Free Ideas and the Novel by Mary McCarthy Page A

a criminal impiety. He would have detested the notion of “the century” which we find, writ in shining letters, on page after page of Les illusions perdues and, more darkly, in Le rouge et le noir. Or more likely he would have snorted with laughter at those Balzacian littérateurs haranguing each other about the requirement laid on a book to be “worthy of the century”: “If your sonnets are on the level of the Nineteenth century,” “Nathan has understood his epoch and responds to its needs,” and so on. The last bit is parody, meant to be funny, but the rest is delivered straight, apparently with Balzac’s concurrence, as though he considered that a century was an actual living entity with a physiognomy and not just an arbitrary tailor’s cut applied to the flow of time. He writes “Nineteenth century” with a capital N, as in “Napoleon,” thus raising it above all the humble ones that had preceded. As for Julien Sorel’s bitter cry— “O dix-neuvième siècle” (no capital)—at the end of The Red and the Black, Tolstoy would have advised the unlucky youth to look more closely into his own soul rather than outward at a time-myth when seeking to distribute blame.
    The very idea of genius would have been scorned by him too, and not merely when attached to Napoleon as a prodigious military brain. I cannot think he ever used the word, unless in derision; it smacked of charlatanism. All those literary young men in Paris cafés and eating-houses with “genius” stamped on their brows like so many window dummies would have seemed a comic spectacle to the outspoken old man, who would not even put up with it in Shakespeare. Yet there was danger in the silly concept that could not be laughed away, and it was the “irrational” Dostoievsky, not the rational Tolstoy, who fully understood this.
    The danger was plainly indicated by Dryden, in 1697, when the word as designating an unusually gifted individual was first coming into use, long before there was a Napoleon to flesh it out on the world stage. “Extraordinary Genius’s have a sort of Prerogative, which may dispense them from Laws.” Dryden was thinking of art and literature, where genius had a license, recognized at any rate in English-speaking countries, to break rules. Slowly or all of a sudden—a historian of language could doubtless trace the development—this license came to be extended to the moral sphere. The freedom of the genius to violate, say, the unities of dramatic convention was accorded to outstanding men in their personal behavior. It was not yet a question of making one’s life a work of art, hence beyond the reach of ordinary conventions; that was left to Oscar Wilde, who announced to the U.S. customs “I have nothing but my genius to declare.” That his life was a thing of exquisite beauty never occurred to a Julien Sorel, who did not need the sanction of art to behave unfeelingly. For the common horde of geniuses simply the fact of knowing oneself to be superior was sanction enough, whether the sensed superiority was conferred by an artistic talent, an intellectual capacity, or by some other, not fully disclosed gift.
    This, precisely, was the case of Lucien de Rubempré, whose poetic promise, never fulfilled, permitted him to abuse the trust of his family, run up bills with tailor and haberdasher, forge checks, and so on. As the “great man” of the provinces, he was entitled to his just due of misconduct; unfortunately for his peace of mind, he lacked assurance of exactly how much was owing him. His own timidity and the poverty of his relations restricted his predations and even made him ashamed of them. He was not fully possessed of “l’ esprit du siècle” and half recognized laws other than the law of genius.
    Julien Sorel is the opposite. His behavior in every particular has the single purpose of demonstrating that he recognizes no law but his own. In an afterword, Stendhal cites the “law of self-preservation”