STENDHAL
ll
Marguerite de Valois.... The need of playing at a game formed
the whole secret of the character of this amiable princess." And in
nothing more than in this "need for anxiety" and "need of play–
ing a game" does Mathilde resemble her lover and husband. What
helps us explain these traits in him should serve also to explain
them in her.
It is not too much to say that
The Red and the Black
is the
first full-length treatment of the "split-personality" in nineteenth–
century literature. Of course this had been the secret basis of all
the troubles of the heroes of the Gothic novel and of Byron; it was
also being allegorically rendered in Hoffman's
Elixire des Teufels
and
Doppelganger
as well as in Poe's
William Wilson.
In Julien's
case, however, the situation is presented almost as a problem or a
demonstration (Beyle had had an early passion for mathematics):
What would happen if someone really attempted to separate the
intellectual will from the impulses of the simple heart? Stendhal,
a kind of naturalist of the heart, puts his hero through the paces
like a scientist his guinea pig through a maze. Actually, the anal–
ogy is as unsound as it is trite; for the paces happen to be the still
incompletely unravelled interplay of human thought and feeling
md the maze is the whole organic complex of human relationships.
Nor is the observer nearly so detached as he pretends. But Stend–
hal brings to the problem the kind of patient and exhaustive analy–
sis of its elements that we like to think of as modem; through his
influence on Nietzsche and possibly also on von Hartmann he may
be considered as one of those responsible for the modem move–
ment of psychoanalysis. In Julien what was to be the predicament
of nearly all the major heroes of later nineteenth-century litera–
ture-those of Dostoievski, Melville, Proust and Kafka-is fore–
cast with the bareness of a penny horoscope.
We say everything perhaps when we state the cause of this
predicament as a dislocation for the individual of his normal or
traditional objects of love. But this is to be quite general, to be
confronted immediately with the unlimited range of possible
operations open to the human organism. Before attempting to
describe further what seems to be happening in the typical Stend–
halian hero, therefore, it will be necessary to do what in the case of
a writer of more complete or self-sustaining works would be less
legitimate-to tum back again for a moment to the life. For
