien, he was "game" to the last, and "I have struck nothingness" was his self-given substitute for the more orthodox viaticum.
In endeavouring to adjudicate finally the value of Stendhal, it is difficult not to yield to the fascination of his cock-sure prophecy of his eventual fame. For as Stendhal the man, in his autobiographical writings, La Vie de Henri Brulard, Le Journal, and Souvenirs d'Egotisme, would project his ego some years forward and as it were shake hands with himself across the gulf of time, so, one can almost say, Stendhal, the incarnation of the early nineteenth-century Zeitgeist, with his genial greeting, "Je serai compris vers 1880," shakes hands with those modern men of the world who rightly or wrongly have imagined themselves to be incarnations of the Zeitgeist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as they look back with appreciative camaraderie at this earlier manifestation of their own selves. And this no doubt is why Stendhal, viewed of course with a not unnatural Ultramontane frigidity by such critics as Sainte-Beuve or Émile Faguet, has become the spoilt darling of Nietzsche, Taine, and Bourget, and indeed all the more intellectual spirits in modern French and German literature.
The life of Stendhal no doubt may not have been as ideally satisfactory as his theories may have warranted. A man, who professed to find his chief interest in life in the erotic emotion, he played as often as not the rôle of the unhappy lover. His spasmodic fits of political and military ambition spluttered out in the self-complacent consciousness of their own intensity. He suffered throughout his life from being a dilettante with a financial competence. Yet it is no small achievement to have chased happiness so consistently and with so male an energy, to have kept unjaded to the last his intellectual gusto and the appetite of his joie de vivre, and to have been the first man in European literature to have put into efficient practice, without thereby in any way detracting from the clearness of his own personal note, the important principle that the elaborate delineation of character is even more the function of the novel than adventurous action or picturesque description. And so it is that we entitle Stendhal the patentee of psychology, the inventor of introspection, and take our leave of him with his own epitaph:
Qui giace
ARRIGO BEYLE MILANESE
isse, scrisse, amo.
[HEINRICH HEINE]
Heine seems, viewed superficially, the most baffling, elusive, and inconsistent of all writers, the veritable Proteus of poetry. He has so many shapes, that at the first blush it seems almost impossible to grasp finally and definitely the one genuine Heine. What is really this man who is now a gamin and now an angel, whose face seems almost simultaneously to wear the sardonic grin of a Mephistopheles and the wistful smile of a Christ, this flaunting Bohemian who has written some of the tenderest love songs in literature, this cosmopolitan who cherished the deepest feelings for his fatherland, this incarnate paradox who almost at one and the same moment is swashbuckler and martyr, French and German, Hebrew and Greek, revolutionary and aristocrat, optimist and pessimist, idealist and mocker, believer and infidel?
Yet it is even because of this surface inconsistency, this psychological many-sidedness that Heine is a great poet and the one who, mirroring in his own mind the complexity that he saw without, is typically representative of the varied phases of the early nineteenth century. Heine looks at life from every conceivable aspect: he sees the gladness of life and rejoices therein; he sees the tears of life and weeps; he sees the tragedy of life and cannot control his sobs; he sees the farce of life and finds equal difficulty in controlling his laughter. "Ah, dear reader," says Heine, "if you want to complain that the poet is torn both ways, complain rather that the world is torn in two. The poet's heart is the core of the world, and in this present time it must of necessity be grievously rent. The great world-rift clove right through my heart, and even thereby do I know that the great gods have given me of their grace and preference and deemed me worthy of the poet's martyrdom."