Chapter 8

STENDHAL

Marie Henri Beyle was born at Grenoble on the 23rd of January 1783. His family belonged to the upper middle class, the aristocracy of the law. When only eight years old he lost his mother, a loss which he felt deeply and to which his thoughts perpetually recurred. His father was a reserved man, who took little notice of his children, and treated them with extreme severity. He entrusted the education of his son to needy abbés, whom the boy hated, regarding them as tyrants and hypocrites. Between him and his father there was early kindled a feeling of real animosity, which was never extinguished. Everything good that fell to Henri's lot in childhood came to him through his maternal grandfather, a clever and cultured doctor; but so strictly were his father's cruelly severe educational principles adhered to, that at the age of fourteen he was not acquainted with more than two or three children of his own age. This boy, in whose nature there lay germs of profound originality, in whose character determined independence was a main feature, whose energetic temperament begot a keen desire to do unusual deeds, and in whom the life of the senses stirred early and strongly, was subjected in the process of education to such severe, unrelieved, oppressive control, that passionate inward revolt was the inevitable consequence. Because the abbés, who lived in terror of the Revolution, educated him as a royalist and Catholic, he naturally developed into a revolutionist, a Bonapartist, and a freethinker in the extreme sense of the word. But the constant strife between his father's will and his own desires engendered, besides, a want of confidence, a distrust of humanity so deeply rooted that it was never eradicated. And ere long there was added to the fear of being deceived or exploited by others, the fear of deceiving himself, which bred in him the habit of being constantly on his guard, of constant self-examination and self-control.

A certain something in his character is traceable to the influence of the province in which he was born and in which his family had been settled for at least two centuries. The natives of Dauphiné are a keen, obstinate, argumentative race, as different from their neighbours of Provence as they are from the Parisians. The Provençal gives noisy or eloquent expression to his feelings; he rails and curses when he is angry or hurt; the Parisian is polite, witty, brilliantly superficial; the character of the native of Dauphiné is distinguished by a peculiar obstinacy; there is both depth and refinement in it; he remembers an insult and avenges it, but his anger never finds vent in abusive language. Beyle's mother, who read Dante and Ariosto in the original, a very uncommon accomplishment for a provincial lady in those days, was understood to be of Italian descent. This may in part explain Beyle's strong leaning to everything Italian; but it is also to be remembered that until 1349 Dauphiné did not form part of France, and was in its politics a semi-Italian state. It was one of Beyle's fancies that Louis XI, who, as Dauphin, governed the little country for several years, had imparted to its inhabitants something of his own distinguishing quality of prudence, of distrust of first inspirations. Improbable as this is, the surmise is in itself characteristic.

Circumstances early intensified the tendency to distrust with which Henri's home life had imbued him. When he at last attained to the liberty after which he had so long aspired, that is to say, when he was sent to school, a bitter disappointment awaited him. The little strong, thick-set, heavily built boy with the bright, speaking face (nicknamed "the walking tower" on account of his determined step, herculean limbs, and round Hercules head) was, in spite of the ironic expression of his mouth, an enthusiast. And in his schoolfellows he did not find the gay, amiable, noble-minded comrades he had pictured to himself, but a troop of selfish young whelps. When telling his friend Colomb this, he added: "It was a disappointment which has gone on repeating itself throughout my whole life." "Nor was I any luckier," he continued, "in the impression I made on my schoolfellows; I can see now that I displayed a ridiculous mixture of haughtiness and desire to amuse myself. To the other boys' coarse selfishness I responded with my Spanish hidalgo ideas of honour; and I was overwhelmed with despair when they went off to play together and simply ignored me." Compare this utterance with the bitter disappointment of young Fabrice (inLa Chartreuse de Parme, published in 1839), when, during the battle of Waterloo, he begs some soldiers whom he meets for a piece of bread and is answered with a coarse jest: "These cruel words and the general laugh which followed were too much for Fabrice. War was not, then, it appeared, that noble, mutual impulse of souls who loved glory above everything, which Napoleon's proclamations had led him to understand it to be." We can easily imagine what memories of wild outbursts of animal selfishness Beyle brought back with him from his campaign; of these the tale of Fabrice's experiences is probably composed. He had formed too high an estimate of the comradeship existing among soldiers, just as he had over-estimated the comradeship of schoolboys.

About the year 1798 he began to devote himself with great ardour to the study of mathematics, for the characteristic reason, as he told his friends, that there was hypocrisy in every other science, but none, so far as he could discover, in the science of mathematics. But no doubt his ardour was stimulated by the growing fame of the young French general in Italy whom mathematics, practically applied in the science of artillery, had led from one great victory to another.

His studies at an end, Beyle arrived in Paris on the 10th of November 1799, the day following the 18th Brumaire. He had a letter of introduction to the Daru family, who were relatives, and when, after thecoup d'état, Pierre Daru was made Secretary of War and Inspector of Reviews, he gave young Beyle a place in his office. I fancy I can trace reminiscences of this appointment in the episode of Julien's appointment as secretary to the Comte de la Mole in (Rouge et Noir). Colomb tells that on one of the first days after Beyle entered on his duties, when he was writing a letter to Daru's dictation, he absently spelledcelawith two l's, and thereby brought on himself a playful, but none the less humiliating, reproof. A precisely similar incident occurs in the novel. But Daru was evidently a very much kinder and more considerate patron than the Comte de la Mole; he proved himself Beyle's faithful friend and benefactor. Besides his talent for military organisation, Daru had undoubted literary talent; his translations of Horace and his historical prose are excellent examples of the literary style of the Empire, and all the authors of that period looked up to him. It was a strange freak of fortune which determined that throughout most of his campaigns he should have in immediate attendance on him one of the literary pioneers of the following period—not that he had any suspicion of his protege's gifts, gifts of which the young man himself was scarcely conscious as yet.

When Daru and his younger brother, acting under Carnot, then Minister of War, had organised the memorable Italian campaign of 1800, and had themselves been ordered to Italy, they sent for Beyle to come to them there, though they had for the moment no definite appointment to offer him. The youth of seventeen, who was by nature as energetic as he was imaginative, and whose dreams were all of daring deeds and the First Consul, did not wait to be called twice. He packed a dozen standard works in his knapsack and started for Geneva; there, though he had never learned to ride, he mounted a horse which Daru had left behind ill, but which had recovered, and, encountering many difficulties, rode over the Saint Bernard on the 22nd of May, two days after Napoleon. On the 1st or 2nd of June he reached Milan, the city where he was to have his first experience of the joy of life, and which was always to loom largely on his mental horizon. He witnessed the outburst of rapturous joy with which the abolition of the hated supremacy of Austria was hailed, and on the 4th of July was present at the battle of Marengo. After holding an appointment in the commissariat for some months, he entered the seventh regiment of dragoons as sergeant (as we are reminded in a curious note to the fifth chapter ofRouge et Noir) was promoted to a lieutenancy at Romanego, and was shortly afterwards made adjutant to General Michaud. He distinguished himself in all the subsequent engagements, and especially at Castel-Franco, not only by courage; but by the ardour, accuracy, and intelligence with which he executed all the tasks entrusted to him. We have, evidently, a very exact account of young Beyle's feelings as a spectator of the battle of Marengo, in the description of Fabrice del Dongo's youthfully enthusiastic and heroic emotions as spectator of the battle of Waterloo, a description which undoubtedly owes much of its masterliness to its being a faithful reproduction of personal experiences. The period which begins with the youth's ride across the Alps and ends with his farewell to the army after the Peace of Amiens, was the period of his life to which Beyle looked back as that of perfect happiness; it was rich in every variety of romantic experience; during it he did daring deeds, fought a comical duel, had various youthful love affairs, and enjoyed the poetry of a soldier's life in a beautiful country, where the foreign conquerors were greeted as saviours and heroes by a careless, naïvely passionate people, who were prevented by no scruples from indulging their thirst for pleasure.

When Henri returned to Grenoble from this his first flight into the wide world, he found everything as he had left it. His family still revered what he despised, and detested all that he enthusiastically admired. After some violent altercations, the young Hotspur obtained permission to take up his abode in Paris. There he studied Montaigne, Montesquieu, and the eighteenth-century philosophers, more particularly Cabanis and De Tracy, with the latter of whom he was at a subsequent period to become intimately acquainted. (For De Tracy'sIdeologyBeyle had a profound admiration from his earliest youth.) He also took lessons in English.

In this quiet life of study, which lasted for a few years, there was an odd interlude. In 1805, during a visit to his native town, Henri fell in love with a beautiful young actress who was playing there. His love was returned, and, unable to endure the idea of separation from his beloved, he followed her to Marseilles, where she had obtained an engagement, and took a place as clerk in a large grocery business—the only possible means of earning a living which presented itself. He was quite happy on his office stool during the year his passion lasted; but, when the actress suddenly determined to marry a Russian, he returned to Paris and resumed his studies. Before long he received an invitation which he was incapable of refusing, to accompany Marshal Daru to the army. He fought in the battle of Jena, took part in Napoleon's triumphal entry into Berlin, and was appointed superintendent of the Imperial demesnes in Brunswick. This appointment he held for two years, during which he gained some knowledge of the German language and literature, and distinguished himself by his zeal in the Emperor's service. Receiving orders to levy a war tax of five millions, he levied seven. This was what they in those days called "being possessed of the sacred fire." When the Emperor was told, he said, "Well done!" and noted the assessor's name. But Beyle also won honour for himself in ways which appeal more to our sympathies. In 1809 he was left in a little German town, in charge of stores and of the wounded soldiers who were not fit to be removed. No sooner had the garrison departed than the citizens were summoned by the alarm-bell to attack the military hospital and seize the stores. The other officers lost their heads; but Beyle armed all the convalescents, every man who was able to be out of bed, posted the weakest at the windows (which he transformed into loopholes), and, placing himself at the head of the others, made a sortie and scattered the attacking mob.

He followed the army to Vienna, was employed in the negotiations which preceded Napoleon's marriage with Marie Louise, and afterwards received the appointment of inspector of the buildings and movable property belonging to the crown. In this capacity he appeared at court, and was introduced to the Empress.

After a stay in Milan he received permission, in 1812, to take part in the Russian campaign. His love of adventure had been more than satisfied by his previous campaigns; he had been sickened and pained by the sight of corpses, and whilst his carriage wheels passed over and mutilated them, he had tried to divert his mind by poetic fancies. But war always attracted him anew. We see the man whose books, written at a later period in his career, contain such store of delicate and profound insight into national psychology, studying, during the passage of the Niemen, the appearance and temperament of the soldiers of all lands who composed the Grand Army. But by the time Smolensk was reached he had had enough. From that town he writes:—

"How man changes! My old longing for novelty is quite gone. Since I have seen Milan and Italy, everything else repels me by its coarseness. Would you believe it? without any personal reason I am sometimes on the point of shedding tears. In this ocean of barbarism there is not a sound which finds its echo in my soul. Everything is coarse, foul, stinking, both literally and metaphorically. My one pleasure has been hearing a fellow, who is about as musical as I am pious, play a little on a piano which is terribly out of tune. Ambition has no longer any power over me; the most gorgeous order would be no compensation for what I am enduring. I represent to myself the summits on which my spirit dwells (planning books, listening to Cimarosa and loving Angela in a perfect climate) as beautiful heights; far below them on the plain lie the fetid marshes in which I am now sunk.... You will hardly believe it, but what really gives me pleasure is to attend to any Italian official business there is to transact. There has been some lately, and even though it is over, it continues to occupy my imagination like a romance."

In the diary he kept at Moscow we find traces of the same duality in his nature—the craving to occupy his imagination, and the desire to act and to be in the midst of action. During the great fire he writes: "The fire soon reached the house we had left. Our carriages stood for five or six hours on the boulevard. Tired of this inaction, I went to look at the fire, and spent an hour or two with Joinville ... we drank a bottle of wine, which restored us to life. I read a few lines of an English translation ofPaul et Virginie_ which restored me to a feeling of intellectual life in the midst of the universal barbarism."

During the terrible retreat through Russia, Beyle was superintendent of the depots at Minsk, Vitebsk, and Mohilof; he did good service by supplying the army as it passed Orcha with provisions for three days, the only provisions served out to it between Moscow and Beresina. The coolness and determination which had characterised him from his childhood did not desert him now. It has been often told how, on one of the most calamitous days of the campaign, he made his appearance in Daru's quarters cleanly shaved and carefully dressed, and was greeted by his chief with the words: "You are a brave man, Monsieur Beyle; you have shaved to-day."

During the retreat he lost everything—horses, carriages, clothes, and money—even the sum with which he was provided for emergencies. Before he left, his sister had replaced all the buttons on one of his overcoats with pieces of twenty and forty francs, carefully covered with cloth. On his return she asked him if they had been useful to him. After much reflection, he remembered that somewhere in the neighbourhood of Wilna he had presented his coat to a waiter, considering it worn out. The incident is a characteristic one; for Beyle, who was quite as eager to excel in diplomacy as in literature, was extremely prudent, but at the same time extremely forgetful.

He re-entered on his official duties in Paris; in 1813, he was, as a member of the Emperor's staff, at Mainz, Erfurt, Lützen, and Dresden; and for a time he held the appointment of Commissary-General in Silesia. His health giving way, he went to recruit it by the Lake of Como, in the region to which he always returned as to an earthly Paradise, and where, as usual, he passed in blissful idleness such leisure as the pursuit of a happy love affair left him. He was once more actively employed under Napoleon in 1814; but the Emperor's fall blasted all his hopes of a successful official career. He lost everything—his appointment, his income, his position in society; and he bore the loss not merely without complaint, but with cheerfulness, resigning himself with philosophic equanimity to being henceforward simply the cosmopolitan, dilettante, and author.

From 1814 till 1821, except for a short absence in 1817, Beyle was an inhabitant of his beloved Milan. He did not leave it even during the Hundred Days, being convinced that Napoleon's fortunes were irretrievable. A passionate lover of Italian music and singing, he spent happy evenings at the La Scala Theatre. He was received into the best society of the town; in Count Porro's house, or in Lodovico de Brême's box at the theatre, he made acquaintance with the Italian authors and patriots—Silvio Pellico, Manzoni, &c.; and also with such famous travellers as Byron, Madame de Staël, Wilhelm Schlegel, and a whole host of other English and German notabilities. An attachment which lasted for several years made him, what he was capable of being, perfectly happy; but this happiness was rudely disturbed in the summer of 1821 by his summary banishment from Milan. The Austrian police suspected him, quite groundlessly, of intrigues with the Carbonari.

He returned once more to Paris in a state of the deepest dejection; and it was during the height of his grief at being separated from the woman he loved, that he wrote his famous book,De l'Amour. Hitherto he had written, or at least published, nothing but biographies of Haydn and Mozart, which were only adaptations of Italian and German works, and theHistoire de la Peinture en Italie, with its proudly humble dedication to the captive of St. Helena. None of these books had made any sensation; but the last-mentioned had won him the goodwill and friendship of De Tracy, the philosopher. Beyle at first felt himself completely isolated in Paris. Many of his old associates under the Empire were banished; others had forfeited his regard by cringing to the new Government. At De Tracy's house, however, he met the best of the good society of the day—Lafayette, the Comte de Ségur, Benjamin Constant, &c., &c.; and at such houses as Giuditta Pasta, the famous opera-singer's, he met the young authors, men like Mérimée and Jaquemont. Beyle remained in Paris, except for short visits to England and Italy, until 1830. From 1830 until his death in 1842, he was again in government employment, holding posts which were practically sinecures. The first year he was Consul at Trieste, a place which he disliked, and the rest of the time at Civita Vecchia, which was almost equivalent to being in Rome. Here he lived under the sky he had always loved and among the people he preferred to all others, but his solitude and idleness were unutterably wearisome to him. To such of his countrymen as sought him out and suited him, he was an amiable and most efficient cicerone; but he longed to be back in Paris, although the old martial spirit of the Empire forbade him to acknowledge himself a Frenchman after Louis Philippe's Government yielded (in 1840) to the verdict of Europe on the Eastern question without striking a blow. During the last years of his life his health was bad. He died suddenly of apoplexy while on leave in Paris.[2]

[1]Expressions of Gottfried Keller's.

[2]The inscription on his tombstone in the cemetery of Montmartre, directions for which were contained in his will, shows what a hold Milan had on him to the last. It runs:ARRIGO BEYLEMILANESESCRISSEAMOVISSEANN. LIX M. IIMORI IL XXIII MARZOM.D.CCC.XLII.

[2]The inscription on his tombstone in the cemetery of Montmartre, directions for which were contained in his will, shows what a hold Milan had on him to the last. It runs:

ARRIGO BEYLEMILANESESCRISSEAMOVISSEANN. LIX M. IIMORI IL XXIII MARZOM.D.CCC.XLII.

Henri Beyle's is, without doubt, one of the most complex minds of the rich period to which he belongs. What chiefly distinguishes him from his brethren of the Romantic School is his direct intellectual descent from the severely rational sensationalistic philosophers of the eighteenth century. Not even in any short youthful or transition period is there a trace to be found in his soul of the Romantic reverence for religious tradition so prevalent in his day. All his life long he was the unfaltering philosophic antagonist of everything in the great Romantic movement which was of the nature of a reaction against the spirit of the eighteenth century. He was absolutely uninfluenced by Chateaubriand and Madame de Staël—was neither a colourist like the former nor eloquent like the latter; and absolutely uninfluenced by André Chénier, Hugo, and Lamartine—for he was wanting in the sense of metre, and was neither lyric nor pathetic. His models as a Romantic writer were not French; and his allegiance to Condillac and Helvetius, philosphers despised by the Romanticists of every country, never for a moment wavered, even at the time when the prejudice against them was universal.

He was a passionate atheist; that is to say, there was in his conviction that the world is not governed by any God the Father, as it were an element of enmity towards the being in whom he did not believe, an indignation at the horrors of life, which found expression in the sad and witty saying: "What excuses God is that he does not exist." Beyle never let slip an opportunity of displaying his dislike of so-called revealed religion. If he had occasion to write "the one true religion," he did not forget to add in parenthesis "(the reader's);" and when he touched on the subject of Christian morality, he was fond of remarking that it might be reduced to the calculation: "It is advisable not to eat truffles; they give you a stomach-ache."

As moral philosopher (and private individual) he was a pronounced epicurean. He acknowledged no mainspring of action but self-interest, that is to say, the desire of pleasure and the fear of pain; and, in his opinion, no other was necessary to explain even so-called heroic actions, since fear of self-contempt—i.e.fear of something that is painful—is quite enough to make a man, let us say, jump into the water to save another.[1]By virtuous actions, he understands actions which are attended with inconvenience or suffering to the actor, but are beneficial to others.

Psychological phenomena engrossed his attention to the exclusion of everything else; as the observant traveller, as the student of old chronicles, as the author of novels and stories, he was the psychologist, and that alone. His one constant study was the human soul, and he is one of the first modern thinkers who regard history as being in its essence psychology. But to Beyle, with his utilitarian philosophy, the science of the human soul and the science of happiness are one and the same thing. All his thoughts turn on happiness. By a man's character he understood the particular manner of seeking happiness which had become habitual to him; and the reason of his pronounced partiality to the Italians as a people was, that Italian men and women seemed to him to have found the most certain and direct way to happiness.

A man of an independent, original, ardent nature, he regarded it as the first condition of happiness to be one's self. Everywhere throughout his works we find, endlessly varied, the same warning: Be distrustful! Believe only what you have seen; admire nothing that does not appeal to you personally; always take it for granted that your neighbour has been paid to lie! The charge which he never wearies of bringing against the French is that they are too vain to know what happiness is, or rather, that they are unsusceptible to any higher happiness than that of gratified vanity, which he, personally, values very cheaply. According to Beyle, the Frenchman is perpetually asking his neighbour if he, the questioner, is feeling pleasure, is happy, &c.; he dare not decide the question for himself. The fear of not being like others, or of what others will say, is, in Beyle's opinion, the Frenchman's dominant feeling. He himself, on the contrary, not content with his natural originality, cherished a dislike of resembling others which led him into oddity and affectation. The man who was constantly ridiculing others for thinking of the opinion of their neighbours, who loved and exalted frankness, self-forgetfulness, straightforwardness, and simple-mindedness, was constantly keeping guard over himself, observing himself, prescribing to himself such duties as defiance of this neighbour, revenge upon that—and not neglecting to fulfil them. The thought of what his neighbour might say or do plagued him quite as much as it plagued the veriest philistine, merely with this difference, that the philistine was haunted by the thought of his neighbour because he desired to imitate him, Beyle because he wished to defy or avoid him. This eternal antagonism to the philistine is a genuinely Romantic trait. And it is also characteristically Romantic, that the man who was perpetually preaching and lauding naturalness and unconstraint should all his life have had a passion for concealment, disguise, and mystification, for hiding his personal experiences and thoughts under layer upon layer of wrappings and drapery.

Beyle's early years had been passed in profound spiritual solitude. An overflowing fount of feeling had been turned inwards. The child who had lost his mother, and who hated and was hated by his father, learned early to look upon himself as different from others—no doubt also as superior to others, though he defined his superiority as unlikeness.[2]He was conscious that this unlikeness would exclude him from any general sympathy and prevent his being generally understood. Hence his desire that it were possible for him to write his books in a language which should only be understood by a chosen few—a sacred language. Hence also his wish to find "un lecteur unique, unique dans tous les sens," and his dedication ofLa Chartreuse de Parme: "To the happy few."

This, too, was the real source of the inclination to concealment. Not only did Beyle publish all his books under a pseudonym (all, with one exception, under the name ofDe Stendhal, presumably derived from Stendal in Prussia, the birthplace of Winckelmann), but in many of them,De l'Amour_among the rest, the pseudonymous author assumes any number of second pseudonyms. Any sentiment which he does not care to acknowledge as his own, any anecdote which might shed light upon his private life, is laid to the account of an Albéric, or a Lisio, or the amiable Colonel So and So. And he has given himself as many occupations as names; now he is a cavalry officer, now an ironmonger, now a customs officer, now a commercial traveller; here he figures as a man, there as a woman; at one time he is of noble, at another of plebeian birth; at one time English, at another Italian. He would have liked to write in a cipher language for the initiated. This delight in leading his readers on the wrong track is in part to be ascribed to the secretiveness of the diplomatist; but in his private correspondence it was also due to a suspicion of the police which almost amounted to a mania. In his youth Beyle had made acquaintance with both Napoleon's and the Austrian police, and he always retained a fear of his letters being seized and opened. Therefore he hardly ever signed a private letter with his name. I have counted in his correspondence more than seventy pseudonymous signatures, varying from the strangest to the most ordinary names—Conickphile, Arnolphe II, C. de Seyssel, Chopin d'Ornonville, Toricelli, François Durand, &c., &c. He sometimes subscribes himself captain, sometimes marquis, sometimes engineer; sometimes gives his age, or the name of his street and number of his house. Grenoble he calls Culars, Civita Vecchia, Abeille. It amuses him at times to append a misleading indication of locality to his fictitious signature: for example, Théodore Bernard (du Rhône); he actually signs such a document as a public petition to Louis Philippe's Government for a new coat-of-arms for France:

Olagnier,De Voiron (Isère).

Such satisfaction did it give him to make himself unrecognisable and hold himself aloof, that the words,Odi profanum vulgus et arceo, may be employed to express what to him was certainly one condition of happiness.

What did he himself regard as its conditions?—In his early days, evidently daring action and passionate love. The thrill with which a man, in his unbounded devotion to a cause or another man, risks his life; and the tremor communicated to the soul by happy love—these to him were the supreme moments of human existence. Writing of Milan in the introduction toLa Chartreuse, he observes characteristically: "The departure of the last Austrian regiment marked the downfall of the old ideas. It became the fashion for men to hazard their lives. They saw that in order to be happy after centuries of hypocrisy and vapidity, they must love something with real passion, and be capable, on occasion, of risking their lives."

These two passions, love of war and love of woman, were in Beyle's case only two expressions of one fundamental passion, namely, love for what he was wont to callle divin imprévu—the passion which makes a poet of him. How war, especially war as conducted by Napoleon, satisfied his craving, requires no explanation. How women, and especially Italian women, satisfied it, Beyle tells us himself. In a letter from Milan, dated 4th September 1820, he writes: "As I have spent fifteen years in Paris, nothing on earth leaves me so completely indifferent as a pretty Frenchwoman. And my dislike of the commonplace and the affected often carries me beyond mere indifférence. When I meet a young Frenchwoman who has had the misfortune to have been well brought up, I am at once reminded of my own home and my sisters' upbringing; I foresee not only all her movements, but the most fugitive shades of her thoughts. That is why I am partial to bad company; it offers far more of the unforeseen. If I know myself at all, this is the chord in my soul which people and things in Italy set vibrating—the women first and foremost. Imagine my delight when I found out, what no writer of travels had deprived me of the pleasure of discovering, namely, that in that country it is in good society that there is most of the unforeseen. Nothing deters these remarkable geniuses except want of money or pure impossibility; if prejudices still exist, it is only in the lower classes."

In other words, what Beyle loves best is reckless energy, both in action and emotion—energy, whether revealing itself as the irresistibleness of the military genius or the boundless tenderness of the loving woman. Therefore he, the cold, dry cynic, positively worshipped Napoleon.[3]Therefore he loved the women of Milan. Therefore he understood and depicted the life of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy much better even than modern Italian life. A work which he long purposed writing was aHistory of Energy in Italy; and it is not too much to say that his Italian Chronicles, copied, adapted, or imitated from old manuscripts, are equivalent to a psychological analysis of Italian energy.

One utterance will suffice to show that the same love of the unforeseen which had irresistibly attracted him to the war, made of him, when the war was over, a traveller, an emigrant, a cosmopolitan. In a letter in which he tells that he has been transferred to another post and is going unwillingly because of the tender ties which bind him to the place where he is living, he expressly mentions the pleasure which he nevertheless involuntarily feels, "the moment there is any talk of travelling and seeing new life." And it is equally evident that the same love of the unforeseen, the same strong personality, the same recklessness, or, taking it in a profounder sense, genius, which attracted him to woman and made him love more passionately and tenderly than others, reveals itself in the devotion to music and plastic art which made of him the enthusiastic dilettante, cicerone, and biographer. His love for Cimarosa and Correggio, Ariosto and Byron, was a passion. Take his attitude to Byron. His published criticism of the great English poet was severe and cold; he was haughty in personal intercourse with him, disputed with him on the subject of Napoleon, &c.; he actually left unanswered a most charming letter which Byron wrote him seven years after their meeting, because he fancied there was a trace of hypocrisy in the English poet's defence of Sir Walter Scott. But observe the way in which, when he is writing unreservedly, he describes his feelings on the occasion of his first meeting with Byron: "I was at the time wildly enthusiastic on the subject ofLara. My second look no longer showed me Lord Byron as he really was, but the author ofLaraas I thought he ought to be. When the conversation in the box flagged, Monsieur de Brême tried to get me to speak; but I simply could not; I was too full of awe and tenderness. If I had dared, I should have kissed Lord Byron's hand and burst into tears.... My tenderness made me urge him to take a carriage."[4]

Many other men in every age and country have loved war and travel, women and art; but what is peculiarly characteristic and distinctly modern in Beyle is his tendency and his ability to examine himself in the moment of action or of passion. He is constantly observing himself, has, so to speak, constantly his hand on his pulse; and with unfailing coolness he renders account to himself of his condition under all different circumstances, and draws a whole chain of general inferences from it. Let us follow him into a battle. During the cannonade at Bautzen he writes in his journal:

"Between twelve and three we see remarkably well all that can be seen of a battle, that is to say, nothing. The entertainment consists in one's being slightly [the "slightly" is very characteristic] excited by the certainty that something dreadful is happening before one's eyes. The majestic roar of the cannons contributes greatly to this effect; if they made a whistling sound I do not believe that the same degree of emotion would be produced. The whistle might be as terrible, but could not be so grand."

Or let us listen to him when he is in love. He writes:—

OF THE BIRTH OF LOVE.What takes place in the soul is:1. Admiration.2. One says to one's self: "What happiness it would be to kiss her, to be kissed by her, &c."3. Hope.One studies the perfections of the object of one's admiration ... the eyes of even the most reserved women flush in the moment of hope; the passion is so vehement, the pleasure so ardent, that it betrays itself by unmistakable signs.4. Love is born.To love is to have pleasure in seeing, touching, perceiving by all the senses, in as close contact as possible, a lovable person who loves us.5. The first crystallisation begins.One takes pleasure in adorning with a thousand perfections the woman of whose love one is sure; one rehearses all the details of one's happiness with infinite satisfaction.Allow the brain of a lover to work for twenty-four hours, and the result will resemble what happens at Salzburg when a leafless branch is let down into the deserted depths of the salt mines. When it is drawn up again two or three months later, it is covered with sparkling crystals; the smallest twigs, those that are not thicker than a titmouse's claw, are decked with myriads of dazzling, twinkling diamonds; the original branch is unrecognisable. What I denominate crystallisation is the operation of the mind which, from everything that presents itself, draws the discovery of fresh perfections in the beloved object. A traveller speaks of the coolness of the orange groves near Genoa during the scorching summer heat—what a pleasure it would be to enjoy their coolness with her!... This phenomenon which I take the liberty of naming crystallisation, is a product of the nature which ordains that we shall feel pleasure and that the blood shall rush to our heads, of the feeling that our pleasure increases with the perfections of the beloved object, and of the idea: she is mine. The savage has not time to proceed further than the first step. He feels pleasure, but the energy of his brain is employed in the chase of the deer which is to provide him with food.... The man who is passionately in love sees every perfection in the woman he loves; nevertheless his attention may still be distracted, for the mind tires of everything that is monotonous, even of perfect happiness. But then comes what rivets attention:6. Doubt is born.After ten or twelve looks or any other series of actions have inspired the lover with hope and strengthened his hope ... he demands more positive proofs of his happiness. Coldness, indifference, or even anger is displayed if he shows too much assurance.... He begins to doubt his certainty of the happiness he had promised himself. He determines to solace himself with the other pleasures of life, but finds that they no longer exist for him. Fear of a dreadful misfortune attacks him, and his attention is concentrated.7. Second crystallisation.Its diamonds are confirmations of the idea: She loves me. Every quarter of an hour during the night which follows the birth of doubt, the lover, after a moment of terrible suffering, says to himself: Yes, she loves me; and he discovers new charms. Then doubt attacks him again; he sits up, forgets to breathe, asks himself: But does she really love me? And in the midst of these distressing and delightful reflections the poor lover feels with ever greater certainty: She would give me pleasures which she alone in all the world is capable of giving me."

OF THE BIRTH OF LOVE.

What takes place in the soul is:

1. Admiration.

2. One says to one's self: "What happiness it would be to kiss her, to be kissed by her, &c."

3. Hope.

One studies the perfections of the object of one's admiration ... the eyes of even the most reserved women flush in the moment of hope; the passion is so vehement, the pleasure so ardent, that it betrays itself by unmistakable signs.

4. Love is born.

To love is to have pleasure in seeing, touching, perceiving by all the senses, in as close contact as possible, a lovable person who loves us.

5. The first crystallisation begins.

One takes pleasure in adorning with a thousand perfections the woman of whose love one is sure; one rehearses all the details of one's happiness with infinite satisfaction.

Allow the brain of a lover to work for twenty-four hours, and the result will resemble what happens at Salzburg when a leafless branch is let down into the deserted depths of the salt mines. When it is drawn up again two or three months later, it is covered with sparkling crystals; the smallest twigs, those that are not thicker than a titmouse's claw, are decked with myriads of dazzling, twinkling diamonds; the original branch is unrecognisable. What I denominate crystallisation is the operation of the mind which, from everything that presents itself, draws the discovery of fresh perfections in the beloved object. A traveller speaks of the coolness of the orange groves near Genoa during the scorching summer heat—what a pleasure it would be to enjoy their coolness with her!... This phenomenon which I take the liberty of naming crystallisation, is a product of the nature which ordains that we shall feel pleasure and that the blood shall rush to our heads, of the feeling that our pleasure increases with the perfections of the beloved object, and of the idea: she is mine. The savage has not time to proceed further than the first step. He feels pleasure, but the energy of his brain is employed in the chase of the deer which is to provide him with food.... The man who is passionately in love sees every perfection in the woman he loves; nevertheless his attention may still be distracted, for the mind tires of everything that is monotonous, even of perfect happiness. But then comes what rivets attention:

6. Doubt is born.

After ten or twelve looks or any other series of actions have inspired the lover with hope and strengthened his hope ... he demands more positive proofs of his happiness. Coldness, indifference, or even anger is displayed if he shows too much assurance.... He begins to doubt his certainty of the happiness he had promised himself. He determines to solace himself with the other pleasures of life, but finds that they no longer exist for him. Fear of a dreadful misfortune attacks him, and his attention is concentrated.

7. Second crystallisation.

Its diamonds are confirmations of the idea: She loves me. Every quarter of an hour during the night which follows the birth of doubt, the lover, after a moment of terrible suffering, says to himself: Yes, she loves me; and he discovers new charms. Then doubt attacks him again; he sits up, forgets to breathe, asks himself: But does she really love me? And in the midst of these distressing and delightful reflections the poor lover feels with ever greater certainty: She would give me pleasures which she alone in all the world is capable of giving me."

Few such acute and delicate analyses of a passion exist. Not without reason have Beyle's descriptions of what happens in the human soul when it is under the influence of a passion, reminded his best critics, Taine and Bourget, of the third part of Spinoza's Ethics, the masterlyDe Affectibus. In this soldier, administrator, diplomatist, and lover there was a good deal of the philosopher. He endeavoured to resolve every phenomenon of emotional life into its elements, and, on the other hand, he showed the connection between the ideas and emotions, which, united into a system, constitute the disposition and character of the individual. He paid as much attention to the comparative strength of the emotions as to the variety of their connections and concatenations; he traced peculiarities of character to the deepest lying national and climatic causes; he sketched a psychology of race; and, though he did not adhere to strictly scientific methods, there was a strong scientific tendency in his psychological studies. He loved to define by the aid of numbers, measure, weight. Writing of a king's visit to a little town, he describes the procession, the Te Deum and clouds of incense within the church, the salvoes of artillery outside, and concludes: "The peasants were beside themselves with joy and piety;one such day undoes the work of a hundred issues of the Jacobin newspapers." In one of his books, an exiled revolutionist is telling how the revolt he headed failed because he would not consent to the execution of three men, and would not divide among his followers seven or eight millions of francs contained in a box of which he had the key. "Who wills the end must will the means," says Beyle's hero; "if, instead of being an atom, I were a power,I would hang three men to save four,"[5]—a stupid and indefensible theory, by the way, based on the childish premise that any four men are of more value than any three.

It is plain enough that in Beyle's case the final condition of happiness was understanding. The real aim and object of all his endeavour was a clear understanding of the state of his own mind, and insight into the mechanism of the human soul generally. He was of opinion that prosperity, happiness in love, happiness generally, clears the understanding and sharpens the critical faculty, but was equally convinced that nothing contributes so much to make a man unhappy as want of clear-sightedness. In a letter to a friend, dated Moscow, 1812, he writes characteristically: "The happiness you now enjoy ought to lead you back naturally to the principles of pureBeylism. I read Rousseau'sConfessionslast week. It was simply for want of two or threeBeyleanprinciples that he was so unhappy.The mania of seeing duties and virtues everywheremade his style pedantic, his life miserable. After three weeks of friendly intercourse with a man—crash! the duties of friendship, &c." Two years afterwards the man in question has forgotten him; Rousseau seeks and finds some pessimistic explanation.Beylismwould have told him: "Two bodies approach each other; warmth and a fermentation result; but every such state is transitory. It is a flower to be voluptuously enjoyed." These words contain a fragment of excellent practical philosophy, and would testify to an unusually well-balanced mind if the practice of their writer's life had corresponded to his theory. But although Beyle was by nature a robust sensualist, and had accustomed himself to a cynical boldness of expression (he shocked George Sand by his cynicism when she and De Musset met him on their way to Italy), and although as a thinker he was what he required a philosopher to be, namely, clear-headed, unimpressionable, and free from illusions (he used to say that to have been a banker was to have gone through the best preparatory school for philosophy), there lay behind the robust temperament and the dryness of the logician an artistic receptivity to every impression, an irritability and feminine sensitiveness which did not fall far short of Rousseau's. And this sensitiveness Beyle retained to the end of his life. In the autobiography (Vie de Henri Brulard) which was found amongst his papers, we come upon the following confession: "My sensitiveness is excessive; what only grazes another man's skin draws blood from me. Such was I in 1799; such am I in 1840. But I have learned to hide it all under an irony which the vulgar do not understand."

Seldom has a character combined so great a love of spontaneity and straightforwardness with so much calculation and subterfuge; seldom has a mind been so truthful and at the same time so addicted to dissimulation, so ardent in its hatred of hypocrisy and yet so lacking in openness and straightforwardness.

[1]See Beyle's dissertation on the subject in a most interesting letter, dated 28th December 1829.

[2]In a letter of July 16, 1813, he writes: "If the so-called superiority is only a superiority of some few degrees, it makes its possessor amiable and attractive to others—see Fontenelle. If it is more, it destroys every relation between him and other men. This is the unfortunate position in which the superior man, or, to speak more correctly, the man who is different from others, finds himself. Those who surround him can contribute nothing to his happiness. The praise of all these people would very soon disgust me, and their criticism would gall me."And in the fourth chapter ofLa Chartreuse de Parmewe read: "His comrades found out that Fabrice was veryunlikethemselves, at which they took umbrage; he, on the contrary, began to have a very friendly feeling towards them."

And in the fourth chapter ofLa Chartreuse de Parmewe read: "His comrades found out that Fabrice was veryunlikethemselves, at which they took umbrage; he, on the contrary, began to have a very friendly feeling towards them."

[3]In the letter which he wrote, but did not send, to Byron, he writes of Napoleon as "le héros que j'ai adoré." And a letter of 10th July 1818 contains the following lyrical outburst—probably the only one in his twenty volumes: "O Sainte-Hélène! roc désormais si célèbre, tu es l'écueil de la gloire anglaise." We are reminded of Hugo and Heine.

[4]For references to Lord Byron in Beyle's works, see the essay "Lord Byron en Italie" in the volume entitledRacine et Shakespeare, 261; andLettres à ses Amis, i. 273, &c.: ii. 71, &c.

[5]Rouge et Noir, i. 105; ii. 45.

Prior to 1830 Beyle published no imaginative work of any importance except a novel entitledArmance, an unsuccessful book, the hero of which, a gifted young man, makes the woman he loves unhappy, because he suffers from a half-physical, half-mental ailment, the nature of which is not precisely defined, but which appears to resemble that which played a part in the lives of Swift and Kierkegaard. The year 1830, epoch-making in history, is also epoch-making in Beyle's literary career. It is the year in which he writes or plans both his great novels—Le Rouge et le Noir, published in 1831, andLa Chartreuse de Parme, which was not completed till 1839, when it was published simultaneously with the most important of his Italian Chronicles,L'Abbesse de Castro.

Both of the novels deal with the period immediately succeeding Napoleon's fall, and both deal with it in the same spirit. The motto of both might be the passage from De Musset'sConfession d'un Enfant du Sièclequoted inThe Reaction in France: "And when the young men talked of glory they were answered: Become priests! and when they talked of honour: Become priests! and when they talked of hope, of love, of power, of life, it was always the same: Become priests!" The scene ofRouge et Noiris laid in France, that ofLa Chartreusein Italy, but in both books the principal character is a young man with a secret enthusiasm for Napoleon, who would have been happy if he could have fought and distinguished himself under his hero in the bright sunlight of life, but who, now that that hero has fallen, has no chance of making a career except by playing the hypocrite. In this art the two young men gradually develop a remarkable degree of skill. Julien and Fabrice are cut out for cavalry officers; nevertheless both become ecclesiastics; the one passes through a Catholic seminary, the other rises to be a bishop. Not without reason have Beyle's novels been called handbooks of hypocrisy. The fundamental idea inspiring them is the profound disgust and indignation which the spectacle of triumphant hypocrisy aroused in their author. Desiring to work off this feeling he gave vent to it by simply, without any display of indignation, representing hypocrisy as the ruling power of the day, to which every one who desired to rise was compelled to do homage. And he tries to play the modern Macchiavelli by frequently applauding his heroes when their attempts at impenetrable hypocrisy succeed, and expressing disapproval when they allow themselves to be surprised or carried away, and unguardedly show themselves as they are. A certain unpleasant forcedness is inseparable from this ironic style of narration.[1]

As Beyle's was essentially a reasoning mind, with a gift of purely philosophic observation, externalities did not impress him strongly, and he had little skill in depicting them. His one interest is in emotional and intellectual processes, and, himself an adept in the observation of these processes, he endows almost all his characters with the same skill. They as a rule have an understanding of what is happening in their own souls which far surpasses that derived by ordinary mortals from experience. This conditions the peculiar construction of Beyle's novels, which consist in great part of connected monologues that are at times several pages long. He reveals all the silent working of his characters' minds, and lends words to their inmost thoughts. His monologues are never the lyric, dithyrambic outbursts which George Sand's often are; they are the questions and answers—short and concise, though entering into minute details—by which silent reflection progresses.

The fundamental characteristic of Beyle's principal personages, who, measured by the current standards of morality, have no conscience and no morals, is, that they have evolved a moral standard for themselves. This is what every human being ought to be capable of doing, but what only the most highly developed attain to; and it is this capacity of theirs which gives Beyle's characters their remarkable superiority over other characters whom we have met with in books or in real life. They keep an ideal, which they have created for themselves, constantly before their eyes, endeavour to follow it, and have no peace until they have won self-respect. Hence Julien, who is executed for an atrocious attempt to murder a defenceless woman, is able to comfort himself in the hour of his death with the thought that his life has not been a lonely life; the idea of "duty" has been constantly present with him.

It is evident that Beyle found this feature which he has bestowed on his heroes in his own character. In a letter written in 1820, after remarking that he detests large hotels because of the incivility shown in them to travellers, he adds: "A day in the course of which I have been in a passion is a lost day for me; and yet when I am insolently treated I imagine that I shall be despised if I do not get angry." This is precisely the manner in which Julien and Fabrice reason. With some such thought in his mind Julien compels himself to lay his hand caressingly on Madame de Rênal's, Fabrice compels himself defiantly to repeat the true but contemptuous words he had used in speaking of the flight of the French soldiers at Waterloo. Julien is French, and acts with full consciousness of what he is about; Fabrice is Italian and naïve, but they both possess the quality to which we may give the name of moral productivity. Julien says to himself in prison: "The duty which I, rightly or wrongly, prescribed to myself, has been like the trunk of a strong tree against which I have leaned during the storm"; the light-hearted Fabrice, reproaching himself with a momentary feeling of fear, says to himself: "My aunt tells me that what I need most is to learn to forgive myself. I am always comparing myself with a perfect model, a being who cannot possibly exist." Mademoiselle de la Mole inRouge et Noirand Mosca inLa Chartreuse de Parmeare distinguished by the same superiority and self-reliance. Mosca, a character in whom Beyle's contemporaries naïvely saw a portrait of Metternich, is, in spite of his position as prime minister of a small legitimist state, quite as free from prejudice in his views of the system he serves as Beyle's young heroes are. The object of his private hero-worship is Napoleon, in whose army he held a commission in his youth. He jests as he puts on the broad yellow ribbon of his order. "It is not for us to destroy the prestige of power; the French newspapers are doing that quite fast enough;the reverence maniawill scarcely last out our time."

But whether the personages described be eminently or only ordinarily gifted human beings, the manner in which their inner life is revealed is unique. We not only see into their souls, but we perceive (as in the writings of no other author) the psychological laws which oblige them to act or feel as they do. No other novelist offers his readers so much of the pleasure which is produced by perfect understanding.

Madame de Renal loves Julien, her children's tutor. We are told that "she discovered with shame and alarm that she loved her children more than everbecause they were so devoted to Julien." Mathilde de la Mole tortures Julien by confiding to him her feelings for her former lovers. "If molten lead had been injected into his veins he would not have suffered so much. How was the poor fellow to guess that it wasbecause she was talking to himthat it gave Mademoiselle de la Mole so much pleasure to recall her flirtations with Monsieur de Caylus and Monsieur de Luz?" Both these passages elucidate a psychological law.

Julien has entered the Church from ambitious motives, and secretly detests the profession he has embraced. On the occasion of some festival he sees a young bishop kneeling in the village church, surrounded by charming young girls who are lost in admiration of his beautiful lace, his distinguished manners, and his refined, gentle face. "At this sight the last remnant of our hero's reason vanished.At that moment he would, in all good faith, have fought in the cause of the Inquisition." The addition "in all good faith" is especially admirable. A parallel passage is to be found inLa Chartreuse. After the death of a Prince whom he has always despised and who has actually been poisoned by his (Mosca's) mistress, Mosca has been obliged to put himself at the head of the troops and quell a revolt against the young Prince, whose character is as despicable as his predecessor's. In the letter in which he communicates the occurrence to his mistress, he writes: "But the comical part of the matter is that I, at my age, actually had a moment of enthusiasm whilst I was making my speech to the guard and tearing the epaulettes from the shoulders of that coward, General P.At that moment I would, without hesitation, have given my life for the Prince. I confess now that it would have been a very foolish way of ending it." In both these passages we are shown with remarkable sagacity how an artificial enthusiasm dazzles and is, as it were, caught by infection.

No other novelist approaches Beyle in the gift of unveiling the secret struggles of ideas and of the emotions which the ideas produce. He shows us, as if through a microscope, or in an anatomical preparation where the minutest veins are made visible by the injection of colouring matter, the fluctuations of the feelings of happiness and unhappiness in acting, suffering human beings, and also their relative strength. Mosca has received an anonymous letter which tells him that his mistress loves another. This information, which he has several reasons for believing to be correct, at first utterly unmans him. Then, as a sensible man and a diplomatist, he involuntarily begins to take the letter itself into consideration and to speculate as to its probable writer. He determines that it has been composed by the Prince. "This problem solved,the little feeling of pleasure produced by the obviously correct guesswas soon effaced by the return in full force of the painful mental apparition of his rival's fresh, youthful grace." Beyle has not neglected to note the momentary interruption of the pangs of jealousy by the satisfaction of discovery.—In the course of a few days Julien is to be executed. Meanwhile he is receiving constant visits from the woman he loves, but from whom he has been separated for years, and is absorbed by love to the exclusion of all thought of his imminent fate." One strange effect of this strong and perfectly unfeigned passion wasthat Madame de Renal almost shared his carelessness and gentle gaiety. This last bold touch speaks to me of extraordinarily profound observation. Beyle has correctly felt and expressed the power of a happy, absorbing passion to banish all gloomy thoughts (even the thought of certain death) as soon as they attempt to intrude themselves; he knows that passion wrestling with the idea of approaching calamity renders it powerless, when it does not succeed in dismissing it as utterly incredible. It is such passages as these which make other novelists seem shallow in comparison with Beyle.

His characters are never simple, straightforward beings; yet he manages to impart to them, to the women as well as the men, a peculiar imprint of nobility. They possess a certain genuine, though distorted heroism, a certain strength of aspiration which elevates all their emotions; and in the hour of trial they show that they have finer feelings and stouter hearts than the generality of human beings. Observe some of the little characteristics with which he stamps his women. Of Madame de Rénal inRouge et Noirwe are told: "Hers was one of those noble and enthusiastic souls which feel almost as keen remorse for not having performed a magnanimous action of which they have perceived the possibility, as for having committed a crime." Mathilde de la Mole says: "I feel myself on a plane with everything that is audacious and great.... What great action has not seemed foolishness at the moment when it was being ventured on? It is not till it is accomplished that it seems possible to the ordinary mortal." In these two short quotations, two uncommon female characters of opposite types, the self-sacrificing and the foolhardy, are outlined with the hand of a master. We feel that Beyle was absolutely correct when, in his letter to Balzac, he defines his artistic method as follows: "I take some person or other whom I know well; I allow him or her to retain the fundamental traits of his or her character—ensuite je lui donne plus d'esprit."

Of the two novels,Le Rouge et le Noir, the scene of which is laid in France, is unmistakably the better; inLa Chartreuse de Parmewe only occasionally feel that we are treading the firm ground of reality. Beyle constructed his own Italy upon the foundation of the fantastically interpreted experiences of his youth, and upon us moderns this Italy produces an impression of untrustworthiness. Both in his novel and in his essays he shows that the Italian mind, by reason of its quality of vivid imagination, is much more plagued by suspicions and delusions than the French, but that in compensation its pleasures are more intense and more lasting, and that it possesses a keener sense of beauty and less vanity. We are every now and then surprised by observations in the domain of racial psychology, which, provided they are correct (which I believe them to be), are extraordinarily acute. We are told, for instance, of the Duchess of Sanseverina, that, although she herself had employed poison to make away with an enemy, she was almost beside herself with horror when she heard that the man she loved was in danger of being poisoned. "The moral reflection did not occur to her which would at once have suggested itself to a woman educated in one of those religions of the North which permit personal examination: 'I employed poison and am therefore punished by poison.' In Italy this species of reflection in a moment of tragic passion would seem as foolishly out of place as a pun would in Paris in similar circumstances." What evidently attracted Beyle most profoundly in the Italian character was its purely pagan basis, which none of the ancient or medieval religions had really affected. But, in spite of the excellence of its racial psychology,La Chartreuse de Parmeis less to the taste of the modern reader thanLe Rouge et le Noirfrom the fact of its containing more of the purely extrinsic Romanticism of its day in the shape of disguises, poisonings and assassinations, prison and flight scenes, &c. A deeper-seated, intrinsic Romanticism is common to both books.

In many ways Beyle is extremely modern; his constant prophecy, "I shall be read about 1880," has been accurately fulfilled; nevertheless, both in his emotional life and in his delineation of character, he is distinctly a Romanticist. It is to be observed, however, that his Romanticism is the Romanticism of a powerful and of a critical mind; it is the element of enthusiasm to the verge of madness and of tenderness to the pitch of self-sacrifice, that is sometimes found in characters the distinguishing features of which are sense and firmness. In Beyle's essentially self-conscious characters this Romanticism acts like a powerful explosive. It is enclosed in a hard, firm body, but there it retains its power. A blow, and the dynamite shatters its casing and spreads death and destruction around—vide_Julien, the Duchess of Sanseverina, &c. At times these characters appear rather to belong to that sixteenth century which Beyle studied so devoutly than to the nineteenth. Beyle himself remarks of Fabrice that his first inspiration was quite in the spirit of the sixteenth century; and Mathilde is represented as living her whole life in that spirit. But with this Romanticism of energy and daring deeds Beyle combines the form of Romantic enthusiasm peculiar to the France of 1830. His Julien, the gifted plebeian who is kept from rising by the spirit of the Restoration period, who feels himself eclipsed by the all-prevailing gilded mediocrity, is consumed by hunger and thirst for adventures and impressions, and employs, when he is reduced to impotent hatred, every possible means to raise himself above his original social position, but remains, even when he is for the moment successful, at war with his surroundings and unsatisfied. As the melancholic rebel, as the vengeance-breathing plebeian, asl'homme malheureux en guerre avec la société(Beyle's own name for him), he is a brother, about the same age but more prudent, of the step-children of society whom Hugo paints—Didier, Gilbert, Ruy Blas; of the hero of Alexandre Dumas' youth, Antony the bastard; of De Musset's Frank, George Sand's Lélia, and Balzac's Rastignac.

As a stylist, Beyle is directly descended from the prose writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He formed his style upon Montesquieu's; he occasionally reminds us of Chamfort; he is an admirer of Paul Louis Courier, who, like himself, exchanged a military for a literary career, and whose perspicuous, classic simplicity of style strongly commended itself to him. But when Courier made it his chief aim to attain to perfect harmony and pellucidness of style, when, praising an ancient author, he said of him that he would have let Pompey win the battle of Pharsalus if he could thereby have rounded his own period better, he adopted the standpoint farthest removed from Beyle's. Beyle the stylist has no sense for either colour or form. He neither could nor would write for the eye; the picture was nothing to him in comparison with the thought; he never made even the slightest attempt to write in the manner of Chateaubriand or Hugo. And just as little did he appeal to the ear; poetic prose was an abomination to him; he detested the style of Madame de Staël'sCorinne, and scoffed at that of George Sand's novels. It was in his scorn of poetic eloquence that he penned the well-known sentence in his letter to Balzac: "When I was writingLa ChartreuseI used to read two or three pages of theCode civileevery morning, to help me to catch the proper tone and to be perfectly natural; I do not wish to fascinate the reader's mind by artificial means." An author could hardly express greater or more unreasonable contempt for the artistic. Nevertheless, Beyle has artistic qualities. Though the construction of his books is wretched—the drawing of them, so to speak, bad—many of the details are painted with a masterly touch. Though his style is not in the least musical—which is curious in the case of such a worshipper of Italian music—unforgettable sentences abound in his pages. He was not master of the art of writing a page, but he had the genius which sets its stamp on a word or a descriptive phrase. In this respect he is the antipodes of George Sand; her page is always much superior to her word; Beyle's word is far better than his page. He had a genuine admiration for Balzac, but a horror of his style. InMémoires d'un Touristehe expresses the opinion that Balzac first wrote his novels in sensible language, and then decked them out in the ornamental Romantic style with such phrases as "The snow is falling in my heart," &c. Beyle's own style has the merits and the defects which are the inevitable results of his philosophic and abruptly intermittent mode of thought. It is rich in ideas and guiltless of ornamentation, but it is slipshod and jerky.[2]A horror of emptiness and vagueness is its distinguishing and truly great virtue; writing so full of well-digested matter as his is rare.

Beyle often said that only pedants and priests talk about death; he was not afraid of it, but he looked upon it as a sad and ugly thing of which it becomes us best to speak as little as possible. When in 1842 he died suddenly, as he had hoped he might, his name was almost unknown to the public. Only three people attended his funeral, at which not a word was spoken. Such notices of him as appeared in the newspapers, though well-intentioned, only proved how little understood he was by those who appreciated him most. But since then his fame has steadily increased. At first he was regarded as a more or less affectedly eccentric original; and at a later period, when his great gifts were acknowledged, he was still looked upon as an isolated figure, as a paradoxical, unfruitful genius. I, for my part, see in him not only one of the chief representatives of the generation of 1830, but a necessary link in the great intellectual movement of the century; for as a psychologist his successor and the continuer of his work was no less a man than Taine, and as an author his successor and disciple was Prosper Mérimée.[3]

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