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 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 foretaste 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 from the Edinburgh 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.