2/25/24

While Stendhal continues with his elaboration of the crystallization process, with some detail that will sound very familiar to readers of “The Red and The Black,” this chapter is most significant for the way he extends the theory beyond love to include other ways that human beings take on fanatical beliefs.

I’m again tempted to launch into my own set of theories — and my overarching philosophy that the greatest human suffering is caused by our inability to reconcile the feeling of love with the activity of love — but I’m going to hold off on that for a later chapter when Stendhal has little to say. He’s too interesting in this one to pass over.

He doesn’t break new ground in discussing crystallization here, but he does have a few interesting thing to say about it. First, he talks about how challenges to love, or assumed barriers, lead to the crystallization of an imaginary solution. As your typical romantic comedy will attest, there’s endless comic potential in this common scenario. How often do people jump to finding solutions to problems in relationships before even inquiring if something is wrong? Stendhal says we don‘t do this out of anxiety for losing this person, but because we have a need to keep this relationship in our heads:

Only through imagination can you be sure that your beloved is perfect in every given way.

Stendhal then notes that if your beloved ever removes all fear by having an intense (and I would assume positive) response, all crystallization then stops for a moment, but in its place comes a moment of calm and charm that also becomes intoxicating. Then if there is pullback, crystallization starts again and makes any further positive action all the more intoxicating.

Stendhal gets very dark in his description of how all consuming a romantic obsession can be when it reaches this point:

It is no use seeking consolation in pleasures of another sort; they turn to dust and ashes. Your imagination can paint a physical picture for you, and take you a-hunting on a swift horse through Devon woods; but you are aware at the same time that you could find no pleasure in it. This is the optical illusion which leads to the fatal pistol shot.

Most will read that last line as Stendhal alluding to suicide, but readers of ”The Red and The Black” will recognize another fatal pistol shot in that story that was the result of Julian Sorel‘s two romantic obsessions colliding at a most inopportune moment. Always temper Stendhal’s most hopeless statements with the knowledge that he was not a romantic failure with women and his (male) protagonists, as tortured by love as they were, were arguably breaking hearts more freely than they understood.

If this chapter ended here, it would be an interesting prelude to his future works of fiction, but it goes on for another six paragraphs in a radically different direction. In fact, it takes a very abrupt left turn from that pistol shot to a statement that crystallization can apply to gambling as well.

Then Stendhal says that intrigues at court were heavy with crystallization. He argues that the U.S. government is likely immune to this phenomenon because our governments is to rational — proving that Stendhal has crystallized his thoughts about us in a fairly cute way (especially considering the state of our politics today.)

Then he piles on — hate has a mirror form of crystallization. When you cannot fully comprehend a subject, it can easily be crystallized. And even the most brilliant people fall under the rhapsodic spell of music.

There is a medical condition today called “Stendhal Syndrome.” A British Journal of General Practice article describes how it attained its name:

Visiting the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence, (Stendhal) found a monk to let him into the chapel where he could sit on a genuflecting stool, tilt his head back and take in the prospect of Volterrano’s fresco of the Sibyls without interruption. The pleasure was keen. ‘I was already in a kind of ecstasy,’ he writes, ‘by the idea of being in Florence, and the proximity of the great men whose tombs I had just seen. Absorbed in contemplating sublime beauty, I saw it close-up — I touched it, so to speak. I had reached that point of emotion where the heavenly sensations of the fine arts meet passionate feeling. As I emerged from Santa Croce, I had palpitations (what they call an attack of the nerves in Berlin); the life went out of me, and I walked in fear of falling.’ It was something he had observed about himself: ‘when a thought takes too strong a hold of me,’ he writes in his autobiography, ‘I fall down.’

This is a documented medical condition — dysautonomic bodily sensations brought on by exposure to beautiful art and architecture — and it bears Stendhal’s name. And what’s most interesting is that this experience happened after Stendhal wrote this book.

We can, with emotional distance, reject how Stendhal describes love as overly sentimental and irrational. But we cannot deny that human beings can and do react with intensity to the people, things, ideas and desires that affect the senses. If we try to live cut off from these ecstatic experiences, are genuinely living?

Bear this in mind as we move forward. Stendhal‘s novels are remarkable in their ability to balance the analytical/rational with the romantic/ecstatic. To get there, he had to fully explore the emotional and ecstatic side and write this book first.