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 Helvetius 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