274
PARTISAN
R'EVIEW
constructions, and for surrendering oneself to reality as given. But
the reality which he encountered was so constituted that, without
permanent reference to the iInmense changes of the immediate past
and without a premonitory searching after the imminent changes
of the future, one could not represent it; all the human figures and
all the human events in his work appear upon a ground politically and
socially disturbed. To bring the significance of this graphically be–
fore us, we have but to compare him with the best-known realistic
writers of the pre-Revolutionary eighteenth century: with Lesage
or the Ab.b.c Prevost, with the pre-eminent Henry Fielding or with
Goldsmith; we have but to consider how much more accurately and
profoundly he enters into given contemporary reality than Voltaire,
Rousseau, and the youthful realistic work of Schiller, and upon how
much broader a basis than Saint-Simon, whom, though in the very
incomplete edition then available, he read assiduously. In so far as
the serious realism of modem times cannot represent man otherwise
than as embedded in a total reality, political, social, and economic,
which is concrete and constantly evolving-as is the case today
in
any
novel or film-Stendhal is its founder.
However, the attitude from which Stendhal apprehends cir–
cumstance and attempts to reproduce it with all its interconnections
is as yet hardly influenced by Historicism-which, though it pene–
trated into France in his time, had little effect upon him. For that
very reason we have referred in the last few pages to time-perspective
and to a constant consciousness of changes and cataclysms, but not
to a comprehension of evolutions. It is not too easy to describe Stend–
hal's inner attitude toward social phenomena. It is his aim to seize
their every nuance; he most accurately represents the particular
structure of any given milieu, he has no preconceived rationalistic
system concerning the general factors which determine social life, nor
any pattern-concept of how the ideal society ought to look; but in
particulars his representation of circumstance is oriented, wholly in the
spirit of classic ethical psychology, upon an
«analyse du coeur
humain,"
not upon discovery or premonition of historical forces; we
find rationalistic, empirical, sensual motifs in him, but hardly those
of Romantic Historicism. Absolutism, religion and the Church, the
privileges of rank, he regarded very much as would an average
philosophe,
that is as a web of superstition, deceit, and intrigue;
