Stendhal was beset with a horror of being artistic. Was it not he who said of an artist, whose dress was particularly elaborate: "Depend upon it, a man who adorns his person will also adorn his work"? Stendhal was a soldier first, then a writer—Salviati[2] is a soldier. Certainly it is his contempt for the type of person—even commoner, perhaps, in 1914 than in 1814—who carries his emotions on his sleeve, which accounts for Stendhal's naive disclaimer of personal responsibility, the invention of Lisio[3] and Salviati, mythical authors of this work on love—all a thin screen to hide his own obsession, which manages, none the less, to break through unmasked on almost every page.
The translation makes no attempt to hide these peculiarities or even to make too definite a sense from a necessarily doubtful passage.[4] Its whole aim is to reproduce Stendhal's essay in English, just as it stands in French. No other English translation of the whole work exists: only a selection of its maxims translated piece-meal.[5] Had a translation existed, we should certainly not have undertaken another. As it is, we have relied upon a great sympathy with the author, and a studied adhesion to what he said, in order to reconstruct this essay—encouraged by the conviction that the one is as necessary as the other in order to obtain a satisfactory result. Charles Cotton's Montaigne seems to us the pattern of all good translations.
In spite of the four prefaces of the original, we felt it advisable to add still another to the English translation. Stendhal said that no book stood in greater need of a word of introduction. That was in Paris—here it is a foreigner, dressed up, we trust, quite à l'anglaise, but still, perhaps, a little awkward, and certainly in need of something more than the chilly announcement of the title page—about as encouraging as the voice of the flunkey, who bawls out your name at a party over the heads of the crowd already assembled. True, the old English treatment of foreigners has sadly degenerated: more bows than brickbats are their portion, now London knows the charm of cabarets, revues and cheap French cooking.[6]
The work in itself is conspicuous, if not unique. Books on Love are legion: how could it be otherwise? It was probably the first topic of conversation, and none has since been found more interesting. But Stendhal has devised a new treatment of the subject. His method is analytical and scientific, but, at the same time, there is no attempt at bringing the subject into line with a science; it is no part of erotology—there is no
Greek ending with a little passing bell
That signifies some faith about to die.[7]
His faith is unimpeachable and his curiosity and honesty unbounded: this is what makes him conspicuous. In claiming to be scientific, Stendhal meant nothing more than that his essay was based purely upon unbiassed observation; that he accepted nothing upon vague hearsay or from tradition; that even the finer shades of sentiment could be observed with as much disinterested precision, if not made to yield as definite results, as any other natural phenomena. "The man who has known love finds all else unsatisfying"—is, properly speaking, a scientific fact.
Analytical, however, is the best word to characterise the Stendhalian method. Scientific suggests, perhaps, more naturally the broader treatment of love, which is familiar in Greek literature, lives all through the Middle Ages, is typified in Dante, and survives later in a host of Renaissance dialogues and treatises on Love. This love—see it in the Symposium of Plato, in Dante or in the Dialoghi of Leone Ebreo—is more than a human passion, it is also the amor che muove il sole e le altre stelle, the force of attraction which, combined with hate, the force of repulsion, is the cause of universal movement. In this way love is not only scientifically treated, it embraces all other sciences within it. Scientists will smile, but the day of Science and Art with a contemptuous smile for each other is over. True, the feeling underlying this cosmic treatment of love is very human, very simple—a conviction that love, as a human passion, is all-important, and a desire to justify its importance by finding it a place in a larger order of things, in the "mystical mathematics of the kingdom of Heaven." Weaker heads than Plato are also pleased to call love divine, without knowing very clearly what they mean by divinity. Their ignorance is relative; the allegorical representation of Eros—damned and deified alternately by the poets—is in motive, perhaps, not so far from what we have called the scientific, but, perhaps, might better have named the cosmic, treatment.
In a rough classification of books on Love one can imagine a large number collected under the heading—"Academic." One looks for something to express that want of plain dealing, of terre-à-terre frankness, which is so deplorable in the literature of Love, and is yet the distinctive mark of so much of it. "Academic" comprehends a wide range of works all based on a more or less set or conventional theory of the passions. It includes the average modern novel, in which convention is supreme and experience negligible—just a traditional, lifeless affair, in which there is not even a pretence of curiosity or love of truth. And, at the same time, "academic" is the label for the kind of book in which convention is rather on the surface, rather in the form than in the matter. Tullia of Aragon, for example, was no tyro in the theory and practice of love, but her Dialogo d'Amore is still distinctly academic. Of course it is easy to be misled by a stiff varnish of old-fashioned phrase; the reader in search of sincerity will look for it in the thought expressed, not in the manner of expression. There is more to be learnt about love from Werther, with all his wordy sorrows, than from the slick tongue of Yorick, who found it a singular blessing of his life "to be almost every hour of it miserably in love with someone." But, then, just because Werther is wordy, all his feelings come out, expressed one way or another. With Tullia, and others like her, one feels that so much is suppressed, because it did not fit the conventional frame. What she says she felt, but she must have felt so much more or have known that others felt more.
This suppression of truth has, of course, nothing to do with the partial treatment of love necessary often in purely imaginative literature. No one goes to poetry for an anatomy of love. Not love, but people in love, are the business of a playwright or a novelist. The difference is very great. The purely imaginative writer is dealing with situations first, and then with the passions that cause them.
Here it is interesting to observe that Stendhal, in gathering his evidence, makes use of works of imagination as often as works based upon fact or his own actual experience.[8] Characters from Scott are called in as witnesses, side by side with Mademoiselle de Lespinasse or Mariana Alcaforado.
The books mentioned by Stendhal are of two distinct kinds. There are those, from which he draws evidence and support for his own theories, and in which the connexion with love is only incidental (Shakespeare's Plays, for example, Don Juan or the Nouvelle Héloïse), and others whose authors are really his forerunners, such as André le Chapelain.[9] Stendhal gives some account of this curious writer, who perhaps comes nearer his own analytical method than any later writer.