ON LOVE
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH
WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES
BY
PHILIP SIDNEY WOOLF
AND
CECIL N. SIDNEY WOOLF, M. A.
FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
That you should be made a fool of by a young woman,why, it is many an honest man's case.
The Pirate.
NEW YORK
BRENTANO'S
TO B. K.
FOR WHOM
THE TRANSLATION
WAS BEGUN
First Published 1915
Reprinted 1920
Printed in Great Britain at
The Mayflower Press, Plymouth. William Brendon & Son, Ltd.
INTRODUCTORY PREFACE TO THETRANSLATION
Stendhal's three prefaces to this work on Loveare not an encouraging opening. Their main themeis the utter incomprehensibility of the book to all buta very select few—"a hundred readers only": they arerather warnings than introductions. Certainly, the earlylife of Stendhal's De l'Amour justifies this somewhatdistant attitude towards the public. The first andsecond editions were phenomenal failures—not evena hundred readers were forthcoming. But Stendhal,writing in the early part of the nineteenth century,himself prophesied that the twentieth would find hisideas at least more comprehensible. The ideas of geniusin one age are the normal spiritual food for superiorintellect in the next. Stendhal is still something of amystery to the general public; but the ideas, which heagitated, are at present regarded as some of the mostimportant subjects for immediate enquiry by many ofthe keenest and most practical minds of Europe.
A glance at the headings of the chapters gives an ideaof the breadth of Stendhal's treatment of love. Hetouches on every side of the social relationship betweenman and woman; and while considering the dispositionof individual nations towards love, gives us a brilliant,if one-sided, general criticism of these nations, consciousthroughout of the intimate connexion in any given agebetween its conceptions of love and the status of woman.
Stendhal's ideal of love has various names: it isgenerally "passion-love," but more particularly "love[Pg vi]à l'italienne."[1] The thing in itself is always the same—itis the love of a man and a woman, not as husbandand wife, not as mistress and lover, but as two humanbeings, who find the highest possible pleasure, not inpassing so many hours of the day or night together, butin living one life. Still more, it is the attachment oftwo free fellow-creatures—not of master and slave.
Stendhal was born in 1783—eight years before Olympede Gouges, the French Mary Wollstonecraft, publishedher Déclaration des Droits des Femmes. That is to say,by the time Stendhal had reached mental maturity,Europe had for some time been acquainted with the cryfor Women's Rights, and heard the earliest statementof the demands, which have broadened out into whatour age glibly calls the "Woman Question." How,may