Stendhal’s Four Kinds and Seven Stages of Love
Thanks to a post over at obooki’s site, I’m prompted to put up this brief summary of the first part of Stendhal’s On Love. I’ve lifted it from the first draft of a novel I’ve written about two people who fall in love whilst discussing great books about love via email. Please find a lengthier, slightly different, at this point shoddily presented version at Merely a Madness, excerpts here.
D l’Amour by Marie Henri Beyle/ Stendhal 1783-1825
Stendhal had two conflicting sides to his nature: the deeply sensitive and the coolly analytical . Fused in his greatest novels, uneasily juxtaposed here. While correcting the proofs he wept. ‘I nearly went crazy’. Music, by giving precise form to elusive emotions, by expressing the inexpressible, satisfied both sides of his nature. Sought happiness unremittingly: not mere pleasure or the satisfaction of desires, but a rapture accessible only to natures of rate quality. ‘the happy few’; the delight that comes from intense felling, lucid awareness, passion and energy; the happiness of reverie, of response to beauty, of the free imagination – and such happiness he found in loving, even without return….
Preface: It is of little use for an author to beg the public’s indulgence, for the very act of publications gives the lie to this pretence at modesty.
Publisher complaining about unsold copies: ‘They must be sacred, for nobody will touch them. 16
Book One Four kinds of love:
- Passionate: carries us away against our real interest.
- Book concentrates on amour-passion: intense, romantic, generally unrequited and perhaps impossible to requite.
- Mannered: nothing passionate or unpredictable about it. It’s always witty. Cold. Respects ‘real’ interests. Take away vanity, and there’s little left.Physical: self evident.
- Vanity: men both desire and possess fashionable women, much in the way one might own a fine horse. Sometimes physical but not always
"In love, unlike most other passions, the recollection of what you have had and lost is always better than what you can hope for in the future" 44
The Birth of Love: seven stages. Here is what happens to the soul:
- Admiration
- You think "how delightful it would be to kiss her, to be kissed by her" and so on…i.e. from simple to tender admiration.
- Hope. You observe her perfections, and it is at this moment that a woman really ought to surrender, for the utmost physical pleasure. Even the most reserved women blush to the whites of their eyes at this moment of hope. The passion is so strong, and the pleasure so sharp, that they betray themselves unmistakably.
- Love is born. To love is to enjoy seeing, touching, and sensing with all the senses, as closely as possible, a lovable object which loves in return.
- The first crystallization ("a certain fever of the imagination which translates a normally commonplace object into something unrecognizable, makes it an entity apart"). If you are sure that a woman loves you, it is a pleasure to endow her with a thousand perfections and to count your blessings with infinite satisfaction. In the end you overrate wildly and regard her as something fallen from Heaven, unknown as yet, but certain to be yours
Solitude and leisure are necessary. Leave a lover with his thoughts for twenty-four hours, and this is what will happen: At the salt mines of Salzburg, they throw a leafless wintry bough into one of the abandoned workings. Two or three months later they pull it out covered with a shining deposit of crystals. The smallest twig, no bigger than a tom-tit’s claw, is studded with a galaxy of scintillating diamonds. The original branch is no longer recognizable.What I have called crystallization is a mental process which draws from everything that happens new proofs of the perfection of the loved one.No sooner do you think of a virtue than you detect it in your beloved….but his attention is still liable to wander after a time because one gets tired of anything uniform, even perfect happiness. This is what happens next to fix the attention:
6. Doubt creeps in. First a dozen or so glances, or some other sequence of actions, raise and confirm the lover’s hopes. Then, as he recovers from the initial shock, he grows accustomed to his good fortune, or acts on a theory drawn from the common multitude of easily won women. He asks for more positive proofs of affection and tries to press his suit further.7.The second crystallization, which deposits diamond layers of prove that ’she loves me’. Since love casts doubt upon what seemed proven before, the woman who was so certain, before intimacy, that her lover was entirely above vulgar promiscuity, no sooner remembers that she has nothing left to refuse him than she trembles lest he has merely been adding another conquest to his list. Only at this point does second crystallization begin, and much more strongly, since it is now accompanied by fear.
7. Every few minutes throughout the night which follows the birth of doubt, the lover has a moment of dreadful misgiving, and then reassures himself, ’she loves me’; and crystallization begins to reveal new charms. Then once again the haggard eye of doubt pierces him and he stops transfixed. He forgets to draw breath and mutters, ‘But does she love me?’ Torn between doubt and delight, the poor lover convinces himself that she could give him such pleasure as he could find nowhere else on earth. It is the pre-eminence of this truth, and the road to it, with a fearsome precipice on one hand and a views of perfect happiness on the other, which set the second crystallization so far above the first. The lover’s mind vacillates between three ideas: She is perfect. She loves me. How can I get the strongest possible proofs of her love?