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M. DE STENDHAL (HENRI BEYLE).

(FROM THE EDINBURGH Review, JANUARY, 1856.)

1. Bibliothèque Contemporaine. 2o Série. DE STENDHAL. Euvres complètes. Paris: 1854-55.

2. Romans et Nouvelles. Précédés d'une Notice sur De Stendhal, par M. B. COLOMB. 1 vol.

3. Correspondance Inédite. Précédée d'une Introduction, par PROSPER MERIMÉE, de l'Académie Française; ornée d'un beau Portrait de Stendhal. 2 vols.

THE literary career of Henri Beyle, who wrote under the pseudonyme of M. de Stendhal, deserves to be commemorated, if only as a curious illustration of the caprice of criticism; or it may be cited in proof of the occasional readiness of contemporaries to forestall the judgment of posterity, when there is no longer a living and sentient object for their jealousy. His habits were simple, his tastes were of a nature to be easily and cheaply gratified, and his pecuniary wants were consequently of the most modest description. He would have been content, he tells us, to rub on with 4000 francs a year at Paris; he would have thought himself rich with 6000; and in an autobiographical sketch he says, "The only thing I see clearly is, that for twenty years my ideal has been to live at Paris in a fourth story, writing a drama or a novel." This ideal was never realised, because the booksellers and theatrical managers would not, or could not, bid high enough for dramas or novels from his pen; and he was eventually compelled to accept the consulship of Civita Vecchia, where the closing period of his life was shortened by the diseases of the climate, as well

as embittered by disappointment and ennui. There occurred, indeed, one striking exception to this general indifference. In the "Revue Parisienne" of September 23rd, 1840, appeared a long and carefully written article, entitled an "Etude sur H. Beyle," by Balzac, in which "La Chartreuse de Parme " was declared to be a masterpiece, and its author was described as one of the finest observers and most original writers of the age. But although elaborately reasoned out, and largely supported by analysis and quotation, this honourable outburst of enthusiasm was commonly regarded as an extravagance into which Balzac had been hurried by an exaggeration of generosity towards a fancied rival; and Beyle's courteous letter of acknowledgment contains the following sentence, showing how little disposed he was to overestimate his position or his hopes :"This astounding article, such as no writer ever before received from another, I have read, I now venture to own to you, with bursts of laughter. Every time I came to a eulogium a little exalted, and I encountered such at every step, I saw the expression of my friends' faces at reading it."

Could he awake from the dead and see his friends' faces now, his characteristic smile of irony, rather than loud laughter, would be the form in which his feelings might be most appropriately expressed; for those friends have not waited till 1880, the earliest era at which he expected to be read; they have barely exceeded the time prescribed by Horace - nonumque prematur in annum for testing the soundness of a work. Beyle died in 1842, and few beyond the very limited circle of his intimates then seemed aware that a chosen spirit had departed, or that a well of valuable thought and a fountain of exquisite sensibility had been dried up. One solitary garland of immortelles was flung upon his grave. An essay on his life and

character, by M. Auguste Bussière, appeared in the "Revue des Deux Mondes" for January, 1843; but the first paragraph was an avowal of the hazardous character of the attempt:

"We approach a task which is at the same time both embarrassing and seducing, that of appreciating a man of talent whose upright character and original qualities seemed to promise a greater extent of influence than he has exercised on his contemporaries. We shall encounter in this mind and in this character odd specialities, strange anomalies, contradictions which will explain how, after having been more vaunted than read, more read than relished, more decried than judged, more cited than known, he has lived, if the expression may be used, in a sort of clandestine celebrity, to die an obscure and unmarked death. Contemporary literature, it must be owned, has found before the tomb of one of its most distinguished cultivators, only silence, or words worse than silence. M. Beyle dead, all has been said for him. His remains have not seen their funeral attendance swelled by those regrets which delight in display, and which come to seek under the folds of the pall a reflexion of the lustre shed by the living."

Unlike the noble English poet, who, after an ordinary night's sleep, awoke and found himself famous, Beyle must have slumbered thirteen years, dating from the commencement of his last, long sleep, before he could have calculated on a similar surprise on waking. But his hour has come at last, and come sooner than he anticipated. We have now before us popular and cheap editions of almost all his books (thirteen volumes), in addition to two closely printed volumes of correspondence, and three volumes of novels from his unpublished MSS., bearing striking evidence to the assiduity with which every scrap of his composition has been hunted up. We have, moreover, a somewhat

embarrassing superfluity of biographical notices from surviving friends, who, whatever their amount of agreement with Balzac in 1840, have no objection to respond to the popular demand for Beyle testimonials in 1855. Prefixed to the "Correspondance" is a condensed and pithy series of clever, polished, highly illustrative, and by no means enthusiastic, notes and reminiscences by M. Merimée. M. Sainte-Beuve has devoted two papers, distinguished by his wonted refinement and penetration, to Stendhal, in the "Causeries de Lundi." An extremely interesting biographical notice, drawn up by M. Colomb, Beyle's most attached friend and executor, from private papers and other authentic sources of information, is prefixed to the "Romans et Nouvelles ;" and by way of preface or introduction to the "Chartreuse de Parme," the publishers have judiciously reprinted the long-neglected éloge of Balzac.

As if to complicate the problem, Beyle's critics and biographers announce and claim him as "eminently French," although he systematically ridiculed the vanity of his countrymen, reviled their taste, disliked the greater part of their literature, and, deliberately repudiating his country as "le plus vilain pays du monde que les nigauds appellent la belle France," directed himself to be designated as Milanese on his tombstone. Here is enough, and more than enough, to justify us in devoting our best attention to the social and intellectual phenomenon thus presented,to say nothing of the interest we naturally take in the reputation of an author who, in straitened circumstances, ordered the complete collection of "mon cher" Edinburgh Review, and appealed to its extended circulation as an unanswerable proof that the English are more reasonable in politics than the French.

Marie-Henri Beyle was born at Grenoble, on the 23rd of January, 1783, of a family which, without

being noble, was classed and lived familiarly with the provincial aristocracy. One of his earliest preceptors was a priest, who sadly misunderstood and mismanaged his pupil. "Beyle," says M. Merimée, "was wont to relate with bitterness, after forty years, that one day, having torn his coat whilst at play, the Abbé entrusted with his education reprimanded him severely for this misdeed before his comrades, and told him he was a disgrace to religion and to his family. We laughed when he narrated this incident; but he saw in it simply an act of priestly tyranny and a horrible injustice, where there was nothing to laugh at, and he felt as acutely as on the day of its occurrence the wound inflicted on his self-love." It was one of his aphorisms that our parents and our masters are our natural enemies when we enter the world; the simple matter of fact being, that his own character, tendencies, and aspirations had been invariably opposed to the plans, wishes, and modes of thinking of his family. They were clearly wrong in endeavouring to force him into uncongenial paths of study; nor was he likely to be cured of his inborn wilfulness, or his morbid sensibility, by harsh treatment. On the establishment of the École Centrale, in 1795, they had no alternative but to send him there; and such was his quickness or diligence, that when the day arrived for the examinations in "grammaire générale," not one of the pupils could compete with him, and he received all the prizes that had been proposed.

During the four following years he sustained his reputation by carrying off all the first prizes in all the courses that he attended; and at the end of that time, in 1798, he concentrated his energies on mathematics for (according to M. Colomb) the strange reason that he had a horror of hypocrisy, and rightly judged that in mathematics it was impossible. A