Adepts in Self-Portraiture

by Stefan Zweig

  It is thanks to Casanova, in large measure, that we know so much of the daily life of the eighteenth century; of its balls, its theaters, coffee houses, festivals, inns, dining halls, brothels, hunting parties, monasteries, nunneries, and fortresses. Thanks to him we know how people traveled, fed, gamed, danced, lived, loved, amused themselves; we know their manners and customs, their ways of speech. Superadded to this abundance of facts, to this wealth of practical details, we have a tumultuous assembly of human personalities, enough to fill twenty novels and to supply ten generations of novelists. Look at them: soldiers and princes, popes and kings, cheats and cardsharpers, merchants and lawyers, castrati, souteneurs, women of all sorts and stations, authors and philosophers, the wise and the foolish — assuredly it is the best stocked menagerie of human beings that any one writer has ever packed into the enclosure of a single book. Nonetheless, each of the figures on his canvas has an unexplored interior. Casanova once said, writing to Opitz, that he lacked a talent for psychology, that he could not “discern inner physiognomies.” We need not be surprised, therefore, that countless imaginative writers of later generations have drawn their must from this southland vineyard. Hundreds of novels and plays owe to Casanova their best characters and their most likely situations. Nor is the quarry exhausted. Just as ten generations have taken from the Forum stone for new buildings, so for generations yet to come will writers borrow material from this arch-spendthrift.

  But the supreme character in his book — never to be forgotten, and already within a century become proverbial — is Casanova himself, that strange cross between Renaissance adventurer and modern swell-mobsman, that amazing creature who was rascal and genius rolled into one. People will never cease to take delight in the study of his personality. As challengingly erect as the bronze equestrian statue of his fellow Venetian Colleoni, he stands sturdily planted in the midst of life, looking down through the centuries, indifferent to mockery or blame. Shamelessly he has displayed himself to the world, so that we know better than we know our own brothers this titanic, unwearied fragment of mankind. We should waste our time were we to look for psychological depths, to seek backgrounds and hidden abysses. Casanova has nothing of the kind to reveal. There is no rouge on his face, and he is unbuttoned down to the codpiece of his breeches. Without ceremony, without restraint, without ambiguity, he takes the reader comfortably by the arm, reveals all his privacies, whether of bed or board, whether of gaming table or alchemist’s hocus-pocus. He laughingly displays himself in the most delicate situations, and he does so not in an exhibitionist spirit, not under stress of a morbid Candaules perversion, but naïvely, with the inborn and bewitching grace of a child of nature, who has been in paradise, has seen there the naked Eve, and has not eaten of the apple which brings a knowledge of good and evil.

  Here, as always, simplicity, ingenuousness, explains the perfection with which he tells his tale. The most skilful psychologist, the most practiced writer, cannot make of Casanova a more live figure than he makes of himself in virtue of his absolute, unreflecting nonchalance. He stands before our eyes in all sorts of situations. We see him in anger, when his face flushes, when his white teeth are clenched, when his mouth is bitter as gall; we see him in danger, bold, alert, smiling contemptuously, with a steady hand on the hilt of his sword. We see him in good society; vain, boastful, self-possessed, talking easily, voluptuously appraising the charms of women. Whether as a handsome stripling or as a toothless ruin, he is always vividly presented to us. When we read his memoirs, we feel as if he were actually before us; and we are sure that if this man, dead long since, were to come suddenly around the corner, we should recognize him in a moment — though we know him only through a self-portrait limned by one who was neither a professional author nor a psychologist. Goethe’s Werther, Kleist’s Kohlhaas, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Saint-Prieux and Héloïse — not one of the figures made real to us by these great writers is so real as the self-portrayed Casanova.

  It is of no use, therefore, to turn up your nose at his equivocal talent, or to put on moral airs because of his scapegrace behavior, or to hold him to account for his banalities and ignorant plagiarisms in matters philosophical. Despite all you can do, despite all the objections you can raise, Giacomo Casanova has taken his place in world literature, beside the gallows bird Villon, and various other rogues, who will outlive countless thoroughly reputable authors and critics. As when he was alive, so after his death, he has reduced to absurdity all the accepted laws of aesthetics, and has thrown the moral catechism into the waste-paper basket. The growth and the persistence of his reputation show that a man need not be especially gifted, industrious, well-behaved, noble-minded, and sublime, in order to make his way into the temple of literary immortality. Casanova has proved that one may write the most amusing story in the world without being a novelist, and may give the most admirable picture of the time without being a historian; for in the last resort we judge these matters, not by the method but by the effect, not by the morality but by the power. Any thoroughly adequate feeling may be productive, shamelessness just as much as shame, characterlessness just as much as character, evil just as much as good, morality just as much as immorality. What decides whether a man will become immortal, is not his character but his vitality. Nothing save intensity confers immortality. A man manifests himself more vividly, in proportion as he is strong and unified, effective and unique. Immortality knows nothing of morality or immorality, of good or evil; it measures only work and strength; it demands from a man not purity but unity. Here, morality is nothing; intensity, all.

  STENDHAL

  (1783-1842)

  Qu’ai-je été? Que suis-je? Je serais bien embarrassé de le dire.

  STENDHAL: VIE DE HENRI BRULARD

  LOVE OF FALSEHOOD AND DELIGHT IN TRUTH

  I should much prefer to wear a mask and to change my name.

  FROM A LETTER

  Few have lied more arrantly or quizzed the world with greater delight than Stendhal; few have told the truth to better advantage or with more profundity than he.

  His subterfuges and mystifications are legion. When we take up one of his books, we are faced with a riddle before ever we open it, and after reading the preface we are still puzzled, for the author never gives his name simply and straightforwardly as Henri Beyle. At one moment he arbitrarily assumes a title of nobility, at another he becomes “César Bombet,” or he adds the enigmatic letters A. A. to his initials, leaving the reader to find out for himself that they represent the words “ancien auditeur.” He can feel at ease only under the cloak of a pseudonym. We meet him at times as “an Austrian pensioner,” or, again, as “un ancien officier de cavalerie.” But his favorite guise, the one that has most perplexed his fellow countrymen, is Stendhal. This is the name of an obscure village in Prussia which has thus obtained immortal renown through the whimsical humor of a Puckish wit. If he gives a date, we may be sure it is a wrong one. He tells us in the foreword to La Chartreuse de Parme that the novel was written “during the winter of 1830 three hundred leagues from Paris.” This quip will not alter the fact that the said work was actually penned during the year 1839 in the very heart of the capital. Even actual facts are distorted. For instance, in his autobiography he solemnly assures us that he was present on the battlefields of Wagram, Aspern, and Eylau. There is not a word of truth in the statement! His diary informs us that at the time when these events were taking place he was sitting comfortably at home in Paris. He occasionally speaks of long and important conversations with Napoleon, only in the next volume to declare: “Napoleon was not wont to talk to fools of my genus.”

  Every utterance of Stendhal’s must, therefore, be accepted with reserve; especially must we beware of his letters, for in these, presumably from fear of the police, he made use of varying aliases and was accustomed to falsify the date. He would send a letter from Rome, dating it from Orvieto; or, he would be spending the day in Grenoble, and pretend he was writing from Besançon. Often the year is given wr
ongly; nearly always the day of the month is incorrect; well-nigh invariably is the signature an assumed name. Diligent biographers have collected over two hundred such flights of fancy. Stendhal, whose authentic name was Beyle, signed his letters with such imaginary appellations as, Cottinet, Dominique, Don Flegme, Gaillard, A. L. Feburier, Baron Dormant, A. L. Champagne; or he would make use of the names of other writers, such as Lamartine and Jules Janin. His hoaxes were in reality the outcome of an innate delight in bewildering, in dumbfounding people, in disguising himself, in hiding himself. Stendhal assumes these kaleidoscopic changes in order to arouse interest in himself and to make his true personality invisible; he flashes his rapier in masterly fashion in order to keep the inquisitive at bay; and he never attempts to conceal his passion for deception. A friend, in the course of a letter, once reproached Stendhal for having lied most abominably on a certain occasion. “True,” wrote our author in the margin, his spirit unruffled by the accusation. Gaily, and with ironical pleasure, he falsifies the number of his years of civil service, he professes loyalty for the Bourbons at one moment and for Napoleon at another. In all his writings, whether published or unpublished, misstatements abound like spawn in a fishpond. His final lie, the one with which he bowed his adieux to the world, is recorded in the cemetery at Montmartre. Here we read on his tombstone: “Arrigo Beyle, Milanese.” Yet he was really, much to his annoyance, born in Grenoble, and received in baptism the name of Henri! He wished to wear his mask to the end, to cloak himself in romantic trappings even at the approach of death.

  In spite of all, however, few men have launched upon the world so many vital truths concerning their own personalities as did this past master in the art of dissembling. Stendhal was capable of telling the truth with the same alacrity that he displayed in telling lies. He has given us such intimate revelations concerning himself, has spoken with such amazing frankness as to the details of his inner life, that we are left speechless at his lack of reserve. On other occasions, however, just when he is on the verge of confiding some matter of interest, he suddenly draws a veil or fobs us off with a jest. Of his own free will, and with a profusion of circumstantial evidence, he discloses things which ordinary mortals would not admit even under torture. Stendhal was, in fact, as sturdy, no as impudent, a truth teller as he was a liar. In one case as in the other he ignores the conventional moral canons, and thrusts his way ruthlessly through all the barriers of the inner censorship. A man of a naturally shy disposition, timid in the presence of women, entrenching himself behind his aliases, as soon as he takes pen in hand he is full of courage. Vanished then are all inhibitions. Wherever, in his inner self, he encounters resistances, he collars them, drags them to the light of day, and dissects them with the utmost precision. The things which in the material world have proved to be the most inhibitive are mastered by him in the realm of psychology with the most thorough-going success. Thus, already in the year 1820, he intuitively opened some of the most intricately barricaded avenues to the soul, thereby anticipating, by a hundred years, the complicated and highly elaborated apparatus of psychoanalysis. Yet he possessed no more elaborate instrument than personal observation, and depended on no cut-and-dried theories for his intrepid raids into the land of the unconscious. He relied upon the hard and well-pointed bistoury of inquisitiveness to lay bare what he wanted to know; and the most signal quality of his work was a bold statement of the truth without any regard for what the world would say.

  Stendhal scrutinizes what he feels; his feelings are then exhibited frankly and unashamedly; the more daring they are, the better; the more intimate they are, the more passionately does he set them forth. He takes special delight in exploring his most questionable feelings, those which have, through very shame, crept away into the dark recesses of his soul. How often he returns to the hatred he felt for his father! How fantastical are his references to the subject! He mockingly informs us that for a whole month he endeavored, unavailingly, to get up a feeling of sorrow at the news of the old man’s death. The most painful avowals concerning his sex life, his persistent lack of success with women, the crises he underwent on account of his unbridled vanity, are all set out with the accuracy of an ordnance map. He communicates certain intimate happenings with a wealth of detail that reminds us of a clinical history; no one before him has ever allowed such confessions to pass the lips, or if an author should have permitted them to slip into his book they are ascribed to a printer’s error. Stendhal’s supreme merit lies in this, that through the transparent and egoistical coldness of his crystalline intelligence he has been able to transmit to future generations some of the rarest and most precious adventures of the soul. These experiences, preserved as it were in an ice-chamber, will endure for all time, a treasure of inestimable worth. Had this strange master of deception never lived, mankind would have known far less of the universe of the feelings and of their underworld.

  The inconsistency in Stendhal’s make-up can now be explained. It was essential that he should be a master craftsman in the art of deception, in the technique of falsehood, if he was to be successful in the art of telling the truth. He once declared that nothing had helped so greatly in his psychological development as the fact of his growing up in a thoroughly boring family circle which necessitated a constant life of deception from childhood upwards. For it is only when one has had personal experience of the ease with which a lie drops from one’s lips, of the way in which feelings change with lightning speed as they rise from the heart and attain verbal expression, only when one has become an adept in the arts of quibble and fence, that one knows “how many precautions are needed if one is not to lie.” This disciplined mind has shown, after innumerable experiments within the confines of its own psychic world, how swiftly every feeling, immediately it realizes it is being observed, becomes shamefaced and beats a hurried retreat, so that, like a fisherman angling for trout, the experimenter must strike quickly and land the creature without delay if he is to make good the catch. Truth must be clutched and prisoned as soon as ever she pokes her nose around the corner. To seize upon such self-observations, to dissect them before they can scuttle off into the subconscious or (through protective coloration) become merged into the background, such is the hobby of this practiced and passionate seeker after knowledge. He is wise enough to realize that the chase holds very rare moments when fortune smiles on the hunter, that they are as scarce and as precious as the quarry itself. Strange as it may seem, few have had so persistent a respect for truth as Stendhal, the arch-liar. He knew that truth did not flaunt her charms at every crossroad, ready and willing to allow herself to be caressed by all who cared, rough-handed, to touch her. He, cunning as Odysseus, knew that truths dwell in caves, dread the daylight, scurry away at the first sound of a footfall, and slip from between the fingers of one who thinks to have got a firm hold. One needs to tread warily, to creep up softly, to be light of touch, to be tender of hand and of eye, to be practiced in the art of seeing in the dark; above all one needs passion, passion which has been mentally schooled, which can soar on the wings of the spirit, which is endowed with a mania for listening and for tracking; one needs, as Stendhal says, to summon up all one’s courage, to penetrate into the minutest recesses of the labyrinthine plexus of the nerves, to find a way into the tenebrous crypts of the soul. Only thus can we hope to catch a whispered avowal; only thus may we perceive one facet of the everlastingly unattainable “truth” which coarse-grained men have endeavored to immure in the mausoleums of their philosophical systems and to prison in the stifling cages of their theories. Stendhal, the would-be skeptic, looks upon truth as a gem of great price; he, in his wisdom, knows how elusive she is, how rare are her visits; above all, he realizes that she will not allow herself to be penned up like a domestic animal, to be sold and worn out like a beast of burden; he is well aware that knowledge comes only to those whose perceptions are fine.

  Indeed, Stendhal deemed truth so precious that he never offered his truths for sale, never cried his wares. Al
l he wanted was to be upright towards himself, and in his own despite. Hence his unscrupulous lying! This arch-egoist, this passionate investigator of his own motives and actions, never felt the slightest need to teach his contemporaries, and least of all to tell them about himself. On the contrary, he hedged his person about with a thorny thicket of spitefulness and malicious wit so that the crassly inquisitive might not come near, and he might be left in peace to pursue his way along the strangely deep galleries burrowing into his own depths. The greatest joke of his life was to mislead his neighbor; his most persistent passion was the passion to be honest with himself. Lies are short of leg and get left behind, so that they do not outcrawl the framework of their own generation; but the truths a man utters, once they are avowed and acknowledged, live on when he who launched them on the world has long been dead. A man who has dealt uprightly with himself, were it but once in his lifetime, has been upright forever. He who has disclosed the secrets of his soul has confessed them to the whole of mankind.