IN THE HOTEL DE LA MOLE
269
times gives the effect of being a historical novel), as also in
Lucien
Leuwen,
a novel of the Louis-Philippe period, which Stendhal left
unfinished. In :the latter, indeed, in the fonn in which it
has
come
down to us, the element of current history and politics is too heavily
emphasized: it is not always wholly integrated into the course of the
action and is set forth in far too great detail in proportion to the
principal theme; but perhaps in a final revision Stendhal would
have achieved an organic articulation of the whole. Finally, his
autobiographical works, despite the capricious and erratic "egotism"
of their style and manner, are likewise far more closely, essentially,
and concretely connected with the politics, sociology, and economics
of the period than are, for example, the corresponding works of
Rousseau or Goethe; one feels that the great events of contemporary
history affected Stendhal much more directly than they did the other
two; Rousseau did not live to see them, and Goethe had managed
to keep aloof from them.
To have stated this is also to have stated the circumstance
which gave rise to modem tragic realism based on the contemporary
world at that particular moment and in a man of that particular
period: this circumstance was the first of the great movements of
modem times in which large masses of men consciously took part–
the French Revolution with all the consequent convulsions which
spread from it over Europe. From the Refonnation movement, which
was no less powerful and which aroused the masses no less, it is
distinguished by the much faster tempo of its spread, its mass ef–
fects, and the changes which it produced in practical daily life within
a comparatively extensive territory; for the progress then achieved in
transportation and communication, together with the spread of
elementary education resulting from the trends of the Revolution
itself, made it possible to mobilize the people far more rapidly and
in a far more unified direction; everyone was reached by the same
ideas and experiences more quickly, more consciously, and far more
unifonnly. For Europe there began that process of temporal con–
centration, both of historical events themselves and of everyone's
knowledge of them, which has since made tremendous progress and
which not only pennits us to prophesy a unification of human life
throughout the world but has in a certain sense achieved it already.
Such a development abrogates or renders powerless the entire social
