STENDHAL
19
identified, in which the moody and recalcitrant child of the Place
Grenette grows up into the avowed enemy of the whole social
order. This is to say that he is to be explained neither by a glib
invocation of the Oedipus-complex nor by a description of the now
quite familiar socio-economic contradictions of bourgeois society.
It is rather that the whole soil of Western European culture in his
time was such as to bring to monstrous flowering those talents for
confusion and self-destruction which his early experience enabled
him to contribute to it. It was such as to give special scope--in his
case, largely intellectual, although in the next century active as
well-to the potentiality for pure evil that exists in the race in
every time and place. And the reciprocal nature of the whole
process should prove as much as anything to what extent even in
the negative sense the individual is involuntarily tied up with his
society and committed to its destiny. But to pursue the point
further is really to return to the question raised at the beginning
of this paper.
'
Who, in the last analysis, is the
person
that emerges from
behind the slily constructed barrage of subterfuge and deceit that
was the career of Henri Beyle? Or, at least we may ask, what
kind
of person? In attempting an answer we have depended much less
on his own explicit statements about himself than on the monot–
onously consistent pattern underlying his life and work. This pat–
tern we have seen as the hackneyed modern one of frustration–
the brisk progress to death and destruction of some unusually
gifted and equally handicapped individual. Even when it has not
been too apparent on the surface of the works we have insinuated
that the basis of this handicap was some secret sense of sexual
inferiority. Also noted has been the process by which what was
originally a rejection of the father-symbol is translated into a
rejection of all existent religious and social symbols. And the
whole operation has been seen as one made possible only by the
particular situation of early nineteenth-century culture. But for a
fuller identification of the type we must now consider him from
the perspective of a much broader and also more traditional frame–
work of human thought and values.
From the beginning one cannot but be struck by the sacri–
ficial and even hieratic air that surrounds most of Stendhal's char–
acters. "At times I find something superhuman about him,"
