The Joy of Reading

chapter nine

Romantic Spirits

The twenty-six years from 1789 to 1815 saw the violent deaths of millions. Europe was plagued by almost incessant warfare between Britain and her allies and France and hers. Life was difficult, frightening, and, for most people, short. This period of brutal uncertainty produced in many hearts fear that did not subside for decades. These chaotic years brought about many changes, and Europe, at the end of them, was quite different from what it had been before.

Great things happened and great people lived. Three English poets flashed like bright comets across the literary sky. Byron, Shelley, Keats—no matter how you order the three names, they connote youthful genius. A revolution in America was proclaimed, won, and defended. For a while the idea of un carièrre oeuvre aux talents (a career open to talent, not just birth) seemed to open opportunities for people in all walks of life. This idea didn’t last, but it would resurface in the future. A young Corsican adventurer won an empire, lost it, won it again, and lost it a second time. “Liberty and Equality” was the cry everywhere heard.

The time was short—no more than a human generation—but we can’t forget it.

GOETHE

1749–1832

Faust

The statue of Goethe in Lincoln Park in Chicago bears this inscription: “Goethe. The Master Spirit of the German People.” German though he was, Germans alone cannot claim him. Goethe was also one of the master spirits of mankind.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1749. He lived to be eighty-two, dying in 1832 in Weimar, his adopted home for more than fifty years. In those years he lived almost every kind of life, wrote almost every kind of book, and enjoyed almost every kind of triumph.

Goethe’s first truly distinctive publication, the play Götz von Berlichingen, not only was an explosive literary event but also inaugurated an epoch in German cultural history, the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) period. Two years later, in 1763, he published The Sorrows of Young Werther, his first novel; it made him famous all over Europe at the age of twenty-four.

If the world approved of him, he did not wholly approve of himself. His education, he felt, was far from complete, and above all he still had much to learn about the realities of life. He accepted an invitation from the Duke of Weimar and went to visit his little dukedom—and stayed for the rest of his life. He was soon made prime minister, but he also became chief inspector of mines, superintendent of irrigation, and supervisor of army uniforms. There was nothing that the Duke did not see fit to ask Goethe to do, and Goethe thought he could never refuse the Duke.

With all of his official duties there was time to write lyric poems, but not major works. In 1786, eleven years after his arrival in Weimar, he fled the city and all of his posts, disguised as a salesman en route to Italy, which he thought held the secret of life. But instead of finding Italy in Italy, he found Greece. He was not wrong; Greece is in Italy, too. From that time on Goethe turned his back on Sturm und Drang and all the other excesses of the Romantic period, insisting that he was a Classical Greek, at least in spirit. Perhaps he was not reckoning with the heart within his breast.

He returned to Weimar, the Duke forgave him, and Goethe lived there as a literary man instead of a politician—with several journeys to Italy and other lands to punctuate the years—for the rest of his long life. He wrote plays, novels, and poems, and studied and experimented in science (his scientific writings alone fill fourteen volumes). He fell in love, over and over—he was always in love with someone, from the time he was fifteen or so until the day he died. Many of his loves were platonic, others were not, but there was never a time when he was not under the influence of some woman, often a pretty, young one.

The story of Faust is very old: the scholar who, bored with his studies and researches, makes a pact with the Devil who, in return for the scholar’s immortal soul, will show him “real life” before he dies. It is a good story and true; it is hard to live deeply in both ways of knowing, experience and book learning. Goethe made of the tale both an inspired folk tale and an account, as he saw it, of the essential questing journey of Western man.

Faust is divided into two parts, written long years apart. Goethe spent more than sixty years (of course there were long interruptions) on this, his masterpiece. The two parts are very different in form and spirit. The first part of Faust is a more or less realistic drama, if one accepts the possibility of the Devil—Mephistopheles—being a character in the play. Faust is tempted from his high studies and, seeking love, descends into the marketplace, where he meets the young, innocent, and beautiful Margaret (Gretchen). He falls in love with her of course, but she also falls helplessly in love with him, so much so that she is ready and willing to give up everything for him, even her own immortal soul. She is quite serious about that, which Faust realizes he was not—this being one of many things he learns from her and from women. At the end of Part One, Gretchen is both condemned and saved, and Mephistopheles snatches Faust away because he knows the battle that is developing between them is not yet over.

The first part of Faust is one of the most beautiful poems in the world. Unfortunately, there is no really fine translation into English. Perhaps the best way to appreciate it is to see Gounod’s opera Faust. You will leave the theater shaken, your heart broken.

Part Two of Goethe’s Faust is, for many people, an enigma. Faust, having survived the tragedy of Margaret’s death—and become a better man because of it—now uses the Devil, instead of the other way around. The bargain has taken a subtly different form: if Faust will ever say “Enough!” to life, then his soul will belong to Mephistopheles. Faust never does. His spirit, always seeking, always questing, never rests. The Devil never manages to capture him.

It is hard to describe or summarize this second part, with its journeys through space and time—Faust meets Helen of Troy and woos her, as the supreme example of womanhood in history. He flies to Egypt and America in the arms of Mephistopheles. Better not to try and describe it. Faust is better than anything that one can say about it.

LORD BYRON

1788–1824

Don Juan

Selected Poems

George Gordon, Lord Byron, lived a life so completely Byronic that if it had not actually occurred he would have had to invent it. Which, of course, he almost did. Born in London in 1788, he inherited his title when he was ten, attended Harrow and Cambridge, took his seat in the House of Lords on his twenty-first birthday, and immediately set out for a grand tour. He began Childe Harold while in Albania and completed it in Greece six months later. To celebrate, on May 3, 1810, he swam the Hellespont (the narrow waterway between Europe and Asia now known as the Dardanelles). In the Greek myth of Hero and Leander, Leander swims the Hellespont to rescue his beloved, and Byron was not to be outdone by a mythical hero. Crippled since birth, he had suffered from the ridicule of schoolmates; it was like him to show in this way that he was a young man to be reckoned with on a grand scale.

Byron returned to England with the first two cantos of Childe Harold. The day after they were published, in 1812, he “awoke to find himself famous.” He was lionized by the best society and involved himself in a number of liaisons, all illicit, including one with the wife of the prime minister and another with his half-sister. He married a year later and left England after his wife left him; he claimed that she blackened his reputation, and he never returned to his homeland. He spent most of the rest of his life in Italy, falling in love often (last but not least with the Countess Guiccioli, a woman fully his equal).

In 1823, the Greek War of Independence was just beginning to stir. Byron supported the rebels against their Turkish masters, lent them money, financed a corps of soldiers, and “invaded” Greece himself, dressed as a Homeric warrior. His attempts to bring together all the bickering Greek factions failed; he contracted a fever and died at Missolonghi in 1824, at the age of thirty-six.

“Byronism” is a complex combination of idealism and mockery, stirred together to conceal one’s disappointment with the world. The character of Don Juan, with his melancholy view of things, was not Byron, Byron always insisted—but he was. Melancholy was the only possible mood of a man who wanted the world to be better than it is, and who saw how abysmally bad it is, at that. The most honest response was that of Byron’s Don Juan—to laugh, bitterly sometimes and other times heartily, but never again to cry.

Byron tried everything, experienced everything, went everywhere, met everyone, enjoyed every kind of success, even suffered several kinds of failure. No fewer than ten thousand copies of one of his books were sold on the day after publication—in an age when there were probably fewer than fifty thousand book readers in England. At the same time, he was exiled from his home, mercilessly harassed by lawyers and moralists, and attacked in the public press and in the private homes of England. The wonder is that he wrote so much magnificent poetry; it might have been enough just to be Byron.

He wrote lyrics, songs, stories, and satires—the last are some of his very best things—as well as dramas and epistles. He could write superbly in any poetic form or manner. But his greatest work was Don Juan. It is partly a mock epic, but mainly a vehicle for the expression of opinions, views, and feelings. “I want a hero,” the poem begins:

I want a hero: an uncommon want,

When every year and month sends forth a new one, Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant, The age discovers he is not the true one; Of such as these I should not care to vaunt, I’ll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan—We all have seen him, in the pantomime, Sent to the Devil somewhat ere his time.

That is perfect Byron, perfect Don Juan (and, besides, the stanza teaches the reader how to pronounce the name of his hero—it rhymes with “new one” and “true one”). The author cannot be serious, Byron wants you to believe; there is nothing in this old world worth being serious about. It is all no more than “giggling and making giggle,” as he wrote to a friend—except he did not mean it.

Nor should we believe it. Don Juan, all four hundred and fifty wonderful pages of it, is serious stuff. But no long poem was ever easier to read, or more fun.

Don Juan is Byron’s final achievement; he was working on it when he died. Many fine and readable poems preceded it in his canon. One in particular is worth mentioning here. Among Byron’s closest friends was the sentimental Irish poet Thomas Moore. He and Byron continued a lively correspondence for years. Many of Byron’s letters contained short poems, dashed off on the spur of the moment. He wrote Moore on February 28, 1817, to say that he had been up late too many nights at the Carnival in Venice, and he added these few perfect verses:

So we’ll go no more a-roving

So late into the night,

Though the heart be still as loving,

And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,

And the soul wears out the breast,

And the heart must pause to breathe,

And Love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,

And the day returns too soon,

Yet we’ll go no more a-roving

By the light of the moon.

When you passionately desire the world to be what it ought to be, to live up to your dreams, and it never does, finally “the soul wears out the breast.” Byron died at thirty-six of a fever, but he also died because he was worn out. He had been disappointed too often.

In reading Byron, be selective. Not all of his large poetical oeuvre retains the freshness that readers once saw in it. Read all of the lyrics that you can find in anthologies; they are likely to be good. Try a canto of Childe Harold; it may, however, seem antique and overwrought. But do not fail to read deep into Don Juan, especially the first few cantos. What Byron does there no one else has ever done so well.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

1792–1822

Selected Poems

Shelley was born in Sussex, the son of an MP, in 1792. His family intending him for a Parliamentary career, he was educated at Eton and Oxford, but he disliked both and was mocked by his fellow students. He continuously challenged all authority and was finally expelled because of a pamphlet titled “The Necessity of Atheism.” He didn’t care; he wanted out anyway.

He quarreled with his father, and just to show him eloped to Scotland with a sixteen-year-old. They were married, despite the fact that he disapproved of matrimony—as well as royalty, religion, and meat-eating. Before long he was sharing young Harriet with a friend and trying to establish some sort of commune. Not long afterward Harriet drowned herself, but by that time he had formed a relationship with Mary Godwin. They had a son, William, and lived in Geneva with Byron, talking about poetry and life and so forth.

Shelley had very little money and large debts, so he and Mary decamped to Italy intending to live permanently abroad. She kept at, and finished, a novel she had been working on: Frankenstein, which became one of the all-time bestsellers, though, not surprisingly, she gained almost nothing from its fame. Shelley was just now beginning to write well; the first flowering was the poem “Ozymandias.” It is in every anthology of English poetry, and if you haven’t read it in high school, you ought to read it now. There are a couple of tricks in it, so beware. Shelley also wrote a “Greek” play called “Prometheus,” which is very fine. It did not make up for the fact that his little son died and Mary had a nervous breakdown.

Shelley, well aware of the stir he and Byron were making, took every advantage of his fame/notoriety. “Ode to the West Wind” was much admired—appropriately—as was “To a Skylark” and his famous “Defense of Poetry,” in which he declared that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” It was a clarion call as well as a backward-looking challenge to Pope and his couplets. In the spring of 1821, news came of Keats’s death, and Shelley rushed to Rome to see what he could do. Apparently Keats had wanted a stone over his grave in the English Cemetery at Rome with no name and the simple inscription: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” Shelley arranged for this, shaking his head and weeping at the same time. To die so young!

Only a year later his time came, in April 1822, when a small schooner he was sailing across a bay was struck by a sudden squall and sank immediately, its wet sails dragging it beneath the water. He was thirty years old, a little older than Keats, yes, but just a little younger than Byron. He had been called “mad Shelley” at school, and he was always partly that—but also a very fine, but perhaps not great, poet.

JOHN KEATS

1795–1821

Selected Poems

Unlike Shelley and Byron, Keats was the son of a commoner, his father being the manager of a livery stable near London. His father died when he was eight, his mother when he was fourteen. There was very little money, and he was to a large extent self-educated, reading poetry from childhood and trying to write it in his early teens. When he was twenty he signed on as a student at Guy’s Hospital and the next year was licensed as an apothecary. In that year—1815—he met Leigh Hunt, who published a couple of poems in The Examiner, and followed them by “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” which showed promise. Other poems followed but they were savagely attacked by critics who called him a member of the so-called Cockney school. Keats was hurt but he was able to say to his brother George: “I think I shall be among the English poets after my death.”

In 1816, he buried his beloved brother Tom and met Fanny Brawne, with whom he fell in love. The feelings were reciprocated. They probably planned to marry, although events intervened. During the summer of 1818 he suffered from recurrent sore throats; these frightened him because Tom, like their mother, had died of consumption and he feared for the worst. Nevertheless, the winter and spring of that year are known as “the Great Year,” and they are indeed a manifestation of a greater genius than any other poet of his age could show. Or perhaps of any age.

It began in November when, in just a few months, he wrote, consecutively, “The Eve of St. Agnes,” “Ode to Psyche,” “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode on Melancholy,” “Ode on Indolence,” the second version of “Hyperion,” and “To Autumn.” Is it unbelievable? Yes, it is unbelievable.

There is a story about the writing of almost all of these great poems, but the one about “Nightingale” is my favorite. It was spring, the weather was soft and warm, and Keats was lying in a hammock underneath a tree. His friend Charles Brown saw that he had a piece of paper and a pen with which he seemed to be writing, not continuously but from time to time. A nightingale was singing—Brown could hear it. Keats lay in the hammock for no more than two hours and then rose and came into the house. He had a few sheets of paper in his hand that he folded and placed in the cover of a book, which he returned to the shelf.

“Were you writing something?” Brown asked. Keats nodded. The poem is of course the “Ode to a Nightingale.” Probably there is no greater lyric poem in English.

In the fall of that year Keats was very ill. Shelley wrote and asked him to come to Italy, where, he said, the climate would be better for him than that of a London winter. He arrived in Rome in December 1820 and died of consumption the following February. He was twenty-five. He and his friend Severn lived in a small house on the Piazza di Spagne that is now a museum. You can go there and see the narrow room in which he died. There is a window overlooking that famous piazza, so full of life and gaiety.

JANE AUSTEN

1775–1817

Pride and Prejudice

Emma

Persuasion

Jane Austen was born in 1775 in a Hampshire village, the daughter of an English small-town rector. She lived an uneventful life and never married, devoting herself instead—in return for a house given to her and her sister by their married brother—to her many nieces and nephews, all of whom, it is said, adored their aunt Jane. She was a true amateur; she wrote for the pleasure of it. But she was also a very great writer, so this hobby of hers ended up taking over much of her life.

She began to write as a child and kept at it until her untimely death, at forty, of a wasting disease that has not been certainly identified. She did not publish anything until 1811, when she was thirty-five, and then she published anonymously; few outside of her immediate family knew she was the author of Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Persuasion, and her other books. One who did know—the Prince Regent, later George IV—liked her works so much that he possessed a set of them in each of his residences, and after a “discrete royal command” Emma was “respectfully dedicated” to him by the author. Jane Austen was, however, “this nameless author” to Sir Walter Scott when, in the Quarterly Review for March 1816, he praised this “masterful exponent of the modern novel,” who was pleased by the review but coolly noted that he had not mentioned Mansfield Park in it.

Pride and Prejudice was her first novel; she wrote a version of it before she was twenty. She put it aside to write Sense and Sensibility, her first work to be published; she then rewrote Pride and Prejudice and published it in 1813.

It is magically interesting, astonishingly adult. Elizabeth Bennett, its heroine—no doubt there is a lot of Jane Austen in Elizabeth—is as intelligent as she is beautiful, and as articulate as she is wise about the ways of the world. Nevertheless she makes one enormous, nearly disastrous mistake. She is too proud to accept the advances of Mr. Darcy, partly because he is a step or two above her on the English social ladder, but mainly because he insults her when he first meets them.

Elizabeth is the daughter of a gentleman, but of very modest means. Mr. Darcy is a member of a great family, very rich, with a stately home in the country and a handsome house in town. Elizabeth believes with good reason that Mr. Darcy is prejudiced against her family—particularly against her foolish mother and even more foolish younger sister—and she naturally believes him to be proud, because she is so herself. As it turns out, she is wrong on both counts, but as a result they almost fail to find each other in this most bewitching of genteel love stories.

Mr. Bennett is as intelligent as his wife is silly, and he adores his second-eldest daughter because she is so much like him. Their conversations as they come to understand each other are moving. Elizabeth begins to realize that her father has the highest respect for her: that is, he will not try to stop her from making her own mistakes. Elizabeth is strenuously pursued by a cousin, a clergyman named Collins, and is surprised to find that her father does not seem to want to protect her from his attentions. She must find the strength to do this herself, she finally realizes; she must have the wit to recognize that Mr. Collins is an idiot and the strength to refuse him, even if this means she might never marry. In his cool but loving way Mr. Bennett congratulates Elizabeth on her decision. But harder decisions are still to come. Naturally, they involve Mr. Darcy, a very different proposition from Mr. Collins. Jane Austen ties the young lovers up in knots and then neatly unwinds the plot.

Emma, Jane Austen’s fourth novel and in the opinion of many her best, was published in 1816. Emma Woodhouse, the heroine, is also like Jane Austen—another side of her indeed, but still the same intelligent, interesting, proud girl-woman. Like Elizabeth, Emma also makes serious mistakes, both in her own life and in her meddling in the lives of others. She is incredibly wrong in her judgments about those nearest and dearest to her, most especially about Mr. Knightley, a kindly neighbor whom she believes she only admires but could never, ever love. Her discovery that she has been as foolish about Mr. Knightley as she assumes that he has been about her makes for a touching denouement.

But Emma is both more and less than a mere love story. At bottom it is the story of the growing up of a brilliant, wonderful, proud girl, “handsome, clever, and rich,” as Jane Austen writes, who—like Elizabeth Bennett—must learn her lessons the hard way. There is no one to say her nay; she must learn to say it to herself. This is one of the hardest lessons anyone ever learns.

Her last novel, Persuasion, was written shortly before she died and published posthumously. Again it is a love story with a missing link that must be found. Anne Eliot, the daughter of a gentleman, falls in love with Frederick Wentworth, a naval officer with apparently few prospects. Anne does not care, but her good friend, Lady Russell, persuades her to break off the engagement because she believes Wentworth will be a poor man. Anne does so, although it also breaks her heart, and she remains unmarried for a number of years.

By coincidence, Captain Wentworth, who has had a successful naval career and is now well off, returns to the neighborhood. He is still angry at Lady Russell and Anne, and he pays no attention to Anne when he meets her again, although he realizes he still cares for her. She is timid and unable to reveal her own feelings, which have never changed. The scene in which the two find one another again is one of the most moving in fiction, I think. There are tears in my eyes as I write these words.

For many years Austen’s reputation suffered—perhaps it suffers still—from a belief that she was “merely” a miniaturist, a “domestic novelist,” as she termed herself. But any novelist, as Henry James always insisted, must be allowed his or her donnée (or set of assumptions about time, place, characters, etc.); the question, then, is whether what the novelist does with that donnée is grand or foolish, distinctive or ordinary. The donnée of Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Persuasion are circumscribed, but the art and the analytical precision with which Austen examines her small world are unsurpassed. She is a searching critic of the social and especially the economic culture in which she moved and which she may have known better than anybody in her time. And she is also a great storyteller.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

1799–1850

Old Goriot

The word “pure” is employed by sports writers to denote a special, almost unique, talent. A “pure” hitter, in baseball, is one who needs no coaching to hit well, who would rather hit than eat, who hits with grace at the same time that he hits hard. Babe Ruth was such a hitter, and Ted Williams, too. Pure tennis players, skiers, and runners are similarly blessed in their own way.

Honoré de Balzac was a pure writer. Born in France in 1799, he devoted his first twenty years to a misguided obedience to his father’s wish that he become a lawyer. Finally he gave that up, retired with the pittance that his father allowed him to a Paris garret, and proceeded to learn to write. He wrote steadily, furiously. In ten years he may have written twenty novels. But he later disavowed these early offspring of his genius and only began to regard his productions as worthy of him with The Chouans, published in 1829 when he was thirty. Thereafter he wrote two, three, or even four books a year until he died—or rather until he exhausted himself and then died.

His manner of working was notorious, even infamous. He dined at five or six in the afternoon, often took a woman to bed, slept for a few hours, until eleven or twelve at night, arose, told the woman to leave him, and set to work. He worked all night and much of the next day, often sitting at his desk for as many as sixteen hours at a stretch, fortified by extremely strong coffee, which he drank continuously. He might finish his day’s work at four o’clock, bathe, take a short stroll through the boulevards of Paris, dine, sleep, make love, and work again.

He could write a novel in a few days, but the manuscript that he sent to the printer was never what was finally published. He left standing orders with the printer that the original text should be set on large sheets of paper, with much space between the lines and with wide margins. On the first proof he often doubled or trebled the length of the original book; he could add as many as one hundred pages to the second proof. This was an expensive way to work, but Balzac didn’t care; all he cared about was writing, not the printer and his problems!

Balzac soon arrived at the notion that what he wanted to write was not just a single novel, or even a few scattered dramas, as he termed them, but instead a whole account of human life, La Comédie Humaine, as it came to be called. The French word comédie does not mean the same thing as “comedy” in English, where the word connotes something funny. Comédie is closer to “drama.” The English translation The Human Comedy carries some of the meaning of the French phrase. Ask yourself what it means. Does it not suggest some sort of totality, a picture drawn on a very broad canvas, showing men and women and children in all the activities of ordinary life, acting and suffering, living and dying, creating and destroying, succeeding and failing? That is the great picture that Balzac’s The Human Comedy attempts to draw. Perhaps no one has ever done it better.

The standard French edition of La Comédiel Humaine fills some ninety volumes, arranged according to a scheme that Balzac left to his literary executors to complete. The standard English edition, edited by George Saintsbury, is in forty volumes, arranged like the French edition according to certain large divisions: Scenes of Private Life, Scenes of Provincial Life, Scenes of Paris Life. The best known of the Scenes of Paris Life is Old Goriot (Le Père Goriot). Old Goriot is a good introduction to Balzac, as critics and readers have discovered; as a result the novel is available in several editions.

Much of the action of Old Goriot takes place in a cheap and somber boardinghouse on the Left Bank of Paris, an area that is now chic, but was then (around 1820) a slum. There are six or seven main characters: Madame Vauquer, the greedy landlord; Vautrin, the brilliant, sardonic criminal; the young man from the country, Eugène de Rastignac, and his beautiful, wealthy cousin, Madame de Beauséant; and Old Goriot himself and his two socialite daughters, Mesdames de Restaud and de Nucingen. Rastignac and Goriot are more important than anyone else.

Goriot, a retired businessman, is slowly ruined in the course of the book by his folly and the venality and greed of his two daughters, whom he adores. Rastignac rises as Goriot falls, like two figures on a seesaw in a distant playground. The story of Goriot’s fall is heartbreaking; it has brought tears to many a reader’s eyes. The rise of Rastignac is thrilling and will make your heart beat faster. The novel’s very last scene is consequently famous:

He [Rastignac]went a few paces further, to the highest point of the cemetery, and looked out over Paris and the windings of the Seine; the lamps were beginning to shine on either side of the river. His eyes turned almost eagerly to the space between the column of the Place Vendôme and the cupola of the Invalides; there lay the shining world that he had wished to reach. He glanced over that humming hive, seeming to draw a foretaste of its honey, and said magniloquently:

“Henceforth there is war between us.”

And by way of throwing down the glove to Society, Rastignac went to dine with Mme. de Nucingen.

I don’t think any reader has ever failed to be believe that Eugène de Rastignac would succeed in his war.

Paris and London were the two great nineteenth-century cities. London found its biographer in Charles Dickens; because of him we may think we know the London of his day even better than we know our own city. Paris was as large, as powerful, as complex, and as full of misery (and triumph) as London—and its biographer is Honoré de Balzac.

The London that Dickens knew, and that he reveals to us in his novels, was by no means all of London. The life of the upper class was not really understood by Dickens, and never described by him with much truth or sympathy. Balzac knew better than Dickens all of the grades and levels of existence in his city: the aristocracy, the beau monde, the demimonde, and the dregs of life and society. And Balzac knew how all the levels of city life touched and affected one another. His account of the lower reaches of Paris life is not as rich or moving as Dickens’s account of the comparable London realms, but Dickens does not move his characters up and down the social ladder as does Balzac.

These differences are not in the end so important. What the two writers share is a vast sympathy for human nature, especially human foibles, and a love for the energy and variety of city life in their time. In fact, “energy” is the word that aptly characterizes both of them as writers. The pace of Balzac is especially swift; it carries you onward like a mountain torrent.

STENDHAL

1783–1842

The Red and the Black

The Charterhouse of Parma

Marie-Henri Beyle was born in Grenoble in 1783, the son of prosperous bourgeois parents. His father was a strict disciplinarian, and young Beyle took an extreme dislike to him. He adored the memory of his mother, who had died when he was seven; he thought she would have been sympathetic to his ideas about art and life. Beyle ran away from home—or left it on a pretext at seventeen and went to Paris, whose attractions for those who live in their imaginations were as great then as they are now (or were two generations ago, when I lived there). But Paris turned out to be disappointing to this young dreamer, so he crossed the Alps to join Napoleon’s army in Italy, arriving on June 15, 1800, the day after the Battle of Marengo, one of Bonaparte’s greatest victories over the Austrians.

Milan, under the impact of the republican, liberal ideas unleashed by Napoleon, proved to be everything that Paris had not been for Henri Beyle. He fell in love, he delighted in the musical performances at La Scala, he studied Italian, fencing, and horseback riding. He also began to write, although his first book was not published until 1814. He adopted a pseudonym, the first of some 170 used during his career. The most famous of the pseudonyms, and the only one that is remembered, was first employed in 1817: M. de Stendhal.

It has become almost a cliché of psychology, especially of psychoanalysis, that the highest art is a kind of transfer of more basic emotions to a loftier plane—“sublimation,” as Freud called it. Thus art, Freud said, can be therapeutic; it can release feelings that otherwise might destroy the artist and that tend to hurt men and women who are unable to sublimate through art. Whether or not the theory is true in general, it seems to have been true of Henri Beyle, who, as Stendhal, lived in his own imagination a richer and more interesting life than he ever did as his real self.

Stendhal authored two novels that may be the best ever written in French. The first, The Red and the Black, published in 1830, is the story of Julien Sorel, the son of a peasant in southeastern France who struggles valiantly to breach the ramparts of wealth and privilege in his time. Julien is a genius, and the war he wages against society is not an unequal one, but, although he achieves signal triumphs, in the end he is defeated by his enemies, who are everywhere.

Julien’s hero is Bonaparte, an admiration that he must keep secret in the cold, gray years of the post-Napoleonic binge. He is sure that if he had been born a generation earlier, during a time when careers were open to talent and not just to influence and wealth, he would have risen quickly and might even have been one of the emperor’s marshals at the age of thirty. That opportunity is now closed to him; he cannot choose the red of a military career; but the black of a career in the church still beckons, and Julien adopts a mask of humility, scholarship, and virtue.

But he cannot hide the fire in his brilliant eyes, through which his genius shines. Most of the men he meets, and all of the churchmen, are suspicious of him, but at the same time he finds that he is greatly attractive to women. Two women in particular figure in his startling progress toward wealth and power, and they end up destroying him. Mme. de Rênal, the wife of his first employer, is a simple but beautiful woman, ten years older than he, and the mother of three boys whom he has been hired to tutor. Julien feels it his Napoleonic duty to seduce her, and he does so rather easily—much to his surprise. Their intrigue discovered, he is forced to flee to Paris, where he is offered an important post in the household of the Marquis de la Mole, a powerful political figure. Julien and Mathilde, the spirited daughter of la Mole, fall in love. They struggle for dominance in this love, for they are both proud. Mathilde becomes pregnant, and although for a short time it appears that all will turn out well, a letter from Mme. de Rênal, turns out to be disastrous, and Julien fails utterly. The ending of this remarkable book is shocking. Reading it is an overwhelming experience.

Neither Julien nor Mathilde fits into the dry bourgeois world into which they were born. Mathilde, in her imagination, harks back to the sixteenth century, to the great age, as she conceives it, of her family’s history. Julien’s time is not yet; he should have been born in 1910, not 1810, and in America, not France. Their tragedy is that, despite their energy, imagination, and courage, they cannot change their world.

The Charterhouse of Parma was written in a period of fifty-two days at the end of 1838, only a couple of years before Stendhal’s death. The book reads as swiftly as it was written; I do not know of any novel that is more rapid in its style, that rushes with such impetuous speed to its conclusion. (In a sense, it was not concluded; Stendhal wanted to write three hundred more pages, but his publisher resisted. Nevertheless, the ending is right and satisfying.)

The three main characters of The Charterhouse of Parma are a fascinating modification of those of The Red and the Black. Fabrizio del Dongo corresponds to Julien Sorel, but he is no son of a peasant. Instead, he is the illegitimate son of the wife of the Marchese del Dongo, one of the richest men in Italy and also one of the most cowardly and cruel. Fabrizio’s real father was a French officer stationed in Parma during the French occupation. He is thus an aristocrat as well as a rebel; he is also, like Julien, a genius struggling to adapt his time to him, instead of himself to his time. He is one of the most attractive heroes in fiction: brave, impetuous, charming, and irresistible to women.

Mathilde, in The Red and the Black, the proud aristocrat who represents all that is good in the French upper classes, is a paragon of dignity and hauteur; but she is only nineteen. In Charterhouse, her qualities are transferred by Stendhal to Fabrizio’s aunt, the Duchessa Sanseverina; equally beautiful, she is older than Mathilde and thus even more alluring. I confess that Gina di Sanseverina is one of my favorite heroines; perhaps only Shakespeare’s Rosalind and Tolstoy’s Natasha can compare to her. As intelligent as she is proud, she demands nothing from her lovers except that they set their goals by the same high stars that direct and rule her life.

Fabrizio has many adventures; among them, he witnesses (this is the mot juste) the Battle of Waterloo, although he is only fifteen. The description of the battle is masterly; Tolstoy said he had learned about war from Stendhal. Fabrizio naturally comes in conflict with the austere, conservative authorities of post-Napoleonic Italy. He is imprisoned and falls in love with the daughter of his jailer. Clelia is a younger Mme. de Rênal and plays somewhat the same role; that is, while being attractive and beautiful, she is also motherly.

Stendhal set the action of the book in Parma perhaps because Parma was longer under French influence than any other northern Italian city; in other words, like Fabrizio, it was a French-Italian hybrid, enjoying the advantages of both national characters as well as suffering both sets of faults. At any rate, the government of Parma is despotic, and all of the characters must struggle to find their own freedom in the midst of tyranny. This is only one of the extraordinary modern touches of this book, and of Stendhal’s work in general. He once said that he had bought a ticket in a lottery, the first prize in which was to be read in 1935—that is, a century hence. He was a good prophet. His books, especially The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma, are more read and admired in our century than in his own. Together, they are not only great stories but also a vivid commentary on our time, as well as his.

ALEXANDER HAMILTON

1757–1804

JAMES MADISON

1751–1836

JOHN JAY

1745–1829

The Federalist Papers

With the winning of the War of Independence, America became a nation—but still a fragile one, a loose confederation of sovereign states that might break apart, or so it seemed, at any moment. At the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia in 1787 a new Constitution was written and adopted, but it required that two-thirds of the thirteen state legislatures ratify it. Everyone knew this would not be easy, for there was opposition to the new basic law from many quarters.

The proposed new Constitution lacked a Bill of Rights. This troubled many persons, especially in Virginia. It also established a unity of individual citizens rather than of sovereign states and this fact—which limited the powers of the states—troubled many others, especially in New York. But New York and Virginia were the two richest and most powerful of the thirteen states. If they did not ratify the new Constitution, it mattered little if nine other small states like Rhode Island and Delaware and Connecticut should do so.

Probably the greatest difficulties were faced by the New York Federalists. Out of the relatively large delegation from that state, only one delegate—Alexander Hamilton—had signed the Constitution when it was presented to the nation by the convention. Governor DeWitt Clinton and, very likely, a majority of the state’s legislators were opposed to the document. It would take a major effort by the Constitution’s backers to turn the situation around.

The effort was made, and the situation was turned around, by means of a series of essays that began to be published in all the newspapers in New York State and were gathered together in book form even before the series was completed. The papers were all signed “Publius,” but in fact they were written by three men: Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay.

In their totality, The Federalist Papers are one of the most searching commentaries on the U.S. Constitution. The three authors began by taking the high ground—the ground of the epochal importance of the decision for or against the Constitution. Hamilton’s words in the first Federalist are moving and beautiful:

It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.

The Papers go on in elegant, flowing, eighteenth-century style; they are a pleasure to read even if one were to disagree with them. But it would be hard to disagree. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay managed to define, as well as it has ever been defined, the American constitutional idea.

Of all the perils that beset, or seemed to the Federalists to beset, the new nation, that of faction (or, as we would say, party spirit or party strife) was the worst. The Founding Fathers knew well the turmoil that the spirit of party had produced not just in European nations during modern times, but also in Greece and Rome of old. They conceived the Constitution as a bulwark against faction, and indeed the Ninth and Tenth Federalist—especially the Tenth, by Madison—are among the most eloquent of all these papers in support of the Constitution. In fact, however, the Constitution provides no machinery with which to form a government, and it soon became evident that political parties would have to be formed, and then depended on, to provide candidates to fill the offices that the Constitution defined. Despite the eloquence of their plea for a nonfactional organization of the political infrastructure, party strife did have the effect, in the years following the establishment of the new government in 1789, of dividing the authors of The Federalist Papers. Hamilton and Madison, unfortunately, became political enemies, while John Jay abjured them both.

For a while, however, the three worked together to produce one of the small number of political books, and one of that very small list of works of any kind, that every American citizen ought to read.

GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH

HEGEL

1770–1831

The Philosophy of History

Reading Hegel, even just thinking about Hegel, leads one to propose grand, sweeping generalizations. Here are two.

The first I take from Henry Adams, who once observed pointedly that the “centuries” of history in the West have for a long time not truly begun at the years 1600, 1700, or 1800, but at a point approximately fifteen years after. Thus we should view European history as manifesting epochal changes in 1415 (the Battle of Agincourt), in 1515 (the meeting of Francis I, Charles V, and Henry VIII on the so-called Field of the Cloth of Gold), in the mid-teens of the seventeenth century (the murder of Henry IV, the accession of Louis XIII, and the rise of Richelieu), in 1715 (the death of the Sun King, Louis XIV), in 1815 (the Battle of Waterloo), and in 1914 (the beginning of World War I). It is a neat theory and fun to advance at a dinner party.

The second generalization is that, in the history of ideas, it is as important to ask where ideas come from as what they are and what they mean. Taking the above chronology as definitive, then, we can suggest that the important ideas of the sixteenth century (i.e., from 1515 to 1615) came from Italians; those of the seventeenth century (1615–1715) from Frenchmen; those of the eighteenth century (1715–1815) from Englishmen; and those of the nineteenth century, beginning with the Restoration of the European status quo after the final defeat of Napoleon and ending with the onset of the so-called Great War in 1914, from Germans. The nineteenth century is the German century par excellence.

It is thus not an accident that the high point of Hegel’s career and fame was attained in the year 1818, when he began to teach at the University of Berlin. Born in 1770, he was now forty-eight; but it had required that Napoleon be finally defeated and that the torch be handed from that world-historical figure to a succession of Germans for Hegel’s ideas to become widely recognized. For the next half century or so he was probably the world’s most famous and influential philosopher.

To remember that is also to be reminded of just how mixed up the nineteenth century was, in its thinking if not in its practical science and its industry. Hegel is essentially a crazy philosopher. It was a splendid craziness, however, and he will probably always have the ability to attract people’s minds and their loyalty.

Hegel’s basic philosophical method was to metaphysicize everything; that is, to detect in concrete reality the working of an Idea, of a Universal Mind. He was convinced that the world is rational and therefore intelligible to the human mind, which is also rational. But how to explain all the strange and unpredictable things that happen, and have happened since men first began to wonder if the world could be understood? Hegel realized that the larger the field of view, the grander the visionary sweep, the more likely it would be that a grand and sweeping generalization would apply. All change, all progress, he said, is produced by the conflict of great forces. A world-historical figure, nation, or event poses, as it were, a challenge, or thesis; this is naturally opposed by an antithesis; and the conflict is resolved, inevitably, on a higher plane, by a synthesis of the two forces. It is true enough that we sometimes see something like this happening in our own lives, and perhaps also in history. It does not seem necessary to conclude, however—as Hegel does—that this is the way the world absolutely and universally and inevitably works. But I do not want to cavil. It is a wonderful, ingenious, interesting theory. Maybe it is even correct.

One of the ideas that swept through men’s minds in the nineteenth century was that of the universality of Progress, which meant that history is moving, in general if not at every instant, always in the same direction, and one that is highly pleasing to mankind. Others besides Hegel had advanced this idea, which Hegel assumed without any question. His effort, in The Philosophy of History, was to reveal the manner of universal progress, not to prove that it occurred. His effort succeeded, in that he wrote a fascinating book. There are four great epochs of the world, which are at the same time phases of thought: he called them the Oriental world, the Greek world, the Roman world, and the German world. General progress is in the direction of consciousness of self, and of freedom; the ancient Oriental peoples, and the Greeks and Romans, had been only partly free; freedom had come into its own with the advent of Christianity, and had become dominant in the postmedieval world—the German world, as Hegel called it.

It is important to understand that freedom for Hegel is not the ordinary freedom that we mean when we say, for example, that we are not free if we are in prison. For Hegel, freedom consists in a willing compliance with the working in the world of the Idea, and as such freedom can sometimes entail woe to individuals. It is up to individuals, in fact, to join the fated march of the universal mind, which meant, in his time, he said, joining the nation as a wholly willing participant in its most fundamental, world-historical aims and goals. Freedom is only to be obtained, Hegel seems to say, in giving up one’s individual freedom for the sake of a joint or communal freedom, shared with other men and women who are advancing toward the same desired end.

It is easy to see how this concept was adopted by Karl Marx and made concrete by both the Nazis and the Communists in the twentieth century. Perhaps that is not Hegel’s fault; is a man responsible for the things that other people do with his ideas, and in his name?

Speaking of the twentieth century, let us continue our world-historical game. Someday, ages and ages hence, historians will look back on our time and say that while the nineteenth century was the German century, the twentieth century was—what? The American century? The Russian? It is a good question.

And what about the twenty-first? Will we have to wait till 2015 to decide? Or perhaps 2115?