Fabrice kills a man in a duel, his first action is to rush to a looking-glass to see whether his beauty has been injured by a cut in the face; and Beyle does not laugh at this; he is impressed by it.  In the same book he lavishes all his art on the creation of the brilliant, worldly, sceptical Duchesse de Sanseverina, and then, not quite satisfied, he makes her concoct and carry out the murder of the reigning Prince in order to satisfy a desire for amorous revenge.  This really makes her perfect.  But the most striking example of Beyle’s inability to resist the temptation of sacrificing his head to his heart is in the conclusion of Le Rouge et Le Noir, where Julien, to be revenged on a former mistress who defames him, deliberately goes down into the country, buys a pistol, and shoots the lady in church.  Not only is Beyle entranced by the bravura of this senseless piece of brutality, but he destroys at a blow the whole atmosphere of impartial observation which fills the rest of the book, lavishes upon his hero the blindest admiration, and at last, at the moment of Julien’s execution, even forgets himself so far as to write a sentence in the romantic style:  ’Jamais cette tete n’avait ete aussi poetique qu’au moment ou elle allait tomber.’  Just as Beyle, in his contrary mood, carries to an extreme the French love of logical precision, so in these rhapsodies he expresses in an exaggerated form a very different but an equally characteristic quality of his compatriots—­their instinctive responsiveness to fine poses.  It is a quality that Englishmen in particular find it hard to sympathise with.  They remain stolidily unmoved when their neighbours are in ecstasies.  They are repelled by the ‘noble’ rhetoric of the French Classical Drama; they find the tirades of Napoleon, which animated the armies of France to victory, pieces of nauseous clap-trap.  And just now it is this side—­to us the obviously weak side—­of Beyle’s genius that seems to be most in favour with French critics.  To judge from M. Barres, writing dithyrambically of Beyle’s ‘sentiment d’honneur,’ that is his true claim to greatness.  The sentiment of honour is all very well, one is inclined to mutter on this side of the Channel; but oh, for a little sentiment of humour too!

The view of Beyle’s personality which his novels give us may be seen with far greater detail in his miscellaneous writings.  It is to these that his most modern admirers devote their main attention—­particularly to his letters and his autobiographies; but they are all of them highly characteristic of their author, and—­whatever the subject may be, from a guide to Rome to a life of Napoleon—­one gathers in them, scattered up and down through their pages, a curious, dimly adumbrated philosophy—­an ill-defined and yet intensely personal point of view—­le Beylisme.  It is in fact almost entirely in this secondary quality that their interest lies; their ostensible subject-matter is unimportant.  An