270
PARTISAN R!EVIEW
structure of orders and categories previously held valid; the tempo
of the changes demands a perpetual and extremely difficult effort
toward inner adaptation and produces intense concomitant crises. He
who would account to himself for
his
real life and
his
place
in
human
society is obliged to do so upon a far wider practical foundation and
in a far larger context than before, and to be continually conscious
that the social base upon which he lives is not constant for a moment
but is perpetually changing through convulsions of the most various
kinds.
We may ask ourselves how it came about that modern con–
sciousness of reality began to find literary form for the first time
precisely in Henri Beyle of Grenoble. Beyle-Stendhal was a man of
keen intelligence, quick and alive, mentally independent and coura–
geous, but not quite a great figure. His ideas are often forceful and
inspired, but they are erratic, arbitrarily advanced and lacking, despite
all their show of boldness, in inward certainty and continuity. There
is something unsettled about his whole nature: his fluctuation be–
tween realistic candor in general and silly mystification in particulars,
betw.een cold self-control, rapturous abandonment to sensual pleasures,
and insecure and sometimes sentimental vaingloriousness, is not al–
ways easy to put up with; his literary style is very impressive and
unmistakably original, but it is short-winded, not uniformly suc–
cessful, and only seldom wholly takes possession of and fixes the
subject. But, such as he was, he offered himself to the moment; cir–
cumstances seized him, tossed him about, and laid upon him a unique
and unexpected destiny; they formed him so that he was compelled to
come to terms with reality in a way which no one had done before
him.
When the Revolution broke out Stendhal was a boy of six;
when he left
his
native city of Grenoble and his reactionary, old–
bourgeois family, who though glumly sulking at the new situation were
still very wealthy, and went to Paris, he was sixteen. He arrived
there immediately after Napoleon's
coup
d'etat;
one of his relatives,
Pierre Darn, was an influential adherent of the First Consul; after
some hesitations and interruptions, Stendhal made a brilliant career
in the Napoleonic administration. He saw Europe on Napoleon's
expeditions; he grew to be a man, and indeed an extremely elegant
man of the world; he
also
became, it appears, a useful administrative
