to day, and multiplying petty details with convincing logic.  But in his preoccupation for mental conditions he is apt to lose sight of the material side of life, and the symmetry of his novels is marred by a meagreness of physical detail and a lack of atmosphere.  Zola has laid his finger upon Stendhal’s real weakness when he points out that “the landscape, the climate, the time of day, the weather,.—­Nature herself, in other words,—­never seems to intervene and exert an influence on his characters”; and he cites a passage which in point of fact admirably illustrates his meaning, the scene from the ‘Rouge et Noir’, where Julien endeavors to take the hand of Mme. de Renal, which he characterizes as “a little mute drama of great power,” adding in conclusion:—­“Give that episode to an author for whom the milieu exists, and he will make the night, with its odors, its voices, its soft voluptuousness, play a part in the defeat of the woman.  And that author will be in the right; his picture will be more complete.”  It is this tendency to leave nature out of consideration which gives Stendhal’s characters a flavor of abstraction, and caused Sainte-Beuve to declare in disgust that they were “not human beings, but ingeniously constructed automatons.”  Yet it is unfair to conclude with Zola, that Stendhal was a man for whom the outside world did not exist; he was not insensible to the beauties of nature, only he looked upon them as a secondary consideration.  After a sympathetic description of the Rhone valley, he had to add, “But the interest of a landscape is insufficient; in the long run, some moral or historical interest is indispensable.”  Yet he recognized explicitly the influence of climate and environment upon character, and seems to have been sensible of his own shortcomings as an author.  “I abhor material descriptions,” he confesses in ‘Souvenirs d’Egotisme’:  “the ennui of making them deters me from writing novels.”

Nevertheless, aside from his short ‘Chroniques’ and ‘Nouvelles,’ and the posthumous ‘Lamiel’ which he probably intended to destroy, Stendhal has left four stories which deserve detailed consideration:  ‘Armance,’ ‘Le Rouge et Le Noir,’ ‘La Chartreuse de Parme,’ and the fragmentary novel ‘Lucien Leuwen.’

As has been justly pointed out by Stendhal’s sympathetic biographer, Edouard Rod, the heroes of the four books are essentially of one type, and all more or less faithful copies of himself; having in common a need of activity, a thirst for love, a keen sensibility, and an unbounded admiration for Napoleon—­and differing only by reason of the several milieus in which he has placed them.  The first of these, ‘Armance,’ appeared in 1827.  The hero, Octave, is an aristocrat, son of the Marquis de Malivert, who “was very rich before the Revolution, and when he returned to Paris in 1814, thought himself beggared on an income of twenty or thirty thousand.”  Octave is the most exaggerated of all Stendhal’s