Page:Adams - Essays in Modernity.djvu/248

236 is the carrying-out in the Napoleonic temper, each on the little stage of his own life, of the same idea. For me, Beyle is summed up in two ways—in his own life and direct personal criticism, and in his masterpiece, Le Rouge et le Noir, one (I agree) of the few completely charming novels of the century, and it is all an illustration of what he really means by la chasse au bonheur. It is based on the contempt of the average man and woman, and, indeed, of all humanity. Every thing and every one are useful only in so far as they supply the material for thrilling and victorious emotion to the man of talent. Very short work, therefore, does he make of the tiresome Liberal machinery, which he cannot see is the first step in the slow and painful process of educating the community in the art of self-government. To him it is merely the hateful process of blague and hypocrisy, which prevents the man of talent from his rapid arrival at success. Later on, consciously or unconsciously, he cast all his nominal beliefs to the winds, and showed us, in the Chartreuse de Parme, where his real beliefs really led him—namely, to a complete preference for the despotic régime in which the man of talent has, by his very nature, a far greater chance of realising himself, if only in the shape of passionate love-intrigue, than in the modern political and civil community. The nightmare of Beyle's hours