Stendhal and Literary Ambition

Stendhal, who is well known as art critic and romantic and realist novelist, was fascinated by the theater and often engaged in writing theatrical works without succeeding. His early vocation was to live in Paris by making comedies like Molière. He strengthened himself in critical reading and philosophical studying of the English, Italian and Spanish theatre. He took important theatrical works and developed them into his own immortal theatrical works. Selmours, Les deux Hommes and Letellier were advanced but were not finished. He failed to be a comic playwright because of his too much literary ambition, the change of literary circumstance and viewer's taste, and the lack of literary genius. The ambition to be the greatest comedy-writer did not come true, but he declared himself as a novelist and left his mark in novels.