The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of 1830
to be courageous, fighting a duel or capturing a woman, less out of
thirst for blood or hunger for flesh, than because he thinks it due
to his own _parvenu_ self-respect to give himself some concrete proof
on his own moral force. "Pose and affection" will sneer those enemies
whom he will have to-day as assuredly as he had them in his lifetime,
the smug bourgeois and Valenods of our present age. But the spirit
of Julien will retort, "I made myself master of my affectation and I
succeeded in my pose." And will he not have logic on his side? For what
after all is pose but the pursuit of a subjective ideal, grotesque no
doubt in failure, but dignified by its success. And as M. Gaultier has
shown in his book on _Bovarysme_, is not all human progress simply the
deliberate change from what one is, into what one is not yet, but what
nevertheless one has a tendency to be? Viewed from this standpoint
Julien's character is what one feels justified in calling a _bonâ fide_
pose. For speaking broadly his character is two-fold, half-sensitive
tenderness, half ferocious ambition, and his pose simply consists
in the subordination of his softer qualities for the more effective
realization of his harder. Considered on these lines _Le Rouge et Le
Noir_ stands pre-eminent in European literature as the tragedy of
energy and ambition, the epic of the struggle for existence, the modern
Bible of Nietzschean self-discipline. And from the sheer romantic
aspect also the book has its own peculiar charm. How truly poetic, for
instance, are the passages where Julien takes his own mind alone into
the mountains, plots out his own fate, and symbolizes his own solitary
life in the lonely circlings of a predatory hawk.
Julien's enemies will no doubt taunt him with his introspection, while
they point to a character distorted, so they say, by the eternal mirror
of its own consciousness. Yet it should be remembered that Julien lived
in an age when introspection had, so to speak, been only recently
invented, and Byronism and Wertherism were the stock food of artistic
temperaments. In the case of Julien, moreover, even though his own
criticisms on his own acts were to some extent as important to him as
the actual acts themselves, his introspection was more a strength than
a weakness and never blunted the edge of his drastic action. Compare,
for instance, the character of Julien with the character of Robert
Greslou, the hero of Bourget's _Le Disciple_, and the nearest analogue
to Julien in _fin de siècle_ literature, and one will appreciate at
once the difference between health and decadence, virility and hysteria.
One of the most essential features of the book, however, is the swing
of the pendulum between Julien's ambition and Julien's tenderness. For
our hunter is quite frequently caught in his own traps, so that he
falls genuinely in love with the woman whom, as a matter of abstract
principle, he had specifically set himself to conquer. The book
consequently as a romance of love, ranks almost as high as it does as a
romance of ambition. The final idyll in prison with Mme. de Rênal, in
particular, is one of the sweetest and purest in literature, painted
in colours too true ever to be florid, steeped in a sentiment too deep
ever to be mawkish. As moreover, orthodox and suburban minds tend to
regard all French novels as specifically devoted to obscene wallowings,
it seems only relevant to mention that Stendhal at any rate never finds
in sensualism any inspiration for ecstatic rhapsodies, and that he
narrates the most specific episodes in the chastest style imaginable.
Though too the sinister figure of the carpenter's son looms large
over the book, the characterization of all the other personages is
portrayed with consummate brilliancy. For Stendhal standing first
outside his characters with all the sceptical scrutiny of a detached
observer, then goes deep inside them so that he describes not merely
what they do, but why they do it, not merely what they think, but
why they think it, while he assigns their respective share to innate
disposition, accident, and environment, and criticizes his creations
with an irony that is only occasionally benevolent. For it must be
confessed that Stendhal approves of extremely few people. True scion
of the middle-classes he hates the bourgeois because he is bourgeois,
and the aristocrat because he is aristocrat. Nevertheless, as a gallery
of the most varied characters, patricians and plebeians, prudes and
profligates, Jesuits and Jansenists, Kings and coachmen, bishops and
bourgeois, whose mutual difference acts as a most effective foil to
each other's reality, _Le Rouge et Le Noir_ will beat any novel outside
Balzac.
We would mention in particular those two contrasted figures, Mme. de
Rênal the _bourgeoise passionée_, and Matilde de la Mole the noble
damozel who enters into her intrigue out of a deliberate wish to
emulate the exploits of a romantic ancestress. But after all these
individuals stand out not so much because their characterization is
better than that of their fellow-personages, but because it is more
elaborate. Even such minor characters, for instance, as de Frilair, the
lascivious Jesuit, Noiraud, the avaricious gaoler, Mme. de Fervaques,
the amoristic prude, are all in their respective ways real, vivid,
convincing, no mere padded figures of the imagination, but observed
actualities swung from the lived life on the written page.
The style of Stendhal is noticeable from its simplicity, clear and
cold, devoid of all literary artifice, characteristic of his analytic
purpose. He is strenuous in his avoidance of affection. Though,
however, he never holds out his style as an aesthetic delight in
itself, he reaches occasionally passages of a rare and simple beauty.
We would refer in particular to the description of Julien in the
mountains, which we have already mentioned, and to the short but
impressive death scene. His habit, however, of using language as a
means and never as an end, occasionally revenges itself upon him in
places where the style, though intelligible, is none the less slovenly,
anacoluthic, almost Thucydidean.
After the publication of _Le Rouge et Le Noir_ Stendhal was forced
by his financial embarrassment to leave Paris and take up the post
of consul at Trieste. Driven from this position by the intrigues of
a vindictive Church he was transferred to Civita Vecchia where he
remained till 1835, solacing his ennui by the compilation of his
autobiography and thinking seriously of marriage with the rich and
highly respectable daughter of his laundress. He then returned to Paris
where he remained till 1842, where he died suddenly at the age of
fifty-nine in the full swing of all his mental and physical activities.
His later works included, _La Chartreuse de Parme_, _Lucien, Leuwen_
and _Lamiel_, of which the _Chartreuse_ is the most celebrated, but
_Lamiel_ certainly the most sprightly. But it is on _Le Rouge et Le
Noir_ that his fame as a novelist is the most firmly based. It is
with this most personal document, this record of his experiences
and emotions that he lives identified, just as D'Annunzio will live
identified with _Il Fuoco_ or Mr. Wells with the _New Machiavelli_.
_Le Rouge et Le Noir_ is the greatest novel of its age and one of the
greatest novels of the whole nineteenth century. It is full to the brim
of intellect and adventure, introspection and action, youth, romance,
tenderness, cynicism and rebellion. It is in a word the intellectual
quintessence of the Napoleonic era.
HORACE B. SAMUEL, TEMPLE, Oct., 1913.
THE RED AND THE BLACK
A CHRONICLE OF 1830
CHAPTER I
A SMALL TOWN
Put thousands together less bad,
But the cage less gay.--_Hobbes_.
The little town of Verrières can pass for one of the prettiest in
Franche-Comté. Its white houses with their pointed red-tiled roofs
stretch along the slope of a hill, whose slightest undulations are
marked by groups of vigorous chestnuts. The Doubs flows to within some
hundred feet above its fortifications, which were built long ago by the
Spaniards, and are now in ruins.
Verrières is sheltered on the north by a high mountain which is one of
the branches of the Jura. The jagged peaks of the Verra are covered
with snow from the beginning of the October frosts. A torrent which
rushes down from the mountains traverses Verrières before throwing
itself into the Doubs, and supplies the motive power for a great number
of saw mills. The industry is very simple, and secures a certain
prosperity to the majority of the inhabitants who are more peasant than
bourgeois. It is not, however, the wood saws which have enriched this
little town. It is the manufacture of painted tiles, called Mulhouse
tiles, that is responsible for that general affluence which has caused
the façades of nearly all the houses in Verrières to be rebuilt since
the fall of Napoleon.
One has scarcely entered the town, before one is stunned by the din of
a strident machine of terrifying aspect. Twenty heavy hammers which
fall with a noise that makes the paved floor tremble, are lifted
up by a wheel set in motion by the torrent. Each of these hammers
manufactures every day I don't know how many thousands of nails. The
little pieces of iron which are rapidly transformed into nails by these
enormous hammers, are put in position by fresh pretty young girls. This
labour so rough at first sight is one of the industries which most
surprises the traveller who penetrates for the first time the mountains
which separate France and Helvetia. If when he enters Verrières, the
traveller asks who owns this fine nail factory which deafens everybody
who goes up the Grande-Rue, he is answered in a drawling tone "Eh!
it belongs to M. the Mayor."
And if the traveller stops a few minutes in that Grande-Rue of
Verrières which goes on an upward incline from the bank of the Doubs to
nearly as far as the summit of the hill, it is a hundred to one that he
will see a big man with a busy and important air.
When he comes in sight all hats are quickly taken off. His hair is
grizzled and he is dressed in grey. He is a Knight of several Orders,
has a large forehead and an aquiline nose, and if you take him all
round, his features are not devoid of certain regularity. One might
even think on the first inspection that it combines with the dignity
of the village mayor that particular kind of comfortableness which is
appropriate to the age of forty-eight or fifty. But soon the traveller
from Paris will be shocked by a certain air of self-satisfaction and
self-complacency mingled with an almost indefinable narrowness and lack
of inspiration. One realises at last that this man's talent is limited
to seeing that he is paid exactly what he is owed, and in paying his
own debts at the latest possible moment.
Such is M. de Rênal, the mayor of Verrières. After having crossed the
road with a solemn step, he enters the mayoral residence and disappears
from the eye of the traveller. But if the latter continues to walk
a hundred steps further up, he will perceive a house with a fairly
fine appearance, with some magnificent gardens behind an iron grill
belonging to the house. Beyond that is an horizon line formed by the
hills of Burgundy, which seem ideally made to delight the eyes. This
view causes the traveller to forget that pestilential atmosphere of
petty money-grubbing by which he is beginning to be suffocated.
He is told that this house belongs to M. de Rênal. It is to the
profits which he has made out of his big nail factory that the mayor
of Verrières owes this fine residence of hewn stone which he is just
finishing. His family is said to be Spanish and ancient, and is alleged
to have been established in the country well before the conquest of