Stendhal : Love of Falsehood and Delight in Truth (Stefan Zweig)

STEFAN ZWEIG

Casanova, Stendhal,Tolstoy

Adepts In Self-Portraiture

LOVE OF FALSEHOOD AND DELIGHT IN TRUTH

FEW have lied more arrantly or quizzed the world with greater delight than Stendhal; few have told the truth to better advantage or with more profundity than he. His subterfuges and mystifications are legion. When we take up one of his books, we are faced with a riddle before ever we open it, and after reading the preface we are still puzzled, for the author never gives his name simply and straightforwardly as Henri Beyle. At one moment he arbitrarily assumes a title of nobility, at another he becomes "César Bombet," or he adds the enigmatic letters A. A. to his initials, leaving the reader to find out for himself that they represent the words "ancien auditeur." He can feel at ease only under the cloak of a pseudonym. We meet him at times as "an Austrian pensioner," or, again, as "un ancien officier de cavalerie." But his favourite guise, the one that has most perplexed his fellow countrymen, is Stendhal. This is the name of an obscure village in Prussia which has thus obtained immortal renown through the whimsical humour of a Puckish wit. If he gives a date, we may be sure it is a wrong one. He tells us in the foreword to La Chartreuse de Parme that the novel was written "during the winter of 1830, three hundred leagues from Paris." This quip will not alter the fact that the said work was actually penned during the year 1839 in the very heart of the capital. Even actual facts are distorted. For instance, in his autobiography he solemnly assures us that he was present on the battlefields of Wagram, Aspern, and Eylau. There is not a word of truth in the statement ! His diary informs us that at the time when these events were taking place he was sitting comfortably at home in Paris. He occasionally speaks of long and important conversations with Napoleon, only in the next volume to declare:

"Napoleon was not wont to talk to fools of my genus."

Every utterance of Stendhal's must, therefore, be accepted with reserve; especially must we beware of his letters, for in these, presumably from fear of the police, he made use of varying aliases and was accustomed to falsify the date. He would send a letter from Rome, dating it from Orvieto; or, he would be spending the day in Grenoble, and pretend he was writing from Besangon. Often the year is given wrongly; nearly always the day of the month is incorrect; well-nigh invariably is the signature an assumed name. Diligent biographers have collected over two hundred such flights of fancy. Stendhal, whose authentic name was Beyle, signed his letters with such imaginary appellations as, Cottinet, Dominique, Don Flegme, Gaillard, A. L. Feburier, Baron Dormant, A. L. Champagne; or he would make use of the names of other writers, such as Lamartine and Jules Janin. His hoaxes were in reality the outcome of an innate delight in bewildering, in dumbfounding people, in disguising himself, in hiding himself. Stendhal assumes these kaleidoscopic changes in order to arouse interest in himself and to make his true personality invisible; he flashes his rapier in masterly fashion in order to keep the inquisitive at bay; and he never attempts to conceal his passion for deception. A friend, in the course of a letter, once reproached Stendhal for having lied most abominably on a certain occasion. "True," wrote our author in the margin, his spirit unruffled by the accusation. Gaily, and with ironical pleasure, he falsifies the number of his years of civil service, he professes loyalty for the Bourbons at one moment and for Napoleon at another. In all his writings, whether published or unpublished, misstatements abound like spawn in a fishpond. His final lie, the one with which he bowed his adieux to the world, is recorded in the cemetery at Montmartre. Here we read on his tombstone: "Arrigio Beyle, Milanese." Yet he was really, much to his annoyance, born in Grenoble, and received in baptism the name of Henri ! He wished to wear his mask to the end, to cloak himself in romantic trappings even at the approach of death.

In spite of all, however, few men have launched upon the world so many vital truths concerning their own personalities as did this past master in the art of dissembling. Stendhal was capable of telling the truth with the same alacrity that he displayed in telling lies. He has given us such intimate revelations concerning himself, has spoken with such amazing frankness as to the details of his inner life, that we are left speechless at his lack of reserve. On other occasions, however, just when he is on the verge of confiding some matter of interest, he suddenly draws a veil or fobs us off with a jest. Of his own free will, and with a profusion of circumstantial evidence, he discloses things which ordinary mortals would not admit even under torture. Stendhal was, in fact, as sturdy, nay as impudent, a truthteller as he was a liar. In one case as in the other he ignores the conventional moral canons, and thrusts his way ruthlessly through all the barriers of the inner censorship. A man of a naturally shy disposition, timid in the presence of women, entrenching himself behind his aliases, as soon as he takes pen in hand he is full of courage. Vanished then are all inhibitions. Wherever, in his inner self, he encounters resistances, he collars them, drags them to the light of day, and dissects them with the utmost precision. The things which in the material world have proved to be the most inhibitive are mastered by him in the realm of psychology with the most thoroughgoing success. Thus, already in the year 1820, he intuitively opened some of the most intricately barricaded avenues to the soul, thereby anticipating, by a hundred years, the complicated and highly elaborated apparatus of psychoanalysis. Yet he possessed no more elaborate instrument than personal observation, and depended on no cut-and-dried theories for his intrepid raids into the land of the unconscious. He relied upon the hard and well pointed bistoury of inquisitiveness to lay bare what he wanted to know; and the most signal quality of his work was a bold statement of the truth without any regard for what the world would say.

Stendhal scrutinizes what he feels; his feelings are then exhibited frankly and unashamedly; the more daring they are, the better; the more intimate they are, the more passionately does he set them forth. He takes especial delight in exploring his most questionable feelings, those which have, through very shame, crept away into the dark recesses of his soul. How often he returns to the hatred he felt for his father ! How fantastical are his references to the subject ! He mockingly informs us that for a whole month he endeavoured, unavailingly, to get up a feeling of sorrow at the news of the old man's death. The most painful avowals concerning his sex life, his persistent lack of success with women, the crises he underwent on account of his unbridled vanity, are all set out with the accuracy of an ordnance map. He communicates certain intimate happenings with a wealth of detail that reminds us of a clinical history; no one before him has ever allowed such confessions to pass the lips, or if an author should have permitted them to slip into his book they are ascribed to a printer's error. Stendhal's supreme merit lies in this, that through the transparent and egoistical coldness of his crystalline intelligence he has been able to transmit to future generations some of the rarest and most precious adventures of the soul. These experiences, preserved as it were in an ice-chamber, will endure for all time, a treasure of inestimable worth. Had this strange master of deception never lived, mankind would have known far less of the universe of the feelings and of their underworld.

The inconsistency in Stendhal's make-up can now be explained. It was essential that he should be a master craftsman in the art of deception, in the technique of falsehood, if he was to be successful in the art of telling the truth. He once declared that nothing had helped so greatly in his psychological development as the fact of his growing up in a thoroughly boring family circle which necessitated a constant life of deception from childhood upwards. For it is only when one has had personal experience of the ease with which a lie drops from one's lips, of the way in which feelings change with lightning speed as they rise from the heart and attain verbal expression, only when one has become an adept in the arts of quibble and fence, that one knows "how many precautions are needed if one is not to lie."This disciplined mind has shown, after innumerable experiments within the confines of its own psychic world, how swiftly every feeling, immediately it realizes it is being observed, becomes shamefaced and beats a hurried retreat, so that, like a fisherman angling for trout, the experimenter must strike quickly and land the creature without delay if he is to make good his catch. Truth must be clutched and prisoned as soon as ever she pokes her nose round the corner. To seize upon such self-observations, to dissect them ere they can scuttle off into the subconscious or (through protective colouration) become merged into the background, such is the hobby of this practised and passionate seeker after knowledge. He is wise enough to realize that the chase holds very rare moments when fortune smiles on the hunter, that they are as scarce and as precious as the quarry itself.

Strange as it may seem, few have had so persistent a respect for truth as Stendhal, the arch-liar. He knew that truth did not flaunt her charms at every crossroad, ready and willing to allow herself to be caressed by all who cared, rough-handed, to touch her. He, cunning as Odysseus, knew that truths dwell in caves, dread the daylight, scurry away at the first sound of a footfall, and slip from between the fingers of one who thinks to have got a firm hold. One needs to tread warily, to creep up softly, to be light of touch, to be tender of hand and of eye, to be practised in the art of seeing in the dark; above all one needs passion, passion which has been mentally schooled, which can soar on the wings of the spirit, which is endowed with a mania for listening and for tracking; one needs, as Stendhal says, to summon up all one's courage, to penetrate into the minutest recesses of the labyrinthine plexus of the nerves, to find a way into the tenebrous crypts of the soul. Only thus can we hope to catch a whispered avowal; only thus may we perceive one facet of the everlastingly unattainable "truth" which coarse-grained men have endeavoured to immure in the mausoleums of their philosophical systems and to prison in the stifling cages of their theories. Stendhal, the would-be sceptic, looks upon truth as a gem of great price; he, in his wisdom, knows how elusive she is, how rare are her visits; above all, he realizes that she will not allow herself to be penned up like a domestic animal, to be sold and worn out like a beast of burden; he is well aware that knowledge comes only to those whose perceptions are fine.

Indeed, Stendhal deemed truth so precious that he never offered his truths for sale, never cried his wares. All he wanted was to be upright towards himself, and in his own despite. Hence his unscrupulous lying ! This arch-egoist, this passionate investigator of his own motives and actions, never felt the slightest need to teach his contemporaries, and least of all to tell them about himself. On the contrary, he hedged his person about with a thorny thicket of spitefulness and malicious wit so that the crassly inquisitive might not come near, and he might be left in peace to pursue his way along the strangely deep galleries burrowing into his own depths. The greatest joke of his life was to mislead his neighbour; his most persistent passion was the passion to be honest with himself. Lies are short of leg and get left behind, so that they do not out-crawl the framework of their own generation; but the truths a man utters, once they are avowed and acknowledged, live on when he who launched them on the world has long been dead. A man who has dealt uprightly with himself, were it but once in his lifetime, has been upright for ever. He who has disclosed the secrets of his soul has confessed them to the whole of mankind.

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