the raptures of M. Bourget and M. Barres with the sniffs of Sainte-Beuve and M. Chuquet of the Institute?  The explanation seems to be that Beyle occupies a position in France analogous to that of Shelley in England.  Shelley is not a national hero, not because he lacked the distinctive qualities of an Englishman, but for the opposite reason—­because he possessed so many of them in an extreme degree.  The idealism, the daring, the imagination, and the unconventionality which give Shakespeare, Nelson, and Dr. Johnson their place in our pantheon—­all these were Shelley’s, but they were his in too undiluted and intense a form, with the result that, while he will never fail of worshippers among us, there will also always be Englishmen unable to appreciate him at all.  Such, mutatis mutandis—­and in this case the proviso is a very large one—­is the position of Beyle in France.  After all, when Bunthorne asked for a not-too-French French bean he showed more commonsense than he intended.  Beyle is a too-French French writer—­too French even for the bulk of his own compatriots; and so for us it is only natural that he should be a little difficult.  Yet 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)