Ideas and the Novel (7 page)

This passion of his, amounting to total identification, is a love, however, that dares not speak its name. Wherever he goes among the rich and mean-spirited, he is beset by enemies, his own and the Emperor’s—it is the same. He must hear him referred to as the “usurper”
(“l’usurpateur”)
or as
“Buonaparté,”
a pronunciation of the Corsican family name that brings out the wop in him. They will not speak of him as “Napoleon,” which is a reminder of his imperial title—only kings and Emperors are known by their Christian names; thus Louis XVI was guillotined as “Louis Capet.” In this hateful atmosphere, Julien is obliged to be careful. Wary of M. de Rênal’s tours of inspection of the household, he burns the portrait he has been keeping for safety in his mattress. He must read the “inspired book” at night in secret, hiding the lamp under an inverted vase, and speak of his idol with horror, like the rest of the company, whenever the topic comes up. That is the provinces, but the situation is not much better in Paris, in the household of the Marquis de la Mole.

It is clear that Stendhal views the “inspired book” and Julien’s raptures over it with amusement. Here is one of the points of difference between author and hero. Julien would hardly think of the
Mémorial
as his “Koran”; that is the author’s dry contribution. Stendhal himself was evidently of two minds about Napoleon. Yet if he had to choose, he would certainly prefer the idolators of the Emperor—Julien, the old Surgeon-Major, Fouqué—to his insensate disparagers. The motives of the former seem comparatively innocent.

What Stendhal actually thought of the martyr of St. Helena is not on record, so far as I know. But there is no doubt that he had been drawn to the younger Napoleon, the carrier of the ideas of the French Revolution, de-throner of archaic tyrannies, “breath of fresh air” blowing through the stuffy salon of Europe. Stendhal was no revolutionary, but he was very susceptible to being thrilled. The trees of liberty springing up in public squares in the wake of the victorious armies, the dancing of the carmagnole, like a welcome march, by joyous populations—all this struck a chord of “enthusiasm” to which he always responded. Moreover he had been present during the days of the first delirium. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.”

The explosion of joy set off in Milan by the liberating armies is described in the opening chapter of
The Charterhouse of Parma,
so memorably that I do not need to quote from it. Milan is drunk on the elixir of freedom, untasted since the Middle Ages, and Fabrice del Dongo is the child of those intoxicating weeks. I am recalling that paean to put it in the gloomy context of
The Red and the Black.
It cannot be an accident that the history Julien learned, the only history he knew, was precisely the history of that pure, still undefiled period. Here, briefly, the two novels, otherwise so unlike each other, join. From the Italian campaign of 1796, in which the veteran Surgeon-Major had won his
croix de guerre,
the carmagnole dated, having had its fiery baptism four years earlier at Carmagnola, a town of Piedmont occupied by the revolutionaries. The war dance or dance of liberty came home with the armies, and the music, in double time, served the troops of the Revolution as a marching song. When Napoleon became First Consul, he forbade the playing of the tune.

This marked the end of the honeymoon. The tempering of Stendhal’s own ardor may date from the Russian campaign, in which he served; there trees of liberty were noticeable by their absence, and the army of freedom had turned into a war machine. Or it may have had more to do with the onset of middle age—he was forty-seven when he published
The Red and the Black
—than with any reasoned reassessment of Napoleon as the bearer of glad tidings to the peoples of the world. It perhaps means something in our context that the young Fabrice’s experience of the battle of Waterloo is simply one of utter, aimless confusion; this child conceived in the brio of the victorious Revolution is unaware of being present at a tragedy of epic proportions, unaware, in fact, of being present at a battle of any kind.

But if Stendhal’s feelings toward the putative author of the
Mémorial
seem to be reserved, if not ambivalent, in
The Red and the Black,
there can be no question about his clear, objective understanding of the force of Napoleon as idea. This force is shown as a fact, in competition with other facts and hence productive of irony. For Julien Sorel it proves to be a destructive force, but which nevertheless lifts him out of the ordinary, and there is much that is mean and ordinary in him, starting with a small, almost brutishly low forehead that is far from resembling Stendhal’s own broad expanse of brow.

In striking contrast, Balzac’s hero, Lucien de Rubempré, is noble in appearance; I spoke of his
“beauté surhumaine.”
Lucien even has some drops of noble blood in him, on his mother’s side. Where Julien with his calculations and retentive memory is the soul of prose, Lucien is a poet. Yet Lucien, too, has the example of Napoleon before him as an
ignis fatuus,
and, like a general, he, too, thinks in terms of conquest. He sees himself, after an undecided skirmish at Angoulême, as the conqueror of Paris, moving boldly from success to success. To his awed friends he is “a young eagle”—a step higher on the scale of predators than the circling hawk that Julien envied. He is “the great man of the provinces” before he has published a word and, of course, a “genius,” that is, super-humanly gifted. In the Parisian milieus he enters, Napoleon’s star is still visibly beckoning to the obscure and untried. A poorly dressed young man in thick-soled shoes is said to resemble an engraving of a well-known portrait of Napoleon, an engraving which is “a whole poem of ardent melancholy, restrained ambition, hidden activity.” Can this be the same portrait as the one Julien owned?

Balzac himself draws the obvious moral; he speaks of
“l’exemple de Napoléon, si fatal au Dix-neuvième siècle par les prétentions qu’il inspire à tant de gens médiocres”
(“the example of Napoleon, so fatal for the Nineteenth century because of the pretensions it inspires in so many mediocrities”). He is thinking of Lucien and his generation, but the remark could serve as an epigraph for both his own novel and Stendhal’s—if you grant that Julien is a mediocrity—and an epitaph for their heroes. “Fatal” is indeed the word. Despite differences in tone and in degree of sympathy (Stendhal is fond of Julien), the two stories are eerily alike, to the point where one wonders whether it is not a single book, one and indivisible, that one has been reading, whether in fact all the novels of the century do not refer, each in its own way, to a governing idea—Napoleon.

This last is, of course, an exaggeration. That idea cannot be found in the English novel, which largely ignored him—there are only a few references, scattered here and there. Dickens, when he turned to France in
A Tale of Two Cities,
stopped short with the Terror and the tumbrils; Napoleon was still in the wings, waiting. Wellington unfortunately was no substitute; he was never an Idea on the march, even for his partisans. No ambitious young men in English fiction modeled themselves on the Iron Duke, and it was too late for a generation of budding Cromwells. In a way, I cannot help feeling this as a loss. It may be the reason that nineteenth-century English fiction, in comparison with that of the Continent, seems barren of ideas. There are homiletics and moralizing in plenty but no sovereign concepts. There is no shortage of climbers, but they are ordinary climbers—Lammerses and Veneerings—lacking the divine afflatus. Our own fiction is no better off, with the exception of Captain Ahab, who is obsessed by a personification, though not of the Napoleonic sort. Hyacinth Robinson in
The Princess Casamassima
is a poor excuse for a Leveller.

In Victorian fiction the book that comes closest to having one large governing Idea would be
Dombey and Son,
which I read as a parable of Empire, the Dombey fortune extending tentacles of investment overseas while sickening at the center in the person of poor little Paul and holding somewhere in its clutches Major Joey Bagshot and his servant, called the Native. But Victorian fiction, generally, seems to have missed out through insularity, which was a side-benefit of Empire, on the shaking experience of the century: the fact of seeing an Idea on the march and being unable to forget it—radiant vision or atrocious spectacle, depending on your point of view.

Hegel, at Jena, exclaimed that Napoleon was “an idea on horseback”; being a philosopher, he did not find that antipathetic. À few days later, in a more
terre à terre
frame of mind, he was hurrying to secrete his valuables—manuscript pages of the
Phenomenology
—from the French soldiers. He had already stated in a lecture on history that “A new epoch has arisen. It seems as if the world-spirit [has] succeeded in freeing itself from all foreign objective existence and finally apprehending itself as absolute mind.” On the eve of the battle at Jena, which became a Prussian rout, he wrote admiringly of the “world-soul” of the Emperor.

Victor Hugo was harsher in
Les Misérables: “ce sombre athlète du pugilat de la guerre,”
he called the man. It is easier to see what Hugo meant by his curt disparagement than what Hegel meant by his praise. But, between “world-soul” and “Idea on horseback,” I suppose Hegel was saying that Napoleon carried the future in himself, and that indeed was what most people thought or feared. To many minds, Napoleon was not just the man of destiny but destiny itself in a tricorne. It was natural, therefore, that youths seeking to be his avatars would feel they bore the stamp of destiny on them, like the visible “stamp of genius” reported to be graven on the foreheads of Lucien himself and of any number of needy young literary aspirants he meets in Paris. These young men were possessed by an overriding idea of their destiny; or, to put it coarsely, they thought they had a “future” and they gambled in their futures like speculators buying next year’s wheat shares on the grain exchange.

Such notions were abhorrent to Tolstoy. I do not know how aware he was of the spread of Napoleonic daydreams to the youth of succeeding generations, but he sensed that the glorification of Napoleon was pernicious, whoever was affected by it. One of his main efforts in
War and Peace
is to cut the Idea on horseback down to size. This had nothing to do, I believe, with Russian patriotism—he was hard on the Russian generals too, with the exception of Kutuzov—and if he was more fiercely contemptuous of Napoleon than of, say, Prince Bagration, it was because the man in Napoleon, the parcel of common humanity, had been superseded by an enthroned Idea. The virtue Tolstoy sees in Kutuzov is that, far from claiming to embody in his stout, sleepy person an abstract notion of military genius, he has no particular ideas of strategy in warfare but proceeds by instinct, by a kind of animal cunning, like the fox’s. Tolstoy’s dislike of the French Emperor, for him inseparable from the tiresome, ridiculous “legend” that he sat for like a portrait, knows no bounds. It even makes him deride the cold Napoleon had on the day of Borodino as being even minimally responsible for the French setback there—a thought that ordinarily would have appealed to him since a cold is a little joke of Nature that can be played on a man of destiny as well as on anybody else. He will not allow Napoleon’s cold—inflated to scale by professional historians—to have had any weight at all in the affair.

Tolstoy is not interested in the mighty social forces that may or may not have swept Napoleon and his have-nots to power on a tidal wave of discontent with the status quo ante. He is too pessimistic and, I should say, too acute an observer to expect great changes for humanity in the replacement of one form of power by another. The rapid ennoblement of have-nots into haves by the gift of offices, riches, and titles was only an acceleration of a common social process—the reward system had long been practiced by monarchies. In other words, the revolutionary content of the Napoleonic idea-on-the-march left him cold; he did not believe in its reality. What one finds in
Le rouge et le noir
and
Les illusions perdues
appears to bear him out. Despite the presence of a few lofty spirits—one being an ancient curé—notions of glory and sacrifice, when they are found at all, seem inextricable in most cases from notions of self-advancement, and this cannot be wholly the dampening effect of the Restoration of the Bourbons on young and ardent temperaments.

If Tolstoy took the trouble to polemicize against Napoleon more than forty years after his death, it was not because of any practical harm to be expected from that quarter but because an Idea of him persisted that was injurious to the very act of thought as exemplified in the writing of history. The good reason one might have for such a preoccupation can be clearly seen in the concluding sentences of the article “Napoleon” in the 1911 Britannica: “...the great warrior, who died of cancer on the 5th of May, 1821, was thereafter enshrouded in mists of legend through which his form loomed as that of a Prometheus condemned to a lingering agony for his devotion to the cause of humanity.” Military prowess had fused with philanthropy. Tolstoy did not look on war as a benefaction and, as a Christian, he could never have sympathized with the picture of a latter-day Prometheus. It is a messianic concept, and there could be only one Messiah; later claimants were necessarily false, a series of vulgar impostors.

He did not care for saviors in whatever shape they presented themselves. As is indicated in
Anna Karenina,
it is enough if a man is able to save his own soul by living for it, which is the same as living for God—the rest will take care of itself. This is the Tolstoyan message, which went through various stages but did not really change. It follows that any hypostasization, of a mental concept such as Hegel’s world-soul, or of an aggregate such as the nation, would be to him a criminal impiety. He would have detested the notion of “the century” which we find, writ in shining letters, on page after page of
Les illusions perdues
and, more darkly, in
Le rouge et le noir.
Or more likely he would have snorted with laughter at those Balzacian
littérateurs
haranguing each other about the requirement laid on a book to be “worthy of the century”: “If your sonnets are on the level of the Nineteenth century,” “Nathan has understood his epoch and responds to its needs,” and so on. The last bit is parody, meant to be funny, but the rest is delivered straight, apparently with Balzac’s concurrence, as though he considered that a century was an actual living entity with a physiognomy and not just an arbitrary tailor’s cut applied to the flow of time. He writes “Nineteenth century” with a capital N, as in “Napoleon,” thus raising it above all the humble ones that had preceded. As for Julien Sorel’s bitter cry—
“O dix-neuvième siècle”
(no capital)—at the end of
The Red and the Black,
Tolstoy would have advised the unlucky youth to look more closely into his own soul rather than outward at a time-myth when seeking to distribute blame.