ON LOVE STENDHAL (HENRY BEYLE) 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. [Pg v] INTRODUCTORY PREFACE TO THE TRANSLATION Stendhal's three prefaces to this work on Love are not an encouraging opening. Their main theme is the utter incomprehensibility of the book to all but a very select few--"a hundred readers only": they are rather warnings than introductions. Certainly, the early life of Stendhal's _De l'Amour_ justifies this somewhat distant attitude towards the public. The first and second editions were phenomenal failures--not even a hundred readers were forthcoming. But Stendhal, writing in the early part of the nineteenth century, himself prophesied that the twentieth would find his ideas at least more comprehensible. The ideas of genius in one age are the normal spiritual food for superior intellect in the next. Stendhal is still something of a mystery to the general public; but the ideas, which he agitated, are at present regarded as some of the most important subjects for immediate enquiry by many of the keenest and most practical minds of Europe. A glance at the headings of the chapters gives an idea of the breadth of Stendhal's treatment of love. He touches on every side of the social relationship between man and woman; and while considering the disposition of individual nations towards love, gives us a brilliant, if one-sided, general criticism of these nations, conscious throughout of the intimate connexion in any given age between its conceptions of love and the status of woman. Stendhal's ideal of love has various names: it is generally "passion-love," but more particularly "love