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PARTISAN REVIEW
Stendhallike Baudelaire had personal reasons for revolting against
the class into which he had been born, and we can see from the first
of these three passages that his enthusiasm for political radicalism
began as a protest against the attitude of his royalist family. We must,
however, be clear about the implications of these pronouncements.
Stendhal is not attacking merely the bourgeois like the majority of
nineteenth-century writers. He is systematically rejecting the aristocra–
cy, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; and this makes his position
a novel one. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the writer
had detached himself from one class, and if he did not succeed in be–
coming a member of a higher one, at least he achieved a clearly de–
fined relation to it. In the nineteenth century he detached himself
from the three main classes, but there was no other class or section
of the community to which he could attach himself. This meant that
ultimately he must form a new class of his own. With Stendhal the
process did not go very far. He was constantly proclaiming his repub–
licanism and his hatred of kings, but though he was officially a liberal
republican, his fellow-republicans fare very
ill
in his novels. The prin–
cipal character in
Lucien Leuwen-the
novel in which he attempts
a direct criticism of the contemporary political scene- is continually
deploring the dreary mediocrity of republicans and sighing for the
return of a sort of silver age-very elegant, very aristocratic and,
morally, decidedly lax. Although Stendhal was a great political novelist
he took no active part in politics. He became like the heroes of his own
novels an "outsider" ,and dedicated his books to "the happy few"
who were scattered all over the world and who, he hoped, would
enjoy them and sympathize with his opinions. But he made no attempt
to organize
his
admirers. That was a task which was left to Baudelaire
whose writings on the subject are really a development of the Stend–
halian theory. His view of the writer's position is set out most clearly
in
his great essay on Constantin Guys:
Dandyism is an institution which though outside the law, has its
own rigorous code to which all its adherents must strictly conform, how–
ever independent and free they may be by nature.. .. Dandyism appears
chiefly in periods of transition when democracy is not yet all-powerful
and aristocracy is only partly tottering and degraded. In the upheavals
which belong to such periods, a handful of men ... may conceive the
plan of founding a new sort of aristocracy which will be all the more
difficult to destroy because it will be based on the most precious and the
