evelopment of Julien Sorel's mind in _Le
Rouge et Le Noir_, when he shows us the soul of the young peasant with
its ignorance, its ambition, its pride, going step by step into the
whirling vortex of life--then we seem to be witnessing not so much the
presentment of a fiction as the unfolding of some scientific fact. The
procedure is almost mathematical: a proposition is established, the
inference is drawn, the next proposition follows, and so on until the
demonstration is complete. Here the influence of the eighteenth century
is very strongly marked. Beyle had drunk deeply of that fountain of
syllogism and analysis that flows through the now forgotten pages of
Helvetius and Condillac; he was an ardent votary of logic in its
austerest form--'la lo-gique' he used to call it, dividing the syllables
in a kind of awe-inspired emphasis; and he considered the ratiocinative
style of Montesquieu almost as good as that of the _Code Civil_.

If this had been all, if we could sum him up simply as an acute and
brilliant writer who displays the scientific and prosaic sides of the
French genius in an extreme degree, Beyle's position in literature would
present very little difficulty. He would take his place at once as a
late--an abnormally late--product of the eighteenth century. But he was
not that. In his blood there was a virus which had never tingled in the
veins of Voltaire. It was the virus of modern life--that new
sensibility, that new passionateness, which Rousseau had first made
known to the world, and which had won its way over Europe behind the
thunder of Napoleon's artillery. Beyle had passed his youth within
earshot of that mighty roar, and his inmost spirit could never lose the
echo of it. It was in vain that he studied Condillac and modelled his
style on the Code; in vain that he sang the praises of _la lo-gique_,
shrugged his shoulders at the Romantics, and turned the cold eye of a
scientific investigator upon the phenomena of life; he remained
essentially a man of feeling. His unending series of _grandes passions_
was one unmistakable sign of this; another was his intense devotion to
the Fine Arts. Though his taste in music and painting was the taste of
his time--the literary and sentimental taste of the age of Rossini and
Canova--he nevertheless brought to the appreciation of works of art a
kind of intimate gusto which reveals the genuineness of his emotion. The
'jouissances d'ange,' with which at his first entrance i