Volume 21, Number 12 · July 18, 1974
Seer of the Ego
By John Bayley
Stendhal
by Joanna Richardson
Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 344 pp., $10.00
In the last full-length biography of Stendhal in English—now thirty years old—F.C. Green observed that the impression he makes 'derives from a quality rarely found in imaginative literature—the unswerving respect for the truth.' The point would be to define, as Green did not, what is the use made of the word 'truth' in this context, and by Stendhal himself. Dante or Shakespeare or Milton did not exactly tell lies: the splendor of their art lies in the way it takes for granted not only natural appearance and human activity but the great metaphysical cosmologies which grew up with these and gave them the coherence of a second nature. In this sense even Homer, the great truthteller, is simply endorsing an accepted view of things. And this acquiescence is always as true as the opposing challenge—that the emperor has no clothes. But there are times when this kind of truth is truer than the other, more vital to perception and reflection alike; and Stendhal's was emphatically one of them.
Review, 2748 words
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