The words, read rightly, indicate many things--his adoration of Italy
and Milan, his eccentricity, his scorn of the conventions of society and
the limits of nationality, his adventurous life, his devotion to
literature, and, lastly, the fact that, through all the varieties of his
experience--in the earliest years of his childhood, in his agitated
manhood, in his calm old age--there had never been a moment when he was
not in love.
Beyle's work falls into two distinct groups--the first consisting of his
novels, and the second of his miscellaneous writings, which include
several biographies, a dissertation on Love, some books of criticism and
travel, his letters and various autobiographical fragments. The bulk of
the latter group is large; much of it has only lately seen the light;
and more of it, at present in MS. at the library of Grenoble, is
promised us by the indefatigable editors of the new complete edition
which is now appearing in Paris. The interest of this portion of Beyle's
writings is almost entirely personal: that of his novels is mainly
artistic. It was as a novelist that Beyle first gained his celebrity,
and it is still as a novelist--or rather as the author of _Le Rouge et
Le Noir_ and _La Chartreuse de Parme_ (for an earlier work, _Armance_,
some short stories, and some later posthumous fragments may be left out
of account)--that he is most widely known to-day. These two remarkable
works lose none of their significance if we consider the time at which
they were composed. It was in the full flood of the Romantic revival,
that marvellous hour in the history of French literature when the
tyranny of two centuries was shattered for ever, and a boundless wealth
of inspirations, possibilities, and beauties before undreamt-of suddenly
burst upon the view. It was the hour of Hugo, Vigny, Musset, Gautier,
Balzac, with their new sonorities and golden cadences, their new lyric
passion and dramatic stress, their new virtuosities, their new impulse
towards the strange and the magnificent, their new desire for diversity
and the manifold comprehension of life. But, if we turn to the
contemporaneous pages of Stendhal, what do we find? We find a succession
of colourless, unemphatic sentences; we find cold reasoning and exact
narrative; we find polite irony and dry wit. The spirit of the
eighteenth century is everywhere; and if the old gentleman with the
perruque and the 'M. de Voltaire' could have taken a glance at his
grandson's novels, he would have rapped his snuff-box and approved. It
is true that Beyle joined the ranks of the Romantics for a moment with a
_brochure_ attacking Racine at the expense of Shakespeare; but this was
merely one of those contradictory changes of front which were inherent
in his nature; and in reality the whole Romantic movement meant nothing
to him. There is a story of a meeting in the house of a common friend
between him and Hugo, in which the two men faced each other like a
couple of cats with their backs up and their whiskers bristling. No
wonder! But Beyle's true attitude towards his great contemporaries was
hardly even one of hostility: he simply could not open their books. As
for Chateaubriand, the god of their idolatry, he loathed him like
poison. He used to describe how, in his youth, he had been on the point
of fighting a duel with an officer who had ventured to maintain that a
phrase in _Atala_--'la cime indéterminée des forêts'--was not
intolerable. Probably he was romancing (M. Chuquet says so); but at any
rate the story sums up symbolically Beyle's attitude towards his art. To
him the whole apparatus of 'fine writing'--the emphatic phrase, the
picturesque epithet, the rounded rhythm--was anathema. The charm that
such ornaments might bring was in reality only a cloak for loose
thinking and feeble observation. Even the style of the eighteenth
century was not quite his ideal; it was too elegant; there was an
artificial neatness about the form which imposed itself upon the
substance, and degraded it. No, there was only one example of the
perfect style, and that was the _Code Napoléon_; for there alone
everything was subordinated to the exact and complete expression of what
was to be said. A statement of law can have no place for irrelevant
beauties, or the vagueness of personal feeling; by its very nature, it
must resemble a sheet of plate glass through which every object may be
seen with absolute distinctness, in its true shape. Beyle declared that
he was in the habit of reading several paragraphs of the Code every
morning after breakfast 'pour prendre le ton.' This again was for long
supposed to be one of his little jokes; but quite lately the searchers
among the MSS. at Grenoble have discovered page after page copied out
from the Code in Beyle's handwriting. No doubt, for that wayward lover
of paradoxes, the real joke lay in everybody taking for a joke what _he_
took quite seriously.
This attempt to reach the exactitude and the detachment of an official
document was not limited to Beyle's style; it runs through the whole
tissue of his work. He wished to present life dispassionately and
intellectually, and if he could have reduced his novels to a series of
mathematical symbols, he would have been charmed. The contrast between
his method and that of Balzac is remarkable. That wonderful art of
materialisation, of the sensuous evocation of the forms, the qualities,
the very stuff and substance of things, which was perhaps Balzac's
greatest discovery, Beyle neither possessed nor wished to possess. Such
matters were to him of the most subordinate importance, which it was no
small part of the novelist's duty to keep very severely in their place.
In the earlier chapters of _Le Rouge et Le Noir_, for instance, he is
concerned with almost the same subject as Balzac in the opening of _Les
Illusions Perdues_--the position of a young man in a provincial town,
brought suddenly from the humblest surroundings into the midst of the
leading society of the place through his intimate relations with a woman
of refinement. But while in Balzac's pages what emerges is the concrete
vision of provincial life down to the last pimple on the nose of the
lowest footman, Beyle concentrates his whole attention on the personal
problem, hints in a few rapid strokes at what Balzac has spent all his
genius in describing, and reveals to us instead, with the precision of a
surgeon at an operation, the inmost fibres of his hero's mind. In fact,
Beyle's method is the classical method--the method of selection, of
omission, of unification, with the object of creating a central
impression of supreme reality. Zola criticises him for disregarding 'le
milieu.'
Il y a [he says] un épisode célèbre dans 'Le Rouge et Le Noir,' la
scène où Julien, assis un soir à côté de Mme. de Rénal, sous les
branches noires d'un arbre, se fait un devoir de lui prendre la
main, pendant qu'elle cause avec Mme. Derville. C'est un petit
drame muet d'une grande puissance, et Stendhal y a analysé
merveilleusement les états d'âme de ses deux personnages. Or, le
milieu n'apparaît pas une seule fois. Nous pourrions être n'importe
où dans n'importe quelles conditions, la scène resterait la même
pourvu qu'il fit noir ... Donnez l'épisode à un écrivain pour qui
les milieux existent, et dans la défaite de cette femme, il fera
entrer la nuit, avec ses odeurs, avec ses voix, avec ses voluptés
molles. Et cet écrivain sera dans la vérité, son tableau sera plus
complet.
More complete, perhaps; but would it be more convincing? Zola, with his
statistical conception of art, could not understand that you could tell
a story properly unless you described in detail every contingent fact.
He could not see that Beyle was able, by simply using the symbol 'nuit,'
to suggest the 'milieu' at once to the reader's imagination. Everybody
knows all about the night's accessories--'ses odeurs, ses voix, ses
voluptés molles'; and what a relief it is to be spared, for once in a
way, an elaborate expatiation upon them! And Beyle is perpetually
evoking the gratitude of his readers in this way. 'Comme il insiste
peu!' as M. Gide exclaims. Perhaps the best test of a man's intelligence
is his capacity for making a summary. Beyle knew this, and his novels
are full of passages which read like nothing so much as extraordinarily
able summaries of some enormous original narrative which has been lost.
It was not that he was lacking in observation, that he had no eye for
detail, or no power of expressing it; on the contrary, his vision was of
the sharpest, and his pen could call up pictorial images of startling
vividness, when he wished. But he very rarely did wish: it was apt to
involve a tiresome insistence. In his narratives he is like a brilliant
talker in a sympathetic circle, skimming swiftly from point to point,
taking for granted the intelligence of his audience, not afraid here and
there to throw out a vague 'etc.' when the rest of the sentence is too
obvious to state; always plain of speech, never self-assertive, and
taking care above all things never to force the note. His famous
description of the Battle of Waterloo in _La Chartreuse de Parme_ is
certainly the finest example of this side of his art. Here he produces
an indelible impression by a series of light touches applied with
unerring skill. Unlike Zola, unlike Tolstoi, he shows us neither the
loathsomeness nor the devastation of a battlefield, but its
insignificance, its irrelevant detail, its unmeaning grotesquenesses and
indignities, its incoherence, and its empty weariness. Remembering his
own experience at Bautzen, he has made his hero--a young Italian
impelled by Napoleonic enthusiasm to join the French army as a volunteer
on the eve of the battle--go through the great day in such a state of
vague perplexity that in the end he can never feel quite certain that he
really _was_ at Waterloo. He experiences a succession of trivial and
unpleasant incidents, culminating in his being hoisted off his horse by
two of his comrades, in order that a general, who has had his own shot
from under him, might be supplied with a mount; for the rest, he crosses
and recrosses some fields, comes upon a dead body in a ditch, drinks
brandy with a _vivandière_, gallops over a field covered with dying men,
has an indefinite skirmish in a wood--and it is over. At one moment,
having joined the escort of some generals, the young man allows his
horse to splash into a stream, thereby covering one of the generals
with muddy water from head to foot. The passage that follows is a good
specimen of Beyle's narrative style:
En arrivant sur l'autre rive, Fabrice y avait trouvé les généraux
tout seuls; le bruit du canon lui sembla redoubler; ce fut à peine
s'il entendit le général, par lui si bien mouillé, qui criait à son
oreille:
Où as-tu pris ce cheval?
Fabrice était tellement troublé, qu'il répondit en Italien: _l'ho
comprato poco fa_. (Je viens de l'acheter à l'instant.)
Que dis-tu? lui cria le général.
Mais le tapage devint tellement fort en ce moment, que Fabrice ne
put lui répondre. Nous avouerons que notre héros était fort peu
héros en ce moment. Toutefois, la peur ne venait chez lui qu'en
seconde ligne; il était surtout scandalisé de ce bruit qui lui
faisait mal aux oreilles. L'escorte prit le galop; on traversait
une grande pièce de terre labourée, située au delà du canal, et ce
champ était jonché de cadavres.
How unemphatic it all is! What a paucity of epithet, what a reticence in
explanation! How a Romantic would have lingered over the facial
expression of the general, and how a Naturalist would have analysed that
'tapage'! And yet, with all their efforts, would they have succeeded in
conveying that singular impression of disturbance, of cross-purposes, of
hurry, and of ill-defined fear, which Beyle with his quiet terseness has
produced?
It is, however, in his psychological studies that the detached and
intellectual nature of Beyle's method is most clearly seen. When he is
describing, for instance, the development of Julien Sorel's mind in _Le
Rouge et Le Noir_, when he shows us the soul of the young peasant with
its ignorance, its ambition, its pride, going step by step into the
whirling vortex of life--then we seem to be witnessing not so much the
presentment of a fiction as the unfolding of some scientific fact. The
procedure is almost mathematical: a proposition is established, the
inference is drawn, the next proposition follows, and so on until the
demonstration is complete. Here the influence of the eighteenth century
is very strongly marked. Beyle had drunk deeply of that fountain of
syllogism and analysis that flows through the now forgotten pages of
Helvétius and Condillac; he was an ardent votary of logic in its
austerest form--'la lo-gique' he used to call it, dividing the syllables
in a kind of awe-inspired emphasis; and he considered the ratiocinative
style of Montesquieu almost as good as that of the _Code Civil_.
If this had been all, if we could sum him up simply as an acute and
brilliant writer who displays the scientific and prosaic sides of the
French genius in an extreme degree, Beyle's position in literature would
present very little difficulty. He would take his place at once as a
late--an abnormally late--product of the eighteenth century. But he was
not that. In his blood there was a virus which had never tingled in the
veins of Voltaire. It was the virus of modern life--that new
sensibility, that new passionateness, which Rousseau had first made
known to the world, and which had won its way over Europe behind the
thunder of Napoleon's artillery. Beyle had passed his youth within
earshot of that mighty roar, and his inmost spirit could never lose the
echo of it. It was in vain that he studied Condillac and modelled his
style on the Code; in vain that he sang the praises of _la lo-gique_,
shrugged his shoulders at the Romantics, and turned the cold eye of a
scientific investigator upon the phenomena of life; he remained
essentially a man of feeling. His unending series of _grandes passions_
was one unmistakable sign of this; another was his intense devotion to
the Fine Arts. Though his taste in music and painting was the taste of
his time--the literary and sentimental taste of the age of Rossini and
Canova--he nevertheless brought to the appreciation of works of art a
kind of intimate gusto which reveals the genuineness of his emotion. The
'jouissances d'ange,' with which at his first entrance into Italy he
heard at Novara the _Matrimonio Segreto_ of Cimarosa, marked an epoch in
his life. He adored Mozart: 'I can imagine nothing more distasteful to
me,' he said, 'than a thirty-mile walk through the mud; but I would
take one at this moment if I knew that I should hear a good performance
of _Don Giovanni_ at the end of it.' The Virgins of Guido Reni sent him
into ecstasies and the Goddesses of Correggio into raptures. In short,
as he himself admitted, he never could resist 'le Beau' in whatever form
he found it. _Le Beau!_ The phrase is characteristic of the peculiar
species of ingenuous sensibility which so oddly agitated this sceptical
man of the world. His whole vision of life was coloured by it. His sense
of values was impregnated with what he called his 'espagnolisme'--his
immense admiration for the noble and the high-sounding in speech or act
or character--an admiration which landed him often enough in hysterics
and absurdity. Yet this was the soil in which a temperament of caustic
reasonableness had somehow implanted itself. The contrast is surprising,
because it is so extreme. Other men have been by turns sensible and
enthusiastic: but who before or since has combined the emotionalism of a
schoolgirl with the cold penetration of a judge on the bench? Beyle, for
instance, was capable of writing, in one of those queer epitaphs of
himself which he was constantly composing, the high-falutin' words 'Il
respecta un seul homme: Napoléon'; and yet, as he wrote them, he must
have remembered well enough that when he met Napoleon face to face his
unabashed scrutiny had detected swiftly that the man was a play-actor,
and a vulgar one at that. Such were the contradictions of his double
nature, in which the elements, instead of being mixed, came together, as
it were, in layers, like superimposed strata of chalk and flint.
In his novels this cohabitation of opposites is responsible both for
what is best and what is worst. When the two forces work in unison the
result is sometimes of extraordinary value--a product of a kind which it
would be difficult to parallel in any other author. An eye of icy gaze
is turned upon the tumultuous secrets of passion, and the pangs of love
are recorded in the language of Euclid. The image of the surgeon
inevitably suggests itself--the hand with the iron nerve and the swift
knife laying bare the trembling mysteries within. It is the intensity of
Beyle's observation, joined with such an exactitude of exposition, that
makes his dry pages sometimes more thrilling than the wildest tale of
adventure or all the marvels of high romance. The passage in _La
Chartreuse de Parme_ describing Count Mosca's jealousy has this quality,
which appears even more clearly in the chapters of _Le Rouge et Le Noir_
concerning Julien Sorel and Mathilde de la Mole. Here Beyle has a
subject after his own heart. The loves of the peasant youth and the
aristocratic girl, traversed and agitated by their overweening pride,
and triumphing at last rather over themselves than over each
other--these things make up a gladiatorial combat of 'espagnolismes,'
which is displayed to the reader with a supreme incisiveness. The climax
is reached when Mathilde at last gives way to her passion, and throws
herself into the arms of Julien, who forces himself to make no response:
Ses bras se roidirent, tant l'effort imposé par la politique était
pénible. Je ne dois pas même me permettre de presser contre mon
coeur ce corps souple et charmant; ou elle me méprise, ou elle me
maltraite. Quel affreux caractère!
Et en maudissant le caractère de Mathilde, il l'en aimait cent fois
plus; il lui semblait avoir dans ses bras une reine.
L'impassible froideur de Julien redoubla le malheur de Mademoiselle
de la Mole. Elle était loin d'avoir le sang-froid nécessaire pour
chercher à deviner dans ses yeux ce qu'il sentait pour elle en cet
instant. Elle ne put se résoudre à le regarder; elle tremblait de
rencontrer l'expression du mépris.
Assise sur le divan de la bibliothèque, immobile et la tête tournée
du côté opposé à Julien, elle était en proie aux plus vives
douleurs que l'orgueil et l'amour puissent faire éprouver à une âme
humaine. Dans quelle atroce démarche elle venait de tomber!
Il m'était réservé, malheureuse que je suis! de voir repoussées les
avances les plus indécentes! Et repoussées par qui? ajoutait
l'orgueil fou de douleur, repoussées par un domestique de mon père.
C'est ce que je ne souffrirai pas, dit-elle à haute voix.
At that moment she suddenly sees some unopened letters addressed to
Julien by another woman.
--Ainsi, s'écria-t-elle hors d'elle-même, non seulement vous êtes
bien avec elle, mais encore vous la méprisez. Vous, un homme de
rien, mépriser Madame la Maréchale de Fervaques!
--Ah! pardon, mon ami, ajouta-t-elle en se jetant à ses genoux,
méprise-moi si tu veux, mais aime-moi, je ne puis plus vivre privée
de ton amour. Et elle tomba tout à fait évanouie.
--La voilà donc, cette orgueilleuse, à mes pieds! se dit Julien.
Such is the opening of this wonderful scene, which contains the
concentrated essence of Beyle's genius, and which, in its combination of
high passion, intellectual intensity, and dramatic force, may claim
comparison with the great dialogues of Corneille.
'Je fais tous les efforts possibles pour être _sec_,' he says of
himself. 'Je veux imposer silence à mon coeur, qui croit avoir beaucoup
à dire. Je tremble toujours de n'avoir écrit qu'un soupir, quand je
crois avoir noté une vérité.' Often he succeeds, but not always. At
times his desire for dryness becomes a mannerism and fills whole pages
with tedious and obscure argumentation. And, at other times, his
sensibility gets the upper hand, throws off all control, and revels in
an orgy of melodrama and 'espagnolisme.' Do what he will, he cannot keep
up a consistently critical attitude towards the creatures of his
imagination: he depreciates his heroes with extreme care, but in the end
they get the better of him and sweep him off his feet. When, in _La
Chartreuse de Parme_, Fabrice kills a man in a duel, his first action is
to rush to a looking-glass to see whether his beauty has been injured by
a cut in the face; and Beyle does not laugh at this; he is impressed by
it. In the same book he lavishes all his art on the creation of the
brilliant, worldly, sceptical Duchesse de Sanseverina, and then, not
quite satisfied, he makes her concoct and carry out the murder of the
reigning Prince in order to satisfy a desire for amorous revenge. This
really makes her perfect. But the most striking example of Beyle's
inability to resist the temptation of sacrificing his head to his heart
is in the conclusion of _Le Rouge et Le Noir_, where Julien, to be
revenged on a former mistress who defames him, deliberately goes down
into the country, buys a pistol, and shoots the lady in church. Not only
is Beyle entranced by the _bravura_ of this senseless piece of
brutality, but he destroys at a blow the whole atmosphere of impartial
observation which fills the rest of the book, lavishes upon his hero the
blindest admiration, and at last, at the moment of Julien's execution,
even forgets himself so far as to write a sentence in the romantic
style: 'Jamais cette tête n'avait été aussi poétique qu'au moment où
elle allait tomber.' Just as Beyle, in his contrary mood, carries to an
extreme the French love of logical precision, so in these rhapsodies he
expresses in an exaggerated form a very different but an equally
characteristic quality of his compatriots--their instinctive
responsiveness to fine poses. It is a quality that Englishmen in
particular find it hard to sympathise with. They remain stolidily
unmoved when their neighbours are in ecstasies. They are repelled by the
'noble' rhetoric of the French Classical Drama; they find the tirades of
Napoleon, which animated the armies of France to victory, pieces of
nauseous clap-trap. And just now it is this side--to us the obviously
weak side--of Beyle's genius that seems to be most in favour with French
critics. To judge from M. Barrès, writing dithyrambically of Beyle's
'sentiment d'honneur,' that is his true claim to greatness. The
sentiment of honour is all very well, one is inclined to mutter on this
side of the Channel; but oh, for a little sentiment of humour too!
The view of Beyle's personality which his novels give us may be seen
with far greater detail in his miscellaneous writings. It is to these
that his most modern admirers devote their main attention--particularly
to his letters and his autobiographies; but they are all of them highly
characteristic of their author, and--whatever the subject may be, from a
guide to Rome to a life of Napoleon--one gathers in them, scattered up
and down through their pages, a curious, dimly adumbrated
philosophy--an ill-defined and yet intensely personal point of view--_le
Beylisme_. It is in fact almost entirely in this secondary quality that
their interest lies; their ostensible subject-matter is unimportant. An
apparent exception is the book in which Beyle has embodied his
reflections upon Love. The volume, with its meticulous apparatus of
analysis, definition, and classification, which gives it the air of
being a parody of _L'Esprit des Lois_, is yet full of originality, of
lively anecdote and keen observation. Nobody but Beyle could have
written it; nobody but Beyle could have managed to be at once so
stimulating and so jejune, so clear-sighted and so exasperating. But
here again, in reality, it is not the question at issue that is
interesting--one learns more of the true nature of Love in one or two of
La Bruyère's short sentences than in all Beyle's three hundred pages of
disquisition; but what is absorbing is the sense that comes to one, as
one reads it, of the presence, running through it all, of a restless and
problematical spirit. 'Le Beylisme' is certainly not susceptible of any
exact definition; its author was too capricious, too unmethodical, in
spite of his _lo-gique_, ever to have framed a coherent philosophy; it
is essentially a thing of shreds and patches, of hints, suggestions, and
quick visions of flying thoughts. M. Barrès says that what lies at the
bottom of it is a 'passion de collectionner les belles énergies.' But
there are many kinds of 'belles énergies,' and some of them certainly do
not fit into the framework of 'le Beylisme.' 'Quand je suis arrêté par
des voleurs, ou qu'on me tire des coups de fusil, je me sens une grande
colère contre le gouvernement et le curé de l'endroit. Quand au voleur,
il me plaît, s'il est énergique, car il m'amuse.' It was the energy of
self-assertiveness that pleased Beyle; that of self-restraint did not
interest him. The immorality of the point of view is patent, and at
times it appears to be simply based upon the common selfishness of an
egotist. But in reality it was something more significant than that. The
'chasse au bonheur' which Beyle was always advocating was no respectable
epicureanism; it had about it a touch of the fanatical. There was
anarchy in it--a hatred of authority, an impatience with custom, above
all a scorn for the commonplace dictates of ordinary morality. Writing
his memoirs at the age of fifty-two, Beyle looked back with pride on the
joy that he had felt, as a child of ten, amid his royalist family at
Grenoble, when the news came of the execution of Louis XVI. His father
announced it:
--C'en est fait, dit-il avec un gros soupir, ils l'ont assassiné.
Je fus saisi d'un des plus vifs mouvements de joie que j'ai éprouvé
en ma vie. Le lecteur pensera peut-être que je suis cruel, mais tel
j'étais à 5 X 2, tel je suis à 10 X 5 + 2 ... Je puis dire que
l'approbation des êtres, que je regarde comme faibles, m'est
absolument indifférente.
These are the words of a born rebel, and such sentiments are constantly
recurring in his books. He is always discharging his shafts against some
established authority; and, of course, he reserved his bitterest hatred
for the proudest and most insidious of all authorities--the Roman
Catholic Church. It is odd to find some of the 'Beylistes' solemnly
hailing the man whom the power of the Jesuits haunted like a nightmare,
and whose account of the seminary in _Le Rouge et Le Noir_ is one of the
most scathing pictures of religious tyranny ever drawn, as a prophet of
the present Catholic movement in France. For in truth, if Beyle was a
prophet of anything he was a prophet of that spirit of revolt in modern
thought which first reached a complete expression in the pages of
Nietzsche. His love of power and self-will, his aristocratic outlook,
his scorn of the Christian virtues, his admiration of the Italians of
the Renaissance, his repudiation of the herd and the morality of the
herd--these qualities, flashing strangely among his observations on
Rossini and the Coliseum, his reflections on the memories of the past
and his musings on the ladies of the present, certainly give a
surprising foretaste of the fiery potion of Zarathustra. The creator of
the Duchesse de Sanseverina had caught more than a glimpse of the
transvaluation of all values. Characteristically enough, the appearance
of this new potentiality was only observed by two contemporary forces in
European society--Goethe and the Austrian police. It is clear that
Goethe alone among the critics of the time understood that Beyle was
something more than a novelist, and discerned an uncanny significance in
his pages. 'I do not like reading M. de Stendhal,' he observed to
Winckelmann, 'but I cannot help doing so. He is extremely free and
extremely impertinent, and ... I recommend you to buy all his books.' As
for the Austrian police, they had no doubt about the matter. Beyle's
book of travel, _Rome, Naples et Florence_, was, they decided,
pernicious and dangerous in the highest degree; and the poor man was
hunted out of Milan in consequence.
It would be a mistake to suppose that Beyle displayed in his private
life the qualities of the superman. Neither his virtues nor his vices
were on the grand scale. In his own person he never seems to have
committed an 'espagnolisme.' Perhaps his worst sin was that of
plagiarism: his earliest book, a life of Haydn, was almost entirely
'lifted' from the work of a learned German; and in his next he embodied
several choice extracts culled from the _Edinburgh Review_. On this
occasion he was particularly delighted, since the _Edinburgh_, in
reviewing the book, innocently selected for special approbation the very
passages which he had stolen. It is singular that so original a writer
should have descended to pilfering. But Beyle was nothing if not
inconsistent. With all his Classicism he detested Racine; with all his
love of music he could see nothing in Beethoven; he adored Italy, and,
so soon as he was given his Italian consulate, he was usually to be
found in Paris. As his life advanced he grew more and more wayward,
capricious, and eccentric. He indulged in queer mystifications, covering
his papers with false names and anagrams--for the police, he said, were
on his track, and he must be careful. His love-affairs became less and
less fortunate; but he was still sometimes successful, and when he was
he registered the fact--upon his braces. He dreamed and drifted a great
deal. He went up to San Pietro in Montorio, and looking over Rome, wrote
the initials of his past mistresses in the dust. He tried to make up his
mind whether Napoleon after all _was_ the only being he respected;
no--there was also Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. He went to the opera at
Naples and noted that 'la musique parfaite, comme la pantomime parfaite,
me fait songer à ce qui forme actuellement l'objet de mes rêveries et me
fait venir des idées excellentes: ... or, ce soir, je ne puis me
dissimuler que j'ai le malheur _of being too great an admirer of Lady
L...._' He abandoned himself to 'les charmantes visions du Beau qui
souvent encore remplissent ma tête à l'âge de _fifty-two_.' He wondered
whether Montesquieu would have thought his writings worthless. He sat
scribbling his reminiscences by the fire till the night drew on and the
fire went out, and still he scribbled, more and more illegibly, until at
last the paper was covered with hieroglyphics undecipherable even by M.
Chuquet himself. He wandered among the ruins of ancient Rome, playing to
perfection the part of cicerone to such travellers as were lucky enough
to fall in with him; and often his stout and jovial form, with the
satyric look in the sharp eyes and the compressed lips, might be seen by
the wayside in the Campagna, as he stood and jested with the reapers or
the vine-dressers or with the girls coming out, as they had come since
the days of Horace, to draw water from the fountains of Tivoli. In more
cultivated society he was apt to be nervous; for his philosophy was
never proof against the terror of being laughed at. But sometimes, late
at night, when the surroundings were really sympathetic, he could be
very happy among his friends. 'Un salon de huit ou dix personnes,' he
said, 'dont toutes les femmes ont eu des amants, où la conversation est
gaie, anecdotique, et où l'on prend du punch léger à minuit et demie,
est l'endroit du monde où je me trouve le mieux.'
And in such a Paradise of Frenchmen we may leave Henri Beyle.
1914