Stendhal, Love and More

I had a written a short post on Stendhal's On Love a few months back. In it I had promised to write about The Red and The Black (which I had not finished at that time) and also about the various "stages" and "types" of love that Stendhal describes in his book. Of course, I never got a chance to write about any of these. I was reminded of this when I saw the search entries which bring people on the internet to my blog. Most of those search keywords were "Stendhal", "stages of love" , "kinds of love". Someone was even looking for a biography of Methilde Dembowski!

Well, all those visitors, who came looking for either scholarly information or just some solace for their love-lorn souls, must have been disappointed with what I wrote there. It was a poor summary and a hurried cut-paste job. Now, I am not going to write a scholarly critique here on the history and philosophy of love or something, but if you are looking for simple facts, here they are.

Stendhal distinguishes between four kinds of love. First is the sympathy-love (or amour-gout, love of tastes). This is love, which is based on shared predilections in culture, background and tastes. Stendhal didn't think there was anything wrong with this kind of love but he found it artistically and psychologically very uninteresting. And indeed it is quite boring. No wonder then that most of the successful relationships are based on this kind of love! The second and third kind of love, he enumerated were vanity-love and sensual love. These are not even loves, they are self-interest and guile disguised as something noble. Be it love in order to feel good about oneself (what a beautiful girlfriend I have and how jealous must it make my friends!) or love based on purely physical attraction, Stendhal found both these kinds of love not only uninteresting but morally reprehensible too. Sadly he found the most common form of love practiced in his society was indeed of these kinds.

What he was interested in both personally and as an artist however, was the fourth kind of love, passion-love, or as he called it, "love generated in the mind". He waxes lyrical about this kind of love and gives a few psychologically acute insights into the mind of someone in that state. (By the way, there is a beautiful word limerence which is used to describe this state of being in love). I don't remember any lines and I don't have the book with me right now so can't give any excerpts.

In the last chapter of his book, Stendhal does a comparative study of two famous prototypes in romantic literature, Don Juan the famous womanizer and libertine and Werther, Goethe's tender and tragic hero, who literally dies of unrequited love. No prizes for guessing whose side Stendhal takes! What he argues is that while Don Juan's physical satisfactions might be many, and Werther's few or none, the latter must nevertheless be considered "happier" (of course, not in the literal sense) because of the triumphs of his imagination - joys of realities fashioned by his desires. He sees, feels and experiences things which ordinary mortals don't or can't. Okay, I know what will you say. He commits suicide in end. But more on that later!.

Now that I have summarised the types of love, let's move on to the seven stages of falling in love. But wait, this post has already become too big, it is already late in the night and I don't even remember exactly what those seven stages are. So as I always say, more on that later!