Abstract

Stendhal

This article presents information on the book "Stendhal: The Life of an Egoist," by Rudolph Kayser. This book is a pernicious thing, a fictionized biography. It triumphs in a sense because it portrays vividly a man of immense importance, a man to whom one can turn today and learn a great deal. Henri Beyle was what Hugh Fausset would call a complete romantic. Stendhal was one of the great intellectual novelists, a man of ideas who functioned best in the novel. His great creations, "The Red and the Black" and "The Charterhouse of Parma," are of small interest to those who demand of fiction lush emotionalism. But to those of us who take pleasure in a spare and thrilling story grounded in ideas, they are precious. There is no reproaching Stendhal for rejecting "spurious methods" of gaining the approval of the reader.