Egoists, A Book of Supermen / Stendhal, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Anatole France, Huysmans, Barrès, Nietzsche, Blake, Ibsen, Stirner, and Ernest Hello

by James Huneker

I

The fanciful notion that psychical delicacy is accompanied by a corresponding physical exterior should have received a death-blow in the presence of Henry Beyle, better known as Stendhal. Chopin, Shelley, Byron and Cardinal Newman did not in personal appearance contradict their verse, prose and music; but Stendhal, possessing an exquisite sensibility, was, as Hector Berlioz cruelly wrote in his Memoirs: "A little pot-bellied man with a spiteful smile, who tried to look grave." Sainte-Beuve is more explicit. "Physically his figure, though not short, soon grew thick-set and heavy, his neck short and full-blooded. His fleshy face was framed in dark curly hair and whiskers, which before his death were assisted by art. His forehead was fine: the nose turned up, and somewhat Calmuck in shape. His lower lip, which projected a little, betrayed his tendency to scoff. His eyes were rather small but very bright, deeply set in their cavities, and pleasing when he smiled. His hands, of which he was proud, were small and daintily shaped. In the last years of his life he grew heavy and apoplectic. But he always took great pains to conceal the symptoms of physical decay even from his own friends."

Henri Monnier, who caricatured him, apparently in a gross manner, denied that he had departed far from his model. Some one said that Stendhal looked like an apothecary—Homais, presumably, or M. Prudhomme. His maternal grandfather, Doctor Gagnon, assured him when a youth that he was ugly, but he consolingly added that no one would reproach him for his ugliness. The piercing and brilliant eye that like a mountain lake could be both still and stormy, his eloquent and ironical mouth, pugnacious bearing, Celtic profile, big shoulders, and well-modelled leg made an ensemble, if not alluring, at least striking. No man with a face capable of a hundred shades of expression can be ugly. Furthermore, Stendhal was a charming causeur, bold, copious, witty. With his conversation, he drolly remarked, he paid his way into society. And this demigod or monster, as he was alternately named by his admirers and enemies, could be the most impassioned of lovers. His life long he was in love; Prosper Mérimée declares he never encountered such furious devotion to love. It was his master passion. Not Napoleon, not his personal ambitions, not even Italy, were such factors in Stendhal's life as his attachments. His career was a sentimental education. This ugly man with the undistinguished features was a haughty cavalier, an intellectual Don Juan, a tender, sighing swain, a sensualist, and ever lyric where the feminine was concerned. But once seated, pen in hand, the wise, worldly cynic was again master. "My head is a magic-lantern," he said. And his literary style is on the surface as unattractive as were the features of the man; the inner ear for the rhythms and sonorities of prose was missing. That is the first paradox in the Beyle-Stendhal case.

Few writers in the nineteenth century were more neglected; yet, what a chain of great critics his work begot. Commencing with Goethe in 1818, who, after reading Rome, Naples, and Florence, wrote that the Frenchman attracted and repulsed him, interested and annoyed him, but it was impossible to separate himself from the book until its last page. What makes the opinion remarkable is that Goethe calmly noted Stendhal's plagiarism of his own Italian Journey. About 1831 Goethe was given Le Rouge et le Noir and told Eckermann of its worth in warm terms. After Goethe another world-hero praised Stendhal's La Chartreuse de Parme: Balzac literally exploded a bouquet of pyrotechnics, calling the novel a masterpiece of observation, and extolling the Waterloo picture. Sainte-Beuve was more cautious. He dubbed Stendhal a "romantic hussar," and said that he was devoid of invention; a literary Uhlan, for men of letters, not for the public. Shortly after his sudden death, M. Bussière wrote in the Revue des Deux Mondes of Stendhal's "clandestine celebrity." Taine's trumpet-call in 1857 proclaimed him as the great psychologue of his century. And later, in his English Literature, Taine wrote: "His talents and ideas were premature, his admirable divinations not understood. Under the exterior of a conversationalist and a man of the world Stendhal explained the most esoteric mechanisms—a scientist who noted, decomposed, deduced; he first marked the fundamental causes of nationality, climate, temperament; he was the naturalist who classified and weighed forces and taught us to open our eyes." Taine was deeply influenced by Stendhal; read carefully his Italian Pilgrimage, and afterward Thomas Graindorge. He so persistently preached Stendhalism—beylisme, as its author preferred to term his vagrant philosophy—that Sainte-Beuve reproved him. Melchior de Vogüé said that Stendhal's heart had been fabricated under the Directory and from the same wood as Barras and Talleyrand. Brunetière saw in him the perfect expression of romantic and anti-social individualism. Caro spoke of his "serious blague," while Victor Hugo found him "somniferous." But Mérimée, though openly disavowing discipleship, acknowledged privately the abiding impression made upon him by the companionship of Beyle. 'Much of Mérimée is Stendhal better composed, better written.

About 1880 Zola, searching a literary pedigree for his newly-born Naturalism, pitched upon Stendhal to head the movement. The first Romantic—he employed the term Romanticism before the rest—the first literary Impressionist, the initiator of Individualism, Stendhal forged many formulas, was a matrix of genres, literary and psychologic. Paul Bourget's Essays in Contemporary Psychology definitely placed Beyle in the niche he now occupies. This was in 1883. Since then the swelling chorus headed by Tolstoy, Georg Brandes, and the amiable fanatics who exhumed at Grenoble his posthumous work, have given to the study of Stendhal fresh life. We see how much Nietzsche owed to Stendhal; see in Dostoïevsky's Raskolnikow-Crime and Punishment—a Russian Julien Sorel; note that Bourget, from Le Disciple to Sensations d'Italie, is compounded of his forerunner, the dilettante and cosmopolitan who wrote Promenades dans Rome and Lamiel. What would Maurice Barrès and his "culte du Moi" have been without Stendhal—who employed before him the famous phrase "deracination"? Amiel, sick-willed thinker, did not alone invent: "A landscape is a state of soul"; Stendhal had spoken of a landscape not alone sufficing; it needs a moral or historic interest. Before Schopenhauer he described Beauty as a promise of happiness; and he invented the romance of the petty European Principality. Meredith followed him, as Robert Louis Stevenson in his Prince Otto patterned after Meredith. The painter-novelist Fromentin mellowed Stendhal's procedure; and dare we conceive of Meredith or Henry James composing their work without having had a complete cognizance of Beyle-Stendhal? The Egoist is beylisme of a superior artistry; while in America Henry B. Fuller shows sympathy for Beyle in his Chevalier Pensieri-Vani and its sequel. Surely the Prorege of Arcopia had read the Chartreuse. And with Edith Wharton the Stendhal touch is not absent. In England, after the dull essay by Hayward (prefixed to E. P. Robbin's excellent translation of Chartreuse), Maurice Hewlett contributed an eloquent introduction to a new edition of the Chartreuse and calls him "a man cloaked in ice and fire." Anna Hampton Brewster was possibly the first American essayist to introduce to us Stendhal in her St. Martin's Summer. Saintsbury, Dowden, Benjamin Wells, Count Lützow have since written of him; and in Germany the Stendhal cult is growing, thanks to Arthur Schurig, L. Spach, and Friedrick von Oppeln-Bronikowski.

It has been mistaken criticism to range Beyle as only a "literary" man. He despised the profession of literature, remarking that he wrote as one smokes a cigar. His diaries and letters, the testimony of his biographer, Colomb, and his friend Mérimée, betray this pose—a greater poser and mystificateur it would be difficult to find. He laboured like a slave over his material, and if he affected to take the Civil Code as his model of style it nettled him, nevertheless, when anyone decried his prose. His friend Jacquemont spoke of his detestable style of a grocer; Balzac called him to account for his carelessness. Flattered, astounded, as was Stendhal by the panegyric of Balzac, his letter of thanks shows that the reproof cut deeply. He abused Chateaubriand, Madame de Staël, and George Sand for their highly coloured imagery and flowing manner. He even jeered at Balzac, saying that if he—Beyle—had written "It snows in my heart," or some such romantic figure, Balzac would then have praised his style.

Thanks to the labours of Casimir Stryienski and his colleagues, we may study the different drafts Stendhal made of his novels. He seldom improved by recasting. The truth is that his dry, naked method of narration, despite its clumsiness, despite the absence of plan, is excellently adapted to the expression of his ideas. He is a psychologue. He deals with soul-stuff. An eighteenth-century man in his general ideas and feelings, he followed the seventeenth century and Montesquieu; he derives from Montaigne and Chamfort, and his philosophy is coloured by a study of Condillac, Hobbes, Helvétius, Cabanis, Destutt Tracy, and Machiavelli. He is a descendant of Diderot and the Encyclopædists, a philosophe of the salons, a petit maître, a materialist for whom nothing exists but his ideas and sensations. A French epicurean, his pendulum swings between love and war—the adoration of energy and the adoration of pleasure. What complicates his problem is the mixture of warrior and psychologist. That the man who followed Napoleon through several of his campaigns, serving successfully as a practical commissary and fighter, should have been an adorer of women, was less strange than that he should have proved to be the possessor of such vibrating sensibility. Jules Lemaitre sees him as "a grand man of action paralysed little by little because of his incomparable analysis." Yet he never betrayed unreadiness when confronted by peril. He read Voltaire and Plato during the burning of Moscow—which he described as a beautiful spectacle—and he never failed to present himself before his kinsman and patron, Marshal Daru, with a clean-shaved face, even when the Grand Army was a mass of stragglers.

"You are a man of heart," said Daru, Frenchman in that phrase. When Napoleon demanded five millions of francs from a German province, Stendhal—who adopted this pen-name from the archæologist Winckelmann's birthplace, a Prussian town—raised seven millions and was in consequence execrated by the people. Napoleon asked on receiving the money the name of the agent, adding, "c'est bien!" We are constrained to believe Mérimée's assertion that Stendhal was the soul of honour, and incapable of baseness, after this proof. At a time when plunder was the order of the day's doings, the poor young aide-de-camp could have pocketed with ease at least a million of the excess tax. He did not do this, nor did he, in his letters or memoirs, betray any remorse for his honesty.

Sainte-Beuve said that Beyle was the dupe of his fear of being duped. This was confirmed by Mérimée in the concise little study prefixed to the Correspondence. It is doubtful if these two men were drawn to each other save by a certain contemptuous way of viewing mankind. Stendhal was the more sentimental of the pair; he frequently reproached Mérimée for his cold heart. He had also a greater sense of humour. That each distrusted the other is not to be denied. Augustin Filon, in his brochure on Mérimée, said that "the influence exercised by Stendhal on Mérimée during the decisive years in which his literary eclecticism was formed, was considerable, even more than Mérimée himself was aware." But the author of Carmen was a much finer artist. The Danish critic, Georg Brandes, has described Beyle's relation to Balzac as "that of the reflective to the observant mind; of the thinker in art to the seer. We see into the hearts of Balzac's characters, into the 'dark-red mill of passion' which is the motive force of their action; Beyle's characters receive their impulse from the head, the 'open light-and-sound chamber'; the reason being that Beyle was a logician, and Balzac a man of an effusively rich animal nature. Beyle stands to Victor Hugo in much the same position as Leonardo da Vinci to Michaelangelo. Hugo's plastic imagination creates a supernaturally colossal and muscular humanity fixed in an eternal attitude of struggle and suffering; Beyle's mysterious, complicated, refined intellect produces a small series of male and female portraits, which exercise an almost magic fascination on us with their far-away, enigmatic expressions, and their sweet, wicked smile. Beyle is the metaphysician among the French authors of his day, as Leonardo was the metaphysician among the great painters of the Renaissance."

According to Bourget, Beyle's advent into letters marked the "tragic dawn of pessimism." But is it precise to call him a pessimist? He was of too vigorous a temper, too healthy in body, to be classed with the decadents. His was the soul of a sixteenth-century Italian, one who had read and practised the cheerful scepticism of Montaigne. As he served bravely when a soldier, so, stout and subtle in after life, he waged war with the blue devils—his chief foe. Disease weakened his physique, weakened his mentality, yet he fought life to its dull end. He was pursued by the secret police, and this led him to all sorts of comical disguises and pseudonyms. And to the last he experienced a childish delight in the invention of odd names for himself.

Félix Fénéon, in speaking of Arthur Rimbaud, asserted that his work was, perhaps, "outside of literature." This, with some modification, may be said of Beyle. His stories are always interesting; they may ramble and halt, digress and wander into strange places; but the psychologic vision of the writer never weakens. His chief concern is the mind or soul of his characters. He hitches his kite to earth, yet there is the paper air-ship floating above you, lending a touch of the ideal to his most matter-of-fact tales. He uses both the microscope and scalpel. He writes, as has been too often said, indifferently; his formal sense is nearly nil; much of his art criticism mere gossip; he has little feeling for colour; yet he describes a soul and its manifold movements in precise terms, and while he is at furthest remove from symbolism, he often has an irritating spiritual suggestiveness. The analogue here to plastic art—he, the least plastic of writers—is unescapable. Stendhal, whatever else he may be, is an incomparable etcher of character. His acid phrases "bite" his arbitrary lines deeply; the sharp contrasts of black and white enable him to portray, without the fiery-hued rhetoric of either Chateaubriand or Hugo, the finest split shades of thought and emotion. Never colour, only nuance—and the slash and sweep of a drastic imagination.

He was an inveterate illusionist in all that concerned himself; even with himself he was not always sincere—and he usually wrote of himself. His many books are a masquerade behind which one discerns the posture of the mocker, the sensibility of a reversed idealist, and the spirit of a bitter analyst. This sensibility must not be confounded with the sensibilité of a Maurice de Guérin. Rather it is the morbid sensitiveness of a Swift combined with an unusual receptivity to sentimental and artistic impressions. Professor Walter Raleigh thus, describes the sensibility of those times: "The sensibility that came into vogue during the eighteenth century was of a finer grain than its modern counterpart. It studied delicacy, and sought a cultivated enjoyment in evanescent shades of feeling, and the fantasies of unsubstantial grief." Vanity ruled in Stendhal. Who shall say how much his unyielding spirit suffered because of his poverty, his enormous ambitions? His motto might have been: Blessed are the proud of spirit, for they shall inherit the Kingdom of Earth. He wrote in 1819: "I have had three passions in my life. Ambition—1800-1811; love for a woman who deceived me, 1811-1818; and in 1818 a new passion." But then he was ever on the verge of a new passion, ever deceived—at least he believed himself to be—and he, the fearless theoretician of passion, often was, he has admitted, in practice the timid amateur. He planned the attack upon a woman's heart as a general plans the taking of an enemy's citadel. He wrote L'Amour for himself. He defined the rules of the game, but shivered when he saw the battle-field. Magnificent he was in precept, though not always in action. He was for this reason never blasé, despite continual grumblings over his ennui. In his later years at Cività Vecchia he yearned for companionship like a girl, and, a despiser of Paris and the Parisians, he suffered from the nostalgia of the boulevard. He adored Milan and the Milanese, yet Italy finally proved too much for his nerves; J'ai tant vu le soleil, he confessed. Contradictory and fantastic, he hated all authority. Mérimée puts down to the account of the sour old abbé Raillane, who taught him, the distaste he entertained for the Church of Rome. Yet he enjoyed its æsthetic side. He was its admirer his life long, notwithstanding his gibes and irreligious jests, just as he was a Frenchman by reason of his capacity for reaction under depressing circumstances. But how account for his monstrous hatred for his father? The elder Beyle was penurious and as hard as flint. He nearly starved his son, for whom he had no affection. Henry could not see him salute his mother without loathing him. She read Dante in the original, and her son assured himself that there was Italian blood on her side of the house. The youth's hatred, too, of his aunt Séraphie almost became a mania. It has possibly enriched fiction by the portrait of Gina of the resilient temperament, the delicious Duchess of Sanseverina. All that she is, his aunt Séraphie was not, and with characteristic perversity he makes her enamoured of her nephew Fabrice del Dongo. Did he not say that parents are our first enemies when we enter the world?

His criticisms of music and painting are chiefly interesting for what they tell us of his temperament. He called himself "observer of the human heart," and was taken by a cautious listener for a police spy. He seldom signed the same name twice to his letters. He delighted to boast of various avocations; little wonder the Milanese police drove him out of the city. He said that to be a good philosopher one must be sec, and without illusions. Perspicacious, romantic, delicate in his attitude toward women, he could be rough, violent, and suspicious. He scandalised George Sand, delighted Alfred de Musset; Madame Lamartine refused to receive him in her drawing-room at Rome. His intercourse with Byron was pleasant. He disliked Walter Scott and called him a hypocrite—possibly because there is no freedom in his love descriptions. Lord Byron in a long letter expostulated with Stendhal, defending his good friend, Scott; but Stendhal never quite believed in the poet's sincerity—indeed, suspecting himself, he suspected other men's motives. He had stage-fright when he first met Byron—whom he worshipped. A tremulous soul his, in a rude envelope. At Venice he might have made the acquaintance of young Arthur Schopenhauer and Leopardi, but he was too much interested in the place to care for new faces.

He said that without passion there is neither virtue nor vice. (Taine made a variation on this theme.) A dagger-thrust is a dignified gesture when prompted by passion. After the Napoleonic disaster, Stendhal had lost all his hopes of referment; he kept his temper admirably, though occasionally calling his old chief bad names. It was a period of the flat, stale, platitudinous, and bourgeois. "In the nineteenth century one must be either a monster or a sheep," wrote Beyle to Byron. A patriot is either a dolt or a rogue! My country is where there are most people like me—Cosmopolis! The only excuse for God is that he does not exist! Verse was invented to aid the memory! A volume of maxims, witty and immoral, might be gathered from the writings of Stendhal that would equal Rivarol and Rochefoucauld. "I require three or four cubic feet of new ideas per day, as a steamboat requires coal," he told Romain Colomb. What energy, what lassitude this man possessed! He spoke English—though he wrote it imperfectly—and Italian; the latter excellently because of his long residence in Italy.

Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil, described Stendhal as "that remarkable man who, with a Napoleonic tempo, traversed his Europe, in fact several centuries of the European soul, as a surveyor and discoverer thereof. It has required two generations to overtake him one way or other; to divine long afterward some of the riddles that perplexed and enraptured him—this strange Epicurean and man of interrogation, the last great psychologist of France." He also spoke of him as "Stendhal, who has, perhaps, had the most profound eyes and ears of any Frenchman of this century."

Stendhal said that Shakespeare knew the human heart better than Racine; yet despite his English preferences, Stendhal is a psychologist of the Racinien school. When an English company of players went to Paris in 1822, Stendhal defended them by pen and in person. He was chagrined that his fellow-countrymen should hiss Othello or The School for Scandal. He despised chauvinisme, he the ideal globe-trotter. And he was contradictory enough to have understood Tennyson's "That man's the best cosmopolite who loves his native country best." He scornfully remarked that in 1819 Parisian literary logic could be summed up thus: "This man does not agree with me, therefore he is a fool; he criticises my book, he is my enemy; therefore a thief, an assassin, a brigand, and forger." Narrow-mindedness must never be imputed to Stendhal. Nor was he a modest man—modesty that virtue of the mediocre.

How much Tolstoy thought of the Frenchman may be found in his declaration that all he knew about war he learned first from Stendhal. "I will speak of him only as the author of the Chartreuse de Parme and Le Rouge et le Noir. These are two great, inimitable works of art. I am indebted for much to Stendhal. He taught me to understand war. Read once more in the Chartreuse de Parme his account of the battle of Waterloo. Who before him had so described war—that is, as it is in reality?" In 1854 they said Balzac and Hugo; in 1886, Balzac and Stendhal. Some day it may be Stendhal and Tolstoy. The Russian with his slow, patient amassing of little facts but follows Stendhal's chaplet of anecdotes. The latter said that the novel should be a mirror that moves along the highway; a novel, he writes elsewhere, is like a bow—the violin which gives out the sound is the soul of the reader. And Goncourt assimilated this method with surprising results. Stendhal first etched the soul of the new Superman, the exalted young man and woman—Julien Sorel and Matilde de la Môle. They are both immoralists. Exceptional souls, in real life they might have seen the inside of a prison. Stendhal is the original of the one; the other is the source of latter-day feminine souls in revolt, the souls of Ibsen and Strindberg. Laclos's Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Marivaux he has remoulded—Valmont is a prototype of Julien Sorel.

J. J. Weiss has said that profound immorality is probably an attribute common to all great observers of human nature. It would require a devil's advocate of unusual acuity to prove Stendhal a moral man or writer. His philosophy is materialistic. He wrote for the "happy few" and longed for a hundred readers, and wished his readers to be those amiable, unhappy souls who are neither moral nor hypocritical. His egoism brought him no surcease from boredom. His diaries and letters and memoirs, so rich in general ideas, are valuable for the student of human nature. The publication of his correspondence was a revelation—a very sincere, human Stendhal came into view. His cosmopolitanism is unaffected; his chapters are mosaics of facts and sensations; his manner of narrative is, as Bourget says, a method of discovery as well as of exposition. His heroes and heroines delve into their motives, note their ideas and sensations. With a few exceptions, modern romancers, novelists, psychologists of fiction seem shallow after Stendhal. Taine confesses to reading Le Rouge et le Noir between thirty and forty times. Stendhal disliked America; to him all things democratic were abhorrent. He loathed the mass, upheld the class; an individualist and aristocrat like Ibsen, he would not recognize the doctrine of equality. The French Revolution was useful only because it evolved a strong man—Napoleon. America, being democratic, would therefore never produce art, tragedy, music, or romantic love.

It is the fate of some men to exist only as a source of inspiration for their fellow-artists. Shelley is the poet's poet, Meredith the novelist's novelist, and Stendhal a storehouse for psychologues. His virile spirit, in these times of vapid socialistic theories, is a sparkling and sinister pool wherein all may dip and be refreshed—perhaps poisoned. He is not orthodox as thinker or artist; but it is a truism that the wicked of a century ago may be the saints of to-morrow. To read him is to increase one's wisdom; he is dangerous only to fools. Like Schopenhauer and Ibsen, he did not flatter his public; now he has his own public. And nothing would have amused this charming and cynical man more than the knowledge of his canonisation in the church of world literature. He gayly predicted that he would be understood about 1880-1900; but his impertinent shadow projects far into the twentieth century. Will he be read in 1935? he has asked. Why not? A monument is to be erected to him in Paris. Rodin has designed the medallion portrait.

II

The labours, during the past twenty years, of Casimir Stryienski, François de Nion, L. Bélugon, Arthur Chuquet, Henry Cordier, Pierre Brun, Ricciotto Canudo, Octave Uzanne, Hugues Rebell—to quote the names of a few devoted Stendhalians—have enabled us to decipher Stendhal's troubled life. M. Stryienski unearthed at Grenoble a mass of manuscript, journals, tales, half-finished novels, and they have been published. Was there any reason to doubt the existence of a Stendhal Club after the appearance of those two interesting books, Soirées du Stendhal Club, by Stryienski? The compact little study in the series, Les Grands Ecrivains Français, by Edouard Rod, and Colomb's biographical notice at the head of Armance, and Stryienski's Etude Biographique are the principal references for Stendhal students. And this, too, despite the evident lack of sympathy in the case of M. Rod. It is a minute, painstaking étude, containing much fair criticism; fervent Stendhalians need to be reminded of their master's defects and of the danger of self-dupery. If Stendhal were alive, he would be the first to mock at his disciples' enthusiasm—the enthusiasm of the parvenu, as he puts it. (He ill concealed his own in the presence of pictorial master-pieces or the ballets of Viganò.) Rod, after admitting the wide influence of Stendhal upon the generations that followed him, patronisingly concludes by a quotation: "Les petits livres ont leurs destinées." What, then, does he call great, if Le Rouge et le Noir and La Chartreuse de Parme are "little books"?

Marie-Henry Beyle was born at Grenoble, Dauphiny, January 23, 1783. He died at Paris, March 23, 1842, stricken on the Rue Neuve des Capucines by apoplexy. Colomb had his dying friend carried to his lodgings. He was buried in Montmartre Cemetery, followed there by Mérimée, Colomb, and one other. Upon his monument is an epitaph composed a short time before he died. It is in Italian and reads: Arrigo Beyle, Milanese. Scrisse, Amò, Visse. Ann. 59. M.2. Mori 2. 23 Marzo. MDCCCXLII. (Harry Beyle, Milanese. Wrote, Loved, Lived. 59 years and 2 months. He died at 2 A.M. on the 23rd of March, 1842.) This bit of mystification was quite in line with Beyle's career. As he was baptised the English Henry, he preferred to be known in death as the Milanese Harry. Pierre Brun says that there was a transposition in the order of Scrisse, Amò, Visse; it should read the reverse. The sculptor David d'Angers made a medallion of the writer in 1825. It is reproduced in the Rod monograph, and his son designed another for the tomb. This singular epitaph of a singular man did not escape the eyes of his enemies. Charles Monselet called him a renegade to his family and country; which is uncritical tomfoolery. Stendhal was a citizen of the world—and to the last a Frenchman. And not one of his cavilling contemporaries risked his life with such unconcern as did this same Beyle in the Napoleonic campaigns. Mérimée has drawn for us the best portrait of Stendhal, Colomb, his earliest companion, wrote the most gossipy life. Stryienski, however, has demonstrated that Colomb attenuated, even erased many expressions of Stendhal's, and that he also attempted to portray his hero in fairer colours. But deep-dyed Stendhalians will not have their master transformed into a tame cat of the Parisian salons. His wickedness is his chief attraction, they think. An oft-quoted saying of Stendhal's has been, Stryienski shows, tampered with: "A party of eight or ten agreeable persons," said Stendhal, "where the conversation is gay and anecdotic, and where weak punch is handed around at half past twelve, is the place where I enjoy myself the most. There, in my element, I infinitely prefer hearing others talk to talking myself. I readily sink back into the silence of happiness; and if I talk, it is only to pay my ticket of admission." What Stendhal wrote was this: "Un salon de huit ou dix personnes dont toutes les femmes ont eu les amants," etc. The touch is unmistakable.

Henry was educated at the Ecole Centrale of Grenoble. When he was ten years of age, Louis XVI was executed, and the precocious boy, to annoy his father, displayed undisguised glee at the news. He served the mass, an altar-boy at the Convent of the Propagation, and revealed unpleasant traits of character. His father he called by a shocking name, but the death of his mother, when he was seven, he never forgot. He loved her in true Stendhalian style. His maiden aunt Séraphie ruled the house of the elder Beyle, and Henry's two sisters, Pauline—the favourite of her brother—and Zenaïde, most tyrannically. His young existence was a cruel battle with his elders, excepting his worthy grandfather, Doctor Gagnon, an esprit fort of the approved eighteenth-century variety. On his book-shelves Henry found Voltaire, Rousseau, d'Holbach, and eagerly absorbed them. A great-aunt taught him that the pride of the Spaniard was the best quality of a man. When he heard of his aunt's death, he threw himself on his knees and passionately thanked the God in whom he had never believed. His father, Chérubin-Joseph Beyle, was chevalier of the Legion of Honor and his family of old though not noble stock. Its sympathies were aristocratic, royalist, while Henry—certainly not a radical in politics—loved to annoy his father by his Jacobin opinions. He in turn was ridiculed by the Dauphinois when he called himself de Stendhal. Not a lovable boy, certainly, and, it is said, scarcely a moral one. At school they nick-named him "la Tour ambulante," because of his thick-set figure. He preferred mathematics to all other studies, as he contemplated entering l'Ecole Polytechnique. November 10, 1799, found him in Paris with letters for his cousins Daru. They proved friendly. He was afterward, through the influence of Pierre Daru, minister of war, made lieutenant of cavalry, commissary and auditor of the Council of State. He served in the Italian campaign, following Napoleon through the Saint Bernard pass two days later. Aide-de-camp of General Michaud, he displayed sang-froid under fire. He was present at Jena and Wagram, and asked, during a day of fierce fighting, "Is that all?" War and love only provoked from this nonchalant person the same question. He was always disappointed by reality; and, as Rod adds, "Is that all?" might be the leit motiv of his life. Forced by sickness to retire to Vienna, he was at the top-notch of his life in Paris and Milan, 1810-1812. He left a brilliant position to rejoin the Emperor in Russia. In 1830 he was nominated consul at Trieste; but Metternich objected because of Stendhal's reputation as a political intrigant in Milan, ten years earlier—a reputation he never deserved. He was sent to Cività Vecchia, where he led a dull existence, punctuated by trips to Rome, and, at long intervals, to Paris. From 1814 to 1820 he lived in Milan, and in love, a friend of Manzoni, Silvio Pellico, Monti. The police drove him back to Paris, and he says it was the deadliest blow to his happiness. For a decade he remained here, leading the life of a man around town, a sublimated gossip, dilettante, surface idler; withal, a hard worker. A sybarite on an inadequate income, he was ever the man of action. Embroiled in feminine intrigues, sanguine, clairvoyant, and a sentimentalist, he seldom contemplated marriage. Once, at Cività Vecchia, a young woman of bourgeois extraction tempted him by her large dot; but inquiries made at Grenoble killed his chances. Indeed, he was not the stuff from which the ideal husband is moulded. He did not entertain a high opinion of matrimony. He said that the Germans had a mania for marriage, an institution which is servitude for men. On a trip down the Rhône, in 1833, he met George Sand and Alfred de Musset going to Italy—to that Venice which was the poet's Waterloo and Pagello's victory. Stendhal behaved so madly, so boisterously, and uttered such paradoxes that he offended Madame Dudevant-Sand, who openly expressed her distaste for him, though admiring his brilliancy. De Musset had a pretty talent for sketching and drew Stendhal dancing at the inn before a servant. It is full of verve. He also wrote some verse about the French consul at Cività Vecchia:

"Où Stendhal, cet esprit charmant,
Remplissait si dévotement
Sa sinécure."

Sinecure it was, though ennui ruled; but he had his memories, and Rome was not far away. In 1832, while at San Pietro in Montorio, he bethought himself of his age. Fifty years would soon arrive. He determined to write his memoirs. And we have the Vie de Henri Brulard, Souvenirs d'Egotisme, and the Journal (1801-1814). In their numerous pages—for he was an indefatigable graphomaniac—may be found the thousand and one experiences in love, war, diplomacy that made up his life. His boasted impassibility, like Flaubert's, does not survive the test of these letters and intimate confessions. Mérimée, too, wrote to Jenny Dacquin without his accustomed mask. Stendhal is the most personal of writers; each novel is Henry Beyle in various situations, making various and familiar gestures.

His presence was welcome in a dozen salons of Paris. He preferred, however, a box at la Scala, listening to Rossini or watching a Viganò ballet, near his beloved Angela. But after seven years Milan was closed to him, and as he was known in a restricted circle at Paris as a writer of power, originality, and as an authority on music and painting, he returned there in 1821. He frequented the salon of Destutt de Tracy, whose ideology and philosophic writings he admired. There he saw General Lafayette and wrote maliciously of this hero, who, though seventy-five, was in love with a Portuguese girl of nineteen. The same desire to startle that animated Baudelaire kept Beyle in hot water. He was a visitor at the home of Madame Cabanis, of M. Cuvier, of Madame Ancelot, Baron Gérard, and Castellane, and on Sundays, at the salon of Etienne Délacluze, the art critic of the Débats, and a daily visitor at Madame Pasta's. He disliked, in his emphatic style, Victor Cousin, Thiers, and his host Délacluze. For Beyle to dislike a man was to announce the fact to the four winds of heaven, and he usually did so with a brace of bon-mots that set all Paris laughing. Naturally, his enemies retaliated. Some disagreeable things were said of him, though none quite so sharp as the remark made by a certain Madame Céline: "Ah! I see M. Beyle is wearing a new coat. Madame Pasta must have had a benefit." This witticism was believed, because of the long friendship between the Italian cantatrice and the young Frenchman. He occupied a small apartment in the same building, though it is said the attachment was platonic.

In 1800 he met, at Milan, Signora Angela Pietragrua. He loved her. Eleven years later, when he returned to Italy, this love was revived. He burst into tears when he saw her again. Quello è il chinese! explained the massive Angela to her father. Even that lovetap did not disconcert the furnace-like affection of Henry. This Angela made him miserable by her coquetries. The feminine characters in his novels and tales are drawn from life. His essay on Love is a centaine of experiences crystallised into maxims and epigrams. This man of too expansive heart, who confessed to trepidation in the presence of a woman he loved, displayed surprising delicacy. Where he could not respect, he could not love. His sensibility was easily hurt; he abhorred the absence of taste. Love was for him a mixture of moonshine, esprit, and physical beauty. A very human man, Henry Beyle, though he never viewed woman exactly from the same angle as did Dante; or, perhaps, his many Beatrices proved geese.

Stryienski relates that, on their return from Italy in 1860, Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie visited Grenoble and, in the municipal library, saw a portrait of Stendhal. "But that is M. Beyle, is it not?" cried the Empress. "How comes his portrait here?" "He was born at Grenoble," responded Gariel, the librarian. She remembered him, this amusing mature friend of her girlhood. The daughters of Madame de Montijo, Eugénie and Paca, met Beyle through Mérimée, who was intimate with their mother. The two girls liked him; he spun for them his best yarns, he initiated them into new games; in a word, he was a welcome guest in the household, and there are two letters in the possession of Auguste Cordier, one addressed to Beyle by E. Guzman y Palafox dated December, 1839, when the future Empress of the French was thirteen; the other from her sister Paca, both affectionate and of a charm. The episode was a pleasant one in the life of Beyle.

Mérimée also arranged a meeting between Victor Hugo and Beyle in 1829 or 1830. Sainte-Beuve was present, and in a letter to Albert Collignon, published in Vie littéraire, 1874, he writes of the pair as two savage cats, their hair bristling, both on the defensive. Hugo knew that Beyle was an enemy of poetry, of the lyric, of the "ideal." The ice was not broken during the evening. Beyle had an antipathy for Hugo, Hugo thoroughly disliked Beyle. And if we had the choice to-day between talking with Hugo or Beyle, is there any doubt as to the selection?—Beyle the raconteur of his day. He was too clear-sighted to harbour any illusions concerning literary folk. Praise from one's colleagues is a brevet of resemblance, he has written. Doesn't this sound like old Dr. Johnson's "The reciprocal civility of authors is one of the most risible scenes in the farce of life"?

III

Prosper Mérimée has told us that his friend and master, Henry Stendhal-Beyle, was wedded to the old-fashioned theory: a man should not be in a woman's company longer than five minutes without making love; granting, of course, that the woman is pretty and pleasing. This idea Stendhal had imbibed when a soldier in the Napoleonic campaign. It was hussar tactics of the First Empire. "Attack, attack, attack," he cries. His book De l'Amour practically sets forth the theory; but like most theoreticians, Stendhal was timid in action. He was a sentimentalist—he the pretended cynic and blasé man of the world. Mérimée acknowledges that much of his own and Stendhal's impassibility was pure posing. Nevertheless, with the exceptions of Goethe and Byron, no writer of eminence in the last century enjoyed such a sentimental education as Stendhal. At Weimar the passionate pilgrim may see a small plaque which contains portraits of the women beloved by Goethe—omitting Frederike Brion. True to the compass of Teutonic sentimentality, Goethe's mother heads the list. Then follow the names of Cornelia, Kätchen Schönkopf, Lotte Buff, Lili Schönemann, Corona Schröter, Frau von Stein, Christiane Vulpius—later Frau von Goethe—Bettina von Arnim, Minna Herzlieb, and Marianne v. Willemer; with their respective birth and death dates. Several other names might have been added, notably that of the Polish pianiste Goethe encountered at Marienbad. The collection is fair-sized, even for a poet who lived as long as Goethe and one who reproached Balzac with digging from a woman's heart each of his novels. To both Goethe and Stendhal the epigram of George Meredith might be applied: "Men may have rounded Seraglio Point. They have not yet doubled Cape Turk."

The wonder is that thus far no devoted Stendhalian has prepared a similar carton with the names and pictures of their master's—dare we say?—victims. Stendhal loved many women, and like Goethe his first love was his mother. For him she was the most precious image of all, and he was jealous of his father. This was at the age of seven; but the precocity of the boy and his exaggerated sensibility must be remembered—which later brought him so much unhappiness and so little joy. A casual examination of the list of his loves, reciprocated or spurned, would make a companion to that of Weimar. Their names are Mélanie Guilbert-Louason, Angela Pietragrua, Mlle. Beretter, the Countess Palffy, Menta, Elisa, Livia B., Madame Azur, Mina de Grisheim, Mme. Jules, and la petite P. The number he loved without consolation was still larger. Despite his hussar manœuvres, Stendhal was easily rebuffed. It is odd that Goethe's and Stendhal's fair ones, upon whom they poured poems and novels, did not die—that is, immediately—on being deserted. Goethe relieved the pain of many partings by writing a poem or a play and seeking fresh faces. Stendhal did the same—substituting a novel or a study or innumerable letters for poems and plays. He believed that one nail drove out another; which is very soothing to masculine vanity. But did any woman break her heart because of his fickleness? Frau von Stein of all the women loved by Goethe probably took his defection seriously. She didn't kill herself, however. He wounded many a heart, yet the majority of his loves married, and apparently happily. Stendhal, ugly as he was, slew his hundreds; they recovered after he had passed on to fresh conquests; a fact that he, with his accustomed sincerity, did not fail to note. Yet this same gallant was among the few in the early years of the nineteenth century to declare for the enfranchisement, physical and spiritual, of woman. He was a féministe. But, in reality, his theory of love resembled that of the writer who said that "it was simple and brief, like a pressure of the hand between sympathetic persons, or a gay luncheon between two friends of which a pleasant memory remains, if not also a gentle gratitude toward the companion." I quote from memory.

It was at Rome that he first resolved to tell the story of his life. In the dust he traced the initials of the beloved ones. In his book he omitted no details. His motto was: la vérité toute nue. If he has not spared himself, he has not spared others. What can the critics, who recently blamed George Moore for his plain speech in his memoirs, say to Stendhal's journals and La Vie de Henri Brulard? Many of the names were at first given with initials or asterisks; Mérimée burned the letters Stendhal sent him, and regretted the act. But the Stendhalians, the young enthusiasts of the Stendhal Club, have supplied the missing names—those of men and women who have been dead half a century and more.

De l'Amour, Stendhal's remarkable study of the love-passion, is marred by the attempt to imprison a sentiment behind the bars of a mathematical formula. He had inherited from his study of Condillac, Helvétius, Tracy, Chamfort the desire for a rigid schematology, for geometrical demonstration. The word "logic" was always on the tip of his tongue, and he probably would have come to blows with Professor Jowett for his dictum, uttered at the close of a lecture: "Logic is neither an art nor a science, but a dodge." Love for Stendhal was without a Beyond. It was a matter of the senses entirely. The soul counted for little, manners for much. A sentimental epicurean, he is the artistic descendant of Benjamin Constant's Adolphe, both by tradition and temperament. Stendhal fell into the mistake of the metaphysician in setting up numerous categorical traps to snare his subject. They are artificial, and yet bear a resemblance to certain Schopenhauerian theories. Both men practised what they did not preach. "Beauty is a promise of happiness," wrote Stendhal, and it was so effective that Baudelaire rewrote it with a slight variation. The "crystallisation" formula of Stendhal occurred to him while down in a salt mine near Salzburg. He saw an elm twig covered with sparkling salt crystals, and he used it as an image to express the love that discerns in the beloved one all perfections. There are several crystallisations during the course of "true love." His book is more autobiographical than scientific; that the writer gleaned the facts from his own heart-experiences adds to the value and veracity of the work. As a catechism for lovers, it is unique; and it was so well received that from 1822 to 1833 there were exactly seventeen copies sold. But it has been plundered by other writers without acknowledgment. Stendhal and Schopenhauer could have shaken hands on the score of their unpopularity—and about 1880 on their sudden recrudescence.

With all his display of worldly wisdom Stendhal really loved but three times in his life; this statement may shock some of his disciples who see in him a second Casanova, but a study of his life will prove it. He had gone to Paris with the established conviction that he must become a Don Juan. That was—comical or shocking as it may sound—his projected profession. Experience soon showed him other aspects. He was too refined, too tender-hearted, to indulge in the conventional dissipations of adolescent mankind. The lunar ray of sentiment was in his brain; if he couldn't idealise a woman, he would leave her. It was his misfortune, the lady's fortune—whoever she might have been—and the world's good luck that he never was married. As a husband he would have been a glorious failure. Mélanie Guilbert-Louason was an actress in Paris, who, after keeping him on tenter-hooks of jealousy, accepted his addresses. He couldn't marry her, because the allowance made by his father did not suffice for himself; besides, she had a daughter by a former marriage. He confesses that lack of money was the chief reason for his timidity with women; a millionaire, he might have been a conquering and detestable hero. Like Frédéric Moreau in L'Education Sentimentale, Stendhal always feared interruption from a stronger suitor, and his fears were usually verified. But he went with Guilbert to Marseilles, where she was acting, and to support himself took a position in a commercial house. That for him meant a grand passion; he loathed business. She married a Russian, Baskow by name. Stendhal was inconsolable for weeks. How he would have applauded the ironical cry of Jules Laforgue's Hamlet: "Stability! stability! thy name is Woman." Although he passed his days embroidering upon the canvas of the Eternal Masculine portraits of the secular sex, Stendhal first said, denying a certain French king, that women never vary.

He fell into abysmal depths of love with Angela Pietragrua at Milan. He was a dashing soldier, and if Angela deceived him he was youthful enough to stand the shock. Eleven years later he revisited Milan and wept when he saw Angela again. He often wept copiously, a relic possibly of eighteenth-century sensibilities. Angela did not weep. She, however, was sufficiently touched to start a fresh affair with her faithful Frenchman. He did not always enjoy smooth sailing. There were a dozen women that either scorned him or else remained unconscious of his sentiments. One memory remained with him to the last—recall his cry of loneliness to Romain Colomb when languishing as a French consul at Cività Vecchia: "I am perishing for want of love!" He thought doubtless of Métilde, wife of General Dembowsky, who from 1818 to 1824 (let us not concern ourselves if these dates coincide with or overlap other love-affairs; Stendhal was very versatile) neither encouraged nor discouraged at Milan the ardent exile. So infatuated was he that he neglected his chances with the actress Viganò, and also with the Countess Kassera. Madame Dembowsky, who afterward did not prove so cruel to the conspirator Ugo Foscolo, allowed Stendhal the inestimable privilege of kissing her hand. He sighed like a schoolboy and trailed after the heartless one from Milan to Florence, from Florence to Rome. The gossip that he was the lover in Paris of the singer Pasta caused the Dembowsky to deny him hope. He was sincerely attached to her. Had she said "Kill yourself," he would have done so. Yes, such a romantic he was. She was born Viscontini and separated from a brutal soldier of a husband. Her cousin, Madame Traversi, was an obstacle in this unhappy passion of Stendhal's. She hated him. Métilde died at the age of thirty-eight, in 1825. Because of her he had replied to Mile. Viganò—when she asked him: "Beyle, they say that you are in love with me!" "They are fooling you." For this he was never forgiven. It is a characteristic note of Stendhalian frankness—Stendhal, who never deceived anyone but himself. Here is a brace of his amiable sayings on the subject of Woman:—

"La fidélité des femmes dans le mariage, lorsqu'il n'y a pas d'amour, est probablement une chose contre nature."

"La seule chose que je voie à blâmer dans la pudeur, c'est de conduire à l'habitude de mentir."

IV

A promenader of souls and cities, Stendhal was a letter-writer of formidable patience; his published correspondence is enormous. How enormous may be seen in the three volumes published at Paris by Charles Bosse, the pages of which number 1,386. These letters begin in 1800, when Stendhal was a precocious youth of seventeen, and end 1842, a few days before his death. There are more than 700 of them, and he must have written more—probably several thousand; for we know that Mérimée destroyed nearly all his correspondence with Stendhal, and we read of 300 written to a Milanese lady—his one grand, because unsuccessful, passion. But a few of these are included, the remainder doubtless having been burned for prudence' sake. The earliest edition of the Stendhal letters appeared in 1855, edited by Prosper Mérimée, with an introduction by the author of Carmen. The present edition is edited by two devoted Stendhalians, Ad. Paupe and P. A. Cheramy. It comprises all the earlier correspondence, the letters printed in the Souvenirs d'Egotisme (1892), some letters never before published, Lettres Intimes (1892), and letters published in the first series of Soirées du Stendhal Club (1905). There are also letters from the archives of the Ministers of the Interior, of War, and of Foreign Affairs—altogether a complete collection, though ugly in appearance, resembling a volume of Congressional reports, but valuable to the Stendhal student.

For the first time the names of his correspondents appear in full. Mérimée suppressed most of them or gave only the initials. We learn who these correspondents were, and there is a general key for the deciphering of the curious names Stendhal bestowed upon them—he was a wag and a mystifier in this respect. His own signature was seldom twice alike. A list is given and reaches the number of one hundred and seventy-nine pseudonyms. Maurice Barrès has written a gentle preface rather in the air, which he entitled: Stendhal's Sentiment of Honour. One passage is worthy of quotation. Barrès asserts that Stendhal never asked whether a sentiment or an act was useful or fecund, but whether it testified to a thrilling energy. Since the pragmatists are claiming the Frenchman as one of their own, this statement may prove revelatory.

The first volume is devoted to his years of apprenticeship (1800-1806) and his active life (1808-1814). The majority of the letters are addressed to his sister, Pauline Beyle, at Grenoble, a sympathetic soul. With the gravity of a young, green philosopher, he addresses to her homilies by the yard. Sixty instructing twenty! He tells her what to read, principally the eighteenth century philosophers: Rousseau, Voltaire, Helvétius, Tracy, Locke—amusing and highly moral reading for a lass—and he never wearies of praising Shakespeare. "I am a Romantic," he says elsewhere; "that is, I prefer Shakespeare to Racine, Byron to Boileau." This worldly-wise youth must have bored his sister. She understood him, however, and as her life at home with a disagreeable and avaricious father was not happy, her correspondence with brother Henry must have been a consolation. He does not scruple to call his father hard names, and recommends his sister not to marry for love but for a comfortable home. She actually did both. Edouard Mounier is another correspondent; also Félix Faure, born in Stendhal's city, Grenoble. We learn much of the Napoleonic campaigns in which Stendhal served, particularly of the burning of Moscow and the disastrous retreat of the French army. Related by an eye-witness whose style is concise, whose power of observation is extraordinary, these letters possess historic value.

All Paris and Milan are in the second volume, The Man of the World and the Dilettante (1815-1830); while The Public Functionary and Novelist are the themes of volume three (1830-1842). The friends with whom Stendhal corresponded were Guizot, Thiers, Balzac, Byron, Walter Scott, Sainte-Beuve, and many distinguished noblemen and men of affairs. He had friends in London, Thomas Moore and Sutton-Sharp among the rest; and he visited England several times. Baron Mareste and Romain Colomb were confidants. Stendhal, with an irony that never deserted him, wrote obituary notices of himself because Jules Janin had jestingly remarked that when Stendhal died he would furnish plenty of good material for the necrologists. The articles in guise of letters sent to M. Stritch of the German Review, London, are tedious reading; besides, there are too many of them.

As a man whose ears and eyes were very close to the whirring of contemporary events, his descriptions of Napoleon and Byron are peculiarly interesting. At first Napoleon had been a demi-god, then he was reviled because with the Corsican's downfall he lost his chances for the future. He had witnessed the coronation and did not forget that Talma had given the young Bonaparte free tickets to the Comédie Française; also that Pope Pius VII. pronounced Latin Italian fashion, thus: Spiritous sanctous. As the Emperor passed by on horseback, cheered by the mobs, "he smiled his smile of the theatre, in which one shows the teeth, but with eyes that smile not." Stendhal tells us that the Emperor had forehead and nose in an unbroken line, a common trait in certain parts of France, he adds.

He first encountered Byron in the year 1812, at Milan. It was in a box of the Scala. He was overcome by the beauty of the poet, by his graciousness. Here we see Stendhal, no longer a soldier or a cynic, but a man of sensibility, almost a hero-worshipper. Byron was agreeable. They met often. When Byron's physician and secretary, Polidori, was arrested by the Milan secret police, Stendhal relates that the Englishman's rage was appalling. Byron resembled Napoleon, declared Stendhal, in his marble wrath. Another time the French author advised Byron, who lived at a distance from the opera house, to take a carriage, as after midnight walking was dangerous in Milan. Coldly though politely Byron asked for some indication of his route and then, during a painful silence, he left poor Stendhal staring after him as he hobbled away in the darkness. Such human touches are worth more than the letters in which the literature of the day is discussed.

Ten years later, from Genoa (1823), Byron wrote Stendhal, whom he apparently liked, thanking him for a notice he had read of himself in the latter's book, Rome, Naples, et Florence. Supreme master of the anecdote, these letters may serve as an introduction to Stendhal's works, though we wish for more of the tender epistles. However, in The Diary, the Journal and the Life of Henri Brulard, one may find copious and frank confessions of Stendhal's love-life. So little of the literary man was in him that at the close of his career, when he had received the Legion of Honor, he was indignant because this was bestowed upon him not in his capacity of public functionary but as a man of letters. Adolphe Paupe, the editor of this bulky correspondence —and who knows how much more material there may be in the Grenoble archives!—fittingly closes his brief introduction with a quotation from a writer the antipodes of Stendhal, the parabolic Barbey d'Aurevilly, who, after calling the correspondence "adorable," adds that it possesses the unheard-of charm of Stendhal's other books, a charm which is inexhaustible. Notwithstanding this eloquence, I prefer the old edition compiled by Mérimée. There is such a thing as too much Stendhal, although every scrap of his writing may be sacred to his disciples.

I am glad, therefore, to note in the second series of the Soirées du Stendhal Club, that the principal Stendhalian—or Beyliste, as some name themselves—Casimir Stryienski, shows a disposition to mock at the antics of over-heated Stendhalians. M. Stryienski, who has been called by Paul Bourget "the man of affairs of the Beyliste family," dislikes the idea of a Stendhal cult and wonders how the ironic and humorous Beyle would have treated the worshippers who wish to make of him a mystic god—which is the proper critical attitude. Beyle-Stendhal would have been the first man to overthrow any altar erected to his worship. The second series, collated by Stryienski and Paul Arbelet, is hardly as novel as the first. The most important article is devoted to the question whether Stendhal dedicated to Napoleon his History of Painting (mostly borrowed from Lanzi's book). The 1817 dedication is enigmatic; it might have meant Napoleon, or Louis XVIII., or the Czar Alexander of Russia. M. Arbelet holds to the latter, as Stendhal was so poor that he hoped for a position as preceptor in Russia and thought by the ambiguity of his dedication to catch the favourable eye of the Czar. Napoleon was at Saint Helena and a hateful king was on the throne of France. Let all three be duped, said to himself the merry Stendhal. That is Arbelet's theory. When in 1854 a new edition of the history appeared, it was headed by a touching, almost tearful dedication to the exile at Saint Helena! Stendhal's executor, Romain Colomb, had found it among the papers of the dead author, and as Napoleon was dead he published it. Evidently Stendhal had written several, and for politic reasons had selected the misleading one of the 1817 edition. Recall Beethoven's magnificent rage when he tore into pieces the dedicatory page of his Eroica Symphony, on hearing that his hero, Napoleon, had crowned himself Emperor. Quite Stendhalian this, Machiavellian, and also time-serving. No doubt he smiled his wicked smile—with tongue in cheek—at the trick, and no doubt his true disciples applaud it. He was the Superman of his day, one who bothered little with moral obligations. His favourite device was a line of verse from an old opera bouffe: "Vengo adesso di Cosmopoli"; and what has a true cosmopolitan, a promenader of cities and prober of souls, in common with such a bourgeois virtue as truth-telling? If, as Metchnikoff asserts, a man is no older than his arteries, then a thinker is only as old as his curiosity. Beyle was ever curious, impertinently so—the Paul Pry of psychologists.

V

His cult grows apace, and like all cults will be overdone. First France, then Italy, and now Germany has succumbed to the novels, memoirs, and delightful gossiping books of travel written by the Frenchman from Grenoble. But what a literary and artistic gold-mine his letters, papers, manuscripts of unfinished novels have proved to men like Casimir Stryienski and the rest. Even in 1909 the Stendhal excavators are busy with their pickers and stealers. Literary Paris becomes enthusiastic when a new batch of correspondence is unearthed at Grenoble or elsewhere. Recently a cahier—incomplete to be sure, but indubitably Stendhal's—was found and printed. It was a section of the famous journal exhumed in the library of Grenoble by Stryienski during 1888. Published in the Mercure de France, it bore the title of Fin du Tour d'Italie en 1811. It consists of brief, almost breathless notes upon Naples, its music, customs, streets, inhabitants. References to Ancona, to the author's second sojourn in Milan, and to his numerous lady-loves—each one of whom he lashed himself into believing unique—are therein. He placed Mozart and Cimarosa above all other composers, and Shakespeare above Racine. Naturally the man who loved Mozart was bound to adore Raphael and Correggio. Lombard and Florentine masters he rated higher than the Dutch. Indeed, he abhorred Rembrandt and Rubens almost as much as William Blake abhorred them, though not for the same reason. Despite his perverse and whimsical spirit, Stendhal was, in the larger sense, all of a piece. His likes and dislikes in art are so many witnesses to the unity of his character.

Maurice Barrès relates that at the age of twenty he was in Rome, where he met in the Villa Medici its director, M. Hébert, the painter (died 1908), who promptly asked the young Frenchman: "Do you admire Stendhal?" and proceeded to explain that the writer of La Chartreuse de Parme was his cousin, and once consul at Cività Vecchia, although he spent most of his time in Rome. Stendhal's Promenades had offended the Pope, so these visits were really stolen ones. Bored to death in the stuffy little town where he represented the French Government, Stendhal had been reproved more than once for the dilatory performance of his duties. Hébert, after warning Barrès not to study him too deeply, described him as an old gentleman of exceeding but capricious esprit. He roamed among the picture galleries, exclaiming joyously before some old Greek marble or knitting his brows in the Sistine Chapel. Raphael was more to his taste than Michaelangelo, as might have been expected from one who went wild over the ballets Viganò. Another anecdote is one that reveals the malicious, almost simian trickiness of Beyle-Stendhal. An English lady, a traveller bent on taking notes for a book about Paris, was shown around the city by Stendhal. Seriously, and with his usual courtesy, he gave her an enormous amount of misinformation, misnaming public buildings, churches, the Louvre, its pictures, and nicknaming well-known personages. All this with the hope that she would reproduce it in print. Not very spirituel, this performance of M. Beyle. He was an admirer of English folk and their literature, and corresponded in a grotesque sort of English with several prominent men and women in London. We find him writing a congratulatory letter to Thomas Moore on his Lalla Rookh, complacently remarking that the ingrained Hebraism of English character and literature made the production of such an exotic poem all the more wonderful. Though he could praise the gew-gaws and tinsel of Moore's mock Orientalism, he openly despised the limpidity of Lamartine's elegiac verse and the rhythmic illuminated thunder of Victor Hugo.

It is not generally known that Stendhal's friend and disciple, Prosper Mérimée, left an anonymous book, of which there are not many examples, though it has been partially reprinted. It is entitled "H. B. [Henry Beyle], par un des quarante, avec un frontispice stupéfiant dessiné et gravé. Eleutheropolis, l'an 1864 du mensonge Nazaréen." Now, there is a "stupefying" drawing, a project for a statue, by Félicien Rops, the etcher. It depicts the new world-city of Eleutheropolis—a Paris raised to the seventh heaven of cosmopolitanism—with Stendhal set in its midst. Rops was evidently contented to take the little pot-bellied caricature of Henri Monnier, which Monnier declared was not exaggerated, and put it on a pedestal. In his familiar and amusing manner the illustrator shows us multitudes from every quarter of the globe travelling by every known method of conveyance. The idea of teeming nationalities is evoked. All sorts and conditions of men and women are hurrying to pay their homage to Stendhal, who, hat in hand, stomach advancing, legs absurdly curving, umbrella under his arm, and his ironical lips compressed, contemplates with his accustomed imperturbability these ardent idolators. He seems to say: "I predicted that I should be understood about 1880."

But if this cartoon of Rops is amusing, the contents of Mérimée's book are equally so, both amusing and blasphemous. Stendhal and Mérimée got on fairly well together. Mérimée tells what he thought of Stendhal. There are shocking passages and witty. An atheist, more because of political reasons than religious, Stendhal relates a story about the death of God from heart disease. Since that time the cosmical machine, he asserted, has been in the hands of his son, an inexperienced youth who, not being an engineer, reversed the levers; hence the disorder in matters mundane.

To prove how out of tune was Stendhal with his times, we have only to read his definitions of romanticism and classicism in his Racine et Shakespeare. He wrote: "Romanticism is the art of presenting to people literary works which in the actual state of their habitudes and beliefs are capable of giving the greatest possible pleasure; classicism, on the contrary, is the art of presenting literature which gave the greatest possible pleasure to their great-grandfathers." He also proclaimed as a corollary to this that every dead classic had at one time been a live romantic. Yet he was far from sympathising, both romantic and realist as he was, with the 1830 romantic movement. Nor did he suspect its potential historical significance; or his own possible significance, despite his clairvoyant prediction. He disliked Hugo, ignored Berlioz, and had no opinion at all on the genius of Delacroix. The painters of 1830, that we knew half a century later as the Barbizon school, he never mentions. We may imagine him abusing the impressionists in his choleric vein. His appreciations of art, while sound—who dare flout Raphael and Correggio?—are narrow. The immense claims made continually by the Stendhalians for their master are balked by evidences of a provincial spirit. Yes; he, the first of the cosmopolitans, the indefatigable globe-trotter, keenest of observers of the human heart, man without a country—he has said, "My country is where there are most people like me"—was often as blindly prejudiced as a dweller in an obscure hamlet. And doesn't this epigram contradict his idea of the proud, lonely man of genius? It may seem to; in reality he was not like a Nietzschian, but a sociable, pleasure-loving man, seldom putting to the test his theories of individualism. He always sought the human quality; the passions of humanity were the prime things of existence for him. A landscape, no matter how lovely, must have a human or a historic interest. The fiercest assassin in the Trastevere district was at least a man of action and not a sheep. "Without passion there is neither virtue nor vice," he preached. Therefore he greatly lauded Benvenuto Cellini. He loathed democracy and a democratic form of government. Brains, not votes, should rule a nation. He sneered at America as being hopelessly utilitarian.

In the preface to his History of Italian Painting he quoted Alfieri: "My only reason for writing was that my gloomy age afforded me no other occupation." From Cività Vecchia he wrote: "It's awful: women here have only one idea, a new Parisian hat. No poetry here or tolerable company—except with prisoners; with whom, as French Consul, I cannot possibly seek friendship." To kill the ennui of his existence he either slipped into Rome for a week or else wrote reams of "copy," most of which he never saw in print. Among certain intellectual circles in Paris he was known and applauded as a man of taste, a dilettante of the seven arts, though his lack of original invention occasionally got him into scrapes. Stendhal might have echoed Molière's "Je prends mon bien où je le trouve"; but he would not have forgotten to remind the dramatic poet that the very witticism was borrowed from Cyrano.

Stryienski's Soirées du Stendhal Club actually presents for the delectation of the Stendhalians parallel columns from Lanzi and Stendhal—so proud are the true believers of the fold that even such evidences of plagiarism do not disconcert them. The cribbing occurs in the general reflections devoted to the Renaissance. It is as plain as a pikestaff. Notwithstanding, we can read Stendhal with more interest than the original. His lively spirit adorns Lanzi's laborious pages.

Beyle's joke about the "reversed engines of Christianity," quoted by Mérimée, and his implacable dislike of the Jesuits (as may be seen in his masterpiece, Le Rouge et le Noir—in those days the Yellow Peril was the Jesuits), did not dull his perception of what the papacy had done for art in Italy. He nearly approaches eloquence in his Philosophy of Art (which Taine appreciated and profited by) when writing of the popes of the Renaissance. He does not fail to note the vivifying and reforming influence of the Church at this period upon the brutality and lusts of the nobility and upon poets and painters. Adoring Raphael as much as he did Napoleon and Byron, he declared that Raphael failed in chiaroscuro and vaunted the superiority of Correggio in this particular. But he did not deign to mention Rembrandt. Nothing Germanic or Northern pleased him. He was a Latin among Latins, and his passion for Italy and the Italians was not assumed. He had asked of his executor that he be buried in the little Protestant cemetery at Rome. Then he changed his mind and ordered that the cemetery of Andilly, near Montmorency, be his last resting-place. But the fates, that burn into ashes the fairest fruits of man's ambitions, dropped Stendhal's remains in the cemetery of Montmartre, Paris, where still stands the prosaic tomb with its falsification of the writer's birth. His epitaph he doubtless discovered when fabricating his life of Haydn. In the composer's case it runs: "Veni, scripsi, vixi." And when we consider the fact that his happiest years were in Milan, that there lived the object of his deepest affection, Angela Pietragrua, this inscription was as sincere as the majority of such marble ingenuities in post-mortem politeness.

With all his critical limitations, Stendhal never gave vent to such ineptitudes as Tolstoy regarding Shakespeare. The Russian, who has spent the latter half of his life bewailing the earlier and more brilliant part, would have been abhorrent to the Frenchman, who died as he had lived, impenitent. Stendhal was a man, not a purveyor of words, or a maker of images. Not poetic, yet he did not fail to value Dante and Angelo. Virile, cynical, sensual, the greatest master of psychology of his age, he believed in action rather than thought. Literature he pretended to detest. Not a spinner of cobwebs, he left no definite system; it remained for Taine to gather together the loose strands of his sane, strong ideas and formulate them. He saw the world clearly, without sentiment—he, the most sentimental of men—and he had a horror of German mole-hill metaphysics. The eighteenth century with its hard logic, its deification of Reason, its picturesque atheism, enlisted Beyle's sympathies. Socialism was for him anathema.

Love and art were his watchwords. His love of art was on a sound basis. Joyous, charming music like Mozart's, Rossini's, Cimarosa's, appealed to him; and Correggio, with his sensuous colouring and voluptuous design, was his favourite painter. He was complex, but he was not morbid. The artistic progenitor of a long line of analysts, supermen, criminals, and æsthetic ninnies, he probably would have disclaimed the entire crowd, including the faithful Stendhalians, because the latter have so widely departed from his canons of simplicity and sunniness in art.

But Stendhal left the soul out of his scheme of life; never did he knock at the gate of her dwelling-place. Believing with Napoleon that because the surgeon's scalpel did not lay bare any trace of the soul, there was none, Stendhal practically denied her existence. For this reason his windows do not open upon eternity. They command fair, charming prospects. Has he not written: "J'ai recherché avec une sensibilité exquise la vue des beaux paysages.... Les paysages étaient comme un archet qui jouait sur mon âme"? He meant his nerves, not his soul. Spiritual overtones are not sounded in his work. A materialist (a singularly unhappy home and maladroit education are to blame for much of his errors in after life), he was, at least, no hypocrite. He loved beautiful art, women, landscapes, brave feats. He confesses, in a letter to Colomb, dated November 25, 1817, to planning a History of Energy in Italy (both Taine and Barrès later transposed the theme to France with varying results). A tissue of contradictions, he somehow or other emerges from the mists and artistic embroilments of the earlier half of the last century a robust, soldierly, yet curious, subtle and enigmatic figure. It is best to employ in describing him his own favourite definition—he was "different." And has he not said that difference engenders hatred?

VI

In his brilliant and much-abused book, A Rebours, the late J.-K. Huysmans describes the antics of a feeble-brained young nobleman who, having saturated himself with Baedeker's London, the novels of Dickens, English roast beef and ale, came to the comical conclusion that he might be disappointed if he crossed the Channel, so after a few hours spent within the hospitable walls of a Parisian English bar he gathered up his plaids, traps, walking-stick, and calmly returned to his home near the French capital. He had travelled to England in an easy-chair, as mentioned by Goldsmith—better after all than not travelling at all. Circumstances condemn many of us to this mode of motion, which comes well within the definition of our great-grandfathers, who called it The Pleasures of the Imagination.

But there are, luckily for them, many who are not compelled to assist at this intellectual Barmecide's feast. They go and they come, and no man says them nay. Whether they see as much as those who voyaged in the more leisurely manner of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is open to doubt. Europe or Asia through a car-window is only a series of rapidly dissolving slides, pictures that live for brief seconds. Modern travel is impressionistic. Nature viewed through a nebulous blur. Our grandfathers, if they didn't go as far as their descendants, contrived to see more, to see a lot of delightful little things, note a myriad of minute traits of the country through which they paced at such a snail's gait. Nowadays we hurriedly glance at the names of railroad stations. The ideal method of locomotion is really that of the pedestrian—shanks'-mare ought to be popular. Vernon Lee spoke thus of our hero: "'Tis the mode of travelling that constituted the delight and matured the genius of Stendhal, king of cosmopolitans and grand master of the psychologic novel."

It is interesting to turn back and flutter the pages of that perennially delightful book, Promenades dans Rome. Italy may truthfully be said to have been engraved upon the author's heart. Under the heading Manner of Travelling From Paris to Rome, dated March 25, 1828, he tells his readers, few but fit, how he made that wonderful trip.

One of the best ways, writes Stendhal, is to take a post-chaise, or a calèche, light and made in Vienna. Carry little baggage. It only means vexation at the various custom-houses, bother with the police—who treat all travellers as spies or suspected persons—and it will surely attract bandits. Besides, prices are instantly doubled when a post-chaise arrives. There is the mail-coach. It rolls along comfortably. In its capacious interior one may sleep, watch the scenery, converse, or read. You can go to Béfort or Basel if you desire to pass the north of la Suisse, or to Pontarlier or Ferney, if desirous of reaching the Simplon. You may take the mail to Lyons or Grenoble, and pass by Mont Cenis; or until Draguignan if you wish to escape the mountains and enter Italy by the beautiful highway, the work of M. de Chabral. You arrive at Nice and pass on to Genoa. This is the ideal route for scenery.

But, continues Stendhal, the most expeditious and the interesting way, the one he usually took, begins with a forty-eight hour ride in the diligence as far as Béfort; a carriage for which you pay a dozen francs will conduct you to Basel. Once there you may take a diligence for Lucerne—that singular and dangerous lake, the theatre of William Tell's exploits, remarks Stendhal impressively (they believed in the Tell legend, those innocent times)—and attain Altdorf. Here Tell and the apple will arouse your imagination. Then Italy may be entered by Saint Gothard, Bellinzona, Como, and Milan. Via the Simplon was more to the taste of our writer. He often took the diligence, which at Basel went to Bern; arriving in the Rhône valley by way of Louèche and Tourtemagne, he would find his baggage, which had gone around by Lausanne, Saint Maurice, and Sion. He tells us that the conductor of the excellent diligence plying between Lausanne and Domo d'Ossola was a superior man; a glimpse of his calm Swiss features drives away all fear of danger. For ten years three times a week this conductor has passed the Simplon. He did not encounter avalanches. Anyhow, the Simplon route is less dangerous than Mont Cenis; there are fewer precipices and the edge of the road is bordered by trees; if the horses ran away the coach would not be overturned into the abyss. And since the opening of the Simplon route, Stendhal gravely notes, only forty travellers have perished, nine of them unhappy Italian soldiers returning from Russia. Are not these details of a savoury simplicity, like the faded odour of sandal-wood which meets your nostrils when you open some old secretary of your grandparents?

Kept by a man from Lyons was a fine inn on the Simplon route in those days. Stendhal never failed to record where could be found good wines, cooking, and clean sheets. He usually paid twelve francs for a carriage to Domo d'Ossola, Lac Majeur (Lago Maggiore) vis-à-vis to the Borromean Islands. Four hours in a boat to Sesto Calende, and five hours in a fast coach—behold, Milan! Or you can reach Milan via Varese. Milan to Mantua in the regular diligence. Thence to Bologna by a carriage, there the mail-coach. You go to Rome by the superb routes of Ancona and Loreto. You must pay thirty or thirty-five francs on the coach between Milan and Bologna. Stendhal assures us that he often found good company in the carriages that traverse the distance from Bologna to Florence. It took two days to cover twenty leagues and cost twenty francs. From Florence to Rome he consumed four or five days, going by Perugia in preference to Siena. Once he travelled in company with three priests, of whom he was suspicious until the ice was broken; then with joyous anecdotes they passed the time, and he is surprised to find these clerical men, who said their prayers openly three times a day without being embarrassed by the presence of strangers, were very human, very companionable. With his accustomed naïve expression of pleasure, he writes that they saved him considerable annoyance at the custom-house.

And to-day, eighty years later, we take a train de luxe at Paris and in thirty hours we are in the Eternal City. It is swifter, more comfortable, and safer, our way of travelling, than Stendhal's, but that we see as much as he did we greatly doubt. The motor-car is an improvement on the mail-coach and the express train; you may, if you will, travel leisurely and privately from Paris to Rome. Or, why not hire a stout little carriage and go through Tuscany in an old-fashioned manner as did the Chevalier de Pensieri-Vani! Few may hope to store as many memories as Stendhal, yet we should see more than the occupants of railroad drawing-rooms that whiz by us on the road to Rome.

VII

Even in our days of hasty production the numerous books of Stendhal provoke respectful consideration. What leisure they had in the first half of the last century! What patience was shown by the industrious man who worked to ward off ennui! He must have written twenty-five volumes. In 1906 the Mercure de France printed nineteen newly discovered letters to his London friend, Sutton Sharpe (Beyle visited London occasionally; he corresponded with Thomas Moore the poet, and once he spent an evening at a club in the company of the humourist Theodore Hook). But the titles of many of his books suffice; the majority of them are negligible. Who wishes to read his lives of Rossini, Haydn, Mozart, Metastasio? His life of Napoleon, posthumously published in 1876, is of more interest; Beyle had seen his subject in the flesh and blood. His Racine et Shakespeare is worth while for the Stendhalian; none but the fanatical kind would care to read the History of Painting in Italy. There is the Correspondence, capital diversion, ringing with Stendhalian wit and prejudice; and Promenades dans Rome is a classic; not inferior are Mémoires d'un Touriste, or Rome, Naples, et Florence. Indeed, the influence of the Promenades has been pronounced. His three finished novels are Armance, Le Rouge et le Noir—which does not derive its title from the gambling game, but opposes the sword and the soutane, red and black—and La Chartreuse de Parme. The short stories show him at his best, his form being enforced to concision, his style suiting the brief passionate recitals of love, crime, intrigue, and adventure—for the most part, old Italian anecdotes recast; as the Italian tales of Hewlett are influenced by Stendhal. L'Abbesse de Castro could hardly have been better done by Mérimée. In the same volume are Les Cenci, Vittoria Accoramboni, Vanina Vanini, and La Duchesse de Palliano, all replete with dramatic excitement and charged with Italian atmosphere. San Francesca a Ripa is a thrilling tale; so are the stories contained in Nouvelles Inédites, Féder (le Mari d'Argent), Le Juif (Filippo Ebreo)—the latter Balzac might have signed; and the unfinished novel, Le Chasseur Vert, which was at first given three other titles: Leuwen, l'Orange de Malte, Les Bois de Prémol. It promised to be a rival to Le Rouge et le Noir. Lucien Leuwen, the young cavalry officer, is Stendhal himself, and he is, like Julien Sorel, the first progenitor of a long line in French fiction; disillusioned youths who, after the electric storms caused by the Napoleonic apparition, end in the sultry dilettantism of Jean, duc d'Esseintes of Huysmans' A Rebours and in the pages of Maurice Barrès. From Beyle to Huysmans is not such a remote modulation as might be imagined. Nor are those sick souls, Goncourt, Charles Demailly and Coriolis, without the taint of beylisme. Lucien Leuwen is a highly organized young man who goes to a small provincial town where his happiness, his one love-affair, is wrecked by the malice of his companions. There is a sincerer strain in the book than in some of its predecessors.

Armance, Stendhal's first attempt at fiction, is unpleasant; the theme is an impossible one—pathology obtrudes its ugly head. Yet, Armance de Zohilhoff is a creature who interests; she was sketched from life, Stendhal tells us, a companion to a lady of left-handed rank. She is an unhappy girl and her marriage to a babilan, Octave de Malivert, is a tragedy. Lamiel, a posthumous novel, published by Casimir Stryienski in 1888, contains an avant-propos by Stendhal dated from Cività Vecchia, May 25, 1840. (His prefaces are masterpieces of sly humour and ironical malice.) It is a very disagreeable fiction—Lamiel is the criminal woman with all the stigmata described by Lombroso in his Female Delinquent. She is wonderfully portrayed with her cruelty, coldness, and ferocity. She, too, like her creator, exclaimed, "Is that all?" after her first bought experience in love. She becomes attached to a scoundrel from the galleys, and sets fire to a palace to avenge his death. She is burned to cinders. A hunchback doctor, Sansfin by name, might have stepped from a page of Le Sage.

The Stendhal heroines betray their paternity. Madame de Renal, who sacrifices all for Julien Sorel, is the softest-hearted, most womanly of his characters. She is of the same sweet, maternal type as Madame Arnoux in Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale, though more impulsive. Her love passages with Julien are the most original in French fiction. Mathilde de la Môle, pedant, frigid, perverse, snobbish, has nevertheless fighting blood in her veins. Lamiel is a caricature of her. What could be more evocative of Salome than her kneeling before Julien's severed head? Clelia Conti in the Chartreuse is like the conventional heroine of Italian romance. She is too sentimental, too prudish with her vow and its sophistical evasion. The queen of Stendhal women is Gina, la duchesse Sanseverina. She makes one of the immortal quartet in nineteenth-century fiction—the other three being Valérie Marneffe, Emma Bovary, and Anna Karénina. Perhaps if Madame de Chasteller in Le Chasseur Vert had been a finished portrait, she might have ranked after Gina in interest. That lovable lady, with the morals of a grande dame out of the Italian Renaissance, will never die. She embodies all the energy, tantalizing charm, and paradox of Beyle. And a more vital woman has not swept through literature since the Elizabethans. At one time he dreamed of conquering the theatre. Adolphe Brisson saw the ébauches for several plays; at least fifteen scenarios or the beginnings of them have been found in his literary remains. Nothing came of his efforts to become a second Molière.

Zola places Le Rouge et le Noir above La Chartreuse de Parme; so does Rod. The first novel is more sombre, more tragic; it contains masterly characterisations, but it is depressing and in spots duller than the Chartreuse. Its author was too absorbed in his own ego to become a master-historian of manners. Yet what a book is the Chartreuse for a long day. What etched landscapes are in it—notably the descriptions of Lake Como! What evocations of enchanting summer afternoons in Italy floating down the mirror-like stream under a blue sky, with the entrancing Duchess! The episodes of Parmesan court intrigue are models of observation and irony. Beyle's pen was never more delightful, it drips honey and gall. He is master of dramatic situations; witness the great scene in which the old Duke, Count Mosca, and Gina participate. At the close you hear the whirring of the theatre curtain. Count Mosca, it is said, was a portrait of Metternich; rather it was Stendhal's friend, Count de Saurau. In sooth, he is also very much like Stendhal—Stendhal humbly awaiting orders from the woman he loves. That Mosca was a tremendous scoundrel we need not doubt; yet, like Metternich and Bismarck, he could be cynical enough to play the game honestly. Despite the rusty melodramatic machinery of the book, its passionate silhouettes, its Pellico prisons, its noble bandit, its poisons, its hair-breadth escapes, duels and assassinations—these we must accept as the slag of Beyle's genius—there is ore rich enough in it to compensate us for the longueurs.

Of his disquisition, De l'Amour, with its famous theory of "crystallisation," much could be written. Not founded on a basic physiological truth as is Schopenhauer's doctrine of love, Beyle's is wider in scope. It deals more with manners than fundamentals. It is a manual of tactics in the art of love by a superior strategist. His knowledge of woman on the social side, at least, is unparalleled. His definitions and classifications are keener, deeper than Michelet's or Balzac's. "Femmes! femmes! vous êtes bien toujours les mêmes," he cries in a letter to a fair correspondent. It is a quotidian truth that few before him had the courage or clairvoyancy to enunciate. Crowded with crisp epigrams and worldly philosophy, this book on Love may be studied without exhausting its wisdom and machiavellianism.

Stendhal as an art or musical critic cannot be taken seriously, though he says some illuminating things; embedded in platitudes may be found shrewd aperçus and flashes of insight; but the trail of the "gifted amateur" is over them all. At a time when Beethoven was in the ascendant, when Berlioz—who hailed from the environs of Grenoble—was in the throes of the "new music," when Bach had been rediscovered, Beyle prattles of Cimarosa. He provoked Berlioz with his praise of Rossini—"les plus irritantes stupidités sur la musique, dont il croyait avoir le secret," wrote Berlioz of the Rossini biography. Lavoix went further: "Ecrivain d'esprit ... fanfaron d'ignorance en musique." Poor Stendhal! He had no flair for the various artistic movements about him, although he had unwittingly originated several. He praised Goethe and Schiller, yet never mentioned Bach, Beethoven, Chopin; music for him meant operatic music, some other "divine adventure" to fill in the background of conversation. Conversation! In that art he was virtuoso. To dine alone was a crime in his eyes. A gourmet, he cared more for talk than eating. He could not make up his mind about Weber's Freischütz, and Meyerbeer he did not very much like; "he is said to be the first pianist of Europe," he wrote; at the time, Liszt and Thalberg were disputing the kingdom of the keyboard. It was Stendhal, so the story goes, who once annoyed Liszt at a musicale in Rome by exclaiming in his most elliptical style: "Mon cher Liszt, pray give us your usual improvisation this evening!"

As a plagiarist Stendhal was a success. He "adapted" from Goethe, translated entire pages from the Edinburgh Review, and the material of his history of Painting in Italy he pilfered from Lanzi. More barefaced still was his wholesale appropriation of Carpani's Haydine, which he coolly made over into French as a life of Haydn. The Italian author protested in a Paduan journal, Giornale dell' Italiana Letteratura, calling Stendhal by his absurd pen-name: "M. Louis-Alexander-César Bombet, soi-disant Français auteur des Haydine." The original book appeared in 1812 at Milan. Stendhal published his plagiarism at Paris, 1814, but asserted that it had been written in 1808. He did not stop at mere piracy, for in 1816 and in an open letter to the Constitutionnel he fabricated a brother for the aforesaid Bombet and wrote an indignant denial of the facts. He spoke of César Bombet as an invalid incapable of defending his good name. The life of Mozart is a very free adaptation from Schlichtegroll's. When Shakespeare, Handel, and Richard Wagner plundered, they plundered magnificently; in comparison, Stendhal's stealings are absurd.

Irritating as are his inconsistencies, his prankishness, his bombastic affectations, and pretensions to a superior immorality, Stendhal's is nevertheless an enduring figure in French literature. His power is now felt in Germany, where it is augmented by Nietzsche's popularity—Nietzsche, who, after Mérimée, was Stendhal's greatest pupil. Pascal had his "abyss," Stendhal had his fear of ennui—it was almost pathologic, this obsession of boredom. One side of his many-sided nature was akin to Pepys, a French Pepys, who chronicled immortal small-beer. However, it is his heart's history that will make this protean old faun eternally youthful. As a prose artist he does not count for much. But in the current of his swift, clear narrative and under the spell of his dry magic and peptonized concision we do not miss the peacock graces and coloured splendours of Flaubert or Chateaubriand. Stendhal delivers himself of a story rapidly; he is all sinew. And he is the most seductive spiller of souls since Saint-Simon.

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[II]

THE BAUDELAIRE LEGEND