energy and ambition, the epic of the struggle for existence.

Reverting from the emotional content of the book to its more technical characteristics, it may be claimed that it was the first novel in the history of European literature to portray with successful consistency a series of characters alternately complex and simple, in a style which, whatever might be the personal sympathies and aversions of the author, subordinated all picturesque flourishes to his cardinal aim of psychological truth. For on the principle that the external life is but the mere mechanical expression of the life carried on within the mind, Stendhal portrays his characters by describing their mental processes. This method is of course most palpable in Julien, who lives in a chronic state of soliloquy which fails, however, to blunt the edge of his drastic action, and who keeps inside his brain a register which tickets every process with the most copious annotations. But even such comparatively simple characters as M. Rênal, the purse-proud mayor of a petty provincial town; Mme. de Rênal, the conventionally adulterous wife; abbé Pirard, the Jansenist priest, all think too according to their dimmer lights and their limited intelligences, and their thoughts also are duly recorded with scientific precision.

The same year in which Le Rouge et le Noir was published, Stendhal wrote his other great work La Chartreuse de Parme, which while thought by Taine and Balzac, though not by Goethe, to have been his masterpiece, certainly lacks the original outlook and concentrated force of the earlier work. In this book, which describes all the ramifying intrigues of that Italian court life which Stendhal knew and loved so well, the rich tapestry of romance is successfully embroidered by the needle of the psychologist. The rapid succession of adventure is not an end in itself, but simply a means to the setting in motion of this numerous array of characters whose cerebral interiors are so faithfully portrayed; Fabrice del Dougo, the hero, no Ishmael of the intellect like Julien, but a jeune premier with a soul, who runs a wild career of military ardour, amoristic extravagance, justifiable homicide, and political persecution, only finally to fall in love with his gaoler's daughter and die in the self-chosen exile of a Trappist monastery; the Duchess of Sanseverina (a reincarnation of Stendhal's mistress, Countess Pietragrua), his dashing and magnanimous aunt who loves him with an ardour which the reader thinks must at any rate have needed a papal dispensation; Count Mosca, the hardened minister and man of the world who is yet capable of all the devotion of a grand passion; his enemy, the grotesque and plebeian Raversi; the loyal and sonneteering coachman, Ludovici; the pretty and amiable little actress Marietta with her obstreperous lover and her avaricious duenna; Ranuce Ernest of Parma studiously living up to his majestic rôle; and most romantic if not most interesting of all, Clèlia Conti, with her pathetic clash of amoristic devotion and filial duty.

In 1830 the monetary embarrassments of Stendhal forced him to leave Paris and take up the post of consul at Trieste. The Ultramontanes, however, with a not unnatural desire to be revenged on a man whose attitude to the Church is well crystallised in the phrase that "the priests were the true enemies of all civilisation," drove him from his position, and he was transferred to Civita Vecchia where he remained till 1835, solacing his ennui by the compilation of his autobiography and thinking seriously of marriage with the rich and highly respectable daughter of his laundress. Returning to Paris, Stendhal completed Lucien Leuwen, that long posthumous romance of the financial, literary, and political life of the age of Louis Philippe, a work which, though lacking something of the high vital quality of La Chartreuse and Le Rouge et le Noir, does ample justice to the encyclopædic powers of the author's observation. For here too we trace the personal Stendhalian characteristics, the sympathy with the isolated intellectual, the contempt for the bourgeois and the philistine, the idealisation of an efficiency that is not always achieved. We may perhaps give a quotation which well illustrates the friendly malice with which this detached novelist treats even his most favoured heroes:

"He talked for the sake of talking, he bandied the pro and the con, he exaggerated and altered the circumstances of every story which he told, and he told a great many and at great length. In a word he talked like a young man of parts from the provinces; and consequently his success was immense."

And how neat in the subtle simplicity of its irony is the following:

"He was received in this house with that stiffness resulting from baulked hopes of matrimony which has the knack of making itself felt in such a variety of ways and in so amiable a manner in a family composed of six young ladies who are particularly pretty."

Returning to Paris, Stendhal commenced in 1838 the last of his novels, the posthumous and unfinished Lamiel. Influenced, though by no means discouraged by the lack of success of his other novels, he determined to write "in a wittier style on a more intelligible subject," and with regard to each incident to ask himself the question, "Should it be described philosophically or described narratively according to the doctrine of Ariosto?" Hence Lamiel, the most fascinating feminine character in the whole of the Stendhalian literature. For Lamiel is a young woman possessed simultaneously of a brisk intellectual honesty, a lively humour, a charming naïveté, and a Nietzschean outlook on a tumultuous world. "Her character was based on a profound disgust for pusillanimity," and "where there was no danger there she found no pleasure." The whole book is crisp with the true comic spirit. The scene in particular in which Lamiel purchases her first lesson in the essential element of human knowledge, as a mere matter of intellectual curiosity, is a masterpiece of racy delicacy. Yet acuteness of psychology is never sacrificed to airiness of style. Sansfin the malicious hump-backed doctor, Comte D'Aubigné Nerwinde the snob, "a serious, prudent, and melancholy paragon always preoccupied with public opinion," the plebeian parents of Lamiel, the pompous duchess, the conventional young lord, are all portrayed with a delightful malice whose satire is never too extravagant to be otherwise than convincing.

But it is Lamiel herself who dominates the book, Lamiel with that mixture of high flippancy and deep seriousness which is so essentially attractive, ever developing fresh phases in response to her repeated change of environment, yet ever retaining a fundamental consistency with her original character. It can only be regretted that Stendhal should have left unfinished what might well have been possibly the greatest, and certainly the most amusing of all his novels, and that having traced the adventures of his heroine from her plebeian origin to the aristocratic château, and from the aristocratic château to Paris, he should finally leave her floating jauntily amid all the rich welter of Parisian life with only a synopsis of those subsequent experiences which if undergone would have entitled her to rank as one of the most truly romantic characters in the whole of fiction.

In 1842, Stendhal, with his physical and intellectual faculties still unimpaired, died suddenly at the age of fifty-nine. Like his hero Julien, he was "game" to the last, and "I have struck nothingness" was his self-given substitute for the more orthodox viaticum.

In endeavouring to adjudicate finally the value of Stendhal, it is difficult not to yield to the fascination of his cock-sure prophecy of his eventual fame.