2/20/24
Stendhal begins his book in an off-putting way. His first line is this:
I want to try and establish exactly what this passion is, whose every genuine manifestation is characterized by beauty.
One line into his treatise and I’m already at odds with him. Every genuine manifestation of love is characterized – made distinct – by beauty? Let me give him the benefit of the doubt here, and of translation, and assume that Stendhal means the five types of love he mentioned here all concern beauty and should not be confused with the love you have for a child or close friend.
That still doesn’t clear up all of my issues with him, however, because the last thing I want to read in any book, right up front, is a bunch of categories. And it’s made worse by the tautology of the first in the list: passionate love. Doesn’t the opening line imply that these are all forms of passionate love?
He goes on to elaborate that this is exemplified by Heloise’s love for Abelard. His other three examples – the Portuguese nun, captain of Vésel and the gendarme of Cento are unknown to me. Perhaps this is overwhelming physical desire for someone? That can’t be, because physical love is number three on the list. So I don’t know what Stendhal is trying to say.
Category two I understand – mannered love – but it seems like a false category in some sense, a socially constructed ideal “where there is no place for anything at all unpleasant.” Come to think of it, that seems to describe many of the too-perfect-to-be-true relationships I see marketed by couples on Instagram these days, so I’ll let it stand.
Stendhal says that “physical love” is where your Love-life begins at sixteen. I still don’t see the difference between categories one and three. And then he closes with vanity-love, where someone dates another as sort of a fashion piece to be shown off and allows them to feel better about themselves, which to me sounds an awful lot like mannered love.
If Stendhal really thought this a complete list, he would be starting his project on extremely shaky grounds. And he admits this at the end of the first essay:
Instead of defining four kinds of love, one might well admit eight or ten distinctions. There are perhaps as many different ways of feeling as there are of seeing, but differences of terminology do not affect the arguments which follow. Every variety of love mentioned henceforth is born, lives, dies, or attains immortality in accordance with the same laws.
That’s both reassuring – he’s not holding onto these categories, even though he’s wasted our opening attention with them – and not reassuring, because of the too-strong statement that all types of love follow the same laws.
But before just giving up on Stendhal based on his extremely weak premise, I’m going to attempt a rescue of him via his masterpiece “The Red and the Black” by bringing up a fifth kind of love he examined in that book. He calls this type “mind-made love” and while he locates it specifically to Paris, I’ve found this to be a highly common form of love in our world, perhaps the one I experience most often.
Here’s how Stendhal describes it:
Mind-made love is of course subtler than true love, but its moments of enthusiasm are limited: it understands itself too well; it is always evaluating, passing judgment. Rather than deranging the mind, it throbs only to the beating of thought.
He illustrates this via a relationship between Julian Sorel, the very odd protagonist of our story, and the daughter of his employer, Mathilide. Stendhal is a brilliant psychological story teller, so he tells this love story largely through internal thought processes of the lovers every step of the relationship. He doesn’t judge either of the lovers although it would be very easy to do so in numerous places. But what they both experience is a form of madness.
For example, here’s how Stendhal describes Julian’s state of mind as he once again has to adjust to one of Mathilde’s many changes of mood and opinion about their relationship:
His mind had so little control over his actions that, if some sour-tongued philosopher had said to him – ’Think how you can quickly take advantage of any favorable inclinations. In this sort of mind-made love, as one sees in Paris, no state of being lasts longer than two days’ – Julian would not have understood him.
Julian may not have understood this, but it struck me like a slap in the face – I have experienced this phenomenon many times in the past four years. What Stendhal doesn’t say about this kind of mind-made love is that the constant shape shifting of the relationship becomes part of its dark appeal. Having a puzzle-solving mentality and a strong draw to mystery, for me the difficulties of this type of relationship do not race it toward a conclusion, but sustain it.
This is why I’m giving Stendhal a pass on his terrible first chapter. I know what he’s capable of delivering when he takes time to develop his theories and frameworks. Despite his opening statement that love is all about beauty, I know that he sees more subtlety, and understands full well that love can sometimes be mostly about thought.