On Stendhal (Henri Beyle)

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: Paul Bourget (1852–1935) played a crucial role in the intellectual and literary scenes in France at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries as a novelist, poet, and literary analyst. He has often been credited with "discovering" Stendhal and Baudelaire, neither of whose work had been widely acclaimed in his lifetime. Deeply interested in psychology, Bourget similarly helped to introduce Freud to his contemporaries. Early in his career he was a frequent contributor to numerous periodicals devoted to literature and the arts, including La Revue des deux mondes, Le Globe, L'Illustration, and La Nouvelle Revue. Having abandoned literary criticism for the psychological novel and novella, Bourget, a friend and admirer of Henry James, had a determinative influence on an entire generation of young French writers and readers who eagerly awaited each of his books; many critics felt that he was destined to be remembered as one of the great novelists of the turn of the last century. But his return to Catholicism in 1901 contributed to an increasingly moralizing tone in his writing and nascent reactionary views that did not always sit well with his erstwhile admirers. His sympathies late in life with the emerging Action Française further discredited him, and today Paul Bourget is remembered, if at all, as a theorist, and in particular for the Essais de psychologie contemporaine (1883–1885), in which he defines and analyzes the influence of the authors and literary movements that marked his generation, while drawing attention to precursors of modernity and the mal du siècle to be found in the Romantic movement, and, reaching further back, to antecedents of romantic pessimism in the writings of the seventeenth-century moralists. Friedrich Nietzsche was much struck by the discussion of romanticism and decadence in the Essais, and patterned his use of the terms on Bourget's definitions.

The essay presented here is one of ten that make up the Essais de psychologie contemporaine, which first appeared in La Nouvelle Revue between 1881 and 1885 as "Psychologie contemporaine—Notes et portraits." A first volume of the collected essays, dealing with Baudelaire, Renan, Flaubert, Taine, and Stendhal (Henri Beyle), was published in 1883 (Paris, Lemerre); the second, containing studies of Alexandre Dumas fils, Leconte de Lisle, the Goncourt brothers, Turgenev, and Amiel, appeared in 1885 as Nouveaux Essais de psychologie contemporaine (Paris, Lemerre).

Today's reader must keep in mind that these Essais were written close to a century and a half ago. Certain notions will seem odd, even troubling—and were so even then—due to Bourget's singular ambivalence regarding the societal and intellectual movements and mindsets he identified. Thus when he defined "decadence," "cosmopolitanism," and "dilettantism," using the terms to illuminate the work of authors he plainly revered, Bourget acknowledged—with a lucidity perhaps as unsettling to himself as to his readers—their corrosive effects. But he did not see decadence, epitomized by Baudelaire's life and writings, destructive as it was, as incompatible with artistic achievement. Born of an imagination that despised the ordinary, reveled in spiritual and sensual pleasure, and recognized no moral compass, Baudelaire's work might well have imparted no lesson to future generations, left no legacy other than itself, but what a legacy! Conversely, the dangers of cosmopolitanism, as Bourget describes it in connection with Stendhal, might well outweigh its benefits. The consequence—for a certain social and intellectual elite—of easier travel and decreasing national prejudices, it both created and characterized a new "European society," more curious, broader-minded, more refined, but also more superficial in its interests and tastes, spawning dilettantism and a weakened national identity: Bourget saw it as the source of the prevalent pessimism that afflicted his and future generations.

Although brief excerpts of the present essay, dealing specifically with Le Rouge et le Noir, have appeared in English, it has not previously been translated in its entirety. Bourget's persuasive analysis stresses the three determining factors that governed Stendhal's personal and creative evolution: the eighteenth-century philosophes, most particularly Condillac, Helvétius, and the Sensationalists; the sway of Napoleon and "the...