16
PARTISAN REVIEW
provisation, without center and without limits-a medley of con–
flicting themes and motifs that can never be resolved because they
are never really .grasped. Distinctions, comparisons, and qualifi–
cations of the most ·tenuous sort must be made for every movement
of the mind or sensibility. It would not be hard to discover in this
mania
for analysis a symptom of what we today call paranoia. In
Lucien Leuwen
at least it is carried to the point of absurdity if not
of madness; and it is no wonder that the book is uncompleted.
Indeed, of all Stendhal's novels only
Armance
may be considered
complete, and that simply terminates with the unexplained suicide
of the hero.
Yet even the briefest resume of any one of them reveals that
there
is
action-a kind of action. But this is neither the rapid and
vigorous melodrama of Balzac nor the mechanical Punch-and-Judy
show of Flaubert and the naturalists. Rather, the web of analysis
is punctured at intervals by unprepared and frequently meaning–
less outbursts of ferocity-like the end of
The Red and the Black.
Because the conflict cannot be resolved it is elaborated and re–
peated; and there are lacking all those qualities of movement and
design that we expect of the novel form.
If
we compare the work
just mentioned with another on which it had a direct influence,
Crime and Punishment,
we see the clifference between a work that
renders only the
agon
and
pathos
of the hero, to use the terms of
classical tragedy, and one that includes within it something like an
epiphany.
The value or feasibility of the latter in Dostoievski may
be questioned; but, from the aesthetic point of view, it gives final–
ity and ,completeness. Stendhal cannot be numbered among those
few great novelists who were also artists ; his works have been
interesting for other things than their style and form. And to dis–
cuss these things is to tum from such action as we find in his novels
to some of their theoretical aspects-to what is sometimes called
his "philosophy."
For Stendhal had no philosophy of a systematic kind, nor
were his major ideas and opinions even.very original for his time.
His metaphysic of the Will was a common heritage from German
idealism; it is in Balzac and it will be a little later in Schopen·
hauer. (We know also that Stendhal read and was rather impressed
