Is Stendhal a champion of women's rights?

Stendhal is emphatically a champion of Women's Rights. It is true that the freedom, which Stendhal demands, is designed for other ends than are associated to-day with women's claims. Perhaps Stendhal, were he alive now, would cry out against what he would call a distortion of the movement he championed.

What books did Stendhal read?

Stendhal's reading was [Pg xvi]extensive, and we might swell the list with the names of Montesquieu, Condillac, Condorcet, Chamfort, Diderot—to name only the moralists. It is noticeable that almost all these books, mentioned as the favourite authorities of Stendhal, are eighteenth-century works.

What is Stendhal's habit of quoting without acknowledging?

[Pg 352]Stendhal's habit of quoting without acknowledgment from all kinds of writings is so curious, that it demands a word to itself. His wholesale method of plagiarism has been established in other works beside the present one; almost the whole of his first work—La Vie de Haydn(1814)—is stolen property. See above, note 18.

Is the Stendhalian method scientific or analytic?

Analytical, however, is the best word to characterise the Stendhalian method. Scientific suggests, perhaps, more naturally the broader treatment of love, which is familiar in Greek literature, lives all through the Middle Ages, is typified in Dante, and survives later in a host of Renaissance dialogues and treatises on Love.