Page:The Yellow Book - 04.djvu/242

216 interest to, and that of the intellectual qualities those that had beauty for him were the crueller ones force, concentration, sagacity, in the service of egotism. But here are a few of the possible exceptions. "Moliere," he says, in a dispute about that writer's morality, "painted with more depth than the other poets. Therefore, he is more moral. Nothing could be more simple." With this epigram he leaves the subject; but it is tolerably clear that he means to deny any other moral than truth, not to say that the truth is an inevitable servant of good. If it did mean the latter, it was thrown off at the moment as an easy argument, for his belief is pronounced through his works, that his loves are the world's banes, and that any interest in the world s good, in the moral law, is bourgeois and dull. Here is another phrase that perhaps might suggest that the generalisation was unsafe: "He is the greatest man in Europe because he is the only honest man." This, like the other, is clear enough to a reader of him; and it is really impossible to find in him any identification of the interesting, the worthy, with the permanently and generally serviceable. Where the social point of view is taken for a moment it is by grace of logic purely, for a formal fairness. A more unmitigated moral rebel, a more absolute sceptic, a more thoroughly isolated individual than the author of Le Rouge et le Noir could not exist. Nor could a more unhesitating dogmatist exist, despite his sneering apologies, for dogmatism is as natural an expression of absolute scepticism as it is of absolute faith. When a man refuses to say anything further than, "This is true for me, at this moment," or perhaps, "This is true of a man exactly such as I describe, in exactly these circumstances," he is likely to make these statements with unshakable firmness. This distinctness and coherence of the mind, which is entirely devoted to relativity, is one of the charms of Stendhal for his lovers. It makes possible the completeness and