But if Stendhal’s feelings toward the putative author of the Mémorial seem to be reserved, if not ambivalent, in The Red and the Black, there can be no question about his clear, objective understanding of the force of Napoleon as idea. This force is shown as a fact, in competition with other facts and hence productive of irony. For Julien Sorel it proves to be a destructive force, but which nevertheless lifts him out of the ordinary, and there is much that is mean and ordinary in him, starting with a small, almost brutishly low forehead that is far from resembling Stendhal’s own broad expanse of brow.
In striking contrast, Balzac’s hero, Lucien de Rubempré, is noble in appearance; I spoke of his “beauté surhumaine.” Lucien even has some drops of noble blood in him, on his mother’s side. Where Julien with his calculations and retentive memory is the soul of prose, Lucien is a poet. Yet Lucien, too, has the example of Napoleon before him as an ignis fatuus, and, like a general, he, too, thinks in terms of conquest. He sees himself, after an undecided skirmish at Angoulême, as the conqueror of Paris, moving boldly from success to success. To his awed friends he is “a young eagle”—a step higher on the scale of predators than the circling hawk that Julien envied. He is “the great man of the provinces” before he has published a word and, of course, a “genius,” that is, super-humanly gifted. In the Parisian milieus he enters, Napoleon’s star is still visibly beckoning to the obscure and untried. A poorly dressed young man in thick-soled shoes is said to resemble an engraving of a well-known portrait of Napoleon, an engraving which is “a whole poem of ardent melancholy, restrained ambition, hidden activity.” Can this be the same portrait as the one Julien owned?
Balzac himself draws the obvious moral; he speaks of “l’exemple de Napoléon, si fatal au Dix-neuvième siècle par les prétentions qu’il inspire à tant de gens médiocres” (“the example of Napoleon, so fatal for the Nineteenth century because of the pretensions it inspires in so many mediocrities”). He is thinking of Lucien and his generation, but the remark could serve as an epigraph for both his own novel and Stendhal’s—if you grant that Julien is a mediocrity—and an epitaph for their heroes. “Fatal” is indeed the word. Despite differences in tone and in degree of sympathy (Stendhal is fond of Julien), the two stories are eerily alike, to the point where one wonders whether it is not a single book, one and indivisible, that one has been reading, whether in fact all the novels of the century do not refer, each in its own way, to a governing idea—Napoleon.
This last is, of course, an exaggeration. That idea cannot be found in the English novel, which largely ignored him—there are only a few references, scattered here and there. Dickens, when he turned to France in A Tale of Two Cities, stopped short with the Terror and the tumbrils; Napoleon was still in the wings, waiting. Wellington unfortunately was no substitute; he was never an Idea on the march, even for his partisans. No ambitious young men in English fiction modeled themselves on the Iron Duke, and it was too late for a generation of budding Cromwells. In a way, I cannot help feeling this as a loss. It may be the reason that nineteenth-century English fiction, in comparison with that of the Continent, seems barren of ideas. There are homiletics and moralizing in plenty but no sovereign concepts. There is no shortage of climbers, but they are ordinary climbers—Lammerses and Veneerings—lacking the divine afflatus. Our own fiction is no better off, with the exception of Captain Ahab, who is obsessed by a personification, though not of the Napoleonic sort. Hyacinth Robinson in The Princess Casamassima is a poor excuse for a Leveller.
In Victorian fiction the book that comes closest to having one large governing Idea would be Dombey and Son, which I read as a parable of Empire, the Dombey fortune extending tentacles of investment overseas while sickening at the center in the person of poor little Paul and holding somewhere in its clutches Major Joey Bagshot and his servant, called the Native. But Victorian fiction, generally, seems to have missed out through insularity, which was a side-benefit of Empire, on the shaking experience of the century: the fact of seeing an Idea on the march and being unable to forget it—radiant vision or atrocious spectacle, depending on your point of view.