Aside from his works of fiction, Stendhal’s works may be conveniently grouped under biographies,—­’Vie de Haydn, de Mozart, et de Metastase,’ ‘Vie de Napoleon,’ ‘Vie de Rossini’; literary and artistic criticism,—­’Histoire de la Peinture en Italie,’ ’Racine et Shakespeare,’ ‘Melanges d’Art et de Litterature’; travels,—­’Rome, Naples, et Florence,’ ‘Promenades dans Rome,’ ‘Memoires d’un Touriste’; and one volume of sentimental psychology, his ‘Essai sur l’Amour,’ to which Bourget owes the suggestion of his ’Physiologie de l’Amour Moderne.’  Many of these works merit greater popularity, being written in an easy, fluent style, and relieved by his inexhaustible fund of anecdote and personal reminiscence.  His books of travel, especially, are charming causeries, full of a sympathetic spontaneity which more than atones for their lack of method; his ‘Walks in Rome’ is more readable than two-thirds of the books since written on that subject.

Stendhal’s present vogue, however, is due primarily to his novels, to which he owes the almost literal fulfillment of his prophecy that he would not be appreciated until 1880.  Before that date they had been comparatively neglected, in spite of Balzac’s spontaneous and enthusiastic tribute to the ‘Chartreuse de Parme,’ and the appreciative criticisms of Taine and Prosper Merimee.  The truth is that Stendhal was in some ways a generation behind his time, and often has an odd, old-fashioned flavor suggestive of Marivaux and Crebillon fils.  On the other hand, his psychologic tendency is distinctly modern, and not at all to the taste of an age which found Chateaubriand or Madame de Stael eminently satisfactory.  But he appeals strongly to the speculating, self-questioning spirit of the present day, and Zola and Bourget in turn have been glad to claim kinship with him.

Stendhal, however, cannot be summarily labeled and dismissed as a realist or psychologue in the modern acceptation of the term, although he was a pioneer in both fields.  He had a sovereign contempt for literary style or method, and little dreamed that he would one day be regarded as the founder of a school.  It must be remembered that he was a soldier before he was a man of letters, and his love of adventure occasionally got the better of his love of logic, making his novels a curious mixture of convincing truth and wild romanticism.  His heroes are singularly like himself, a mixture of morbid introspection and restless energy:  he seems to have taken special pleasure in making them succeed where he had failed in life, and when the spirit of the story-teller gets the better of the psychologist, he sends them on a career of adventure which puts to shame Dumas pere or Walter Scott.  And yet Stendhal was a born analyst, a self-styled “observer of the human heart”; and the real merit of his novels lies in the marvelous fidelity with which he interprets the emotions, showing the inner workings of his hero’s mind from day