STENDHAL
21
of martyrdom is not the kind of question to be easily answered. It
is significant, however, that for his finest and most enduring novel
he should find his "objective correlative" (to use T. S. Eliot's
phrase) in an account in the
Grenoble Gazette
of the guillotining
of a handsome young man for a
crime passionel.
Entirely by
chance life threw up for him what elsewhere his imagination failed
to accomplish-a design that gave an illusion of unity to all the
elements in his long internecine warfare with society. By his choice
of symbols is Henri Beyle finally found out; and in identifying
himself with the criminal who pays to society the debt which it
does not deserve he becomes identifiable in our eyes as the familiar
and immemorial scapegoat-hero. The romantic outlaw of the
Gothic tradition is apotheosized into the sacred criminal. To such
an extent goes the aureole gather round Julien's head that the old
Abbe is obliged to protest, "This Julien is a strange creature, his
action is inexplicable.... Perhaps it will be possible to make a
martyr out of him." And let there be no mistake about it: Julien
himself, in his last agony of self-communion, accepts his fate with
the pride and also the fullest consciousness of his role: "The
accuser whom society sets at my heels has been made rich by a
scandalous injustice.... I have committed a murderous assault,
and I am rightly condemned, but, short of murder only, the Vale–
nod who condemned me is a hundred times more injurious to
society."
In the classic manner the Stendhalian hero rehearses in the
cycle of his own rise and fall the pattern of his culture as a whole.
He takes on himself the guilt that is the result, in individuals and
societies alike, of the disequilibrium between the principle of con–
servation, expressed in the limitations set by tradition and the
moral code, and the principle of expansion, expressed in the inter–
ests and motives of the will. As a prefiguration of what was to be
the destiny of his culture, his career has perhaps more meaning
and a more terrifying reality for us today than when it was re–
corded. Prophecy has become a
fait accompli.
Not only does it
throw into boldest relief the most obsessive problem of our time,
the problem of justice, but it also demonstrates to what extent that
