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:  Napoleon’; 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: