Adepts in Self-Portraiture

by Stefan Zweig

  An easy thing to propose, but mighty difficult of accomplishment! For Stendhal has made up his mind to be “simplement vrai” in his Henri Brulard. He knows how hard it is to be true, to tell the truth when truth shows the writer at a disadvantage; he knows how easy it is for vanity to distort the memory of events. How is a man to find his way through the dark labyrinth of the past, how distinguish between a beacon and a will-o’-the-wisp, how avoid the falsehoods that lie ambushed at every corner? Stendhal discovers a way to shun these pitfalls: “Je prends pour principe, de ne pas me gêner et d’effacer jamais.” He will change nothing in the first draft, “pour ne mentir par vanité.” He will ride roughshod over shame, will write his reminiscences so rapidly that the censor will not be aroused in time to interfere; the artist must not be given a chance to improve the style; there must be no touching-up, the picture must remain a snapshot; the record must be made so swiftly that events have no leisure to assume a theatrical pose. Stendhal’s pen speeds on wings; he writes quickly and never reads over his pages; he is quite unconcerned about style, unity, or architectonic; “J’écris ceci sans mentir, j’espère sans me faire illusion, avec plaisir comme une lettre à un ami.” He has no wish to lie for the sake of artistic effect as did Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He consciously sacrifices the beauty of his memoirs to straightforwardness; art is sacrificed to psychology.

  In actual fact, both Henri Brulard, and its sequel Souvenirs d’un égotiste, are of dubious artistic worth. Both bear traces of hurry in composition; they are careless, and lack plan. Stendhal throws his reminiscences on paper just as they crop up in his mind, indifferent as to whether they fit the time and place in his book or not. The sublime rubs shoulders with the platitudinous; aimless generalities are interspersed with the most intimate of personal revelations; and verbosity often impedes the “dazzling” development of a dramatic situation. But the flaws only serve to set off the fundamental honesty of the exposition, and every detail is of as much value to psychological science as a whole book could be. Such revelations as his perilous love for his mother, his deadly hatred for his father, things that are usually thrust down into the unconscious and never come to the light of day if the censor keeps good watch and ward, all these intimate secrets of the soul slip through into Stendhal’s books during the second when he deliberately relaxes his vigilance. He never allows his feelings time for “moral” reflection, for titivating and making themselves “beautiful.” And it is precisely because of this system that he is able to catch them where they are most sensitive, to seize them and record them in their shameless nudity. What tragic alarm and anxiety, what an elemental wrath, surges up from the child’s heart in these annals! Who can ever forget the scene when little Henri, hearing of his Aunt Seraphie’s death, throws himself on his knees and thanks God? The child’s life had been embittered and made forlorn by this woman, and now he was rid of “one of the two devils, who had been let loose upon my unhappy childhood” (the other “devil” was young Beyle’s father). Yet immediately after his prayer of thanks, we find the admission that even this devil had for a moment been able to arouse the boy’s precocious eroticism.

  The man must indeed have been a genius who could so boldly and so astutely reveal to his fellow mortals the amazing complexity of the underworld of the emotions. Before Stendhal’s day it is rare to find anyone who has shown how innumerable are the strata which go to the composition of a human being, how the most contrary of feelings tingle in the most extreme nerve endings, how in the immature soul of a child we already find the germs of the coarse and the noble, of the brutal and the tender; and it is to this casual discovery that we owe the first of all essays in analytical autobiography. Stendhal is the first to draw a portrait of the ego not as an entity (as Jean-Jacques Rousseau endeavored to do, not to mention Casanova for whom the ego was the only palpable reality), but as a conglomerate of warring elements, interpenetrating one another, surging over and under and behind one another. Like an archaeologist who from a potsherd or from an inscription on a stone can guess the history of days long past, so does Stendhal gather from his minute observations the unending treasures hidden in the human soul, bringing to light the rulers and tyrants of this hidden world, and the wars and battles that have devastated it. Inasmuch as he disinterred and reconstituted his own self, he opened the way for adventurous discovery to those who came after. It is difficult to point to any other whose curiosity about himself has borne so much fruit and has furnished so great a contribution to scientific knowledge.

  What makes Henri Brulard such an unforgettable document of the psyche is that the book was written with complete indifference as to form and style, as to posterity and literature, as to ethical standards and criticisms. It was written purely to gratify a private and personal enjoyment. In his novels, Stendhal wished to be the artist; but in Henri Brulard he was a man, an individual and nothing more, a person impelled by curiosity to know himself. The portrait has all the charm of spontaneity we find in an improvisation. Nothing definitive, nothing complete and finished, comes to trouble the vivid and fascinating picture of his personality. One never “gets through” Stendhal. We are lured on to fresh discoveries concerning him, we would like to unravel new enigmas, we wish to understand him by knowing him, and know him by understanding him. The experimental spirit is constantly wishing to make further experiments on him. Thus his essential being, with its twilight colors, its contrasts of hot and of cold, its vibrant nerves, is as living today as ever it was. Because he portrayed himself, he has bequeathed his passion for investigation and his science of psychical observation to a later generation; and, as a true amateur, as a consummate lover of his own uniqueness, he has taught us the delight there is to be gained from self-questioning and self-observation.

  MODERNITY OF STENDHAL

  Je serai compris vers 1900.

  Stendhal, though born in the eighteenth century, the century of the crude materialism of Diderot and Voltaire, overleaped the whole of the nineteenth century and landed in the epoch of psycho-energetics, when the study of the workings of the soul had developed into a science. As Nietzsche says: “Two generations had to pass away before he was overtaken, and before some of the riddles which fascinated him were again brought forward for solution.” Stendhal’s work hardly dates at all, many of his premises have become the common property of mankind, and not a few of his prophecies are now in course of fulfillment. Though he lagged behind his contemporaries as far as fame was concerned, he has outsoared them all now with the exception of Balzac. These two alone, Balzac and Stendhal, transcended the limitations of their own time: the former by his revelation of the divisions and subdivisions of society, by his disclosure of the supremacy of money, by his prophetic scrutiny of the mechanism of political control; the latter in that, with the penetrating eye of the psychologist, with a genius for grasping at actualities, he was able to reduce the individual to his component particles and to detect the slightest differences in shade and contour. The subsequent evolution of society has proved Balzac’s prevision to be correct; the new psychology has shown the soundness of Stendhal’s work; for though to their contemporaries their conclusions appeared disproportionately large or too minutely differentiated, nevertheless these conclusions admirably fit the social and individual conditions of today. Balzac’s world-embracing vision foresaw the modern epoch and Stendhal’s intuition anticipated the modern man.

  Stendhal’s characters relive in us today, they are our very selves, trained in self-observation, informed in matters psychological, cheerfully self-conscious, free from moral prejudices, inquisitive about self, weary of all the cold theories of cognition, and interested only in the throbbings of their own personality. Differentiated man is no longer a monstrosity, he is no longer a special case as he was when Stendhal lived and wrote in a world of romanticist art, for the new sciences of psychology and psychoanalysis have now placed delicate instruments in our hands, so that we may reveal the hidden and disentangle the involved. This “marvelously pre
scient man,” as Nietzsche calls him, though living in the days of postchaises and wearing a Napoleonic uniform, is amazingly one of ourselves. His total lack of dogmatism, his early preference for being a European rather than a man of some specific nationality, his detestation of the mechanical regularization of the world, his hatred of pompous mass heroics, seem to us parts of our own make-up. How fine is his serene self-composure when compared with the sentimental bleatings of his contemporaries, and how splendidly did he make good by the influence he exerted upon great writers of a later generation. Innumerable are the trails and the ways he has opened to subsequent men of letters: Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov is unthinkable had Stendhal’s Julien not been created; Tolstoy’s battle of Borodino owes much to its classical exemplar, Stendhal’s memorable description of Waterloo; and much of Nietzsche’s joy in thinking was derived from the refreshing perusal of his predecessor’s works. Thus the “âmes fraternelles,” the “êtres supérieurs,” whom Stendhal sought in vain during his lifetime, gathered around him in the end, in the only fatherland his free cosmopolitan spirit could recognize and love, the fatherland of men who resembled himself.

  Of all his contemporaries, Balzac alone hailed him as brother, and there are none of that generation who are more akin to us today in spirit and in feeling than this man, Henri Beyle. Through the medium of cold print and paper we can feel his warm and breathing presence. Although he plumbed his own depths as none other before him, he remains unfathomable. He revels in contradictions, dazzles us with the phosphorescent hues of his enigmatical personality; he lays bare his innermost secrets and hides others from our gaze, fulfilling himself and yet never completing the picture of himself, always and always a live and palpitating personality.

  Those who have been out of touch with their own epoch are the very ones whom a new epoch delights to honor. The most delicate spiritual oscillations have the longest wavelength in time and eternity.

  TOLSTOY

  (1828-1910)

  Nothing acts so strongly, and so effectively imposes a like mood on everyone, as a life work, and, in the long run, the work of a whole life.

  DIARY, MARCH 23, 1894

  PRELUDE

  The important thing is, not the moral perfection to which a man attains, but the process of attainment.

  DIARY IN OLD AGE

  “There was a man in the land of Uz...; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God and eschewed evil... His substance was... seven thousand sheep, and three thousand camels, and five hundred yoke of oxen, and five hundred she asses, and a very great household; so that this man was the greatest of all the men of the east.”

  Thus begins the history of Job, who was blessed with contentment until the hour when God raised a hand against him and smote him with sore boils, that he might awaken from his dull satisfaction, might suffer from torment of soul and hold counsel with himself. Thus, likewise, begins the spiritual history of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy, who was also the greatest of all the men of his country and his time. He, too, was highly placed among the mighty ones of the earth, living in wealth and comfort in the house of his fathers. His body was overflowing with health and strength. The woman of his choice became his wife, and bore him thirteen children. The work of his hands and his brain proved imperishable, and will be a beacon for all time. Just as the peasants of Yasnaya Polyana bowed low in reverence when the lordly boyar passed them by, so did all the world bow down in deference to his fame. Like Job before the testing, Leo Tolstoy had nothing left to wish for. In one of his letters we read the bold assertion: “My happiness is without alloy.”

  Suddenly, betwixt night and morning, all these things became meaningless, worthless. This diligent man conceived a loathing for his work. He became estranged from his wife, grew indifferent to his children. At night, after tossing sleepless upon his bed, he would wander to and fro like a sick man. In the daytime, he sat before his writing table staring into vacancy, unable to put pen to paper. Once he rushed upstairs and locked his fowling piece away, being fearful lest he should turn the weapon against himself. Sometimes he groaned as if his heart were breaking under its load of sorrow. Not infrequently he sat in a darkened room, sobbing like a child. He would not open letters or receive friends. His sons looked askance at their father, his wife despairingly at her husband, who had thus in a moment been overwhelmed with gloom.

  Why this sudden transformation? Was he stricken with leprosy or some other hidden and terrible disease? Had disaster befallen him? What had happened to Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy, that one so rich in worldly goods should in an instant have become so poor in joy, that the greatest man in Russia should be thus overborne by misery?

  Terrible was the answer: nothing had happened to him. Or, to be precise (and this answer was more terrible still, and truer), Nothing had happened. Tolstoy had glimpsed the Nothing that lies behind things. Something had given way in his soul, a crack had opened, a narrow black fissure; and he had no choice, in his panic fear, but to go on staring through it into this void, this unnamable Nothing, this nihil, this nullity, this not-self that stretches alien and cold and dark and impalpable, as background to a life pulsing with warm blood; he had no choice but to contemplate the Nothing which is the eternal framework of our transitory existence.

  He who has once peeped into this unutterable abyss can no longer turn away his eyes. His senses are darkened; life has lost savor and meaning. Laughter is frozen on his lips. He can grip nothing in his hands without feeling the chill from this realm of non-existence strike inwards from his fingers to his shuddering heart. Everything he looks at is associated in his thought with this other thing that is nihil, is Nothing. Yesterday, the happenings of life were firm, were instinct with the warmth of feeling; today they are withered and valueless. Fame is but a grasping at the wind; art is fool’s play; money is yellow dross; and one’s own live and wholesome body is no more than food for worms. Black invisible lips drain the sap and the sweetness from all that seemed of worth. How cold a place is the world for one to whom this abyss of nonentity has yawned; the “maelstrom” of Edgar Allan Poe which drew everything into its vortex; Pascal’s “gouffre,” whose depths were deeper than the topmost altitudes of the spirit.

  Futile is the attempt to veil it, to hide it. What do we gain by calling this open maw “God,” and declaring it holy? What do we gain by pasting leaves torn from the Bible over the fissure? The darkness of the primeval void is so intense that it makes its way through the thickest parchment, extinguishes the altar lights in the churches; and from the ice-bound poles of the universe there comes a cold too intense to be thawed by the lukewarm breath of the Word. What do we gain by the attempt to drown this oppressive and deadly silence with our shouts, or by preaching at the tops of our voices, as children in a dark wood will sing to scare away their fears? The silence of Nothing overpowers the efforts of conscious speech. When the murk of this dread nullity has once entered the heart, there to take up its abode, neither will nor wisdom can bring a light.

  In the four-and-fiftieth year of a life that was exercising a worldwide influence, Tolstoy for the first time perceived this great Nothing, its recognition being his share in the universal human lot. Thenceforward to the day of his death, he continued to stare unceasingly into the vacancy, the impalpable void that lies behind existence. But even when facing that awesome prospect, the vision of Tolstoy was unclouded; it was still the vision of a man who for wisdom and spirituality was unmatched in our day. His titanic energy was unrivalled in the struggle with the unnamable, in the contest with the primal terror of mortal man; never did anyone more resolutely than he counterpose to the question which destiny asks of man, the question which man asks of destiny. No one ever suffered more intensely than he from the empty and soul-cramping prospect of the Beyond; no one endured the suffering with more splendid fortitude, since in him the clear and bold and determined observation of the artist was sustained by a virile consciousness which enabled him to look into the black vacancy undismayed. Leo T
olstoy was the most vigilant, the most sincere, the most incorruptible personality in modern art and literature; and never for a moment did he blench as he faced the tragedy of existence. Nothing could have been more heroic than his endeavor to give form and meaning to the incomprehensible, and to discover a core of truth in the unavoidable.

  For three decades, from the middle twenties to the middle fifties, Tolstoy lived a carefree life, immersed in creative work. For three decades more, down to the end, his thoughts and feelings were monopolized by the endeavor to wrest a meaning from life, to understand the incomprehensible, to reach the unattainable. Things went easily with him until he set himself the task of saving, not himself alone, but all mankind, by his struggle for the truth. His attempt makes him a hero, almost a saint. His failure makes him the most human of all human figures.

  LIKENESS

  “My face was that of an ordinary peasant.”

  A face overgrown with hair, showing more coverts than clearings, thickets barring the way to inspection of the inner man. The patriarchal beard, streaming in the wind, climbs high up on to the cheeks, for decades hides the full lips, and covers the brown and seamed and bark-like skin. Eyebrows are matted, interlacing like gnarled tree roots, a finger’s breadth in vertical extent. A flood of grey hair foams over the forehead, the spume of the disordered locks. Wherever you look, there is a hirsute profusion that shows all the wanton luxuriance of a tropical forest. As with Michelangelo’s Moses (the pattern of virility), the preponderant impression conveyed by Tolstoy’s visage is derived from the aspect of the white-foaming waves of his huge God-the-Father beard.