On Love

ON LOVE





                               STENDHAL

                             (HENRY BEYLE)



                                ON LOVE


                      TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH


                    WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES

                                  BY

                          PHILIP SIDNEY WOOLF

                                  AND

                     CECIL N. SIDNEY WOOLF, M. A.

                 FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE



That you should be made a fool of by a young woman, why, it is many an
                          honest man's case.

                             _The Pirate._



                               NEW YORK

                              BRENTANO'S





                               TO B. K.

                               FOR WHOM

                            THE TRANSLATION

                               WAS BEGUN






                        _First Published 1915_

                           _Reprinted 1920_


                      Printed in Great Britain at

     _The Mayflower Press, Plymouth_. William Brendon & Son, Ltd.



[Pg v]
                INTRODUCTORY PREFACE TO THE TRANSLATION


Stendhal's three prefaces to this work on Love are not an encouraging
opening. Their main theme is the utter incomprehensibility of the book
to all but a very select few--"a hundred readers only": they are rather
warnings than introductions. Certainly, the early life of Stendhal's
_De l'Amour_ justifies this somewhat distant attitude towards the
public. The first and second editions were phenomenal failures--not
even a hundred readers were forthcoming. But Stendhal, writing in
the early part of the nineteenth century, himself prophesied that
the twentieth would find his ideas at least more comprehensible. The
ideas of genius in one age are the normal spiritual food for superior
intellect in the next. Stendhal is still something of a mystery to
the general public; but the ideas, which he agitated, are at present
regarded as some of the most important subjects for immediate enquiry
by many of the keenest and most practical minds of Europe.

A glance at the headings of the chapters gives an idea of the breadth
of Stendhal's treatment of love. He touches on every side of the
social relationship between man and woman; and while considering the
disposition of individual nations towards love, gives us a brilliant,
if one-sided, general criticism of these nations, conscious throughout
of the intimate connexion in any given age between its conceptions of
love and the status of woman.

Stendhal's ideal of love has various names: it is generally
"passion-love," but more particularly "love

[Pg vi]
_à l'italienne._"[1] The thing in itself is always the same--it is the
love of a man and a woman, not as husband and wife, not as mistress
and lover, but as two human beings, who find the highest possible
pleasure, not in passing so many hours of the day or night together,
but in living one life. Still more, it is the attachment of two free
fellow-creatures--not of master and slave.

Stendhal was born in 1783--eight years before Olympe de Gouges, the
French Mary Wollstonecraft, published her _Déclaration des Droits
des Femmes_. That is to say, by the time Stendhal had reached mental
maturity, Europe had for some time been acquainted with the cry for
Women's Rights, and heard the earliest statement of the demands, which
have broadened out into what our age glibly calls the "Woman Question."
How, may we ask, does Stendhal's standpoint correspond with his
chronological position between the French Revolution and the "Votes for
Women" campaign of the present day?

Stendhal is emphatically a champion of Women's Rights. It is true that
the freedom, which Stendhal demands, is designed for other ends than
are associated to-day with women's claims. Perhaps Stendhal, were he
alive now, would cry out against what he would call a distortion of
the movement he championed. Men, and still more women, must be free,
Stendhal holds, in order to love; his chapters in this book on the
education of women are all an earnest and brilliant plea to prove
that an educated woman is not necessarily a pedant; that she is, on
the contrary, far more _lovable_ than the uneducated woman, whom our
grandfathers brought up on the piano, needlework and the Catechism; in
fine, that intellectual sympathy is the true basis of happiness in the
relations of the two sexes. Modern exponents of Women's Rights will say
that this is true, but only half the truth. It would be more correct to
say that Stendhal

[Pg vii]
saw the whole truth, but forbore to follow it out to its logical
conclusion with the blind _intransigeance_ of the modern propagandist.
Be that as it may, Stendhal certainly deserves more acknowledgment, as
one of the pioneers in the movement, than he generally receives from
its present-day supporters.

       *       *       *       *       *

Stendhal was continually lamenting his want of ability to write.
According to him, a perusal of the _Code Civil_, before composition,
was the best way he had found of grooming his style.