t of the
eighteenth century is everywhere; and if the old gentleman with the
perruque and the 'M. de Voltaire' could have taken a glance at his
grandson's novels, he would have rapped his snuff-box and approved. It
is true that Beyle joined the ranks of the Romantics for a moment with a
_brochure_ attacking Racine at the expense of Shakespeare; but this was
merely one of those contradictory changes of front which were inherent
in his nature; and in reality the whole Romantic movement meant nothing
to him. There is a story of a meeting in the house of a common friend
between him and Hugo, in which the two men faced each other like a
couple of cats with their backs up and their whiskers bristling. No
wonder! But Beyle's true attitude towards his great contemporaries was
hardly even one of hostility: he simply could not open their books. As
for Chateaubriand, the god of their idolatry, he loathed him like
poison. He used to describe how, in his youth, he had been on the point
of fighting a duel with an officer who had ventured to maintain that a
phrase in _Atala_--'la cime indeterminee des forets'--was not
intolerable. Probably he was romancing (M. Chuquet says so); but at any
rate the story sums up symbolically Beyle's attitude towards his art. To
him the whole apparatus of 'fine writing'--the emphatic phrase, the
picturesque epithet, the rounded rhythm--was anathema. The charm that
such ornaments might bring was in reality only a cloak for loose
thinking and feeble observation. Even the style of the eighteenth
century was not quite his ideal; it was too elegant; there was an
artificial neatness about the form which imposed itself upon the
substance, and degraded it. No, there was only one example of the
perfect style, and that was the _Code Napoleon_; for there alone
everything was subordinated to the exact and complete expression of what
was to be said. A statement of law can have no place for irrelevant
beauties, or the vagueness of personal feeling; by its very nature, it
must resemble a sheet of plate glass through which every object may be
seen with absolute distinctness, in its true shape. Beyle declared that
he was in the habit of reading several paragraphs of the Code every
morning after breakfast 'pour prendre le ton.' This again was for long
supposed to be one of his little jokes; but quite lately the searchers
among the MSS. at Grenoble have discovered page after page copied out
from the Code in Beyle's handwri