Of his disquisition, De l'Amour, with its famous theory of "crystallisation," much could be written. Not founded on a basic physiological truth as is Schopenhauer's doctrine of love, Beyle's is wider in scope. It deals more with manners than fundamentals. It is a manual of tactics in the art of love by a superior strategist. His knowledge of woman on the social side, at least, is unparalleled. His definitions and classifications are keener, deeper than Michelet's or Balzac's. "Femmes! femmes! vous êtes bien toujours les mêmes," he cries in a letter to a fair correspondent. It is a quotidian truth that few before him had the courage or clairvoyancy to enunciate. Crowded with crisp epigrams and worldly philosophy, this book on Love may be studied without exhausting its wisdom and machiavellianism.
Stendhal as an art or musical critic cannot be taken seriously, though he says some illuminating things; embedded in platitudes may be found shrewd aperçus and flashes of insight; but the trail of the "gifted amateur" is over them all. At a time when Beethoven was in the ascendant, when Berlioz—who hailed from the environs of Grenoble—was in the throes of the "new music," when Bach had been rediscovered, Beyle prattles of Cimarosa. He provoked Berlioz with his praise of Rossini—"les plus irritantes stupidités sur la musique, dont il croyait avoir le secret," wrote Berlioz of the Rossini biography. Lavoix went further: "Ecrivain d'esprit ... fanfaron d'ignorance en musique." Poor Stendhal! He had no flair for the various artistic movements about him, although he had unwittingly originated several. He praised Goethe and Schiller, yet never mentioned Bach, Beethoven, Chopin; music for him meant operatic music, some other "divine adventure" to fill in the background of conversation. Conversation! In that art he was virtuoso. To dine alone was a crime in his eyes. A gourmet, he cared more for talk than eating. He could not make up his mind about Weber's Freischütz, and Meyerbeer he did not very much like; "he is said to be the first pianist of Europe," he wrote; at the time, Liszt and Thalberg were disputing the kingdom of the keyboard. It was Stendhal, so the story goes, who once annoyed Liszt at a musicale in Rome by exclaiming in his most elliptical style: "Mon cher Liszt, pray give us your usual improvisation this evening!"
As a plagiarist Stendhal was a success. He "adapted" from Goethe, translated entire pages from the Edinburgh Review, and the material of his history of Painting in Italy he pilfered from Lanzi. More barefaced still was his wholesale appropriation of Carpani's Haydine, which he coolly made over into French as a life of Haydn. The Italian author protested in a Paduan journal, Giornale dell' Italiana Letteratura, calling Stendhal by his absurd pen-name: "M. Louis-Alexander-César Bombet, soi-disant Français auteur des Haydine." The original book appeared in 1812 at Milan. Stendhal published his plagiarism at Paris, 1814, but asserted that it had been written in 1808. He did not stop at mere piracy, for in 1816 and in an open letter to the Constitutionnel he fabricated a brother for the aforesaid Bombet and wrote an indignant denial of the facts. He spoke of César Bombet as an invalid incapable of defending his good name. The life of Mozart is a very free adaptation from Schlichtegroll's. When Shakespeare, Handel, and Richard Wagner plundered, they plundered magnificently; in comparison, Stendhal's stealings are absurd.
Irritating as are his inconsistencies, his prankishness, his bombastic affectations, and pretensions to a superior immorality, Stendhal's is nevertheless an enduring figure in French literature. His power is now felt in Germany, where it is augmented by Nietzsche's popularity—Nietzsche, who, after Mérimée, was Stendhal's greatest pupil. Pascal had his "abyss," Stendhal had his fear of ennui—it was almost pathologic, this obsession of boredom. One side of his many-sided nature was akin to Pepys, a French Pepys, who chronicled immortal small-beer. However, it is his heart's history that will make this protean old faun eternally youthful. As a prose artist he does not count for much. But in the current of his swift, clear narrative and under the spell of his dry magic and peptonized concision we do not miss the peacock graces and coloured splendours of Flaubert or Chateaubriand. Stendhal delivers himself of a story rapidly; he is all sinew. And he is the most seductive spiller of souls since Saint-Simon.
[II]
THE BAUDELAIRE LEGEND
I
For the sentimental no greater foe exists than the iconoclast who dissipates literary legends. And he is abroad nowadays. Those golden times when they gossipped of De Quincey's enormous opium consumption, of the gin absorbed by gentle Charles Lamb, of Coleridge's dark ways, Byron's escapades, and Shelley's atheism—alas! into what faded limbo have they vanished. Poe, too, Poe whom we saw in fancy reeling from Richmond to Baltimore, Baltimore to Philadelphia, Philadelphia to New York. Those familiar fascinating anecdotes have gone the way of all such jerry-built spooks. We now know Poe to have been a man suffering at the time of his death from cerebral lesion, a man who drank at intervals and but little. Dr. Guerrier of Paris has exploded a darling superstition about De Quincey's opium-eating. He has demonstrated that no man could have lived so long—De Quincey was nearly seventy-five at his death—and worked so hard, if he had consumed twelve thousand drops of laudanum as often as he said he did. Furthermore, the English essayist's description of the drug's effects is inexact. He was seldom sleepy—a sure sign, asserts Dr. Guerrier, that he was not altogether enslaved by the drug habit. Sprightly in old age, his powers of labour were prolonged until past three-score and ten. His imagination needed little opium to produce the famous Confessions. Even Gautier's revolutionary red waistcoat worn at the première of Hernani was, according to Gautier, a pink doublet. And Rousseau has been white-washed. So they are disappearing, those literary legends, until, disheartened, we cry out: Spare us our dear, old-fashioned, disreputable men of genius!
But the legend of Charles Baudelaire is seemingly indestructible. This French poet himself has suffered more from the friendly malignant biographer and Parisian chroniclers than did Poe. Who shall keep the curs out of the cemetery? asked Baudelaire after he had read Griswold on Poe. A few years later his own cemetery was invaded and the world was put in possession of the Baudelaire legend; that legend of the atrabilious, irritable poet, dandy, maniac, his hair dyed green, spouting blasphemies; that grim, despairing image of a Diabolic, a libertine, saint, and drunkard. Maxime du Camp was much to blame for the promulgation of these tales—witness his Souvenirs Littéraires. However, it may be confessed that part of the Baudelaire legend was created by Charles Baudelaire. In the history of literature it is difficult to parallel such a deliberate piece of self-stultification. Not Villon, who preceded him, not Verlaine, who imitated him, drew for the astonishment or disedification of the world like unflattering portraits. Mystifier as he was, he must have suffered at times from acute cortical irritation. And, notwithstanding his desperate effort to realize Poe's idea, he only proved Poe correct, who had said that no man can bare his heart quite naked; there will be always something held back, something false too ostentatiously thrust forward. The grimace, the attitude, the pomp of rhetoric are so many buffers between the soul of man and the sharp reality of published confessions. Baudelaire was no more exception to this rule than St. Augustine, Bunyan, Rousseau, or Huysmans; though he was as frank as any of them, as we may see in the recently printed diary, Mon cœur mis à nu (Posthumous Works, Société du Mercure de France); and in the Journal, Fusées, Letters, and other fragments exhumed by devoted Baudelarians.