French language, yet on this side of the Channel we have hardly more than heard of him!  Nor is it merely as a writer that Beyle is admired in France.  As a man, he seems to have come in, sixty or seventy years after his death, for a singular devotion.  There are ‘Beylistes,’ or ‘Stendhaliens,’ who dwell with rapture upon every detail of the master’s private life, who extend with pious care the long catalogue of his amorous adventures, who discuss the shades of his character with the warmth of personal friendship, and register his opinions with a zeal which is hardly less than sectarian.  But indeed it is precisely in these extremes of his French devotees that we shall find a clue to the explanation of our own indifference.  Beyle’s mind contained, in a highly exaggerated form, most of the peculiarly distinctive elements of the French character.  This does not mean that he was a typical Frenchman; far from it.  He did not, like Voltaire or Hugo, strike a note to which the whole national genius vibrated in response.  He has never been, it is unlikely that he ever will be, a popular writer.  His literary reputation in France has been confined, until perhaps quite lately, to a small distinguished circle.  ‘On me lira,’ he was fond of saying, ‘vers 1880’; and the ‘Beylistes’ point to the remark in triumph as one further proof of the almost divine prescience of the great man.  But in truth Beyle was always read by the elite of French critics and writers—­’the happy few,’ as he used to call them; and among these he has never been without enthusiastic admirers.  During his lifetime Balzac, in an enormous eulogy of La Chartreuse de Parme, paid him one of the most magnificent compliments ever received by a man of letters from a fellow craftsman.  In the next generation Taine declared himself his disciple; a little later—­’vers 1880,’ in fact—­we find Zola describing him as ‘notre pere a tous,’ and M. Bourget followed with elaborate incense.  To-day we have writers of such different tendencies as M. Barres and M. Gide acclaiming him as a supreme master, and the fashionable idolatry of the ‘Beylistes.’  Yet, at the same time, running parallel to this stream of homage, it is easy to trace a line of opinion of a totally different kind.  It is the opinion of the more solid, the more middle-class elements of French life.  Thus Sainte-Beuve, in two characteristic ‘Lundis,’ poured a great deal of very tepid water upon Balzac’s flaming panegyric.  Then Flaubert—­’vers 1880,’ too—­confessed that he could see very little in Stendhal.  And, only a few years ago, M. Chuquet, of the Institute, took the trouble to compose a thick book in which he has collected with scrupulous detail all the known facts concerning the life and writings of a man whom he forthwith proceeds to damn through five hundred pages of faint praise.  These discrepancies are curious:  how can we account for such odd differences of taste?  How are we to reconcile the admiration of Balzac with the dislike of Flaubert,