276
PAR TIS A N R'EVlEW
he finds the smell and the noise of the masses unendurable, and in
his
books, outspokenly realistic though they are in other respects, we
find no "people," either in the Romantic "folk" sense or in the
socialist sense-only petty-bourgeois, and occasional accessory figures
such as soldiers, domestic servants, and coffee-house mademoiselles.
Finally, he sees the individual man far less as the product of
his
historical situa.tion and as taking part in it, than as an atom within it;
a man seems to have been thrown almost by chance into the milieu
in which he lives; it is a resistance with which he can deal more or
less successfully, not really a culture-medium with which he is organic–
ally connected. In addition, Stendhal's conception of mankind is on
the whole preponderantly materialistic and sensual; an excellent il–
lustration of this occurs in
Henri Brulard
(ch. 26):
«J'appelle
caractere
d'un homme sa maniere habituelle d'aller
a
La chasse du
bonheur, en termes plus claires, mais moins qualificatifs,
l'ensemble
de ses habitudes morales." But happiness, even though, for Stendhal
too, it can be found only in the mind, in art, passion, or fame, always
has a far more sensual and earthy coloring in him than in the
Romanticists. His aversion to philistine efficiency, to the type of
bourgeois that was coming into existence, could be Romantic too.
But
a
Romantic would hardly conclude a passage on his distaste for
money-making with the words:
«
J'
ai eu Ie rare plaisir de faire toute
ma vie
a
peu pres ce qui me plaisait" (Brulard,
ch. 32).
His conception of
esprit
and of freedom is still entirely that
of the pre-Revolutionary eighteenth century, although it is only
with effort and a little spasmodically that he succeeds in realizing it
in his own person. For freedom he has to pay the price of poverty and
his
esprit
easily becomes paradox, bitter and wounding:
«une gaite
qui fait peur" (Brulard,
ch. 6). His
esprit
no longer has the self-as–
surance and freedom from problems of the Voltaire period; he man–
ages neither his social life nor that particularly important part of it,
his
sexual relations, with the easy mastery of a gentleman of rank
of the
ancien: regime;
he even goes so far as to say that he cultivated
esprit
only to conceal his passion for a woman whom he did not
possess-«cette peur, mille fois repetee, a eti, dans Ie fait, le principe
dirigeant de ma vie pendant dix ans" (Egotisme,
ch. 1). Such
traits make him appear a man born too late who tries in vain to
realize the mode of life of a past period; other elements of his
