bread sweetened with the sense of earning, and an opportunity, also, of frequent visits to Rome. He staid there for six years-Ixion bound to the wheel, he termed it—trying vainly to secure another appointment; and then procured leave of absence on half pay for an indefinite period. He traveled in Italy, France, and England, spending some months in London, where he had never been before; but was obliged to resume his consular functions in the spring of 1839, on account of a change in the French ministry. The malaria of the region about Rome had gravely affected his health, and its improvement was more than undone by his return to Cività Vecchia.

After twenty months of his second residence his constitution was so impaired that his physicians advised him to seek medical advice in Paris. He had then published all the works he had written, and he hurried to the city of his heart with the hope of complete recovery, and of brighter days than he had ever known. He was doomed to disappointment. His health was irremediably shattered; some of his friends had died, others had gone away; Paris had lost much of its charm; a deep melancholy settled upon him-the reflected shadow of the end. In less than a year he was struck with apoplexy in the street, and carried to his lodgings in the Rue Neuve des Petits Champs. He never moved, never spoke ; | and, after lying totally insensible for twelve hours, the troubled, fervid, veiled pulses of Henri Beyle forever stopped. It was the exit he would probably have asked; for he abhorred death-bed scenes, sentimental shows, melodrama in every form. It was well in the present, and in the future he had not a shadow of belief. Death, he had frequently affirmed, is but the falling of the curtain between egotism and annihilation. He was buried in Montmartre; and on his tomb was carved by his own direction an inscription in Italian, which, literally translated, runs thus:

"HENRI BEYLE, MILANESE;

WROTE; LOVED; LIVED;

59 YEARS, 2 MONTHS;

DIED AT 2 A. M., MARCH 23, 1842."

Not in his writing, nor loving, nor living, had he met, in his own judgment, with anything but failure. His writings had been vain; his loves unfortunate; his life disastrous. Why he chose to call himself a native of Milan, when he knew everybody else knew that he was born in Grenoble, is curious enough. This would seem like a disposition to be thought odd; though to affect oddity, or to excite sensation in any manner, was not one of his weaknesses. He unquestionably deceived himself, but he never willingly attempted to deceive others. His defects, and they were many and manifest, were the defects of a strong, open, inharmonious, contradictory nature. Whatever his motive, he was most singular in denying his nationality. Who ever heard before of a Frenchman willing to be thought, in life or death, in time or eternity, anything but a Frenchman?

Beyle's works-not one of which, so far as the writer knows, has been translated into English-have

been reprinted in Paris, and embrace thirteen volumes, exclusive of two volumes of his correspondence. The thirteen volumes, independent of those already mentioned, embrace “Love,” “Life of Rossini," "Racine and Shakespeare," "Walks in Rome," “Memoirs of a Tourist,” “Rouge et Noir,” “The Carthusian Nun of Parma," and "Romances and Novels." Most of his writings were given to the world under the pseudonym of Stendhal, by which he is still spoken of, and indeed generally known, in Europe. He appended a variety of signatures to his miscellaneous compositions. Those contributed to the Revue des Deux Mondes-a series of Italian chronicles and tales like "The Cenci," "Vanino Vanini," and "The Abbess of Castro"-comprised in the two volumes of “Romances and Novels," appeared under divers names, and were not recognized save by a few personal friends as the product of the same mind. He appears to have been as fond of variegated nomenclature in his literary as in his actual life, and to this eccentricity many persons have ascribed his failure to secure contemporaneous fame. He could not have believed an author's name to be his capital (all the author owns usually), unless he counted it as shifting capital-which is quite probable-to be concentrated and indemnifying after death.

“Love” is virtually a singular, elaborate, and fantastic essay, which, notwithstanding the threadbare subject, he has managed to infuse with a good deal of originality. As it treats of the universal passion, it might naturally be thought one of the most read of Beyle's books. On the contrary, it is one of the most neglected; and yet in it the reader often sees him at his best. The author glorifies and idealizes his theme, on one hand, and, on the other hand, reduces all its marvels, magic, and mystery, to his philosophy of self-interest. His theory is, that love is what the lover makes it; that all its witchery dwells in the eye of the loving; that the charm of the beloved cannot survive the loss of the lover. He revels, in "Love" as elsewhere, in whimseys, incompleteness, irrelevancy, paradoxes, incongruities, so that it is very laborious sometimes to follow his thought or grasp his conclusions. His besetting sin is want of clearness-a very rare fault in a Frenchman (perhaps it would be less observed in any other language), not in the style but in the arrangement of the parts, and presentation of the whole. His ideas are incomplete, his illustrations disjointed, his meaning often deliberately obscure. Still, he was the antipodes of hasty or careless. Nearly all his manuscripts were rewritten, some of them ten or twelve times; but it was the thought, not the style, he toiled over and altered. For style, as such, he proclaimed his contempt (he could not perceive that art exists almost entirely in form); making the fatal mistake that Carlyle, Browning, and so many Englishmen and Germans, have made; and unmindful that fame is prone to reject what is hard to understand. He was entirely conscious of his peculiarity he did not consider it a fault-and he rigidly adhered to it, it is alleged, on account of his superla

tive dislike to Staël and what he regarded as her school of mawkish sentimentalists and commonplace high-fliers.

"Racine and Shakespeare" is a study of and appeal for romanticism in opposition to classicism. Beyle was one of the earliest, bravest, and ablest advocates of romanticism, and to him more than to anybody else, perhaps, it owes its establishment in France. He was one of the few Frenchmen who have been capable of understanding and doing justice to Shakespeare, while recognizing at the same time the full merits of Racine. He has left us an admirable distinction between the two schools. He calls romanticism the art of presenting to a public the works which, in its habit of sympathy and manner of thought, can furnish that public with the largest amount of enjoyment; while classicism presents it with the works that have furnished its great-grandfathers with the largest amount of pleasure they could enjoy.

"Walks in Rome" is a remarkable delineation of the art, customs, manners, and people of the Eternal City, as they were in the early part of the present century. The book abounds in curious in- | formation, rare learning, excellent criticism; but it represents the Italians so much worse than they now are, that one cannot help thinking he has emphasized and exaggerated their vices, and neglected their virtues altogether. He knew Italy and the Italians better than any of his countrymen have known them, and he greatly liked them, also; though he has described them generally as a people shockingly licen- | tious, and wellnigh destitute of moral principle. No doubt the instances he cites of corruption and profligacy are individually true; but they must be the exceptions that disprove the rule.

"Memoirs of a Tourist" exhibits the author's extraordinary talent for observation-this was instinctive, involuntary in him—his keen insight, and his vast power of analysis. The volumes (there are two) bristle with ideas, but contain very few pictures, and have the palpable defects that mar his genius everywhere.

"Rouge et Noir," a romance of the nineteenth century, is full of characters too wicked and too clever ever to have lived. They are hardly humanly inhuman, albeit they may be regarded as inhumanly intellectual. They are metaphysical embodiments of Beyle's prejudices and theories; they speak, move, and act as, in the purely selfish philosophy, men and women are supposed to, but really never do. The faults of the book are so kindred to those of "The Carthusian Nun of Parma (La Chartreuse de Parme)," which is universally regarded as his best work, and which Balzac has pronounced a masterpiece of literature, that what is said of one may apply almost equally well to the other. Praise from Honoré de Balzac is praise indeed. In the Revue Parisienne (Septembr 23, 1840), he paid to "La Chartreuse" the most generous tribute; declaring its author, moreover, to be one of the most accurate observers and most original writers of the age. Beyle was duly grateful for the superlative compli

zac,

ment-such, he said, as no author had ever received from another—and in a note, kindly thanking Baladmitted he had read the article with bursts of laughter. He deemed the encomium, as he did the scheme of salvation, altogether too agreeable to be true, which showed his modesty and skepticism at the same time. The magnanimous critic was by no means blind to the defects of "La Chartreuse" (artistic excellence was in him a sixth sense); and he freely commented on its inadequacy of form; deeply regretting, after its author's death, that he had not pruned it into proper shape.

The title of the romance is irony intensified. The austere nun is presumed to be the heroine, Gina Pietranera, a noble Milanese, of ravishing beauty, exhaustless spirit, and totally imperceptible morality. Her nephew, Fabricio, is the putative hero, and as handsome, shrewd, and accomplished a scoundrel as French fiction can furnish. Then there are Ernesto VII., sovereign of Parma (the scene is laid in Parma and Milan; the time 18151820), and his minister, Count Mosca della Rovere, Rossi, prefect of police, Duke Sanseverina-Taxis, Palla Ferrante, a radical republican, with other hussies and rascals equally remarkable for good looks and bad morals. A large portion of the book is taken up with the adventures of Fabricio, of whom his aunt is very fond. Not sinfully, however; sin being prevented, not from principle (none of the characters are so superfluously burdened), but from the fact that he cares nothing for her. He is constantly falling into trouble, and Gina is as constantly getting him out. After he has violated all the articles of the Decalogue, and committed many offenses unknown at the date of the framing of that instrument, he is considered vicious enough to entitle him to an archbishopric. His precious aunt has some difficulty in securing for him the ecclesiastic dignity; but she finally succeeds, and he is dismissed to the happiness which holy and exalted villains, according to the code of Parmesan ethics, so richly deserve. Gina, who has several husbands and numberless lovers, and is true to none of them, promises at the close of the story to continue her enchantments and iniquities while she has breath. The book has no regular plot: it is a series of scenes providing opportunity to the author to exhibit wickedness intellectually, and set his cynicism in shining epigram. Its moral is its excessive immorality—that is, as respects the behavior of the characters. The incidents are related without the slightest coarseness; the evil consisting wholly in the idea. "La Chartreuse" is a metaphysical presentation of reasoning misanthropy in narrative form; the persons introduced being so exquisitely drawn as patterns of corruption and exponents of art, that the reader simultaneously rejoices at the felicity of their delineation and the impossibility of their existence.

Henri Beyle had with genius much of its eccentricity, its lights and shadows, its discords and antagonisms. He had selfishness and sensibility, sensualism and spirituality, passionate introspection with self-misunderstanding, deep insight with igno

ously home, only to die in its unappreciative arms. Unable to earn his bread by his pen, ceaselessly struggling against unappreciation and a proud heart, thousands, after he is dead, are officious in his praise, happy to name him brother of Balzac.

How often it happens that Genius, symbolized by Saturn, must devour its own children, ere it is trans

"H

AS HE

AUTHOR

CHAPTER I.

TWO YEARS AFTER.

USH!" said Rose; "do not speak to her, she does not even see us ;" and, stretching out her hand, she softly drew her husband back.

It was Ninon's slender shape that came fluttering by, seemingly blown on its onward path by the vagabond, roving wind-so listless, so shadowy, so irresponsive, did she appear, a mere pale resemblance to the fresh, gay young beauty that had passed this way in all the flush of her careless youth and love but two short years ago.

She wore a knot of blue ribbons at her bare breast, and others in her hair of the color that Michael had always loved and praised, yet deemed not half so richly dyed as her beautiful, faithful eyes, or one half so soft in their silken gloss as the sweet, red lips he had so often kissed. She wore the ribbons still, though praise and blame were surely forever overpast from the man who lay sepulchred safely enough in the treacherous bosom of the smiling, sparkling sea yonder.

Moving to and fro in her daily life, she heard the speech of no man, nor woman either, save one.

A harsh word would have been no more to her than a kind one, a blow have moved her no more than a caress; looks of pity, words of reproof, were alike lost upon her, and naught of either good or evil could touch her in the isolation of her soul.

And so it was that they who had loved her not in by-gone days, having held her in light esteem, were moved even to tears by the dumb anguish of her eyes, and, after their simple fashion, would do her kindly service, and evince in fifty ways their sympathy with her sorrow; but she heeded them not one whit, nor their looks, nor acts, nor words; the world to her was full of shadows that came and went, went and came, among which she sought by day and night the living, breathing shape of Michael, her lost love.

It came to pass after a while that the Lynaway folk, in looking after or speaking of her, began to touch the forehead significantly, and to say, among

themselves, that the catastrophe had turned her brain, never a very strong one at the best of times.

What else could be supposed of a woman who had never been seen to shed a single tear, or heard to utter a syllable concerning her loss to any living creature; who refused to believe that a dead man was in very truth dead, but spent half her days and nights in watching for his return; and would not wear a vestige of mourning in honor of his memory, but dressed herself always in the colors that he had preferred, so that she might be fair in his eyes at whatever moment he might appear?

And as time went by, and growing weary (as do all people) of bestowing pity where it is not returned in the small change of gratitude and confidence, they came to believe more and more in the fact of her being astray, and less and less in the intense reality and depth of her suffering. They could not understand the existence of anything, whether of joy or sorrow, that had no outward form of expression. Since their own experiences had never been anything out of the common way, they did not know that great suffering is invariably reticent, nay, that, when it shall have reached its extremest limits, it is absolutely silent and incapable of words or complaint.

He who can express his agony with suitable force and vigor, in the form of words most adapted to display its strength, retains too much the mastery over his own emotions, is too little abandoned to the fury of them to be regarded as a truthful and natural exponent of human pain. The extremity of anguish is dumb, since no mere words can fill up the measure of what it endures, while the inarticulate sounds that may be heard proceeding from a soul in travail, and that form the only true and actual language of woe, contain in their uncouth strangeness a meaning that no actual words, however well chosen and aptly uttered, could boast.

"See," said Rose, and her voice was still low, though Ninon was far out of hearing, "she is going to the old place at the edge of the sea. Hark you, Enoch; it lies upon me sometimes like a chill that some evening or morning we shall find her there