DOI issue:
Hapgood, Norman: Henri Beyle
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.21805#0222
2i8 Henri Beyle
Zola draws an Illustration from a strong scene in Le Rouge et le
Noir, and shows how different the setting would have beeil
in his own hands. Beyle is a logician, abstract; Zola thinks him-
self concrete, and concrete he is—often by main force. This is a
sad failure to apply the doctrine of relativity to oneself. Beyle
errs sometimes in the same way, and some of his attempts at local
colour are very tiresome, but on the whole he remains frankly the
analyser, the introspective psychologist, the man of distinct but
disembodied ideas. He recognised the environment as he recog-
nised other things in his fertile reflections, but he was as a rule
too faithful to his own principles to spend much time in trying to
reproduce it in details which did not directly interest him. It
was therefore natural that his celebration by the extremists should
be short-lived. Most of them do him what justice they can with
effbrt, like Zola, or pass him over with some such word as the
“drv” of Goncourt. His fads were his own. None of them
j
have yet become the fads of a school, though some principles that
were restrained with him have become battle-cries in later times.
His real fads are hardly fitted to be banners, for they are too
specific. In very general theories he generally kept rather sane.
H is real difference from the school that claimed him for a father
half a Century after his death, is well suggested in the awkward
word that Zola is fond of throwing at him, “ ideologist.” The
idea, the abstract truth and the intellectual form of it, its clearness,
its stateableness, its cogency and consistency, is the final interest
with him. The outer world is only the material for the ex-
pression of ideas, only the illustrations of them, and the ideas are
therefore not pictorial or dramatic, but logical. The arts are
ultimately the expression of thought and feeling, and colour and
plastic form are means only. You never find him complaining,
as his friend Merimee did, that the meaning of the plastic arts
cannot
Zola draws an Illustration from a strong scene in Le Rouge et le
Noir, and shows how different the setting would have beeil
in his own hands. Beyle is a logician, abstract; Zola thinks him-
self concrete, and concrete he is—often by main force. This is a
sad failure to apply the doctrine of relativity to oneself. Beyle
errs sometimes in the same way, and some of his attempts at local
colour are very tiresome, but on the whole he remains frankly the
analyser, the introspective psychologist, the man of distinct but
disembodied ideas. He recognised the environment as he recog-
nised other things in his fertile reflections, but he was as a rule
too faithful to his own principles to spend much time in trying to
reproduce it in details which did not directly interest him. It
was therefore natural that his celebration by the extremists should
be short-lived. Most of them do him what justice they can with
effbrt, like Zola, or pass him over with some such word as the
“drv” of Goncourt. His fads were his own. None of them
j
have yet become the fads of a school, though some principles that
were restrained with him have become battle-cries in later times.
His real fads are hardly fitted to be banners, for they are too
specific. In very general theories he generally kept rather sane.
H is real difference from the school that claimed him for a father
half a Century after his death, is well suggested in the awkward
word that Zola is fond of throwing at him, “ ideologist.” The
idea, the abstract truth and the intellectual form of it, its clearness,
its stateableness, its cogency and consistency, is the final interest
with him. The outer world is only the material for the ex-
pression of ideas, only the illustrations of them, and the ideas are
therefore not pictorial or dramatic, but logical. The arts are
ultimately the expression of thought and feeling, and colour and
plastic form are means only. You never find him complaining,
as his friend Merimee did, that the meaning of the plastic arts
cannot