Some slight sketch of the life and character of Stendhal isparticularly necessary to an understanding of Le Rouge et Le Noir(The Red and the Black) not so much as being the formal stuffing ofwhich introductions are made, but because the book as a book standsin the most intimate relation to the author’s life and character. Thehero, Julien, is no doubt, viewed superficially, a cad, a scoundrel,an assassin, albeit a person who will alternate the moist eye of thesentimentalist with the ferocious grin of the beast of prey. ButStendhal so far from putting forward any excuses makes a specific pointof wallowing defiantly in his own alleged wickedness. “Even assumingthat Julien is a villain and that it is my portrait,” he wrote shortlyafter the publication of the book, “why quarrel with me. In the time ofthe Emperor, Julien would have passed for a very honest man. I lived inthe time of the Emperor. So—but what does it matter?”
Henri Beyle was born in 1783 in Grenoble in Dauphiny, the son of aroyalist lawyer, situated on the borderland between the gentry andthat bourgeoisie which our author was subsequently to chastise withthat malice peculiar to those who spring themselves from the classwhich they despise. The boy’s character was a compound of sensibilityand hard rebelliousness, virility and introspection. Orphaned of hismother at the age of seven, hated by his father and unpopular with hisschoolmates, he spent the orthodox unhappy childhood of the artistictemperament. Winning a scholarship at the Ecole Polytechnique atthe age of sixteen he proceeded to Paris, where with characteristicindependence he refused to attend the college classes and set himselfto study privately in his solitary rooms.
In 1800 the influence of his relative M. Daru procured him a commissionin the French Army, and the Marengo campaign gave him an opportunityof practising that Napoleonic worship to which throughout his life heremained consistently faithful, for the operation of the philosophicalmaterialism of the French sceptics on an essentially logical andmathematical mind soon swept away all competing claimants for hisreligious adoration. Almost from his childhood, moreover, he hadabominated the Jesuits, and “Papism is the source of all crimes,” wasthroughout his life one of his favourite maxims.
After the army’s triumphant entry into Milan, Beyle returned toGrenoble on furlough, whence he dashed off to Paris in pursuit ofa young woman to whom he was paying some attention, resigned hiscommission in the army and set himself to study “with the view ofbecoming a great man.” It is in this period that we find the mostmarked development in Beyle’s enthusiasm of psychology. This tendencysprang primarily no doubt from his own introspection. For throughouthis life Beyle enjoyed the indisputable and at times dubious luxuryof a double consciousness. He invariably carried inside his braina psychological mirror which reflected every phrase of his emotionwith scientific accuracy. And simultaneously, the critical spirit,half-genie, half-demon inside his brain, would survey in thesemi-detached mood of a keenly interested spectator, the actual emotionitself, applaud or condemn it as the case might be, and ticket theverdict with ample commentations in the psychological register of itsown analysis.
But this trend to psychology