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 × 2, tel je suis à 10 × 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 extraordinary 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 fore-taste 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, curiously enough, from the pages of this 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.' In such a Paradise of Frenchmen we may leave Henri Beyle. Of him, even more than of other mortals, our judgment must be ambiguous and undecided. But of one thing at least we may be sure in his unaccommodating case. It may be difficult to strike a balance between the blemishes and the genius of his writings, between the profundities and the narrowness of his thought, between the charm and the futilities of his character; but this, at any rate, we may say of him with certainty: he was an extraordinary man. LYTTON STRACHEY. THE EVOLUTION OF CONTEMPORARY FRENCH LITERATURE 1. Le Disciple (édition définitive, 1905); L'Étape; Un Divorce ; L'Émigré; Pages de critique et de doctrine (2 vols., 1912). PAUL BOURGET. Plon-Nourrit et Cie. 2. Un homme libre; Les Déracinés; L'Appel au Soldat; Au service de l'Allemagne; Colette inspirée (1913). MAURICE BARRÈS. 3. La Peur de Vivre. A. Fontemoing. Baudoche; La Colline La Croisée des chemins; La Neige sur les Pas (1911); La Maison (1913). HENRY 4. Stéphanie (1913). PAUL ADAM. Fasquelle. 5. Le mystère de la charité de Jeanne d'Arc (1910); Le porche du mystère de la deuxième vertu (1911); Le mystère des saints innocents (1912). CHARLES PÉGUY. Éditions des Cahiers de la Quinzaine. 6. Le Romantisme français (1908). PIERRE LASSERRE. Mercure de France. 7. L'Art Poétique; Théâtre (4 vols.). Mercure de France. Cinq grandes Odes; L'Annonce faite à Marie; L'Otage. CLAUDEL. Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Française. PAUL A VERY great change has come over the French nation, and the nature of this of this change may be briefly characterised as consisting in a renascence of French energy. The virile qualities of the race, those qualities that had for many centuries made France the foremost country in Europe, appeared to have become extinct. True, the deeds of daring and heroism accomplished by Frenchmen in Africa and in Asia-deeds that built up the magnificent French empire beyond the seas-showed us that the old undaunted spirit of adventure still lived on; but it seemed to be confined to a few individuals, choice specimens indeed, but yet merely a handful. While these heroes and adventurers (in the highest sense of the word), such as Savorgnan de Brazza, Marchand, Lenfant, were busy carving out the new empire and carrying the tricolour flag to the remotest parts of the Dark Continent, the nation as a whole was plunged in mournful lethargy, in the lethargy of despair. It saw not the promise held out by the valiant efforts of the empire-builders, labouring in distant and unexplored regions pour la plus grande gloire de la France. It saw only the wounds inflicted in 1870; it saw only the anarchy that gangrened ever more and more its political and moral and intellectual life. It accepted its fate with elegant resignation, and it was content to die, if only it could do so with a smile on its lips. Gloria victis— the French nation was too prone to despair of itself; it did not seek to gain the victory, for it had abandoned all hope of this; it only aimed at husbanding sufficient strength to be able to die elegantly, to disappear from the world's stage after so many centuries of glory with the chivalry and heroism of the preux of former days. Let us show the world how to die bravely such was the highest philosophy of a people suffering from that most insidious of all diseases, namely pessimism. The first condition of a renascence of French energy was necessarily the rejection of pessimism and scepticism. A strong and vigorous nation is essentially optimistic; it believes in life, it believes in itself, it believes in the future of the race. We have only to think of the magnificent optimism of the Greeks, of their joyful self-confidence, of their robust belief (untainted by any sombre fanaticism) in themselves. We need only think of the optimism of the Renaissance, which was truly an epoch of giants. And Frenchmen had only to look back on their own history, had only to read the pages that tell of the building-up of the greatest of European monarchies-pages that contain the record of so much prowess, in which the glorious lust of conquest and adventure is written large, which are doubtless soiled by many crimes, but which seldom bear witness to deeds of baseness and treachery. The French were always, till the end of the eighteenth century, a nation of aristocrats; consequently they were a nation of optimists, a nation in which the joy of life and belief in life prevailed, and on which the evil bigotry of Spanish monks and Northern puritans could have no hold. Here-in their own history-the French have an inexhaustible store of optimism from which to draw. And it is pleasing to see the young generation of to-day go back to these great traditions, go back beyond the Revolution to the real sources of French |