Page:The Yellow Book - 04.djvu/234

208 France of Louis XV. In Rome, Florence, et Naples, published shortly afterward by Beyle, under his most familiar pseudonym of Stendhal, is a conversation, with all the marks of a piece of genuine evidence on the English character, between the author and an Englishman; and yet a large part of what is given as the opinion of this acquaintance of Beyle is almost a literal translation of Jeffrey's remarks on the conditions of good conversation. Such a striking phrase as "where all are noble all are free" is taken without change, and the whole is stolen with almost equal thoroughness. This characteristic runs through all of his books. He was not a scholar, so he stole his facts and many of his opinions, with no acknowledgments, and made very pleasing books.

Related, perhaps, to this characteristic, are the inexactness of his facts and the unreliability of his judgments. Berlioz somewhere in his memoirs gives to Stendhal half-a-dozen lines, which run something like this: "There was present also one M. Beyle, a short man with an enormous belly, and an expression which he tries to make benign and succeeds in making malicious. He is the author of a Life of Rossini, full of painful stupidities about music." Painful indeed, to a critic with the enthusiasm and the mastery of Berlioz, a lot of emphatic judgments from a man who was ignorant of the technique of music, who took it seriously but lazily, and who could make such a delicious comment at the end of a comparison of skill with inspiration, as, "What would not Beethoven do, if, with his technical knowledge, he had the ideas of Rossini?" Imagine the passionate lover of the noblest in music hearing distinctions drawn between form and idea in music, with condescension for Beethoven, by a man who found in Cimarosa and Rossini his happiness night after night through years. Imagine Beyle talking of grace, sweetness, softness,