Page:The Yellow Book - 04.djvu/243

Rh the originality of a perfect individual, of an entirely unrestrained growth. It is the kind of character that we call capricious or fantastic when it is weak, but when it is strong it has a value for us through its emphasis of interesting principles which we do not find so visible and disentangled in more conforming people. The instincts which in Stendhal have such a free field to expatiate seem to some readers rare and distinguished, and to these readers it is a delight to see them set in such high relief. This, in its most general aspect, is what gave him his short-lived glory among the young writers of France. They hailed him as the discoverer of the doctrine of relativity, or as the first who applied it to the particular facts they wished to emphasise—the environment and its influence on the individual. This has been overworked by great men and little men until we grow sad at the sound of the word; but it was not so in Beyle's time, and he used the principle with moderation, seldom or never forgetting the incalculable and inexplicable accidents of individual variations. He does not forget either that individuals make the environment, and he is really clearer than his successors in treating race-traits, the climate and the local causes, individual training, and individual idiosyncrasies, as a great mixed whole, in which the safest course is to stick pretty closely to the study of the completed product. For this reason Zola very properly removed him from the pedestal on which Taine had put him, for what is a solvent of all problems to the school for which Taine hoped to be the prophet is in Stendhal but one principle, in its place on an equality with others. Zola s analysis of this side of Beyle is really masterly; and he proves without difficulty that the only connection between Beyle and the present naturalists is one of creed, not of execution that Beyle did not apply the principle he believed in. The setting of his scenes is not distinct. Sometimes it is not even sketched in; and here