STENDHAL
15
be bought.'' In such an epigram Stendhal says as much about the
particular society of his time as Balzac in the whole of
Cesar
Birotteau
or
Lost Illusions.
But this disgust is ultimately trans–
lated into an intellectual contempt for the world in general. Of
Octave
it is remarked, "No suspicion of personal interest came to
attack the purity of his diabolism." And we have already seen how
Julien is equally "detached" toward all the social classes to which
he is exposed-the peasant, the bourgeois, the clerical, and the
aristocratic. There is nothing but the stripped ego against the
world-the whole personality canalised in the intellectual will. At
least this is the self·conscious ideal that these characters set before
themselves; and action, instead of being the expression of some
material or idealistic motive, becomes more and more an end in
itself. Action, that is to say, is something spontaneous and essen–
tially irrational-to use a word that Gide has made well-known,
gratuitous.
It has no meaning except as an objectification of the
"pure will" of the doer.
But if the ideal of a Napoleon operating on society through
other means than the sword dominates their minds, there lingers
in
the sensibility the still unquieted echoes
of].].
Rousseau. And,
at the end, as a Freudian critic would put it, the assertions of the
Super-ego are successfully drowned out by the protests of the ld.
When Julien makes his attack on the life of his former mistress,
it is not out of the assumed necessity of justifying himself by such
an act-like Raskolnikov's murder of the two women in
Crime
and
Punishment.
It is far from being a "gratuitous" act. It is rather
the act of an exasperated child-a means of relieving the too great
tension created by the contradictory nature of his feelings toward
her. Mterwards, just before his execution, he confesses, "And
why be a hypocrite still, when I am cursing hypocrisy? It is not
death, nor the cell, nor the damp air, it is the absence of Madame
de Renal that is crushing me."
The consequences of this ordeal are strikingly reflected in
the formal bankruptcy of the Stendhalian novel. Because his
heroes are incapable of action in the classic sense Stendhal is
forced to rely almost exclusively upon analysis. Of course one
admits that the analytical is the modern habit of mind;
Hamlet,
as
Monseignor Kolbe has pointed out, is fundamentally a play
about
analysis. But in Stendhal the analysis is a vast and endless im-
