QUI GIACE ARRIGO BEYLE MILANESE VISSE, SCRISSE, AMO.

The words, read rightly, indicate many things—­his adoration of Italy and Milan, his eccentricity, his scorn of the conventions of society and the limits of nationality, his adventurous life, his devotion to literature, and, lastly, the fact that, through all the varieties of his experience—­in the earliest years of his childhood, in his agitated manhood, in his calm old age—­there had never been a moment when he was not in love.

Beyle’s work falls into two distinct groups—­the first consisting of his novels, and the second of his miscellaneous writings, which include several biographies, a dissertation on Love, some books of criticism and travel, his letters and various autobiographical fragments.  The bulk of the latter group is large; much of it has only lately seen the light; and more of it, at present in MS. at the library of Grenoble, is promised us by the indefatigable editors of the new complete edition which is now appearing in Paris.  The interest of this portion of Beyle’s writings is almost entirely personal:  that of his novels is mainly artistic.  It was as a novelist that Beyle first gained his celebrity, and it is still as a novelist—­or rather as the author of Le Rouge et Le Noir and La Chartreuse de Parme (for an earlier work, Armance, some short stories, and some later posthumous fragments may be left out of account)—­that he is most widely known to-day.  These two remarkable works lose none of their significance if we consider the time at which they were composed.  It was in the full flood of the Romantic revival, that marvellous hour in the history of French literature when the tyranny of two centuries was shattered for ever, and a boundless wealth of inspirations, possibilities, and beauties before undreamt-of suddenly burst upon the view.  It was the hour of Hugo, Vigny, Musset, Gautier, Balzac, with their new sonorities and golden cadences, their new lyric passion and dramatic stress, their new virtuosities, their new impulse towards the strange and the magnificent, their new desire for diversity and the manifold comprehension of life.  But, if we turn to the contemporaneous pages of Stendhal, what do we find?  We find a succession of colourless, unemphatic sentences; we find cold reasoning and exact narrative; we find polite irony and dry wit.  The spirit of the eighteenth century is everywhere; and if the old gentleman with the perruque and the ‘M. de Voltaire’ could have taken a glance at his grandson’s novels, he would have rapped his snuff-box and approved.  It is true that Beyle joined the ranks of the Romantics for a moment with a brochure attacking Racine at the expense of Shakespeare; but this was merely one of those contradictory changes of front which were inherent in his nature; and in reality the whole Romantic movement meant nothing to him.  There is a story of a meeting in the house of a common friend between him and Hugo, in which