this very fact is in itself no bad reason for giving him some attention.
An understanding of this very Gallic individual might give us a new
insight into the whole strange race. And besides, the curious creature
is worth looking at for his own sake too.

But, when one tries to catch him and pin him down on the
dissecting-table, he turns out to be exasperatingly elusive. Even his
most fervent admirers cannot agree among themselves as to the true
nature of his achievements. Balzac thought of him as an artist, Taine
was captivated by his conception of history, M. Bourget adores him as a
psychologist, M. Barres lays stress upon his 'sentiment d'honneur,' and
the 'Beylistes' see in him the embodiment of modernity. Certainly very
few writers have had the good fortune to appeal at once so constantly
and in so varied a manner to succeeding generations as Henri Beyle. The
circumstances of his life no doubt in part account for the complexity of
his genius. He was born in 1783, when the _ancien regime_ was still in
full swing; his early manhood was spent in the turmoil of the Napoleonic
wars; he lived to see the Bourbon reaction, the Romantic revival, the
revolution of 1830, and the establishment of Louis Philippe; and when he
died, at the age of sixty, the nineteenth century was nearly half-way
through. Thus his life exactly spans the interval between the old world
and the new. His family, which belonged to the magistracy of Grenoble,
preserved the living tradition of the eighteenth century. His
grandfather was a polite, amiable, periwigged sceptic after the manner
of Fontenelle, who always spoke of 'M. de Voltaire' with a smile
'melange de respect et d'affection'; and when the Terror came, two
representatives of the people were sent down to Grenoble, with the
result that Beyle's father was pronounced (with a hundred and fifty
others) 'notoirement suspect' of disaffection to the Republic, and
confined to his house. At the age of sixteen Beyle arrived in Paris,
just after the _coup d'etat_ of the 18th Brumaire had made Bonaparte
First Consul, and he immediately came under the influence of his cousin
Daru, that extraordinary man to whose terrific energies was due the
organisation of Napoleon's greatest armies, and whose leisure
moments--for apparently he had leisure moments--were devoted to the
composition of idylls in the style of Tibullus and to an enormous
correspondence on literary topics with the poetasters of the day. It was