DOI Heft:
Hapgood, Norman: Henri Beyle
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.21805#0214
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Henri Beyle
of Beyle smiles at his effort to get far enough away from his own
saturated French nature to love the masculine and august painter
he is praising. Before the Moses, Merimee teils us, Beyle could
find nothing to say beyond the observation that ferocity could not
be better depicted. This vague, untechnical point of view was no
subject of regret to Stendhal. He gloried in it. “ Foolish as
a scholar,” he says somewhere, and in another place, “ Vinci is a
great artist precisely because he is no scholar.”
Add to these qualities of lack of truthfulness, lack of thorough-
ness, and lack of imagination, a total disregard for any moral view
of life, in the sense of a believing, strenuous view, and you have,
from the negative side, the general aspects of Stendhal’s character.
He was not vicious—far from it—though he admires many things
that are vicious. He is not indecent, for “ the greatest enemy of
voluptuousness is indecency,” and voluptuousness tests all things.
The keen Duclos has said that the French are the only people among
whom it is possible for the morals to be depraved without either the
heart being depraved or the courage being weakened. It would
be almost unfair to speak of Beyle’s morals as depraved, as even in
his earliest childhood he seems to have been without a touch of
any moral quality. “ Who knows that the world will last a
week ? ” he asks, and the question expresses well the instinct in
him that made him deny any appeal but that of his own ends.
Both morals and religion really repel him. It is impossible to
love a supreme being, he says, though we may perhaps respect
him. Indeed, he believes that love and respect never go together,
that grace, which he loves, excludes force, which he respects ; and
thus he loves Reni and respects Michelangelo. Grace and force
are the opposite sides of a sphere, and the human eye cannot see
both. As for him, he fearlessly takes sympathy and grace and
abandons nobility. In the same manner that he excludes
strenuous
Henri Beyle
of Beyle smiles at his effort to get far enough away from his own
saturated French nature to love the masculine and august painter
he is praising. Before the Moses, Merimee teils us, Beyle could
find nothing to say beyond the observation that ferocity could not
be better depicted. This vague, untechnical point of view was no
subject of regret to Stendhal. He gloried in it. “ Foolish as
a scholar,” he says somewhere, and in another place, “ Vinci is a
great artist precisely because he is no scholar.”
Add to these qualities of lack of truthfulness, lack of thorough-
ness, and lack of imagination, a total disregard for any moral view
of life, in the sense of a believing, strenuous view, and you have,
from the negative side, the general aspects of Stendhal’s character.
He was not vicious—far from it—though he admires many things
that are vicious. He is not indecent, for “ the greatest enemy of
voluptuousness is indecency,” and voluptuousness tests all things.
The keen Duclos has said that the French are the only people among
whom it is possible for the morals to be depraved without either the
heart being depraved or the courage being weakened. It would
be almost unfair to speak of Beyle’s morals as depraved, as even in
his earliest childhood he seems to have been without a touch of
any moral quality. “ Who knows that the world will last a
week ? ” he asks, and the question expresses well the instinct in
him that made him deny any appeal but that of his own ends.
Both morals and religion really repel him. It is impossible to
love a supreme being, he says, though we may perhaps respect
him. Indeed, he believes that love and respect never go together,
that grace, which he loves, excludes force, which he respects ; and
thus he loves Reni and respects Michelangelo. Grace and force
are the opposite sides of a sphere, and the human eye cannot see
both. As for him, he fearlessly takes sympathy and grace and
abandons nobility. In the same manner that he excludes
strenuous