Sundays with Stendhal 2, Of Politics and Literature

At risk of exhibiting the same cynicism of which Stendhal himself was accused, a famous passage on politics and newspapers and literature from The Red and the Black, Book Two, chapter 52, “The Discussion”:

Here the author would have liked to insert a page of dots. ‘That will not look pretty,’ says the publisher, ‘and for so frivolous a work not to look pretty means death.’

‘Politics,’ the author resumes, ‘are a stone attached to the neck of literature, which, in less than six months, drowns it.  Politics in the middle of imaginative interests are like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert.  The noise is deafening without being emphatic.  It is not in harmony with the sound of any of the instruments.  This mention of politics is going to give deadly offence to half my readers, and bore the other half, who have already found far more interesting and emphatic politics in their morning paper.’

‘If your characters do not talk politics,’ the publisher retorts, ‘they are no longer Frenchmen of 1830, and your book ceases to hold a mirror, as you claim ….’