Page:The Yellow Book - 04.djvu/241

Rh might sum up as honesty to one's instincts, or originality, make us contemptuous of all judgments but our own; it leads us (so far does Beyle go) to esteem only ourselves. Reason, he argues, or rather states, makes us see, and prevents our acting, since nothing is worth the effort it costs. Laziness forces us to prefer ourselves, and in others it is only ourselves that we esteem.

With this principle as his broadest generalisation it is not unnatural that his profoundest admiration was for Napoleon. I am a man, he says in substance, who has loved a few painters, a few people, and respected one man—Napoleon. He respected a man who knew what he wanted, wanted it constantly, and pursued it fearlessly, without scruples and with intelligence, with constant calculation, with lies, with hypocrisy, with cruelty. Beyle used to lie with remarkable ease even in his youth. He makes his almost autobiographical hero, Julien Sorel, a liar throughout and a hypocrite on the very day of his execution. Beyle lays down the judgments about Napoleon, that he liked argument, because he was strong in it, and that he kept his peace, like a savage, whenever there was any possibility of his being seen to be inferior to any one else in grasp of the topic under discussion. It is in his Life of Napoleon that Beyle dwells as persistently as anywhere on his never-ceasing principle: examine yourself; get at your most spontaneous, indubitable tastes, desires, ambitions; follow them; act from them unceasingly; be turned aside by nothing.

It is possible, in going through Beyle's works for that purpose, to find a remark here and there that might possibly indicate a basis of faith under this insistence, a belief that in the end a thorough independence of aim in each individual would be for the good of all; but these passing words really do not go against the truth of the statement that Beyle was absolutely without the moral attitude; that the pleasing to himself immediately was all he gave