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