and the praise of Balzac, predicted that he would be understood about
1880. If to be studied and admired is to be understood, the prediction
has been fulfilled. Taine pronounced him the greatest psychologist
of the century; M. Zola, doing violence to facts, claimed him as a
literary ancestor; M. Bourget discovered in him the author of a
nineteenth-century Bible and a founder of cosmopolitanism in letters.
During his lifetime Beyle was isolated, and had a pride in isolation.
Born at Grenoble in 1783, he had learnt, during an unhappy childhood,
to conceal his natural sensibility; in later years this reserve was
pushed to affectation. He served under Napoleon with coolness and
energy; he hated the Restoration, and, a lover of Italian manners
and Italian music, he chose Milan for his place of abode. The
eighteenth-century materialists were the masters of his intellect;
"the only excuse for God," he declared, "is that he does not exist";
in man he saw a being whose end is pleasure, whose law is egoism,
and who affords a curious field for studying the dynamics of the
passions. He honoured Napoleon as an incarnation of force, the
greatest of the _condottieri_. He loved the Italian character because
the passions in Italy manifest themselves with the sudden outbreaks
of nature. He indulged his own passions as a refuge from ennui, and
turned the scrutiny of his intelligence upon every operation of his
heart. Fearing to be duped, he became the dupe of his own philosophy.
He aided the romantic movement by the paradox that all the true
classical writers were romantic in their own day--they sought to
please their time; the pseudo-classical writers attempt to maintain
a lifeless tradition. But he had little in common with the romantic
school, except a love for Shakespeare, a certain feeling for local
colour, and an interest in the study of passion; the effusion and
exaltation of romance repelled him; he laboured to be "dry," and often
succeeded to perfection.

His analytical study _De l'Amour_, resting on a sensual basis, has
all the depth and penetration which is possible to a shallow
philosophy. His notes on travel and art anticipate in an informal
way the method of criticism which became a system in the hands of
Taine; in a line, in a phrase, he resolves the artist into the
resultant of environing forces. His novels are studies in the
mechanics of the passions and the will. Human energy, which had a
happy outlet in the Napoleoni