272
PARTISAN R'EVIEW
realistic writing grew out of
his
discomfort in the post-Napolenonic
world and
his
consciousness that he did not belong to it and had
no place in it. Discomfort in the given world and inability to become
part of it is, to
be
sure, characteristic of Rousseauean Romanticism
and it is probable that Stendhal had something of that even in
his
youth; there is something of it in his congenital disposition, and the
course of
his
youth can only have strengthened such tendencies,
which, so to speak, harmonized with the tenor of life of
his
genera–
tion; on the other hand, he did not write
his
recollections of his
youth, the
Vie de Henri Brulard,
until he was in his thirties, and we
must allow for the possibility that, from the viewpoint of
his
later
development, from the viewpoint of 1832, he overstressed such motifs
of individualistic isolation.
It
is, in any case, certain that the motifs
and expressions of his isolation and his problematic relation to society
are wholly different from the corresponding phenomena in Rousseau
and his early Romantic disciples. Stendhal, in contrast to Rousseau,
had a bent for practical affairs and the requisite ability; he aspired
to sensual enjoyment of life as given; he did not withdraw from
practical reality from the outset, did not entirely condemn it from the
outset-instead he attempted, and successfully at first, to master it.
Material success and material enjoyments were desirable to him; he
admires energy and the ability to master life, and even his cherished
dreams
("Ie silence du bonheur")
are more sensual, more concrete,
more dependent upon human society and human creations (Cim–
arosa, Mozart, Shakespeare, Italian art) than those of the
Promeneur
Solitaire.
Not until success and pleasure began to slip away from
him,
not until practical circumstances threatened to cut the ground from
under his feet, did the society of his time become a problem and a
subject to
him.
Rousseau did not find himself at home in the social
world he encountered, which did not appreciably change during
his lifetime; he rose in it without thereby becoming happier or more
reconciled to it, while it appeared to remain unchanged. Stendhal
lived while one earthquake after another shook the foundations of
society; one of the earthquakes jarred him out of the ordinary course
of life prescribed for men of his station, flung him, like many of his
contemporaries, into previously inconceivable adventures, events,
responsibilities, tests of himself, and experiences of freedom and
power; another flung him back into a new
lif~
of triviality which he
